books from the Lewis conference

George Fox University, where the conference was held, is a small campus with an even smaller bookstore. A single room with not much but textbooks and campus-themed clothing, it did put out a table filled with plenty of copies of special-ordered books by conference presenters. A few more books drifted in on the second day of the conference, but more of them, though promised and expected, did not appear before the end of the event

Most of the books on display I already had, but there was one new one I eagerly purchased, and one of the non-arrivals I simply ordered online after I got home.

Tolkien's Faith: A Spiritual Biography by Holly Ordway (Word on Fire, 2023)
Some readers - fewer these days than formerly - are unaware that there's a Catholic dimension to The Lord of the Rings at all. Some writers - more these days than formerly - are Catholic enthusiasts practicing landsmanship on Tolkien and claiming The Lord of the Rings as a Catholic allegory dripping with intentional religious symbolism in a C.S. Lewis mode.
Both these ideas are misled. Ordway is trying to steer a course between Scylla and Charybdis here; I detected as much from the first chapter and, having read that far, wished the author good luck at it when I met her at the conference. In the end, she'll succeed if readers attend closely to what she's saying, which they don't always do, cf the consistent misreadings of Christopher Milne's memoir.
This is a full biography of Tolkien: it's very long (365 pages in main text) and covering his whole life in detail, but only in its religious and spiritual aspects. There's nothing beyond a few context-providing sentences about his academic life or scholarly work, his World War I service, or even the writing of his fiction. The last, mostly LR, makes scattered appearances to show only how Tolkien's deep religiosity informed his creative thinking. Thus Galadriel obviously resembles Mary in aspects, but in the farewell scene her words echo Christ at the Last Supper, so there's that aspect too. Ordway's conclusion is that Tolkien's characters are not allegories of Christianity but types of Christ or other figures, in imitation of Christ as Thomas à Kempis put it: an observation first made in regard to Tolkien by Gracia Fay Ellwood in 1966, so Ordway is on solid ground here.
The book's major focus is on placing Tolkien's faith in context. So when Ordway says that Tolkien liked to say particular prayers, she goes into detail on exactly what those prayers say and what it meant to a Catholic believer in Tolkien's day. There's an appendix with the full texts of the prayers in Latin (which Tolkien used in prayer, even after the vernacular reforms) and English. There's a whole sequence of biographical paragraphs on the priests of the Birmingham Oratory whom Tolkien would have known when he was receiving his childhood religious training there. There's even longer discussions of saints Tolkien especially venerated, and of the godparents of all of his children - a significant clue as to what was important to their parents. There's physical descriptions of the churches Tolkien attended, noting that the old churches in England had all been claimed by the Anglicans, and that most Catholic churches were drab functional buildings, sometimes claimed from other uses, until new ones of better aesthetic quality were built.
Despite all this detail, Ordway assumes that the reader knows absolutely nothing. She explains what the Old Testament is. She even explains what Christianity is. This smoothly blends into discussions of the anti-Catholic environment of England at the time, as reflected in those makeshift churches. She notes, which I think previous biographers have not, that Tolkien was initially one of only four Catholic professors at Oxford, and that the four of them carried the sacred canopy in the first Catholic procession in Oxford for centuries in 1934.
All of this works very well. Yet it doesn't always do so. Some reviews have called this book a hagiography, despite Ordway's specific denial; I wonder if anyone making that charge has ever seen an actual hagiography. But there is a tendency to skim over or argue against negative aspects. That Tolkien came close to lapsing from his faith in early adulthood, and that his wife was at times resentful that he'd made her convert, are mentioned, but there's very little detail on these. Perhaps there's none to be had, though in other respects Ordway is a remarkably diligent researcher.
More serious is the case of a chapter on Tolkien's racial views, which is mostly about his opposition to anti-Semitism and on the reflection of the Jews in the Dwarves. This reflection is framed as complimentary, so there's nothing about how the Dwarves in the earlier legendarium are basically evil. It's also unconscionable at this late date to discuss Tolkien and racism without noting his reflexive acceptance of negative stereotypes about Asian peoples and their reflection in the Orcs.
Later on, there's a rather strained and desperate argument that Tolkien wasn't really as much opposed to the reforms of Vatican II as he's usually depicted, and an even more strained and desperate argument that Tolkien's friend C.S. Lewis wasn't really as anti-Catholic as he's usually depicted. Lewis combined deep personal friendship with individual Catholics with a reflexive anti-Catholic general attitude that often pained Tolkien and which probably descended from Lewis's Ulster Protestant childhood. This makes Lewis a perfect example of why "Some of my best friends are X" is a worthless defense of oneself against charges of prejudice.
I finished this book less happy with it than I'd been halfway through.

C.S. Lewis's Oxford by Simon Horobin (Bodleian Library, 2024)
I was especially anxious to read this detailed account of Lewis in Oxford, because I wondered what it would say about the Inklings. Many writers tend to jump to unwarranted conclusions about the history of this poorly-documented group. Horobin doesn't. He lays out the known facts, and doesn't speculate beyond them.
This is a marvelously researched book, delving into plenty of detail, particularly uncovering material about Lewis's interaction with his tutorial pupils from his comments on their essays, preserved in his papers in the Bodleian - something I can't recall seeing previous writers do. He's also wise and judicious on the dicey matter of Mrs. Moore.
The Inklings chapter does not reveal anything new, but at least it sticks to what is known. I was particularly pleased with lines like "Although Thursday-night meetings petered out at the end of the 1940s," because that's exactly how much is certainly known, no more. It's so reliable that two tiny errors stood out glaringly. Horobin calls the Cretaceous Perambulators, Lewis's walking group, "a subset of the Inklings," which they were not: the overlap between the groups was minimal. And he writes of "one August evening in 1940, when the group met at Tolkien's home." In fact, as is shown elsewhere in the letter by Lewis that Horobin quotes from (offering Lewis's paraphrase of Tolkien as Tolkien's words), Lewis and Havard going to Tolkien's home was a substitute for a meeting not held because nobody else (including Tolkien) could come to Lewis's college rooms that evening.