Those Hobbits in the Bird and Baby (Part 2)

In an earlier post, I showed how certain in-game features in LOTRO represent real-life people and places connected with the life of J.R.R. Tolkien. Specifically, the Bird and Baby in Michel Delving represents the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford where Tolkien and his literary colleagues frequently met. Also, the three named hobbits in the back room of the inn represent specific members of this informal society, the Inklings. In this point, I’ll introduce the real-life counterpart of the second of these hobbits, Carlo Williams.

Charles Williams (1886-1945)

Carlo Williams represents Charles Williams, a prominent novelist and editor of the 1930s and 1940s in England. Williams was largely self-taught as a writer. He attended university in the first decade of the twentieth century, but was unable to complete his degree because of lack of financial resources. In 1908 he went to work for Oxford University Press (OUP), perhaps the most prestigious publisher of scholarly work in the world, and he continued working for it in various editorial positions for the rest of his life.

Williams had very idiosyncratic views about the world; he was a lifelong member of the Church of England, but he also dabbled in secret societies and the occult. For example, for a time he was a Rosicrucian, and he also moved in some of the same circles as Aleister Crowley, the famous practitioner of black magic! Williams himself never seems to have rejected basic Christian doctrine or Christian morality, though, and his views found expression in his novels and poetry, which influenced other prominent English authors, including T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, and C.S. Lewis.

Williams’s novels were all set in modern times, but they had many supernatural components. For example, War in Heaven (1930) concerns the discovery of the Holy Grail and the attempts of various people to wield its power. In The Greater Trumps (1932), the original Tarot gives special powers to its users to control forces of nature. Williams’s best known novel is probably Descent into Hell (1937), in which characters’ fears and obsessions take on external, tangible form.

Williams joined the Inklings when his job required him to move from London to Oxford in 1940, and it was then that he was first introduced to J.R.R. Tolkien. Apparently Tolkien did not share the great admiration of some of the other Inklings for Williams’s writing, but the two spent a great deal of time together and had a friendly relationship. Some scholars have suggested that Williams and Tolkien had at least a modest influence on each other’s writing, but it seems that the devout Tolkien thought that popular novels were not the appropriate venue for discussions of the devil and black magic.

For his part, Williams certainly admired The Lord of the Rings. Although he died years before it was published, he heard draft chapters of it read aloud in Inklings meetings and at one point borrowed the entire manuscript from Tolkien so he could refresh his memory on certain points. At the time, Tolkien wrote that Williams “says the great thing is that [The Lord of the Rings's] centre is not in strife and war and heroism . . . but in freedom, peace, ordinary life and good living.”

Tolkien once wrote a poem about Williams. It is too long to quote in its entirety, but here are a few lines of it:

Our dear Charles Williams many guises shows:
the novelist comes first. I find his prose
obscure at times. Not easily it flows;
too often are his lights held up in brackets.
Yet error, should he spot it, he’ll attack its
sources and head, exposing ramps and rackets,
the tortuous byways of the wicked heart
and intellect corrupt. Yea, many a dart
he crosses with the fiery ones! The art
of minor fiends and major he reveals –
when Charles is on his trail the devil squeals,
for cloven feet have vulnerable heels.

So it seems that at the very least Tolkien appreciated the theological and moral points Williams tried to make in his writings.

Here are some websites where you can learn more about Williams and his novels:

The Charles Williams Society

The Charles Williams Picture Page

Charles Williams: Alchemy & Integration (scholarly biography of Williams)

Again, I’d like to recommend Humphrey Carpenter’s book The Inklings, which is where I found much of the information for this post, including Tolkien’s poem on Williams.