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

Their depictions of the struggles of Middle-earth and Narnia do not represent a flight from reality, but rather a return to a more realistic view of the world as we actually find it.

Indeed, as he later acknowledged, one of the great heroic figures in The Lord of the Rings is based on his firsthand knowledge of the men in the trenches of the Great War: “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.”

Tolkien and Lewis offer an understanding of the human story that is both tragic and hopeful: 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.

In this sense, they offer a challenge to those who view war as a ready solution to our problems as well as those who condemn any war as an unqualified evil. Neither Tolkien nor Lewis fell prey to the extreme reactions to the war so typical of their era. “We know from the experience of the last twenty years,” wrote Lewis in 1944, “that a terrified and angry pacifism is one of the roads that lead to war.”28 Tolkien decried “the utter stupid waste of war,” yet admitted “it will be necessary to face it in an evil world.”

Perhaps the character of Faramir, the Captain of Gondor in The Lord of the Rings, expresses it best.30 He possesses humility as well as great courage—a warrior with a “grave tenderness in his eyes”—who takes no delight in the prospect of battle. As such, he conveys a message that bears repeating at the present moment, in a world that is no stranger to the sorrows and ravages of war. “War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all,” he explains. “But I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”31

As Tolkien once told his publisher, the Shire “is based on rural England and not any other country in the world.”15 The house of his famous hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, takes its name—“Bag End”—from his aunt’s farm in Worcestershire. “I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size),” he admitted. “I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking.”16 In contrast, Tolkien viewed the overreliance on technology, “the Machine,” as a step toward dominating others. The act of “bulldozing the real world,” Tolkien wrote, involves “coercing other wills.”17 Hence, the hateful realm of Mordor is sustained by its black engines and factories, which Sauron introduces as his forces invade the Shire. This theme would absorb Tolkien for much of his career.

Modern assumptions about “progress” that disregard the rhythms and traditions of the past will come under attack. “I care more how humanity lives than how long,” he wrote. “Progress, for me, means increasing the goodness and happiness of individual lives. For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible idea.”22

It is a conviction that appears often in his writing, where he lampoons the growth of technologies and bureaucracies at the expense of human freedom. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, King Caspian tangles with slave traders who, with statistics and graphs, try to justify their operations as “economic development.” Caspian wants the trade ended: “But that would be putting the clock back,” gasped the governor. “Have you no idea of progress, of development?” “I have seen both in an egg,” said Caspian. “We call it ‘Going Bad’ in Narnia. This trade must stop.”23

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. In the climactic battles for Narnia and Middle-earth, Nature herself joins in the war against tyranny.

For his part, Lewis warned against the bondage imposed upon humanity when, under the guise of scientific progress, men and women are regarded as “patients.” In Perelandra, the second in his Space Trilogy, we meet Professor Weston, a famous physicist and devotee of the new science. Weston is an advocate of “emergent evolution,” a process by which the human species is “thrusting its way upward and ever upward” toward new heights of achievement. He boasts that his new beliefs have swept away all his old conceptions of our moral obligations to others. “Man in himself is nothing,” he explains. “The forward movement of Life—the growing spirituality—is everything.”51 Weston emerges as an essentially satanic figure.

It’s important to remember that eugenicists thought of themselves as reformers, committed to improving the human condition. They endorsed the idea of state action to achieve their goals. “They were dedicated to facing head-on the challenges posed by modernity,” writes Rosen. “Doing so meant embracing scientific solutions.”58 Animated by the Myth, they emphasized the collective destiny of the human race, at the expense of the individual. The conceit of the intellectual elites of the day was that science, and the technology it underwrites, could solve the most intractable of human problems.

Both authors thus reflect the historic Christian tradition: human nature as a tragic mix of nobility and wretchedness.

Although both men read and enjoyed stories about war, about armies clashing in a great moral contest, they did not think of themselves as “holy crusaders” when the First World War got underway. Tolkien did not get swept up in the war fever of 1914. When tens of thousands of young men volunteered for service in the British Expeditionary Force, he continued his studies. In August 1916, shortly after being deployed to France, Tolkien experienced the “universal weariness” of war and the “bitter disillusionment” of discovering that his military training had not prepared him for the conditions of actual combat.

Some of Lewis’s journal entries during this time record his anxiety about being wounded in the war.16 Almost until the day of his enlistment, in fact, he hoped he could avoid military service.17 He remarked wryly to his father that one of the most serious consequences of the war was the survival of those least fit for survival. “All those who have the courage to do so and are physically sound, are going off to be shot: those who survive are moral and physical weeds—a fact which does not promise favorably for the next generation.”18

Before examining the contribution of the churches to the demonization campaign, we should remember that Germany authorized numerous acts of aggression and vindictive violence that outraged the democratic Allies. After German troops invaded Belgium, reports of atrocities against civilians filtered out of the country: massacres, the use of women and children as human shields, rape, the mistreatment and execution of prisoners, and other war crimes. C. S. Lewis wrote his father in October 1914, mentioning a friend who was “employed at his camp the other day in unloading a train of seriously wounded soldiers from the front: from whom he learned that the newspaper stories of German atrocities (mutilation of nurses, killing wounded, etc.) were not in the least exaggerated.”48

Two young soldiers, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, managed to survive this delirium with their souls intact. It is not easy to say how the temper of the times shaped their attitudes as they went off to war; no person fully escapes the assumptions of his age. Nevertheless, neither man ever expressed the crusader mind-set, much less the apocalyptic views of the clergy.

Their goals were much more practical and earthly: to fight honorably, survive the trenches intact, and pick up their academic careers where the war had interrupted them. “Before I went to the last war I certainly expected that my life in the trenches would, in some mysterious sense, be all war,” wrote Lewis years later. “In fact, I found that the nearer you got to the front line the less everyone spoke and thought of the allied cause and the progress of the campaign.”68

Did the experience of war transform Tolkien and Lewis into faith-based crusaders? Tolkien entered the war a devout Catholic, Lewis a lapsed Anglican and an atheist (his turn toward Christianity did not occur until much later). They shared a basic patriotism and sense of duty to King and Country, yet they were reluctant recruits into the war effort. As authors they sought to recover the romantic and mythic traditions based on the struggle between good and evil. But they declined to sanctify war as a divine undertaking. Rather, the characters in their works often display a great ambivalence toward conflict.

In The Fellowship of the Ring, Elrond grows somber as he reflects on the history of the wars that have ravaged his world. He has lived long enough to know that, despite hopes to the contrary, the forces of evil would not be eradicated by the next battle: “I have seen three ages in the West of the world, and many defeats, and many fruitless victories.”81 Tolkien denied that his Lord of the Rings was “just a plain fight between Good and Evil,” or that his protagonists represent untainted goodness. “But in any case this is a tale about war,” he wrote, “and if war is allowed (at least as a topic and a setting) it is not much good complaining that all the people on one side are against those on the other.”82

Lewis occasionally poked fun at his characters, such as Reepicheep in the Narnia series, for their bravado: “For his mind was full of forlorn hopes, ...

Lewis was much more explicit about the biblical themes that frame his work. But even his protagonists—obedient to a Calling larger than themselves—are nonetheless flawed, fearful, and self-doubting. “Peter did not feel very brave; indeed, he felt he was going to be sick,” wrote Lewis in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. “But that made no difference to what he had to do. He rushed straight up to the monster and aimed a slash of sword at its side.”86

Thus, in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, we follow Frodo Baggins in near-constant peril as he pursues his mission as a foot soldier in a great war. We see his fear as well as his determination to overcome it and remain true to his quest: “There is a seed of courage hidden (often deeply, it is true) in the heart of the fattest and most timid hobbit, waiting for some final and desperate danger to make it grow,” Tolkien wrote. “He thought he had come to the end of his adventure, and a terrible end, but the thought hardened him. He found himself stiffening, as if for a final spring; he no longer felt limp like a helpless prey.”

The losses were indeed devastating: a total of 6,097 British sailors perished at sea, compared to 2,551 Germans. Among those caught up in the battle was Christopher Wiseman, a member of Tolkien’s “Tea Club and Barrovian Society,” or TCBS, a semi-secret society of friends who first met in 1911 at King Edward’s School, Birmingham. Though others were included, its core members were Tolkien, Wiseman, Geoffrey Bache Smith, and Robert Gilson. All of them, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, were drawn into the First World War as soldiers. Tolkien’s circle shared a love of literature and a powerful desire to leave their mark on the world. Wiseman must have left his mark on Tolkien, because he named his son, Christopher, after him.

News of these battles, of their ferocity and destructiveness, was in the air as twenty-four-year-old Tolkien disembarked on June 4, 1916. Trained as a battalion signals officer with the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, his preparation could hardly have equipped him for the realities that lay ahead. He seemed to sense as much, for he did not expect to return home alive. “Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute,” Tolkien recalled. “Parting from my wife then . . . it was like a death.”

“The Lonely Isle,” suggests his deep sadness as his familiar world slipped further and further from sight: Down the great wastes and in gloom apart I long for thee and thy fair citadel. Where echoing through the lighted elms at eve In a high inland tower there peals a bell: O lonely, sparkling isle, farewell!11 It is easy to imagine Tolkien, the untested soldier, drawing on this moment of separation when he described scenes of parting in The Lord of the Rings. Recall Frodo’s dark realization as he prepares to leave the Shire: “This would mean exile, a flight from danger to danger, drawing it after me. And I suppose I must go alone. . . . But I feel very small, and very uprooted, and well—desperate. The Enemy is so strong and terrible.”

No soldier, especially one with Tolkien’s literary cast of mind, could ever forget the experience. As an undergraduate at Oxford, Tolkien already had discovered that he was drawn to ancient legends and the languages in which they were embedded. Not even the demands of active combat could completely distract him from his passion. He began writing bits and pieces of the legends that would form the basis of his epic trilogy: “The early work was mostly done in camps and hospitals between 1915 and 1918—when time allowed.”28 Thus the battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings possess a grim authenticity.

Among the dead was TCBS member Rob Gilson. Two nights before he was killed, Gilson had written home: “Guns firing at night are beautiful—if they were not so terrible. They have the grandeur of thunderstorms. But how one clutches at the glimpses of peaceful scenes. It would be wonderful to be a hundred miles from the firing line once again.”38

Though he entered the war with great anxiety over his own capacities under the stress of battle, Gilson distinguished himself in his final moments. When his commanding officer was killed, Gilson took over and led his men “perfectly calmly and confidently” into No Man’s Land.39 His friend could not have been far from Tolkien’s thoughts when, in The Lord of the Rings, he described as “curiously tough” the hobbits of the Shire.

Reflecting on his experiences years later, Tolkien acknowledged that his taste for fantasy was “quickened to full life by war” and that “the mythology (and associated languages) first began to take shape during the 1914–18 war.”46 Much of the “early parts” of his epic, he explained, were “done in grimy canteens, at lectures in cold fogs, in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire.”47 In other words, Tolkien had begun to lay the foundation for his war trilogy.

The next day they were at it again, exchanging bombs, hand grenades, and machine-gun fire with the enemy. The assault lasted all day. The ground, according to one survivor, was “torn up by shells and littered with dead bodies.”55 At sunset a white flag appeared at the German garrison at Ovillers: surrender. Tolkien, unharmed but physically and emotionally exhausted, had endured fifty hours of combat. Years later he described this period as “the animal horror of the life of active service.”

Yet it brings to mind a moment in The Lord of the Rings, when Merry, cut off from the Fellowship, finds himself friendless and alone in the midst of their great quest. “Everyone he cared for had gone away into the gloom that hung over the distant eastern sky; and little hope at all was left in his heart that he would ever see any of them again.”

A week later Tolkien’s battalion was on a train to Ypres, the scene of some of the most devastating battles of the war. Yet Tolkien was not with them; he was stricken with “trench fever,” a bacterium that entered the bloodstream through lice. He was transported to an officers’ hospital to recover. Chronic ill health sent him back to England on November 8, 1916, to recuperate at Birmingham University’s wartime hospital.

A few weeks later, in December 1916, Tolkien received another sad letter, this time from Christopher Wiseman, his friend who survived the Battle of Jutland. In what should have been a safe zone, G. B. Smith was hit by a German shell fragment while walking along a road in the village of Souastre, north of Bouzincourt. An infection set in, and four days later he was dead.

Mostly confined to a sickbed in England, Tolkien faced a grim accounting. Gilson and Smith were dead. So was Ralph Stuart Payton, another member of the TCBS. He, too, had fought at the Somme. He was killed in action on July 22, 1916, his body never identified. Gone also was Thomas Kenneth “Tea Cake” Barnsley, who was in the debating society with Tolkien. He served as a captain in the 1st Birmingham Battalion, was buried alive by a trench mortar, escaped—only to be killed in action near Ypres in June 1917.

Trench fever probably spared Tolkien’s life. The 11th Lancashire Fusiliers went back into action on May 27, 1918, near the River Aisne, and sustained enormous casualties. The entire battalion was presumed dead or taken prisoner.

Thus on the desolate path to Mordor we encounter “dead grasses and rotting reeds” that “loomed up in the mists like ragged shadows of long-forgotten summers.”72 We see “a land defiled, diseased beyond healing.”73 We watch Sam Gamgee, during the passage through the marshes, catch his foot and fall on his hands, “which sank deep into sticky ooze, so that his face was brought close to the surface of the dark mire.” Looking intently into the glazed and grimy muck, he is startled by what he finally sees. “There are dead things, dead faces in the water,” he said with horror. “Dead faces!” Gollum laughed. “The Dead Marshes, yes, yes: that is their name,” he cackled.74

Gilbert, who wrote a definitive account of the Somme offensive, noted that Tolkien’s description of the Dead Marshes matches precisely the macabre experience of the soldiers in that battle: “Many soldiers on the Somme had been confronted by corpses, often decaying in the mud, that had lain undisturbed, except by the bombardment, for days, weeks and even months.”76 In a letter to L. W. Forster, written in December 1960, Tolkien confirmed the influence of the war on his story, at least in his description of its bleak landscapes: “The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme.”77

We don’t know why Tolkien wrote those enigmatic words. But we do know what hobbits are like: from his own account, the character of the hobbit was a reflection of the ordinary soldier, steadfast in his duties while suffering in that dreary “hole in the ground,” the front-line trench.

Most of the members of the British Expeditionary Force were “citizen soldiers,” drawn largely from the working classes. Unlike the French, Italian, Russian, and German armies, the BEF did not experience a large-scale collapse in discipline or morale.79 Even during the most intensive campaigns along the Western Front, they showed a “remarkable resilience” relative to other armies.80 The change in character that comes over Sam Gamgee was probably not unlike the transformation that Tolkien must have witnessed among many of his fellow soldiers in battle: “But even as hope died in Sam, or seemed to die, it was turned to a new strength. Sam’s plain hobbit-face grew stern, almost grim, as the will hardened in him, and he felt through all his limbs a thrill, as if he was turning into some creature of stone and steel that neither despair nor weariness nor endless barren miles could subdue.”

Whatever Tolkien thought about these questions, he was careful never to demean the significance of the soldier at his post: “I have always been impressed that we are here, surviving, because of the indomitable courage of quite small people against impossible odds.” The hobbits were made small, he explained, “to show up, in creatures of very small physical power, the amazing and unexpected heroism of ordinary men ‘at a pinch.’ ”85

Tolkien the soldier lived among these “ordinary men,” fought alongside them, witnessed their courage under fire, joked with them, mourned with them, and watched them die. Thus the “small people” who fought and suffered in the Great War helped inspire the creation of the unlikely heroes in Tolkien’s greatest imaginative work. Like the soldiers in that war, the homely hobbits could not have perceived how the fate of nations depended upon their stubborn devotion to duty.

Lewis did not share Smythe’s eagerness for battle, however. Perhaps his reading of Homer’s The Iliad, which he had begun a few weeks after the war broke out, had something to do with it. Although there is a notion that some British officers went into battle with The Iliad in their backpacks and the rage of Achilles in their hearts, Lewis was not one of them.

In any event, Lewis was focused on his academic career; he wanted to explore his love of the classics and English literature and to cultivate friendships with like-minded scholars. Having been born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Lewis was still exempt from service in the British military. Not yet eighteen years old, he could not enlist—nor did he wish to. “Apropos of conscription, I sincerely hope that one of two things may happen,” he wrote his father. “Either that the war may be over before I am eighteen, or that conscription may not come into force before I have volunteered. I shouldn’t fancy going out to meet the others—as a conscript.”9

Lewis’s brother, Warnie, with whom he shared a close and lifelong friendship, called his discovery of MacDonald “a turning point in his life.”13 Biographers Roger Green and Walter Hooper regard the work as “the highlight among Lewis’s literary discoveries” during this time.14 Nearly forty years later, Lewis was still recommending MacDonald’s work to friends and acquaintances.15 Biographer George Sayer draws special attention to the book and the enduring power of its symbolism. “The influence of Phantastes on Jack lasted many years, perhaps all his life,” he writes. “It had a transforming influence on his attitude toward the ordinary, common things around him, imbuing them with its own spiritual quality.”

A year later the war was mired in stalemate. Conscription, which went into effect in January 1916, made Lewis’s decision for him. He could not remain behind while other men his age were sent to the front; he resigned himself to the prospect of enlisting. “It makes me so sad to think I shall have only two more sets of holidays of the good old type,” he wrote, “for in November comes my 18th birthday, military age, and the ‘vasty fields’ of France, which I have no ambition to face.”

What effect was news of the war having on Lewis? It is hard to say. Many years later, speaking to another generation of young men caught up in a great war, Lewis insisted that war produced at least one benefit: it forced us to consider our own mortality. “If active service does not prepare a man for death,” he asked, “what conceivable concentration of circumstances would?”26 There is little sign in the summer of 1916, however, that he was intellectually preparing himself for anything other than an academic career.

A deepening atheism may have had something to do with it. Lewis was reared in the Anglican Church, but he came to associate Christianity with “ugly architecture, ugly music, and bad poetry.” Church sermons seemed vapid and irrelevant. Lewis’s doubts about God and Christianity were reinforced by his tutor, Kirkpatrick, under whom he studied before applying to Oxford. Kirkpatrick was, in Lewis’s words, “a hard, satirical atheist.” From Kirkpatrick Lewis learned that unexamined beliefs and assumptions must be taken to the woodshed. Hardly any subject was taboo, including the war, which had begun just weeks before Lewis came under Kirkpatrick’s tutelage.

Kirkpatrick’s ruthless rationality—like “red beef and strong beer”—exerted an enduring influence on his student. Lewis embraced the necessity of logic and reason, even as he pursued literary Romanticism. He learned not to abandon his conclusions, especially about spiritual matters, just because they might be unpopular.

Years later, recalling this period in his life, Lewis admitted that he “put the war on one side to a degree which some people will think shameful and some incredible.” He denied, though, that he was trying to evade reality. “I maintain that it was rather a treaty with reality,” he wrote, “the fixing of a frontier.” It seems that Lewis made a pact with his country that left him at least partially in control: “You shall have me on a certain date, not before. I will die in your wars if need be, but till then I shall live my own life. You may have my body, but not my mind.”36 Based on his letters to friends and family, he appeared to keep up his end of the treaty.

After three years of living with the knowledge of war, Lewis was ordered to deploy for France. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Somerset Light Infantry, a combat regiment. On November 17, 1917, he sailed from Southampton to Le Havre in Normandy, expecting to undergo more training. Instead, twelve days later, he was sent to the front line. He arrived on his nineteenth birthday.