Tolkien & Lewis: Myth, Imagination, and The Quest for Meaning

A Duncan Group production in association with Crouse Entertainment Group and Iowa Public Television. Currently airing nationwide on PBS stations.

Tolkein Lewis Title

In 1931, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien – long before fame would eclipse their careers as professors - and fellow scholar Hugo Dyson spent an evening at Lewis’s apartment in Magdalen College in Oxford, England. Their discussion is the stuff of legend as they engaged in a lively debate that challenged their notions of myth, truth, reality, the imaginative process and faith. At the time, Dyson and Tolkien believed in Christianity while Lewis was a former atheist who’d become a theist.

This film explores in depth that evening and the result that changed Lewis’s life. Both Tolkien and Lewis would go on to write some of the most significant and popular literature of the 20th century. Their most popular books, Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, combined have sold in excess of 150 million copies worldwide, and the films adapted from the books have earned billions worldwide.

This is the most in depth look at the power of myth since the breakthrough PBS series with Joseph Campbell in 1988. It is also the first documentary exploring Lewis’s and Tolkien’s remarkable personal and literary friendships to be produced for North America television.