Welcome to the Tumistic Institute podcast.

Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.

The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Tumistic Institute chapters around the world.

To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at

to mystic institute.org. My talk, as you know, is called Getting to Know Tolkien and Lewis

and why it's worth your time. J.R.R. Tolkien triumphed over a lonely mountain of suffering.

The chapters of his life ring out like an epic catalogue, the sad arc from South Africa to Birmingham, with his father's death

defying his early childhood, his mother's conversion to the Church of Rome, her diabetic martyrdom

in isolation from her Protestant family, the saving

intervention of the erations and the charismatic stamp left on them by two saints, Philip

Neri and John Henry Newman. The Oxford degree in English language and literature, the delayed

marriage to Edith Bratt, the

front line and trench fever, the academic rise, the growing family, C.S. Lewis and the

inklings, the creation of Middle Earth. It is the stuff of legend. C.S. Lewis's life was also

marked by challenges. He lost his mother when he was nine.

He also served at the front and faced the unspeakable horrors of machine guns and barbed wire.

Like Tolkien, he came to Oxford from a foreign country, though Ireland before the days of the Republic was a British colony. The two great men had been tested

in ways that prompted fellow feeling and mutual understanding. We may say that fate or providence

prepared a common ground between them. They also shared a cultural and literary inheritance.

Both were born into the Protestant faith,

though Tolkien, as a young boy, elected to follow his mother's lead and convert to the Church of Rome.

When he went up to Exeter College, Oxford in 1911, he joined the small minority of Catholic undergraduates.

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