Letters to Malcolm and the trouble with Narnia: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their 1949 crisis by Eric Seddon is an exploration of why Tolkien objected so strongly to C.S Lewis’s Narnia series and why their friendship cooled so markedly.

It must be admitted that this essay suffers to a degree from the author’s strong Catholic bias. There is no denying that J.R Tolkien was a committed orthodox Catholic. But interpreting J.R Tolkien’s likes and dislikes and what bothered him solely through the prism of Catholic doctrine is to get a limited view of the man.

In particular, some of us would argue that Mr. Seddon gives too short a shrift to J.R. Tolkien’s strongly held aesthetic views (and in particular, his strong aversion to allegory). Mr. Seddon argues that because J.R Tolkien did not object to all of C.S Lewis books equally, then therefore his aesthetic principles could not have been a large part of what he found so offensive in the Narnia series. We do not find this particular argument convincing.

Using the same method of arguing as Mr. Seddon, we could easily argue that theological objections could not have been what bothered J.R. Tolkien because many of C.S. Lewis’s earlier works did not conform to Catholic doctrine.

Nonetheless, Mr. Seddon’s central argument that J.R Tolkien so strongly objected to the Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe because of way C.S. Lewis’s his type of Christ is not without merit. Only, we would add that The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe was also the penultimate type of what Tolkien objected to aesthetically.

To be sure, the two types of objections were never particularly distinct in Tolkien’s mind. But to fail to understand how the two things intertwined is to not understand why Tolkien should object so strongly to Narnia and not as strongly to other books that transgressed various Catholic doctrines.

Lepanto by G.K.Chesterton is this week’s poem of the week. It is perhaps one of the best poems about a single battle every written. It is certainly better the Charge of the Light Brigade for example.

In part, this is because the poem is about more than just a battle that had happened long in the past. G.K Chesterton wrote the poem during a dark time for Europe and it is his mediation on what had saved Europe in the past and what would be necessary to save it in the future.

Here is a historical account of the battle.