A recent post at Atlas Obscura has drawn attention to the fact that C.S. Lewis and his friend J.R.R. Tolkien both saw, and both disliked, Walt Disney’s masterpiece Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
To anyone familiar with Tolkien and Lewis’s sensibilities, that’s hardly surprising.
Indeed, it would be impossible to imagine Tolkien — who famously disliked Lewis’s own Narnia stories, a sentiment contrasting greatly with Lewis’ enormous esteem for Tolkien’s Middle-earth — being anything but appalled by Disney’s silly dwarfs, with their slapstick humor, nursery-moniker names, and singsong musical numbers.
Nor is it particularly surprising that Lewis similarly derided Disney’s dwarves as “vulgar” (though he appreciated other aspects of the film).
In the words of a Tolkien scholar quoted in the Atlas Obscura post, “I think it grated on them that he was commercializing something that they considered almost sacrosanct.”
(Aside: That post starts with the incredibly ignorant claim, propounded with astonishingly misplaced confidence, that “It’s no secret that J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were legendary frenemies.”)
Thinking about this recently, though, it occurred to me that a contemporary and peer of Lewis and Tolkien’s, though not of their circle, would likely have had a very different view, had he lived a few years longer: G.K. Chesterton (who died in 1936, two years before Snow White was released).
Unlike Tolkien and Lewis — Oxbridge dons and literary elites — Chesterton was a populist who attended but did not graduate from public university (University College London), and whose work was entirely popular in nature.
Chesterton was a great defender of popular and even “vulgar” culture — the very change leveled by Lewis and Tolkien against Snow White. Take the following utterly typically Chestertonian sentiment, from All Things Considered:
I believe firmly in the value of all vulgar notions, especially of vulgar jokes. When once you have got hold of a vulgar joke, you may be certain that you have got hold of a subtle and spiritual idea. Continue reading
- Deacon Steven D. Greydanus is film critic for the National Catholic Register, creator of Decent Films, and a permanent deacon in the Archdiocese of Newark.
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