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

Biographer Alister McGrath believes that the merciless slaughter of war sharpened Lewis’s doubts about God. “His wartime experiences reinforced his atheism,” McGrath writes. “His poetry of the period rails against the silent, uncaring heaven.”48 Although we cannot know for certain, it does seem that the shock of mortal combat stirred a fresh revulsion for the pious doctrines of his youth. In “De Profundis,” Lewis scorned the notion of a loving God who intervenes in human affairs: Come let us curse our Master ere we die, For all our hopes in endless ruin lie. The good is dead. Let us curse God most High.49

On March 24, the day after Wilson’s order, Germany crossed the River Somme, threatening to drive a wedge between the British and French armies. The German offensive would eventually be thwarted, but at a terrible cost.54 Among the casualties in the opening days of the battle was Edward “Paddy” Moore, second lieutenant with the 2nd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade and Lewis’s friend from his Oxford days. Moore was last seen on March 24, defending a position against a much larger German force. Lewis had forged a close bond with Moore, his sister, and their mother, Mrs. Janie King Moore. Lewis and Moore promised each other that if either one of them was killed, the other would care for his surviving parent—a promise that Lewis kept.

In fact, a number of men were cut down, but the battalion continued to advance. Lewis would recall The Iliad when he sought to describe the experience of coming under fire: “This is war. This is what Homer wrote about.”60 By 7:15 p.m., the assault was successful. Lewis safely reached the village, now in British hands, and received about sixty German prisoners.

Nevertheless there were casualties, including Second Lieutenant Laurence Johnson, struck by machine-gun fire and dead the next day. He was twenty years old. Johnson had joined the army at about the same time as Lewis. The two met during military training at Oxford and found they had much in common. Both planned to take up their scholarship, their love of the classics, after the war. Both enjoyed debating the big questions about God, philosophy, and morality. Thrust into combat together, they found time to talk during lulls in the fighting. “I had hoped to meet him at Oxford some day, and renew the endless talks that we had out there,” Lewis wrote soon after learning of his death. “I had him so often in my thoughts. . . . I can hardly believe he is dead.”61 Reflecting years later, Lewis declared that Johnson “would have been a lifelong friend if he had not been killed.” He even viewed Johnson’s arrival in his battalion as a providential challenge to his atheism—“in my own battalion also I was assailed”—and a vital part of his eventual conversion to Christianity.

Meanwhile, the assault at Riez du Vinage was still in play. The next morning, on April 15, the Germans counterattacked by bombing the village. The British returned fire. A shell—probably fired from behind the British line—went off close to Lewis, killing Sergeant Harry Ayres. His death was a great loss to Lewis: the sergeant had treated him with unusual respect and compassion and “became to me almost like a father.”66 Shrapnel from the same mortar struck Lewis in the hand, leg, and chest. A stretcher crew picked him up and took him to No. 6 British Red Cross Hospital, near Étaples. His brother, also deployed in France, borrowed a motorbike and rushed over to see him.

With no life-threatening injuries, Lewis was sent home to England to make a full recovery. “Thank God Jacks has come through it safely,” Warnie wrote in his journal, “and that nightmare is now lifted from my mind.”67 Lewis learned that the fragment in his chest was too close to his heart to be removed; it would have to stay. “They will leave it there,” he wrote, “and I am told that I can carry it about for the rest of my life without any evil results.”68 Lewis would not rejoin his battalion before the war ended; his soldiering days were done.

“My life is rapidly becoming divided into two periods,” he wrote, “one including all the time before we got into the battle of Arras, the other since.”69 From a hospital bed in Bristol, Lewis now struggled to come to terms with the face of war: the shattered limbs and shattered minds, the men who never returned, the randomness of death. In addition to Moore and Johnson, most of the remainder of his friends would die in battle in the last year of the war: Alexander Gordon Sutton, killed January 2; Thomas Kerrison Davy, who died of his wounds on March 29; and Martin Ashworth Somerville, killed in Palestine on September 21. “I could sit down and cry over the whole business: and yet of course we have both...

Like Tolkien, the experience of war cut in two directions for Lewis. He could never quite forget its depredations: “the frights, the cold, the smell of H.E. [high explosive], the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night till they seemed to grow to your feet . . .”73 And yet, as we’ll see, the sorrows of war did not ultimately blacken Lewis’s creative life. The world of Narnia, a land watered by streams of joy—“the land I have been looking for all my life”—would emerge from the wreckage of a Great War.

As he wrote from his bed at Endsleigh Palace Hospital: Can you imagine how I enjoyed my journey to London? First of all the sight and smell of the sea, that I have missed for so many long and weary months, and then the beautiful green country seen from the train. . . . I think I never enjoyed anything so much as that scenery—all the white in the hedges, and the fields so full of buttercups that in the distance they seemed to be of solid gold.74 The experience appears to have wrought a change in Lewis—a small change, perhaps, but a permanent one. It quickened his belief in a spiritual, otherworldly source of natural beauty.

In the years after the conflict, the cruelty and senselessness of the war—of any war for any reason—became the dominant motifs of a generation. The writings of authors such as Robert Graves (Goodbye to All That), Siegfried Sassoon (Memoirs of an Infantry Officer), Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms), T. S. Eliot (The Hollow Men), and Erich Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front) reinforced these themes in the public mind. The watchword was disillusionment: a new cynicism about liberal democracy, capitalism, Christianity, and the achievements of Western civilization.

Most of the nations of Europe suffered grievous losses. Russia gave up 1.7 million men, another 5 million wounded. In Germany, roughly 465,000 soldiers were killed each year for the duration of the war. The generation of German men from nineteen to twenty-two years of age was reduced by 35 percent. In France, the casualty rate (dead or wounded) was an astonishing 75 percent. About 2 million French soldiers died, or roughly 25 percent of all the men in France, leaving behind 630,000 war widows. In Britain, 921,000 soldiers were dead, more than 2 million wounded; one of every three British households had a man killed, injured, or taken prisoner. The United States, which suffered the fewest casualties among the great powers, lost more than 116,000 men, and twice that number wounded.

After serving as a professor of English Language at Leeds University, Tolkien won a professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford in 1925. Nevertheless, his early academic success could not erase the heartache of war. Oxford University lost nearly one in five servicemen in the conflict. From Exeter College, Tolkien’s college, 141 men had perished. Thus he experienced “a time of sorrow and mental suffering.”18 The loss of so many friends to the war produced, in the words of his children, “a lifelong sadness.”19

Though sensitive to religious questions, Lewis remained uncommitted. Still a young man, he already had experienced deep sorrow and struggle, and it left him with a sober, if not gloomy, view of the world. “The early loss of my mother, great unhappiness at school, and the shadow of the last war . . . had given me a pessimistic view of existence,” he wrote years later. “My atheism was based on it.”

Many postwar thinkers and writers, in fact, were unwilling to endure the world in its new form: a kind of spiritual vertigo took hold, a frantic search for solutions to the human predicament. Freudian psychology, eugenics, socialism, spiritualism, scientism—these and other ideologies were attempts to solve, or explain away, the horrors that seemed to be hanging over the human race. Though these ideas may have originated before the war, by the 1920s they were gaining ground rapidly in Europe and the United States.

All of this helped to produce the modern, secular zealot: the revolutionary who seeks to create heaven on earth. Science, psychology, politics, economics, education—any of these disciplines might be enlisted in the cause. At universities such as Oxford, where Tolkien and Lewis established themselves in the 1920s, a cocktail of experimentation and existential doubt was the order of the day. Pacifism was all the rage. Patriotism was out, replaced by contempt for all the old virtues. For the intellectual class as well as the ordinary man on the street, the Great War had defamed the values of the Old World, along with the religious doctrines that helped to underwrite them. Moral advancement, even the idea of morality itself, seemed an illusion.

What Hemingway wrote in A Farewell to Arms captured the attitude of many soldiers and civilians alike. When laid beside the actual names of men and regiments that perished in the conflict, “abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene.”48 As Lewis recalled the scene many years later, the “mental climate of the Twenties” influenced an entire generation of students and future scholars. “None can give to another what he does not possess himself,” he wrote. “A man whose mind was formed in a period of cynicism and disillusion, cannot teach hope or fortitude.”49 The verdict was in: the war to make the world safe for democracy, the holy war to advance Christian ideals, was an unholy delusion.

The first story that Tolkien ever wrote down, as many of his admirers know, can be traced to his days as a soldier. In early 1917, when he was recovering at Great Haywood from trench fever, Tolkien sketched “The Fall of Gondolin,” a tale that would become part of The Silmarillion, the legends of Middle-earth that predate The Lord of the Rings. In “The Fall of Gondolin” we read of the assault by Morgoth, the prime power of evil, against the last elvish stronghold. Although the city is “beleaguered without hope,” there are “deeds of desperate valor” performed by the leaders of the noble houses and their warriors.

Years later, Tolkien admitted to his son, Christopher, then a soldier in the Second World War, that his earliest writings were a way of coping with the violence and suffering and anxieties of war. “I sense amongst all your pains (some merely physical) the desire to express your feeling about good, evil, fair, foul in some way: to rationalize it, and prevent it from festering,” he wrote. “In my case it generated Morgoth and the History of the Gnomes.”54 Morgoth became the equivalent of Satan in Middle-earth, while the gnomes were reinvented as the race of elves who stand against him.

It seems that Tolkien, even in the throes of combat, consciously sought to retrieve a martial tradition that would become a casualty alongside all the other casualties of the First World War. Already he was constructing a mythology about England meant to recall its long history of struggle for noble purposes. “I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought,” he once explained.55 Thus he set out “to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own.”

Near the heart of this tradition are the concepts of honor and sacrifice for a just cause, themes that would of course animate The Lord of the Rings: “Now is the hour come, Riders of the Mark, sons of Eorl!” exclaims Théoden in The Return of the King. “Foes and fire are before you, and your homes far behind. Yet, though you fight upon an alien field, the glory that you reap there shall be your own for ever.”57 As an English soldier serving in France, Tolkien understood the difficulties of fighting “upon an alien field.” He had his own doubts about the meaning of the war, and witnessed some of its fiercest scenes of slaughter. Yet he did not allow them to overwhelm his distinctively moral vision.

Tolkien the ex-soldier could not glamorize combat. His letters to his sons during the Second World War, for example, are filled with great foreboding. “The utter stupid waste of war, not only material but moral and spiritual, is so staggering to those who have to endure it,” he wrote. “But so short is human memory and so evanescent are its generations that in only about 30 years there will be few or no people with that direct experience which alone goes really to the heart. The burnt hand teaches most about fire.”63

C. S. Lewis might well have taken the path of other war authors and embraced the genre of irony and doubt. His earliest war writings suggest he was well on his way. Lewis’s first published work, called “Death in Battle,” appeared in Reveille magazine in 1919. The poem describes “the brutal, crowded faces around me, that in their toil have grown / into the faces of devils—yea, even as my own.”69 The work appeared in the same issue containing poems by Sassoon and Graves. In the same year Lewis published a collection of poems, written from 1915–1918, titled Spirits in Bondage. They embody an almost existential view of human life, ensnared in a cruel and unforgiving cosmos.

The obscenity of belief in God: such was the tide of elite opinion in much of postwar Europe. To many of the best and brightest, Christianity appeared to lack any explanatory power. It could neither account for the internecine conflict of the supposed Christian nations of Europe, nor offer a realistic hope of achieving a more peaceful and just global order. Rather, the church of the modern age seemed tethered to destructive doctrines and medieval superstitions. “We find at the present day among the educated classes . . . a great output of new and more or less fantastic superstitions drawn indifferently from the mysterious East or the neurotic West,” wrote Gilbert Murray in The Ordeal of This Generation (1928). “Also a large and outspoken rejection of all religion and particularly of all morality.”

In their “perpetual dogfight”—a phrase lifted from the war, of course—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. This philosophical pose, given birth by the Enlightenment, grew to maturity after the conflagration of the First World War, into which so many cherished Victorian ideals had vanished.

Barfield also challenged the scientific and materialist view of reality typical among Oxford dons. The “old beliefs” central to Christianity were languishing after a radical assault from various quarters. Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud—in one form or another they and others mocked the notion of the sacred dignity of the individual. A great many educated Europeans and Americans had come to believe that the “aesthetic” experiences—our sense of morality, the longing for joy, and the love of beauty—were essentially meaningless. Though these intellectual movements could be hostile toward one another, Lewis realized they were united in their hatred of the “immortal longings” of ordinary human beings. “These people seemed to me to be condemning what they did not understand.”

Barfield’s spiritualism, for all its eccentricities, appeared to offer a better explanation for these experiences than that of the materialist. He helped Lewis to consider the possibility that our moral intuitions, our aesthetic experiences, could lead us to objective truth: imagination might be as good a guide to reality as rational argument.

By 1925 Lewis had cast off the stern atheism of his younger days. “It will be a comfort to me all my life to know that the scientist and the materialist have not the last word,” he wrote, “that Darwin and Spencer, undermining ancestral beliefs, stand themselves on a foundation of sand.”84 Lewis’s postwar friendships prevented him from adopting the moral indifference—what he called the “shallow pessimisms”—so typical of his generation.85 They pressed upon him questions for which he had no credible answer.

To Lewis, myths might be beautiful, they might charm our imaginations, but they were lies: inventions that contain no objective truth about the world. This is what troubled Lewis about Christianity. It was like the Norse myth of the dying god Balder, a lovely fiction, “one mythology among many.” Here was the “recognized scientific account” of the growth of religion that Lewis had written about to Arthur Greeves. It is the idea that “most legends have a kernel of fact in them somewhere,” but enthusiasts transform the kernel into a glorified sun god, corn deity, or supernatural messiah.

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. Because men and women come from God, Tolkien argued, their highest ideals and longings come from him as well. It is not only man’s abstract reasoning, but also his imaginative inventions that find their origin in God.91 As such, they suggest an aspect of divine truth. Mythmaking, what Tolkien calls “mythopoeia,” is a way of fulfilling God’s purposes as the Creator. By inventing a myth—by populating a world with elves and orcs, dragons and witches, gods and goddesses—the storyteller tries to retrieve the world he knew before man’s fall from grace.

Tolkien answered him immediately, and in his answer he revealed the core of his own philosophy as a writer and as a Christian thinker.96 Yes, the story of Jesus the Christ is a kind of myth: it is the authentic story of the Dying God who returns to life to rescue his people from sin and death and bring them to “the Blessed Land,” where “though they make anew, they make no lie.”97 The difference between Christianity and all the pagan myths is that this Dying God actually entered into history, lived a real life, and died a real death.

Tolkien finally excused himself to return home, while Lewis and Dyson continued to talk until 4:00 a.m. An intellectual barrier to faith had collapsed. Twelve days later Lewis confessed to Arthur Greeves: “I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a great deal to do with it.”100

A counterfeit gospel, a false myth, created a cacophony of despair in the West. Yet two friends and authors refused to succumb to this storm of doubt and disillusionment. Fortified by their faith, they proclaimed for their generation—and ours—a True Myth about the dignity of human life and its relationship to God. Against all expectation, their writings would captivate and inspire countless readers from every culture and every part of the globe.

Postwar writers seemed to have no mental category for the nature of the conflict, no set of beliefs to understand it. This fact makes the literary aims of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis all the more remarkable: they steadfastly rejected the sense of futility and agnosticism that infected so much of the output of their era.

When the first book of Tolkien’s trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, appeared in 1955, his Oxford friend wrote a review for Time and Tide. Lewis frankly acknowledged that Tolkien’s story about hobbits and elves and wizards was a romantic, fantastical tale thoroughly out of step with the times. Here, like nowhere else, the heroic romance “has suddenly returned at a period almost pathological in its anti-romanticism.”5 Nevertheless, Lewis insisted, one of the surprising strengths of the story was its realism: the description of a titanic struggle between Good and Evil that navigates between the deadly reefs of illusion and disillusionment.

Tolkien and Lewis would essentially agree. Central to their experience was an encounter with the presence of evil: the deep corruption of the human heart that makes it capable of hunting down and destroying millions of lives in a remorseless war of attrition.12 A conviction emerged in both these authors, however, that the problem of evil was not explainable only in natural terms. Rather, evil existed as a darkness in the soul of every human being and as a tangible, spiritual force in the world. “The Shadow of that hideous strength,” wrote Scottish poet Sir David Lyndsay, “six miles and more it is of length.”13 Like the war they knew on the Western Front, the Shadow is a dehumanizing force. It seeks to dominate or destroy anything that resists its will. This is the irrepressible fact behind their stories, the reality that flings their characters into action.

When Gandalf visits Frodo he warns of the impending danger and what must be done to overcome it. The Ring, he says, is a corrupting power. Anyone who continues to use it will be destroyed by it. There are no hands, no matter how pure, that can be trusted with the Ring for long: such is its force that it turns every good motive toward evil.

Lewis understood evil in much the same way: it is an objective power in the world, waging a war for individual souls. It seeks to create a society of slaves, ruled by despots, and “held together entirely by fear and greed.”18

In The Magician’s Nephew, the children hear a sound emanating from the depths of the earth, a wondrous voice—“the First Voice”—a voice almost too beautiful to endure. It belongs to Aslan and it is his summons to the new world: the creation of Narnia. The music of his voice fills the children with joy, although they hardly understand what is happening. “But the Witch looked as if, in a way, she understood the music better than any of them,” Lewis wrote. “Her mouth was shut, her lips pressed together, and her fists were clenched. Ever since the song began she had felt that this whole world was filled with a Magic different from hers and stronger. She hated it.”21

In the worlds of Middle-earth and Narnia, evil is a perversion of goodness, which is the ultimate reality. Although Lewis is much more explicit in naming God as the source of everything good in the world, Tolkien shares his Christian belief that evil represents a rejection of God and the joy and beauty and virtue that originate in him.22 Evil is a mutation, a parasite, an interloper. It is an ancient Darkness that fears and despises the Light. At war with the good, it is an immensely powerful force in human life and human societies.

Not surprisingly, the abuse of science and technology lies near the heart of the contest. Wrote an early reviewer in Punch magazine: “It is Mr. Lewis’s triumph to have shown, with shattering credibility, how the pitiful little souls of Jane and Mark Studdock become the apocalyptic battlefield of Heaven and Hell.”25

When, in the 1930s, Tolkien and Lewis began to compose their stories, traditional belief in the existence of evil was already out of fashion. As we’ve seen, leaders in educated circles had dispensed with these “medieval” concepts as the vestiges of religious superstition. In our own day, the concept of evil remains perhaps the most controversial idea in any discussion about God, religion, or Christianity. Skeptics see a psychological tool to repress the members of a community or demonize those outside it. They have a point: no one who studies the history of the West could fail to note the abuse of religious doctrine for perverse ends.

We might expect their stories, rooted in this belief, to lurch in one of two directions: either toward the triumphalism of the crusader, as we saw during the First World War; or toward fatalism, a cast of mind that renders men and women helpless victims in the storms of life. Instead, the heroes of Middle-earth and Narnia are much more complex. They are often hobbled by their own fears and shortcomings; they resist the burdens of war. Yet we also see in them an affirmation of moral responsibility—an irreducible dignity—even amid the terrible forces arrayed against them.

This tension appears repeatedly—relentlessly—in The Lord of the Rings, from its opening pages to its closing chapters. Immediately after Gandalf explains to Frodo that Sauron the Great, the Dark Lord, has arisen again and returned to Mordor to pursue his wicked designs, Frodo shrinks back. “I wish it need not have happened in my time,” he says. “So do I,” says Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”27

Tolkien’s account of the condition of their hearts is as true to human life in the shadow of death as anything in modern prose. Each of them is faced with the appalling clarity of the choice laid before him: to continue in the quest, into dangers and horrors unspeakable, or to take the safe and easy way and turn back. “All of them, it seemed, had fared alike: each had felt that he was offered a choice between a shadow full of fear that lay ahead, and something that he greatly desired. Clear before his mind it lay, and to get it he had only to turn aside from the road and leave the Quest and the war against Sauron to others.”32

The choice they face is also a summons; not a blind accident, but a Calling on their lives. One may answer the Call—or refuse it, turn away, and walk into Darkness. But indifference to the Call to struggle against evil is not an option; one must take sides. Thus, set before our imagination in the works of Tolkien and Lewis is one of the great paradoxes of our mortal lives: the mysterious intersection of providence and free will.

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.

Like Tolkien, Lewis did not limit the need for painful choices to his main protagonists; most everyone is judged by the decisions he makes, or fails to make, when the Call to do battle arrives. In The Magician’s Nephew, the Cabby and his wife, a humble couple from a modest part of London, have been chosen to rule Narnia as its first king and queen. They are warned that there will be challengers to their throne. What, Aslan asks, are they prepared to do?

The lion, we learn later, was Aslan in disguise. He is determined to guide the children in their journey, even if it means danger and suffering. Though Lewis provided us only with fragments of his wartime experience, we may imagine that, on at least one occasion, he found himself “staggering back to help” a friend under fire, hardly aware of what he was doing. Indeed, the scene would have been familiar to countless soldiers in the Great War, in every war that has ever been fought: the image of a soldier throwing himself into harm’s way to rescue a fallen comrade.

In Frodo we are meant to see ourselves: our weaknesses, our rationalizations, and our lack of resolve in combatting evil. But we also get a glimpse into a life of courage and perseverance in the ongoing struggle: you resisted to the last. Tolkien’s story reminds us that evil is a sleepless force in human lives, and that the war against it demands constant vigilance.

His motives, he insists, are pure: “We do not desire the power of wizard-lords, only strength to defend ourselves, strength in a just cause,” he says. “And behold! In our need chance brings to light the Ring of Power. . . . It is mad not to use it, to use the power of the Enemy against him.”42 It all sounds so reasonable to modern ears. Yet it is Boromir, by turning on Frodo and forcing him to flee, who breaks the Fellowship and endangers them all. Boromir repents of his treachery, but it costs him his life.