J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were close frenemies when they were both still alive and kicking, operating within the same dusty Oxford literature circles and bantering over lofty subjects like theology, personal faith and their own fantastical writing.
But if there was one subject that truly brought them together, it was their shared dislike of Walt Disney.
In private letters published in 2006's J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide and recently unearthed by Atlas Obscura, the fantasy legends sling bitchy insults and put-downs like a stuffy, academic Gossip Girl, decrying Disney's creative choices in 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and referring to the man himself as an ill-educated "boob".
"Dwarfs ought to be ugly of course, but not in that way," Lewis wrote in a correspondence to Tolkien shortly after they attended a screening of the film together. "And the dwarfs' jazz party was pretty bad. I suppose it never occurred to the poor boob that you could give them any other kind of music."
"But all the terrifying bits were good, and the animals really most moving: and the use of shadows (of dwarfs and vultures) was real genius. What might not have come of it if this man had been educated-or even brought up in a decent society?"
