Perhaps Lewis’s greatest accolade to MacDonald was having him appear as his guide in The Great Divorce (like Virgil for Dante). Tolkien was more ambivalent, sometimes giving MacDonald high praise, sometimes withdrawing it completely. But if imitation is flattery, the correlations are many and strong—even the subtitle of The Hobbit echoes one of MacDonald’s titles, There and Back. Lewis described Tolkien excitedly to his friend Arthur Greeves as “the one man absolutely fitted, if fate had allowed,