The talking fox of Woody End

[Alcuin]

Originally Posted by Varnafindë

No. Tolkien's fox was written about fifteen years earlier than the Narnia stories.

You may both be right. Narnia may have come years later, but as one of the regular Inklings, Lewis was listening and reviewing and suggesting improvements. “Come on, Tollers!” he would say, addressing Tolkien familiarly. “You can do better!” Lewis was very encouraging: in Letter 227, Tolkien wrote that

… I owe to [C. S. Lewis’s] encouragement the fact that in spite of obstacles … I persevered and eventually finished The Lord of the Rings. He heard all of it, bit by bit, read aloud, but never saw it in print till after his trilogy was published.

Poet and fellow Oxford professor Hugo Dyson hated it: it is probably true that one night in Lewis’s rooms at Merton College as Tolkien began to read to the Inklings from the LotR draft, Dyson fell back on his couch as if in agony and exclaimed, “Oh, G*d! Not more f*****g elves!”

Back to the subject. I seriously doubt that the fox was a randomly chosen creature. Lewis was a medievalist: if I am not mistaken, Narnia is in fact a complex medieval-style allegory composed by Lewis and based upon his nearly-unmatched knowledge and understanding of medieval allegory. I think the fox was indeed chosen to demark the shift in story-telling. I don’t think anyone else - not on this board, and not among professional interpreters of Tolkien - has noticed this before. It’s taken me over forty-four years and perhaps a hundred readings to notice it, along with reading a lot of criticism of the scene both from folks like us and from academicians. It seems deliberately obvious: nearly everyone notices and is aggravated by the fox, but no one notes the shift it marks. It must be a signpost, an intentional marking of a particular turn in the story.

Why then a fox? My guess is that C.S. Lewis suggested a fox. Hoping to substantiate it, I looked up “fox in medieval literature” on Google and found quite a bit of reference material, particularly about Reynard the Fox, “the main character in a literary cycle of allegorical Dutch, English, French and German fables. Those stories are largely concerned with Reynard, an anthropomorphic red fox and trickster figure,” as Wikipedia puts it. There are a great many other references (over 950,000 tonight), and I have not time to plow through more than a sampling.

Does anyone have any idea why Tolkien would choose to mark this part of the story with a fox rather than, say, a squirrel or a badger or bird or some other creature?