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independent spirit and longing for love. Edith, born in Gloucester in 1889, the illegitimate child of a paper dealer and a governess, lost her mother at the age of fourteen; after some years at school, where she took to music with considerable skill, she moved to lodgings in Edgbaston, close by the Birmingham Oratory. At about this time, in one of those serendipitous acts that makes or breaks a life, Father Francis, casting about for a home for the boys more congenial than that offered by their unwelcoming aunt Beatrice, moved them into the very Edgbaston rooming house in which Edith Bratt resided.
    It took Tolkien and Edith less than a year to fall in love. One wonders why it took a week. A photograph of Edith shows a young woman with dark, intense eyes looking directly at the camera, a mass of thick black hair framing her soft, full face; to someone as unfamiliar with young women as Tolkien, her beauty must have come as a shock and a revelation. In addition, she was lithe and musical, a singer and dancer. He, by contrast, was thin, average in height, athletic (he played rugby at King Edward’s, coming away with a broken nose and a lacerated tongue, the source of his mumbling diction), a careful dresser, a tidy, attractive, but not handsome package; but what he lacked in physical presence, he made up for in kindness, intelligence, and romantic disposition. It was a good match and an early marriage might have been anticipated. There was, however, one insurmountable obstacle. Father Francis sniffed out the relationship and, concerned for Tolkien’s studies and doubtful of any underage passion, separated the couple, forbidding them to meet again until Tolkien turned twenty-one. Despite some minor breaches, the wall Father Francis erected held firm. Edith moved to Cheltenham and Tolkien prepared for Oxford. Romance was in suspension, but the seeds of Tolkien’s future had been sown: a Catholic faith, a love of words, a creative, artistic mind, the promise of connubial bliss.

 
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    HEAVEN IN A BISCUIT TIN
    What a pity there are no color photographs of Clive Staples Lewis. To see just once in all its splendor that balding pate, that bright red face, those sagging pouches beneath the shrewd brown eyes—trademarks of a heavy daily intake, sustained for decades, of tobacco, beef, and beer! Almost every account of Lewis’s appearance mentions his ruddy complexion. Even death could not snatch it away: J. B. Phillips, Anglican clergyman and Bible translator, reports that while watching television in late November 1963, the recently deceased Lewis “‘appeared’ sitting in a chair within a few feet of me … ruddier in complexion than ever, grinning all over his face and … positively glowing with health.” Time magazine’s September 8, 1947, cover drawing by Boris Artzybasheff interprets the florid countenance; Lewis’s head turns slightly to the right, exposing the left side of his face, stained from forehead to chin by a mottled brown-and-red flush. His left cheek is dark, reflecting the gloomy presence of an irate steel-gray demon hovering over his left shoulder—Lewis is being portrayed here as author of The Screwtape Letters , instructional epistles from a senior devil to his apprentice—but the right side of his face, lightened to pale peach and white by the presence of an angel (we glimpse only one wing and a corner of the nimbus) is calm, alert, intent.
    Lewis resembled, many said, the neighborhood butcher. Add the ubiquitous tweed jacket and flannel slacks, and he comes up in the world, but only as far as a midlevel accountant. He dressed like an ordinary man. Some of his friends and colleagues took this at face value: Luke Rigby, a pupil of Lewis’s at Oxford during World War II and later a Benedictine abbot, writes that his teacher wore clothes “verging on the shabby” that “reflected the warmth and geniality of the man … a straightforward and down-to-earth condemnation of the ‘pseudo’—the