"Christian History Corner: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, a
Legendary Friendship" Our world would be poorer without two
other worlds: Narnia and Middle-earth. Yet if two young
professors had not met at an otherwise ordinary Oxford faculty
meeting in 1926, those wondrous lands would still be unknown to
us. British author Colin Duriez, who wrote the article "Tollers
and Jack" in issue #78 of Christian History, explains why this
is so in his forthcoming book Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Gift
of Friendship (Hidden Spring). Duriez tells the story of how
these two brilliant authors met, discovered their common love
for mythical tales, and pledged to bring such stories into the
mainstream of public reading taste. Tolkien and Lewis shared the
belief that through myth and legend—for centuries the mode many
cultures had used to communicate their deepest truths—a taste of
the Christian gospel's "True Myth" could be smuggled past the
barriers and biases of secularized readers. Christian History
managing editor Chris A