Jerry Root, Ph.D.
Professor, Wheaton College
Note
1. C. S. Lewis, Letter to Eliza Marian Butler, September 25, 1940. The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis Volume II: Books, Broadcasts, and the War 1931–1949. ed. Walter Hooper (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2004), 444.
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I had my “Indiana Jones” moment of discovery while watching my clothes tumble in a laundromat dryer in San Marcos, Texas. Several years before my laundry insight, in Oxford University’s 400-year-old Bodleian Library, I had stumbled on an unpublished, unidentified partial book manuscript by author C. S. Lewis. But at the time I first read it, I didn’t know its significance. Seven years later, in a single “Eureka!” laundromat moment, I realized what I had discovered. I had found a manuscript whose existence was doubted by most Lewis scholars: the opening pages of a planned collaboration between Lewis and The Lord of the Rings author J. R. R. Tolkien. Who would have thought that a laundry epiphany would solve a decades-old literary mystery involving two of the twentieth century’s most famous authors? The contents of that manuscript provided just the evidence I needed that C. S. Lewis was, among his many talents, also a communication professor. Discovering that manuscript provided the principal impetus for this book.
Communication is my life. I have spent more than forty years as a communication professor and author and co-author of several widely-used communication college textbooks.2 I have also had the privilege of serving as president of the National Communication Association, the largest academic professional association of communication educators and scholars in the world. Yet discovering Lewis and ←xv | xvi→Tolkien’s ideas about language and human nature was like finding the wardrobe door into some of the most important lessons I have ever learned about communication. This book includes those lessons.
At the time I found the manuscript I was relatively new to C. S. Lewis studies. I had not read The Chronicles of Narnia until I was in my 40s. In fact, I had not read a single word of Lewis until I spent Trinity Term 1993 in Oxford as a visiting scholar, attached to Wolfson College and the Department of Experimental Psychology.
While I was in Oxford, given that the city is where Lewis lived, studied and taught, I thought it would be a good place to learn about him. I picked up a biography of Lewis by A. N. Wilson, straightforwardly titled, C. S. Lewis: A Biography. I later learned that Wilson’s biography, although engagingly written, was controversial among Lewis scholars for including several errors, over-speculating about Lewis’s personal life, and being too “Freudian” in its analysis of Lewis’s relationships.3 Unaware at the time that the biography had been criticized by many Lewis scholars for inaccuracies, I nonetheless found Lewis’s life fascinating. The basic information in the book is true. I learned that Lewis was raised a Christian, then became an atheist, and then, in his late 20s and early 30s, slowly converted to Christianity, seeing it as the best way to make sense out of life. I also learned about Lewis’s marriage (twice) to Jewish and former communist and atheist Joy Davidman.4
After reading about Lewis and then returning home to Texas to see the movie Shadowlands, a film about the romance between Lewis and Davidman, which had been filmed during the time we were in Oxford (my wife, two sons, and I are in one of the crowd scenes), I was motivated to learn more about Lewis. I began reading his work more systematically, attending weekend seminars in nearby Austin and San Antonio, and eventually joining a Lewis discussion group in Austin. Those monthly meetings were like taking a five-year graduate seminar in C. S. Lewis. There I met and learned from distinguished Lewis scholars such as Dr. Joel Heck, who wrote the well-received Irrigating Deserts: C. S. Lewis on Education, and Dr. George Musacchio, author of C. S. Lewis, Man & Writer. These individuals were generous in sharing their insights about Lewis, as well as patient with me and others who did not have their depth of understanding. As I more systematically studied Lewis, I became aware of his frequent references to language, meaning, communication, and words. As a communication professor, I recognized a number of insightful communication ideas embedded in his works. I thought it might be interesting to see if I could learn more about Lewis’s perspective on communication.
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With my emerging fascination with C. S. Lewis, I returned to Oxford in 2002 on a second sabbatical from Texas State University. I wanted to read original, handwritten C. S. Lewis manuscripts in Oxford University’s centuries-old Bodleian Library. I enjoyed leisurely leafing through manuscript pages that Lewis’s pen had touched. Lewis was ahead of the sustainability curve, as he would re-use paper and often write on the back of old manuscripts. Among my favorite documents are Lewis essays written on the back of student papers that had been corrected in a firm hand by his friend J. R. R. Tolkien.
As a communication professor, I was interested in what Lewis thought about language, meaning, and communication, but also in how he thought about these topics. I wondered if I could glean new insights into what the ancient Roman rhetoricians called invention: how Lewis’s thoughts emerged and took shape. Could looking at his original manuscripts help me better understand him as a thinker, author, and speaker? I hoped so.
Upon returning my first batch of Lewis manuscripts to the library staff, I ordered a notebook described in the Lewis manuscript catalogue as a collection of miscellaneous notes and scraps. If you are granted access to the holdings at the Bodleian Library (requiring that you swear a centuries-old oath that you will not “kindle a fire” in the library), you first complete a form to request a book or manuscript from the archives, and then wait a few hours (or sometimes a day or more) to retrieve what was ordered. Since the Bodleian is a non-lending library, books and manuscripts are under tight security and read in special reading rooms; even the Queen cannot take a book out of the library! (Other monarchs have tried, with no success.) When the manuscript I had requested arrived in the reading room, it was a somewhat worn and slightly frayed, small, orange-covered paper notebook. I smiled when I saw that Lewis had penciled the word “SCRAPS” in capital letters on the outside cover.
The Lewis catalogue had accurately described the little notebook as containing drafts of Lewis’s ideas on a variety of topics. Other researchers had read these scraps before I did—it is quite famous because its pages include one of the only existing fragment drafts for The Chronicles of Narnia held in the Bodleian Library. Early ideas for The Magician’s Nephew can be found beginning on page 9. This early fragment of The Magician’s Nephew is called “The Lefay Manuscript” because of a character named Mrs. Lefay that appears in the story.5
It was on the first page of the notebook—actually the first page when I turned the book upside down and read it back to front—where I read the words, “In a book like this it might be expected that we should begin with the origins of language …”6 I froze. I held my breath. “What’s this?” Having already read the ←xvii | xviii→manuscript of Studies in Words, I knew that it did not start this way. I knew immediately that these words were important. What I did not realize at the time was that they were the beginning of a planned collaborative book with none other than J. R. R. Tolkien. In fact, I was slow to make