My Presentation at Kalamazoo (TOLKIEN'S METEORITE)

So, my own presentation for this year's Tolkien Seminar, held the day before the Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo, was a piece I call 'Tolkien's Meteorite'. This is a work in progress: I've finished the first and second parts (and Appendix) but the third section still needs more work. For those who might be interested, here's the three-paragraph opening that sets up the topic. The first section that follows looks at the evidence for dating the work. The second section contrasts Lewis's and Tolkien's treatment of their common theme. And part three looks at real-world and fictional analogues which might have inspired or influenced either.

Enjoy! Feedback welcome.

--John R.
--current job: proofing
--current reading: more essays by Martin Amis. Who's certainly no Christopher Hitchens.

Tolkien’s Meteorite

—A Preliminary Investigation—

In his fascinating but unfinished time-travel story, The Notion Club Papers, written circa 1944–46 but not published until 1992, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a passage in which the character based upon Tolkien himself^Nt1 describes the experience of a meteor falling to earth from the point of view of the meteorite itself through a kind of psychometry or object reading.

At about the same time his fellow Inkling C. S. Lewis wrote a meditation on a fallen meteorite which took the form of a poem simply named ‘The Meteorite’. Published in Time and Tide in December 1946, and probably newly written at the time, it was shortly thereafter reprinted as the headpiece to Lewis’s book Miracles (1947), and hence presumably was felt by Lewis to have some relevance to the theme of that work of apologetics.

It seems beyond happenstance that these two Inklings would be working on different expressions of such a striking common theme at about the same time with no connection between the two. What I’d like to do in this paper is explore the relationship between these two works, starting by seeing if we can establish priority of which was written first. It also behooves us to look for antecedents and analogues, both real-world and fictional, for any common source that might underlie both men’s work.