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December 20, 2017 - May 1, 2018
Literary critic Roger Sale has called the conflict “the single event most responsible for shaping the modern idea that heroism is dead.”11 For a generation of men and women, it brought the end of innocence—and the end of faith.
Tolkien and Lewis were attracted to the genres of myth and romance not because they sought to escape the world, but because for them the real world had a mythic and heroic quality. The world is the setting for great conflicts and great quests: it creates scenes of remorseless violence, grief, and suffering, as well as deep compassion, courage, and selfless sacrifice. In an era that exalted cynicism and irony, Tolkien and Lewis sought to reclaim an older tradition of the epic hero. Their depictions of the struggles of Middle-earth and Narnia do not represent a flight from reality, but rather a
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“My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflection of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself.”
it cannot be emphasized enough that neither man welcomed the arrival of war or ever romanticized what war was about.
Both authors regarded twentieth-century modernization as a threat to human societies because they viewed the natural world as the handiwork of God and thus integral to human happiness. As such, nature was an essential ally in the struggle against these dehumanizing forces.
The impact of Spencer on Anglo-American thought can hardly be exaggerated. In the decades leading up to the First World War, it was virtually impossible to undertake any intellectual work without mastering Spencer.
the European states all had long traditions of “national” or “established” churches, meaning state support for a favored Christian denomination. The alliance of church and state allowed the secular goals of government to get mixed up with spiritual goals of Christianity.
Roughly four hundred “war novels” were published in the 1920s and 1930s, many of which helped to create a mythology of war as inherently ignoble and irrational.
Virginia Woolf expressed the indignation of her peers in a letter to a friend: I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic believer in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.
Barfield influenced Lewis in at least two profoundly important ways. He persuaded Lewis to abandon his “chronological snobbery,” the assumption that the dominant intellectual fashion of the day makes every mode of thought from the past either suspect or irrelevant.
The book helped to launch Lewis’s career as a popular writer. Yet without Tolkien’s letter of praise to a publisher—much of it was dismissed as “bunk” by a reader assigned to the manuscript—the story might never have seen the light of day. “I read the story in the original manuscript and was so enthralled that I could do nothing else until I had finished it,” Tolkien said. “I at any rate should have bought this story at almost any price if I had found it in print.”
“C. S. L. had a passion for hearing things read aloud, a power of memory for things received in that way,” Tolkien explained,
Reflecting later on Lewis’s long engagement with his story, Tolkien’s gratitude is manifest. “The unpayable debt” he owed to Lewis, he said, was his “sheer encouragement”—over many years—to keep on. “He was for long my only audience,” Tolkien explained. “Only from him did I ever get the idea that my ‘stuff’ could be more than a private hobby. But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more I should never have brought The L. of the R. to a conclusion.”
As we will see, it is their moral imagination that exerts a unique power: the proposition that every person is caught up in an epic contest between Light and Darkness. In the worlds of Tolkien and Lewis, the choices of the weak matter as much as those of the mighty.
The great achievement of Tolkien and Lewis is the creation of mythic and heroic figures who nevertheless make a claim upon our concrete and ordinary lives.
Here is a truth that Tolkien must have learned during the Great War, an “adventure” he did not seek out, but one that came to him, unwanted. They had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. This freedom to either fulfill or evade the Calling on one’s life is central to Tolkien’s work—and to his understanding of the human condition.
“The Great War was a process by which all the great powers, victors and vanquished alike, transformed themselves from bastions of prosperity into sinkholes of poverty and debt,” writes G. J. Meyer in A World Undone. “Financially as in so many other ways, the war was a road to ruin.”
