Lewis vs. Tolkien on Myth and Allegory

Why did C.S. Lewis add the extra-biblical Lilith to his book as Adam’s first wife a Jinn

C.S. Lewis included Lilith as Adam’s first wife and connected her to the Jinn in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to build a dark, non-human lineage for the White Witch (Jadis). [1, 2]

Why Lilith was used

• The “Son of Adam / Daughter of Eve” Rule: Lewis needed Jadis to have some ancient link to humanity so she could exploit or subvert Narnia’s laws regarding who has the right to rule. Claiming descent from Adam’s mythical first wife, Lilith, provided that pseudo-genealogical loop. [1, 2]
• Literary Inspiration: Lewis was heavily influenced by mythopoeic fantasy and George MacDonald’s Victorian novel Lilith, which prominently featured Adam’s rebellious first wife as a dark, vampiric queen. [1, 2, 3]
• Rebellious Archetype: In extra-biblical medieval Jewish folklore (such as the Alphabet of Ben-Sira), Lilith refused to submit to Adam and fled Paradise, making her an ideal template for an ice-cold, defiant tyrant. [1, 2, 3]

Why the Jinn connection was added

• Inhuman Heritage: Lewis combined Lilith with the “Jinn” (spirits/demons from Middle Eastern/Islamic mythology) and giants to explain why Jadis has no human blood.
• Mythological Blending: Lewis was famous for “smashing together” diverse folklore, ancient demons, and fairy-tale archetypes to craft a hybrid, monstrous ancestry for his villain—an approach that famously annoyed his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, who preferred a strictly unified internal mythology. [1]

If you’d like, we can explore:

• How Jadis’s lineage changes or gets ignored in later books like The Magician’s Nephew
• How C.S. Lewis’s view of myth differed from J.R.R. Tolkien’s

• NarniaWeb ForumJadis: part Lilith, part Jinn – The Man Behind the WardrobeHe chose Lilith because she was connected to Adam in the myths, and he needed some connection to Adam for her to enable her to pre…
• M. LandersC.S. Lewis And Lilith: What Does Blending Myths Do For You? | M. LandersC.S. Lewis Mythological Blending: Narnia’s White Witch derives from Adam’s first wife Lilith (a Jinn and giant descendant in Hebre…
• Crisis MagazineBy Their Works Ye Shall Know Them – Crisis MagazineAnd while Lewis’ portals to Narnia typically allow only child visitors, I can hold out hope that somewhere in this old house I cou…

Show all

How C.S. Lewis’s view of myth differed from J.R.R. Tolkien’s

C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien funamentally differed on the purpose and structure of myth, despite both being devout Christians who believed that mythology ultimately pointed to divine truth. Their disagreement over how myths should be constructed and used was one of the most significant intellectual friction points in their friendship.

Here is how their views compared:

Dimension	J.R.R. Tolkien’s View (“Mythopoeia”)	C.S. Lewis’s View (“True Myth”)
The Nature of Myth	Sub-creation: Writing myth is a way for humans to honor God by using their creative faculties to build entirely new, internally consistent worlds.	An Inklings of Truth: Myths are a “good infection”—imperfect human glimpses of a larger, transcendent reality that God eventually made concrete in history.
Structural Integrity	Strict Purity: Believed a mythology must be homogeneous, unified, and deeply rooted in a singular cultural or linguistic tradition (e.g., Norse/Old English).	Eclectic Syncretism: Joyfully mixed entirely different mythologies together (e.g., putting Father Christmas, Greek Fauns, and Norse Dwarfs in Narnia).
Allegory vs. Applicability	Hatred of Allegory: Strongly disliked formal allegory. He preferred “applicability,” where a story stands on its own but allows readers to draw their own insights.	Acceptance of Allegory / Supposal: Frequently used “supposal” (e.g., suppose Christ came to a world of talking beasts) and didn’t mind clear, didactic moral frameworks.
The Purpose of Fantasy	Recovery and Escape: A vehicle to escape the drabness of the modern industrial world and recover a clear, pristine view of reality.	Evangelism and Insight: A “stealth” vehicle to bypass a reader’s intellectual defenses (“stained-glass inhibitors”) and make them feel spiritual truths deeply.

---

1. Purity vs. The “Mashing Together” of Myths

Tolkien was a purist philologist. To him, building a world required a deep, organic unity where language, geography, and history matched perfectly.

When Lewis read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Tolkien was famously horrified. Lewis threw Greek mythology (Centaurs, Bacchus), Norse mythology (the White Witch), British folklore (Mr. Beaver), and Christian holidays (Father Christmas) into a single book. To Tolkien, this eclectic mixing was sloppy, jarring, and broke the “secondary belief” required to sustain a fantasy world. Lewis, however, viewed all myths as part of a grand soup of human imagination that could be sampled freely to paint a vivid picture.

2. “Sub-Creation” vs. “The True Myth”

Before his conversion, Lewis told Tolkien that myths were nothing but “beautiful lies breathed through silver.” Tolkien corrected him, arguing that because humans are made in the image of a Creator God, our urge to create stories is a divine trait. Tolkien called this Sub-creation. He believed that creating an imaginary world was a sovereign act of art that honored God inherently through its beauty and depth.

Lewis adopted this idea but pivoted it toward a more utilitarian purpose. He began to view pagan myths as “pre-prophecies”—God’s way of preparing the human imagination for the Gospel. For Lewis, Christianity was the “True Myth”: a story that operates on the human heart exactly like a magnificent fairy tale, except for one crucial difference—it actually happened in history.

3. Allegory vs. Supposal

Tolkien famously stated in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings that he had a “cordial dislike” for allegory, preferring history—true or feigned—with its varied applicability. He did not want Aslan-like figures explicitly standing in for Christ.

Lewis, on the other hand, was a medieval scholar who loved allegory. While he insisted Narnia was a “supposal” rather than a strict 1-to-1 allegory, he deliberately designed his stories to “smuggle” Christian theological concepts past what he called the “watchful dragons” of a reader’s cynical, modern mind.

If you want to dive deeper, we can explore:

• The specific late-night conversation on Addison’s Walk in 1931 that convinced Lewis that myth was true.
• How George MacDonald influenced both of their views on fantasy.

===========================================================

George MacDonald was the intellectual and spiritual godfather of modern fantasy, serving as the single greatest literary influence on both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Long before the Inklings formed, this 19th-century Scottish minister and author laid the groundwork for how they understood the relationship between imagination, myth, and faith.

However, Lewis and Tolkien absorbed MacDonald’s influence in completely different ways, echoing their split on how fantasy should be written.

C.S. Lewis: The Baptized Imagination

For C.S. Lewis, discovering George MacDonald’s fantasy novel Phantastes at a train station when he was 16 years old was a life-altering, mystical experience. At the time, Lewis was a staunch atheist, but reading the book shifted something deep inside him. He famously wrote in Surprised by Joy that reading Phantastes“baptized my imagination.”

• Holiness in the Mundane: What stunned Lewis about MacDonald’s work was that it didn’t just feel like a magical escape; it made the real world feel holy. MacDonald had a unique ability to weave a sense of deep spiritual reality—what Lewis called “goodness”—directly into the fabric of a fairy tale without it feeling preachy.
• The Blueprint for Narnia: MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin and Lilith directly shaped Lewis’s style. The idea of portals to other worlds (like a wardrobe), mysterious old houses, and wise, Christ-like archetypes (like the Great-Grandmother spinning thread in The Princess and the Goblin) became the structural foundation for The Chronicles of Narnia. Lewis so revered MacDonald that he made him a central character and spiritual guide in his theological fantasy The Great Divorce.

J.R.R. Tolkien: The Standard for Fairerie

Tolkien’s relationship with MacDonald was more complex and critical, but no less profound. While Tolkien was vocal about his dislike for certain aspects of MacDonald’s tone—finding it occasionally too childish or overly moralistic—MacDonald’s essays and stories fundamentally defined Tolkien’s concept of “Faërie” (the realm of fairy tales).

• Defining the Laws of Fantasy: In his seminal essay On Fairy-Stories, Tolkien heavily debated and refined ideas that MacDonald had championed in his own famous essay, The Fantastic Imagination. MacDonald argued that a fantasy writer must be bound by strict internal laws; if a writer creates a world where a law is broken without a reason, the magic ruins. Tolkien took this idea and perfected it into his philosophy of Sub-creation, demanding that Middle-earth have an airtight, internally consistent logic.
• The Invention of Modern Dwarves and Goblins: Tolkien’s depiction of non-human races owes a massive debt to MacDonald. The malicious, subterranean, light-hating goblins in The Hobbit are direct descendants of the creatures in The Princess and the Goblin. Tolkien took MacDonald’s folklore-inspired creatures and elevated them into a grand, epic mythology.

Their Shared Inherited Concept: “Sehnsucht”

The deepest thread MacDonald passed to both men was the concept of Sehnsucht—a German word translating to a “longing” or “intense yearning” for an unreachable, ideal world.

MacDonald taught both Lewis and Tolkien that the deep ache a reader feels when they read a beautiful fairy tale isn’t just cheap escapism. Instead, that longing is a signpost pointing to a higher reality. For Tolkien, that longing was satisfied by creating the lost, pristine beauty of Middle-earth to escape modern industrialism. For Lewis, that longing was a compass pointing directly toward Heaven.

We can look into:

• The specific concept of “The Fantastic Imagination” as MacDonald defined it.
• A closer look at MacDonald’s novel Lilith and how its dark themes directly birthed Lewis’s White Witch.

==========================================================

George MacDonald’s 1895 novel Lilith: A Romance is a deeply psychological, hallucinatory, and dark masterpiece that serves as the literal DNA for The Chronicles of Narnia. C.S. Lewis didn’t just borrow the name “Lilith”—he took the specific imagery, atmospheric horror, and theological corruption of MacDonald’s villainess and used them to forge Jadis, the White Witch. [1, 2, 3, 4]

The dark themes of MacDonald’s novel directly birthed Lewis’s cold tyrant through several striking parallels:

1. The Portal: Mirror to Wardrobe

Before the White Witch can even exist, the protagonist must find her world. In Lilith, the main character, Mr. Vane, discovers a mysterious, multi-dimensional realm by stepping through a magical mirror hidden away in the dusty library of his ancestral home. Lewis copied this concept almost entirely, swapping the mirror for a wardrobe but retaining the exact mechanics of stepping out of a domestic English house and into a vast, parallel universe. [1, 2, 3, 4]

2. Environmental Frigidity and the Stealing of Water

In MacDonald’s novel, Lilith rules over a city called Bulika. Her primary act of cruelty is a form of environmental terrorism: she has dammed up and stolen the land’s water, forcing the local river to sink below ground and leaving the world a desolate, gray, and barren wasteland. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Lewis translated this specific environmental tyranny into a different climate. Instead of stealing water, Jadis freezes it. She locks Narnia in an eternal, artificial winter where it is “always winter and never Christmas”. Both queens use the natural elements as an extension of their tyrannical, life-denying power. [1]

3. Cruelty to Children (“The Little Ones”)

One of the most horrific elements of MacDonald’s Lilith is the queen’s absolute hatred of children, known in the book as the “Little Ones”. Because of the stolen water, these children are magically frozen in time—they can never grow up into adults. Lilith actively hunts them down because a prophecy states that a child will eventually bring about her downfall. [1, 2]

This directly mirrors Jadis’s dynamic in Narnia. The White Witch is obsessed with hunting down the Pevensie children because of the prophecy of the four thrones at Cair Paravel. Furthermore, her magic quite literally “freezes” life, turning creatures into stone statues, mirroring the stunted, static existence of the Little Ones in MacDonald’s wasteland. [1]

4. Vampiric Power and the Spotted Leopard

MacDonald’s Lilith is a shape-shifting, parasitic entity who sustains her youth and beauty by draining the life out of others, often traveling in the guise of a spotted leopard. She uses illusions and intense physical beauty to blind men to her monstrous nature. [1, 2]

Lewis adapted this into a more “primly de-eroticized” but equally parasitic form of evil. The White Witch rides in a sledge drawn by white reindeer, but her vanguard is led by a fierce secret police of wolves, and her magic requires her to enchant victims with Turkish Delight—a magical addiction that drains Edmund of his moral autonomy and vitality. [1, 2, 3]

5. Frigid, Non-Human Grandeur

Both MacDonald and Lewis construct a very specific archetype of female evil: it is asexual, fiercely prideful, and entirely defined by a hunger for power. When Lilith is captured, her left side features a dark, unyielding spot, and her hand is clenched so tightly shut into a fist of stubborn rebellion that it has fused together. She would rather have her hand chopped off than willingly open it to surrender her power. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Lewis infused Jadis with this exact same unyielding, rigid pride. When Jadis stands in the dying world of Charn in The Magician’s Nephew, she is a magnificent, cold statue of absolute self-will, willing to destroy her entire universe with the Deplorable Word rather than submit to her sister’s rule. [1]

The Divergence: Redemption vs. Annihilation

While Lewis borrowed the terrifying aesthetic of MacDonald’s queen, the two authors parted ways on her ultimate fate due to their differing views on theology:

• MacDonald’s Universalism: Because MacDonald was a Christian universalist (believing all souls are eventually saved), Lilith is not destroyed. She is brought to the House of Death, suffers through repentance, opens her fist, and is eventually redeemed and brought to peace. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
• Lewis’s Orthodox View: Lewis held a more traditional view of free will and damnation. In Narnia, Jadis refuses to repent, doubles down on her malice, and is ultimately annihilated by Aslan at the Battle of Beruna.

If you are interested in reading the original source text that sparked Lewis’s imagination, you can explore the unabridged text via publishers like Barnes & Noble. [1]

Would you like to examine how The Magician’s Nephew expands Jadis’s backstory in Charn, or would you prefer to look closer at the House of Death concept that Lewis borrowed for The Great Divorce?

===========================================================

In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis directly modeled his concept of the “Solid High Countries” (Heaven) and the mechanism of eternal choice after the “House of Death” (or the House of Beds) from George MacDonald’s novel Lilith. [1, 2]

While The Great Divorce uses the frame of a bus ride from a gray hellish town to the outskirts of heaven, its core theology—that a soul must completely die to its earthly ego before it can truly live—is a literal adaptation of the eerie purgatorial environment MacDonald invented. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

The deep conceptual and thematic links Lewis borrowed from MacDonald’s House of Death heavily informed the architecture of The Great Divorce:

1. The Sleep of Death vs. The Solid World

In Lilith, Adam (disguised as an old sexton named Mr. Raven) maintains a massive, silent, subterranean chamber known as the House of Death. It is filled with rows of couches where human souls lie in a “cosmic sleep,” waiting for the end of time. They are not truly dead; they are sleeping a restorative, healing sleep that strips away their earthly selfishness and ready them for God’s presence. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Lewis takes this concept of a physical, transformative transitional state and updates it. Instead of a silent bedroom, Lewis creates the Foothills of Heaven. In this realm, reality is “so solid” that the visiting souls from Hell are merely translucent, ghostly shapes. Just as MacDonald’s characters must lie down and endure the vulnerable state of sleep, Lewis’s ghosts must endure the agonizing pressure of walking on grass that feels like hard diamond needles until their souls become solid enough to match the environment. Both concepts require the soul to undergo a grueling physical transformation to achieve spiritual readiness. [1, 2]

2. The Danger of Refusal (The Haunted Wood vs. The Grey Town)

The most direct thematic parallel is what happens to the souls who refuse to surrender to this transformation.

• In Lilith: The protagonist, Mr. Vane, and Lilith’s ancestors reject the House of Death. They believe that sleeping is a waste of time or a loss of control. By refusing to “die,” they become twisted, wandering ghosts forced to live in a dark, skeletal world or do battle with phantoms in a haunted wood. [1]
• In The Great Divorce: The damned souls choose to live in the Grey Town (Hell). They spend eternity building imaginary houses, arguing, and moving further and further away from one another. Like Mr. Vane, they refuse the “death” of their pride, preferences, and earthly attachments, viewing Heaven’s demands as a loss of autonomy. [1, 2, 3]

3. The Clenched Hand of Pride

The exact psychological state of Lewis’s ghosts is derived from the climax of Lilith. When the witch-queen Lilith is finally brought to the House of Death, she is willing to lay down, but her left hand is clenched into a tight, fused fist. It holds a secret store of power and absolute self-will that she refuses to give up. Adam tells her she cannot sleep until she opens her hand. Her refusal is an excruciating display of pride—she would rather suffer agonizing torment than surrender her last bit of control. [1]

This is the exact thesis of The Great Divorce. Every ghost who rides the bus to Heaven has their own “clenched hand”—some earthly attachment they refuse to open. [1, 2]

• One ghost clings to his self-pity.
• Another clings to her maternal possessiveness.
• Another clings to his theological intellect. [1]

As Lewis famously summarizes through the character of George MacDonald himself in the book:

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it.”

4. MacDonald as the Guide

Lewis was so transparent about borrowing these concepts that he explicitly writes George MacDonald into The Great Divorce as his heavenly guide, playing the exact same role that Adam/Mr. Raven played for Mr. Vane in Lilith. When the narrator meets MacDonald in the solid country, he addresses him as “Master” and uses MacDonald’s own theological framework to understand the terrifying beauty of the afterlife. [1, 2, 3, 4]

If you want to read more about this specific transitional theology, you can look into the Eerdmans Publishing Edition of Lilith which features a direct historical introduction written by C.S. Lewis himself. [1, 2]

Where would you like to direct our focus next—exploring specific ghost characters in The Great Divorce who mirror Lilith’s stubbornness, or looking at how Lewis defined Purgatory versus Universalism in his letters?

===================================================