Introduction
In the late 1930’s and 1940’s, Oxford witnessed the existence of a literary circle of friends that was to have a significant impact on the shape and course of modern fantasy literature: the Inklings. After the graduation and departure of the founder of what was, originally, a student reading club for aspiring writers, and its consequent dissolution, the name was taken over by two of its former members, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, to refer to the people, their friends, who regularly attended their own discussions and manuscript reading sessions. It was on account of these two men that the club’s name entered the literary annals.
While an inkling means ‘a slight knowledge or vague notion,’ for the involved literati, the Inklings had a special, twofold, puny meaning. It denoted those ‘who dabble in ink’ as well as those who inclined toward each other and toward a certain kind of literature. Unlike other literary groups active in this era, such as the Bloomsbury Group, the Angry Young Men, or the Children of the Sun, which relinquished past art forms and themes in favour of new, experimental, and unconventional ones, thereby contributing to the establishment and shaping of the modernist and post-modernist movements, the Inklings appreciated mythological and medieval heroic literature and traditional values. Another aspect in which they differed from most of the rather disillusioned post-war generation of writers is that they were believers, particularly Christians, and religion had a great importance in their lives. Naturally, they incorporated elements of their belief and Christian philosophy into their writings, sometimes explicitly, as in the case of Lewis’s philosophical and apologetic works, and sometimes implicitly, as in his and Tolkien’s fiction. Either way, their faith lies at the core of their work.
The aim of this paper is to explore the Inklings’ understanding of the essence of human nature and the purpose of human life as influenced by Christian philosophy. It confronts the research on this topic of a number of Tolkien scholars, namely Peter Kreeft, Matthew Dickerson, Aeon Skoble, but mostly Donald Williams. Following the research of the latter, the background philosophy is provided by C. S. Lewis’s book on humanity, The Abolition of Man, but the main focus of this paper is on Tolkien’s work, which shows in a tale what Lewis described in theory. Discussing what the essential features that differentiate humans from animals are, this paper hopes to provide, so to say, an inkling of the Inklings’ notion of humanity.
Tolkien’s Catholic Novel
Tolkien proudly admitted on various occasions that his Middle-earth stories were ‘fundamentally religious and Catholic’ in inspiration. Many scholars recognize his masterpiece to be a Catholic novel and compare it to the works of not only C. S. Lewis but also G. K. Chesterton, whose literary endeavours and the theology behind them inspired both these Inklings. For example, Joseph Pearce in Tolkien: Man and Myth emphasizes the author’s Catholicism as one of the key factors behind his popularity. Both Kreeft and Caldecott (2009) identify Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings as a Catholic novel based on the definition by Flannery O’Connor, who claims that a Catholic novel needs not be set in a Christianized world but it is one in which the Christian truth is used as a ‘light to see the world by.’
But what exactly is the quality of this kind of implicitly Christian/Catholic novels that makes them so appealing to readers? That something which, in Deirdre Greene’s words, they hunger for even though they are not conscious of what it is actually that they seek. That something of which Caldecott in his essay ‘Over the Chasm of Fire: Christian Heroism in Lord of the Rings’ and The Silmarillion writes that it makes him ‘feel as if an ever-darkening sky over our present world had been suddenly pierced, the clouds rolled back, and an almost forgotten sunlight had poured down again. As if indeed the horns of Hope had been heard again.’ In the revised edition of his book, Caldecott explains that this is so because such a novel is, as many people recognize (Caldecott reports that even the actor Viggo Mortensen, who played Aragorn in the movie franchise, said so in an interview), a true story which communicates something which they feel to be important for their lives. ‘True’ not in the sense of providing some empirical knowledge or describing a real event, but because it communicates the truth about the way the world and the human Self are made. This is the very same thing Tolkien believed to be the purpose of every literary work, moreover, of every kind of art.
The Meaning of Humanity
Unlike the philosophical theories that dominate the modern consumerist society, which tend to relativize or even outright undermine the value of human life and morality, Christian novels like Tolkien’s provide their readers, who as members of the fallen human race are fragile and naturally liable to sin, with a sense of hope that their lives indeed have a purpose, though this may sometimes be beyond their understanding; that even the smallest persons are important in the context of the world’s history; and that there still are some universally valid moral values originating beyond the current materialist world, holding to which is praiseworthy and will one day be rewarded, be it in this or another life – in short, using Sam Gamgee’s movie line, that ‘there’s some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.’ Scholars agree that this hope permeates every aspect of the novel from the characters’ actions to the landscapes. Yet while the essence of this hope is indeed spiritual, it is understood as a much broader philosophical concept rather than as a strictly defined theological virtue. For that reason, Kreeft calls Tolkien’s worldview (described in the lecture On Fairy Stories and his letters) ‘a philosophy of Hope.’
One of the questions this philosophy helps to answer is what the purpose of human life is. In order to be able to answer this, we need to determine what it means to be human. Donald Williams attempts to explain this in his book Mere Humanity. He shows that Tolkien’s understanding of humanity was influenced by Chesterton’s Christian anthropology, as described in his The Everlasting Man, later developed by Lewis in The Abolition of Man. He describes how Chesterton criticized a number of modern secular philosophies which explain man in purely scientific terms, because by taking God out of the definition of man, they take something transcendental out of him and thus ultimately reduce him to a body of mass, its movement having purely practical motivation. Chesterton notes that the scientists who promote these philosophies do not take their implications as rigorously, so pushing them ad absurdum, he reveals their weak points. Evolutionism – which understands man to be just an animal – is implausible because that could only enhance some of his abilities, not create a new species. Materialist reductionist theories, the most extreme form of which claims that all matter is only a set of atoms, also fall short because the nature of man is so complex that it cannot be reduced just to one aspect. The idea of man as a pile of atoms can be acceptable on the level of physics, but it wholly disregards his spiritual part. Similarly, Freudianism, Marxism, Behaviourism, and Nietzsche’s philosophy limit man to a mere puppet whose actions are motivated by sexual urges, need for money, conditioning, or will to power. Matthew Dickerson in Following Gandalf contributes to this discussion by criticizing determinism, which views man as a machine the actions of which are determined by external physical causes, making free will just an illusion. Chesterton goes on to argue that if human life were only about one of these ends, we should feel satisfied by fulfilling this particular need and not desiring anything else; exemplifying it by Freud’s theory, sexual intercourse should be all we seek in another human. We would be like animals, driven only by our instincts. But we are not. Though there might be some individuals like that, most people seek something more from a relationship, something to also fulfil their spiritual needs. According to Chesterton, what differentiates us from animals is not the possession of reason (and I would say not even of soul, because studying animals shows that they, too, are capable of some kind of thinking: they have consciousness, memory and even emotions and feelings similar to ours), but it is mainly art and imagination, for no animal can develop a new architectonic style of their nest or hole just because it would like the way it looked or make some constructions to contemplate their beauty and symbolism. Thus for Chesterton, the origin of man as a species distinct from animals is a mystery not completely and satisfactorily explicable by any scientific approach, as it is beyond its grasp, but only by a miracle, by allowing the existence of some divine creator, regardless of whether one believes the myth of original sin and its consequences on human nature or not. Williams further maintains that Tolkien more explicitly stated what Chesterton and later Lewis only hinted at. The implication he drew from this is that humans are capable of creativity due to the fact that they were created in the image of the divine Creator to whom this ability is essential.
Morality
Another aspect that distinguishes us from animals is morality and, related to it, free will. Kreeft notes that of all the things existing in this world, only man can fail to achieve the nature of his kind. He points out that rocks, grass, or dogs will never fail to be rocky, grassy or doggy, but man can, and indeed often does, fail to be human. The world wars, concentration camps, or on a smaller scale, bad cases of domestic violence are proof of this. This happens when man ignores the social conventions and begins to behave like a beast heeding nothing but his own urges. Chesterton pointed out that while this approach is in agreement with evolutionists’ opinion that man is just an animal and the highest rule in the animal kingdom is the survival of the fittest, they were nevertheless horrified by people who behaved like animals, or more specifically, who behaved like predators; for instance, if someone was practicing cannibalism (in the case of an animal, they would probably say it is just the way of life), or took to annihilating people who stood in the way of their success or endangered their career (such as the members of mafias or dictators). Even evolutionists believed that most of the behaviour that is natural to animals is inappropriate for man.
But where does this notion of man’s appropriate, that is what is perceived as good, behaviour come from, and what determines it? Most people would agree that the concepts of good and bad human behaviour are based on social conventions. This means that a particular society consented to a set of standards which they thought defined a desirable or at least acceptable human behaviour, and this collection of ideas of right and wrong conduct has been called ‘morality.’ The term originated from Latin moralis, which was coined by Cicero to translate the Greek term ethikos (English: ethics) using the root word mos, that is ‘custom.’ Hence moral means ‘pertaining to manners, customs.’ Alison Milbank reports that Chesterton proposed the idea that morality ‘did not proceed from some rational Rousseauian social contract’ but originated in a need to protect sacred places.
Be it one way or another, it is clear that morality is a uniquely human social construct not applicable to animals. I think all would agree that animals are not capable of discerning what is morally good or bad because their behaviour is governed by their instinct of survival primarily as individuals and secondarily as a species. Their only concerns in life are not to get eaten and to reproduce. This fact makes the question of the origin of moral values and the concepts of good and evil even more interesting and mysterious.
However, moralities can differ between nations. For example, while the already mentioned cannibalism or human sacrifices used to (or somewhere in the world still may) be perfectly normal for some indigenous tribes, such behaviour was renounced centuries ago by the European civilization, which considers itself superior on that account and accuses the indigenous people of being uncivilized. Ralph Wood’s comment in his essay on ‘Tolkien and Postmodernism’, in which he showed that Tolkien was concerned with many of the questions that later troubled the postmodernist era, hinted that the morality of a nation changed even across its history. He writes that the customs of the ancient pagan North that so much inspired Tolkien’s stories were brutal, and that ancient Romans (another of Tolkien’s inspirational sources) or Japanese even praised suicide as a moral ideal. Nonetheless, some values were common to all of them, such as honour, friendship, and humility; values that are still praised in our society nowadays. Philosophers and sociologists observed long ago that certain values are common to societies all around the world, even to the smallest indigenous tribes isolated from civilization. The values listed by Wood are just three of them.
Objective Morality
- S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain wrote that the moralities accepted by humans do not, in their essence, differ so much. The moral codes are not alien to Man in the sense that accepting them would mean to wholly rebuild Man’s nature; on the contrary, they were developed from Man’s innate knowledge of objective good and evil. Lewis expounded this topic in The Abolition of Man, published three years after The Problem of Pain, and its relation both to Chesterton and Tolkien’s theology is discussed by Donald Williams.
As opposed to the modern philosophies’ claims that moral values are relative because what is good or bad depends on individuals’ subjective evaluation, Lewis believed in the existence of objective values, that is attitudes that are always true and others that are really false (or we could say some are always right and some always wrong). He called this system of objective values the Tao. The Tao is originally a Chinese concept which represents the absolute good which governs the whole universe. In a broader sense, it denotes the intuitively proper way of life. Lewis took this concept and showed that all value systems that were ever created by human societies ultimately have their source in the Tao, for people are unable to invent any new values besides those they subconsciously know, which are as if imprinted on their soul. All people have some intuitive expectations of proper responses to certain events and life situations. From these, they developed the moral laws of their societies, which reflect the Tao working in them. If there were no objective values, then society would have no right to punish, say, Hitler for murdering thousands of people in concentration camps, because his subjective view was that it is not immoral. However, humankind as a whole has the innate knowledge inspired by the Tao that such behaviour is wrong, and thus condemning him was necessary to restore justice. It was only in his later book Mere Christianity that Lewis finally identified the source of Tao with God the Creator.
After explaining Lewis’s concept of the Tao, Williams limits himself just to a brief comment that Tolkien’s stories also share this idea. He and Wood both quote the same passage from The Lord of the Rings, which is the most obvious evidence of the existence of objective moral values in Middle-earth. This is the scene when Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli, pursuing the hoard of orcs who captured Merry and Pippin, encounter Éomer on the plains of Rohan, who by law should arrest them for unlawfully crossing into his country. Being of good heart, he empathizes with them, but is doubtful what would be the right thing to do, how to judge the situation aright, because if he let them go he would be punished for disobeying the law. To his concerns, Aragorn responds: ‘As he ever has judged, […] Good and evil have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among men. It is man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.’
However, the capability to recognize objective values is not reserved only for the members of the good races. The application of the concept of objective values in Tolkien’s work was elaborated in Dickerson’s book, which, curiously enough, Williams listed among his sources but never drew any parallels to or commented on in the body text. Dickerson’s interpretation of objective morality is similar to Lewis’s. It defines good and evil as real and true for every person regardless of whether they believe it to be true; thus it is independent of the individual subject. He exemplified this by the case of Fëanor, of whose deeds (the kinslaying) Mandos said they would remain evil no matter how justifiable his motivation may seem. Dickerson then defended the existence of objective morality against determinism, which would make all moral evaluation irrelevant since, according to it, all human actions are pre-determined by various factors. Thus if humans were like pre-programmed robots, there would be no point in examining their morality. Furthermore, he states that the standards of this objective morality are beyond everyone, and agrees with Lewis that they are innate to every human being and perceived intuitively. For that reason we can see that
even orcs or trolls, generally races wicked beyond redemption, believed some deeds to be morally evil. For instance, in the scene where the orcs discover Frodo’s body in Cirith Ungol, the conversation between their leaders clarifies that they understand the concept of loyalty and recognize that it is wrong to abandon one’s mate in trouble, despite the fact that they often do so themselves. Even Gollum feels guilt for murdering his friend Déagol (which is why he invents the story of the Ring being given to him as a gift), or for his intention to lead Frodo into a trap. He is still aware that it is not right. As for the “good” characters, the best illustration of the innate knowledge of moral rightness/wrongness is Gandalf’s reproof of Pippin, who claimed he had no idea what he was doing when he looked into the Palantír: ‘You knew you were behaving wrongly and foolishly; and you told yourself so, though you did not listen.’
As opposed to determinism, according to which man can do only what he is doomed to do, it is the existence of free will as an opportunity to choose not to obey the intuitive knowledge of moral truths that makes man subject to moral evaluation. Yet likewise, based on the knowledge of objective morality, man can freely choose to suffer some evil if that is an inevitable consequence of his decision to stick to doing what is objectively right, like Frodo, who decided to take the Ring to Mordor in order to save Middle-earth from Sauron. Free will is unique to man; no animal would ever choose suffering of its own will in order to save another animal unrelated to it from the same.
Dickerson examined the moral choices Tolkien’s characters made facing some problems in the context of war and battle. The main question he was trying to answer is: what values are they willing to fight for? Or, more accurately, what values are they willing to suffer a defeat for? The answer is not surprising: for characters whom the readers perceive as heroes, moral integrity is more valuable than military victory. They always choose what is objectively morally right even though it may harm them, while the antiheroes choose personal benefit over the benefit of the society and fail morally. This is something Tolkien has been criticized for: that his characters seem to be too unequivocally defined as good or evil. However, it is not the case that the good characters would only make the right choices, never even tempted to do otherwise. It is rather the other way round: readers perceive the characters as good or evil on account of their choices. The readers’ evaluation is based on the very same intuitive knowledge of objective morality, and this is possible because Tolkien’s Middle-earth is governed by the very same principles as our world. As Dickerson makes clear, there is only one morality which is objective, and no situation of military battle can justify breaking the moral law. Thus, by turning the battle for Middle-earth into a battle for morality, Tolkien is training his readers to be able to fight their personal moral battles. Nelson offers a similar observation: Tolkien encourages moral behaviour in his readers by showing rather than exhorting virtue in action, which is a less didactic technique, and therefore, in my opinion, more relatable. His stories become a kind of moral guide for the reader, as he ever hoped them to be to fulfil the resolution of his former literary group of friends, the T.C.B.S. One reason why the moral principles are better understood in stories like Tolkien’s than when reading philosophical books or being lectured on ethics follows from his theory of fairy tales – it is because the tales present the familiar in an unfamiliar context and thus throw a new light on it. Also, as Aeon Skoble notes, when the characters are given personalities the readers can relate to, the moral lesson becomes clearer.
Skoble’s essay is one of the latest additions to the research focused specifically on the question of moral principles pervading Tolkien’s work. Unlike Williams and Dickerson, he does not base his analysis on any Christian concept of morality, but on Aristotle’s ‘virtue ethics’ as presented in his Nicomachean Ethics. The aim of human life according to Aristotle was eudaimonia, that is living a good life. While he believed that there is some objective standard by which to evaluate the goodness of life which is common to all people, he could not explain its source; he only described what he intuitively perceived to be the conditions of leading a good life, which for him equalled leading a morally virtuous life. Like in Lewis’s theory of the Tao, what is truly good and therefore virtuous can be discerned only with the use of reason, and those who are unable to do so on their own have to learn it from others who know it better (contrariwise, it is the duty of those who acquired a better knowledge of the moral principles to teach it to those less gifted).
Even though the terms ‘morality’ and ‘ethics’ are synonyms, following from their etymology, morality being the Roman translation of the Greek word ‘ethics,’ Skoble draws a distinction between the mere following of moral principles and virtue ethics. Virtuousness is not attained by just blindly following a set of moral rules, like Kant suggested, but when evaluating it, the circumstances and motivations always have to be considered. Skoble illustrates this on the virtue of truthfulness and loyalty: while being truthful is objectively good, revealing truth to an enemy like Sauron, which can result in others’ harm, is not virtuous. Also, there is a difference between loyalty to a good person such as Frodo, and the loyalty of an evil person like Gríma to Saruman. Motivation is an important factor, too, because, in the scholar’s words: ‘right actions may be performed for wrong reasons, or, alternatively, wrongful acts may be performed for the right reasons. So just looking at what people do may be less morally instructive than considering who they are’. In comparison, while Christianity (through Aquinas) builds on Aristotle’s theory of virtue ethics, it holds the view that only those morally good acts are truly virtuous which are performed for the right reasons. Thus, according to Christianity, the means can never justify the ends, nor can the ends justify the means.
Conclusion
The Inklings’, particularly Tolkien’s and Lewis’s, understanding of humanity was largely influenced by the theology presented in the works of G. K. Chesterton, whom both men found appealing not only as a writer but also as a philosopher. Chesterton, in turn, derived his theology from the teaching of a medieval scholar, Thomas Aquinas. While Lewis took to developing Chesterton’s theology about humanity theoretically, Tolkien did so practically, employing it in his story-telling. This is the reason why the fantastical races he invented are relatable – because even though beastly in form, they are human on account of having the qualities that, according to Chesterton’s theology, distinguish humans from animals.
In their view, this quality is not reason, because the majority of animals are capable of rational thinking to a certain degree. The main qualities that make us human are art, imagination, free will, and especially morality. They believed in the existence of objective morality, where good and bad are determined by some universal principle innate to every human being rather than by social conventions. Lewis identified this guiding principle with the Tao, and ultimately with God. Following the Thomistic theory that God is present in and puts himself into everything he creates, all men have a subconscious understanding of good and evil; therefore, even evil beings are capable of recognizing what is morally (in)appropriate. But because they also have free will, they can choose not to obey it. Both Lewis and Tolkien presented moral appropriateness as the greatest virtue, hence in their stories, the characters’ moral integrity is more valuable than military victory.
Abstract:
The aim of this paper is to explore the concept of humanity as understood by the members of the Oxford literary group the Inklings, particularly its two core figures, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. It is a fact that their worldview, naturally woven into their fictional stories, was largely shaped by their Catholic faith. Consequently, the sources of their idea of humanity have to be looked for in Catholic theology. The Inklings derived this from their predecessor, another Catholic novelist and philosopher, G. K. Chesterton, who claimed that the essential qualities that differentiate humans from animals are art, imagination, free will, and the ability to evaluate the objective morality or immorality of their actions, which has its ultimate source in God.
Keywords: Inklings, J. R. R. Tolkien C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, philosophy, humanity, morality
In case something is not clear about the sources, here I enclose the full bibliographical list compiled according to the requirements of my department:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/
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Caldecott, S., The Power of the Ring: The Spiritual Vision Behind the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, 2012, New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2009. 256 s. ISBN 082454983X
Carpenter, H., J.R.R Tolkien: A Biography, 2002, London: HarperCollins, 2002. 384 pp. ISBN 978-0-261-10245-3
Carpenter, H., The Inklings, 2006, London: HarperCollins, 1978. 287 pp. ISBN 978-0-00-774869-3
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Lewis, C. S., The Problem of Pain, [online], 2016b, Samizdat University Press, 1940. 102 pp.
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Nelson, C. W., 2000. The Sins of Middle-earth: Tolkien’s Use of Medieval Allegory. In: Clark, G.; Simmons, T., J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances: Views of Middle-earth, 2000. Greenwood Publishing Group. 213 pp. ISBN 978-0-313-30845-1
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Williams, D. T., Mere Humanity: G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien on the Human Condition, 2006, Nashville: B&H Books, 2006. 224 s. ISBN 0-8-054-4018-6