[Child of the 7th Age]

One of the first reasons the friendship cooled between Lewis and Tolkien was their different response to Charles Williams. Tolkien seems to have been the kind of person who had a relatively small circle of friends but was incredibly loyal to them. Lewis was just the opposite. He had a very wide circle of friends. Sometimes he met a new person, and tried to quickly push this person onto his older friends. Tolkien didn't always appreciate this.

Charles Williams, who had already published about two dozen books, moved to Oxford for the duration of World War II. Lewis became very close with Williams; he even persuaded Oxford to give him a University appointment even though he didn't have a higher degree. Williams came to meet with the Inklings. A number of the Inklings had reservations about Williams whom they viewed as quite arrogant. Also, Tolkien didn't like Williams' writings probably because of his philosophy and subject matter. Williams was fascinated with mysticism and the occult and wrote fantasy novels with those themes. All this split Lewis and Tolkien apart.

Tolkien was also a little iritated by the rapid commercial success Lewis had with his books. Remember that in the forties Tolkien was struggling to find a publisher for the Silmarillion. Lewis' Screwtape Letters had sold about a quarter of a million copies, and he was churning out his fantasy and science fiction books at the rate of one a year. Lewis had publishers beating a path to his door, while Tolkien was struggling what to do in the aftermath of the Hobbit.

On top of all that came Lewis' friendship and eventualy marriage with the divorced American writer, Joyce Gresham. Lewis didn't even tell Tolkien when he got married. Tolkien found out about it from the newspaper, and he was very angry he hadn't been personally told.

Despite the friendship cooling in the forties, it's also true that Lewis consistently encouraged Tolkien in writing the Lord of the Rings, and many have said, without this ecouragement, the book would never have been finished or published.

It is sad that, when Lewis died, Tolkien declined all invitations to write an obituary or contribute to a volume of memorial essays. You get the feeling Tolkien had been personally hurt by his friends' actions, and the two never got around to making up.
[img]smilies/confused.gif[/img] sharon, the 7th age hobbit