Was Tolkien’s misgivings with Narnia due to it being a “portal fantasy”, or that he didn’t do enough world building?

[Michael Targaryen]

I’m not talking about Tolkien’s dislike over allegory. I heard that he felt it was a “lazy” fantasy, and I’m wondering if it’s because Narnia is tied to our world where Middle-earth is independent, or if he thought Lewis just didn’t put enough work into his world.

[Johnny]

I think it's the worldbuilding. If I recall correctly (as I remember reading in this book), his criticism said something like Narnia was a "patchwork mythology", i.e. Lewis was drawing from all sorts of mythologies and fantasy elements with no real consistency (like he includes Bacchus, Santa Claus, etc.). It's a fair criticism for someone who spent so much of his life creating a world to house his language, but at the same time, if Lewis was trying to capture a spirit of childlike wonder, it kind of makes sense that these elements would be all mashed up. All that being said, however, I'm not sure if that kind of thing was his primary aim to begin with.

[Fenici]

I think that Tolkien's criticism could be traced in the way they wrote their books. Lewis was really fast in writing his books about Narnia, finishing them almost at first draft, while Tolkien was, as Lewis complained, a "dilatory scholar", putting a lot of time and effort in creating a coherent mythology for Arda. Tolkien was afraid that Lewis produced an inadequate mythology for his world, even using a derisive alternate title for the Chronicles of Narnia: "Nymphs and their Ways, the love-life of a Faun".

As a reference, I've used "Conflict and convergence on fundamental matters in C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien" by Ralph C. Wood.

P.S. English is not my native language, so feel free to correct me.

[Ziech]

https://www.amazon.com/Oddworld-Compl...