November 29, 1898, 111 years ago today, C S Lewis, the famous Christian apologist and author of The Chronicles of Narnia, was born in Belfast, Ireland. (Lewis died the same day as John F Kennedy in 1963, just short of his sixty-fifth birthday.)
Lewis would grow up to become a professor of English at Oxford University, and later Cambridge, in England. While teaching at Oxford, Lewis struck up a friendship with J R R Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, who was instrumental in the conversion of the previously avowed atheist to Christianity.
It was Tolkien who made the number 111 famous in The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume of The Lord of the Rings "trilogy." The book begins with Bilbo's "eleventy-first" birthday.
Tolkien himself turned 111 (posthumously) on January 3, 2003.
Comments