A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-18

by Joseph Loconte

These Christian authors were swimming against the tide of their times. During the postwar years, many veterans composed fiercely anti-war novels and poetry. Many more became moral cynics. Yet Tolkien and Lewis—deeply aware of “the beauty and mortality of the world”—insisted that war could inspire noble sacrifice for humane purposes.

they suggest that war is a symptom of the ruin and wreckage of human life, but that it points the way to a life restored and transformed by grace.

Indeed, a vital theme throughout is the sacred worth of the individual soul; in Middle-earth and in Narnia, every life is of immense consequence. On the other hand, their characters are deeply flawed individuals, capable of great evil, and in desperate need of divine grace to overcome their predicament.

What began in 1618 as a conflict between Catholic and Protestant forces in the German province of Bohemia spiraled into a vast, Machiavellian struggle for dynastic power and real estate. In a certain sense, the conflict anticipated the Great War. Although it could have remained a regional dispute, it sucked into its vortex most of the nations of Europe.

Tolkien’s view was exactly the opposite: myths did not originate with man, but with God. They are his means of communicating at least a portion of his truth to the world.

In the worlds of Middle-earth and Narnia, evil is a perversion of goodness, which is the ultimate reality.

most everyone is judged by the decisions he makes, or fails to make, when the Call to do battle arrives.

Eugenics, communism, fascism, Nazism: these were the revolutions and ideologies that arose in the exhaustion of the democracies of Europe, all in the name of advancing the human race. All began by promising liberation from oppression; all became instruments of totalitarian control.

A recurring motif of his works is how soft and subtle compromises can initiate a total corruption.

But the careful reader sees something else entirely: individuals often at war with their own desires. The heroes of these stories are vulnerable to temptation and corruption, while the antagonists are almost never beyond redemption.

The hero cannot, by his own efforts, prevail in the struggle against evil. The forces arrayed against him, as well as the weakness within him, make victory impossible. The tragic nature of his quest begins to dawn on

the eucatastrophe, a decisive act of Grace that promises to overcome our guilt, restore what has been lost, and set things right.