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

In a talk called “Learning in War Time,” Lewis explained how war exposes the folly of placing our happiness in utopian schemes to transform society. “If we thought we were building up a heaven on earth, if we looked for something that would turn the present world from a place of pilgrimage into a permanent city satisfying the soul of man, we are disillusioned, and not a moment too soon.”23 As we’ll see, unlike the disillusionment that overwhelmed much of his generation, Lewis would use the experience of war—its horror as well as its nobility—as a guidepost to moral clarity.

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.”29 Their recourse was to draw us back to the heroic tradition: a mode of thought tempered by the realities of combat and fortified by belief in a God of justice and mercy.

The belief in progress led others to argue that the West would soon dispense with war altogether as the remnant of a primitive, unenlightened epoch. British writer Norman Angell, in his book The Great Illusion, explained that the great democracies of Europe were coming to realize that war would produce severe economic hardship and losses, and would take all measures necessary to avoid it.

In the new age of international commerce and communication, nations would naturally devote infinitely more resources to peaceful endeavors than to preparations for war. “How can we possibly expect to keep alive warlike qualities,” he asked, “when all our interests and activities—all our environments, in short—are peace-like?”6

Lewis became as dubious as Tolkien of the promises of industrialization to uplift the human condition, a skepticism that he would carry throughout his life.

The Myth of Progress proves to be irresistible, especially to those repelled by traditional Christianity and its unpleasant doctrines of guilt, judgment, and repentance. Indeed, the triumph of science and technology seemed to leave no meaningful role for religion or the supernatural. Science, not religion, was driving human achievement. Its new dominance left many believers struggling for resources with which to shore up the credibility of their faith. “Looked at with the cold eye of empiricism,” writes historian James Turner, Christianity’s claims to knowledge about the cosmos “stood naked as a babe.”39

As Christian clergy transformed themselves into holy warriors, one theme appeared in common among the combatants: the belief that their nations were specially chosen by Providence to accomplish his progressive purposes on the world stage. Fidelity to God demanded fidelity to one’s country as God’s instrument, especially in wartime. Cross and Crown must be kept together.

Lyman Abbott, one of the best-known liberal theologians of his day, envisioned “progressive redemption” as a result of the war. Americans were working hard “to banish those crimes against humanity from our civilization,” he said, and to bring about “the triumph for Christianity such as the world has never before known.”62

Almost without exception, church leaders became tireless evangelists for Wilson’s gospel of peaceful internationalism. “The world that existed before the War has disappeared forever,” declared John Mott. “For the world it is a new birth, a great day of God such as comes only once in 100 or 1,000 years.”64 Joseph Fort Newton, a famous minister at London’s City Temple, likewise discerned “a new chapter in the social, political, intellectual and spiritual life of mankind.”

Here, then, is one of the most striking effects of the Myth of Progress. Even war itself—a process inherently destructive to human life and human societies—was believed to have regenerative properties. The assumption of religious leaders in England and the United States was that war would advance the ideals of Christianity and democracy. More than that, it would give birth to an epoch of peace and righteousness: the “last battle” before the dawn of a new world. Whatever the religious beliefs of the combatants, the secular idealism of the Myth was driving attitudes and expectations about the conflict’s outcome.

The problem, of course, was that none of these holy predictions would come to pass. The gulf between the prophecies of the clergymen and the realities of the conflict would overshadow many souls in the postwar generation. Paul Bull, a minister and former chaplain, spoke for many of them: “The Age of Progress ends in a barbarism such as shocks a savage. The Age of Reason ends in a delirium of madness.”67

Their personal taste of combat, with all its troubling ambiguities, checked the impulse toward self-righteousness. Surely the daily routine of war, its moments of fear, boredom, exhaustion, hardship, and horror, saved them from ever romanticizing the experience.

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.

Thus the battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings possess a grim authenticity. When Tolkien describes the Siege of Gondor—where the “fires leaped up” and “great engines crawled across the field” and the ground “was choked with wreck and with bodies of the slain”—he delivers the realism of the war veteran. “Busy as ants hurrying orcs were digging, digging lines of deep trenches in a huge ring, just out of bowshot from the walls,” he wrote in The Return of the King. “And soon yet more companies of the enemy were swiftly setting up, each behind the cover of a trench, great engines for the casting of missiles.”29

After a heavy rain, it was commonplace to see the bodies of soldiers lying facedown in pools or lakes of muddy water; once injured, their sixty-pound packs sealed their fate. A young British officer reported finding bodies of soldiers wounded on July 1 who had “crawled into shell holes, wrapped their waterproof sheets around them, taken out their Bibles and died like that.”52 War correspondent Sir Philip Gibbs saw more than most. “Dead bodies were heaped there, buried and unburied,” he wrote. “Men dug into corruption when they tried to dig a trench. Men sat on dead bodies when they peered through their periscopes. They ate and slept with the stench of death in their nostrils.”53

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

But we know that he found it compelling—“I accepted his principles at once”—and that he was somewhat embarrassed by his own “unexamined life.” Lewis would have to reckon with Johnson’s principles, with the severity of the moral universe envisioned in the Bible, before his conversion could occur.65

Only a handful of statesmen openly worried about the infatuation with material and scientific advancement. Winston Churchill was one of them. “Without an equal growth of Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love, Science herself may destroy all that makes life majestic and tolerable,” he wrote. “There never was a time when the inherent virtue of human beings required more strong and confident expression in daily life.”71

At the same time, the abuse of science—its capacity to dehumanize its masters as well as its victims—would also be a major theme of their works. Rather than liberating human beings from their ancient frailties, science enslaved them. The dystopian world in Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, for example, is dominated by an ostensibly scientific institute, the N.I.C.E., a cover for supernatural and sinister purposes. “There was now at last a real chance for fallen Man to shake off that limitation of his powers which mercy had imposed upon him as a protection from the full results of his fall,” Lewis wrote. “If this succeeded, Hell would be at last incarnate.”72

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.

An avid reader of modern thought, Mussolini, for all practical purposes, was an atheist. His first publication was a book called God Does Not Exist. His anti-clericalism, however, would not prevent him from manipulating the church for political purposes. “The influenza virus of 1918 had enveloped the world in weeks and penetrated almost everywhere,” writes historian Paul Johnson. “The virus of force, terror and totalitarianism might prove equally swift and ubiquitous.”38

With God discredited, meaning must be found “in life itself, in the act of living, in the vitality of the moment.”46 Thus, the new psychology legitimized a new hedonism. Within a decade, W. R. Matthews, the Dean of Exeter, complained of “the decay of institutional religion” because of the “incoherence of the Christian message and its apparent contradiction with modern knowledge.”

Neither can the “madness” of which Lewis wrote be denied. The moral norms of European civilization seemed to perish along with the human casualties. Although war always involves great suffering, something had changed during the years of 1914–1918. “Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa became one vast battlefield on which after years of struggle not armies but nations broke and ran,” observed Winston Churchill. “When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and these were of doubtful utility.”73

Indeed, it is hard to overstate the spiritual crisis that overcame many young men and women, particularly among the intellectuals, throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Swiss theologian Karl Barth had been appalled at the wholehearted embrace of Germany’s war by the theologians, and at what he saw as the confusion of enlightened culture with the gospel. The Bible, Barth insisted, contained “divine thoughts about men, not human thoughts about God.” Barth savaged the utopian schemes of liberal Christianity in his monumental Epistle to the Romans (1921). His work “burst like a bombshell on the playground of the European theologians.”74 Nevertheless, Barth’s “neo-orthodoxy,” as it came to be called, was being rejected by elite opinion throughout Europe and, increasingly, the United States. It came as a thunderbolt to the literati, for example, when T. S. Eliot was baptized and confirmed into the Church of England in 1927. How could the author of The Wasteland find solace in such a primitive superstition? How could a member of the literary set, London’s Bloomsbury Group, commit such an act of intellectual betrayal?75 Virginia Woolf expressed the indignation of her peers in a letter to a friend:

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’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.

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. “There was an Eden on this very unhappy earth,” Tolkien explained many years later. “We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of ‘exile.’ ”92 The mythmaker, fired by the sense of exile and the desire to return to his authentic home, reflects “a splintered fragment of the true light.”93

The friends finally returned to Lewis’s study, where they talked until 3:00 a.m. The subject was Christianity. Lewis did not understand the meaning of the central teachings of the faith: the concepts known as “the blood of the Lamb” and “the atonement.” How could the life and death of Jesus have “saved the world”? How could the sacrificial death of someone two thousand years ago help us now? It all seemed irrelevant and incomprehensible.95 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.

Early reviews of the book were mostly positive, but Lewis was stunned to realize that almost no one discerned in it the biblical doctrine of the fall, which anchors the entire story. “If only there were someone with a richer talent and more leisure, I believe this great ignorance might be a help to the evangelization of England,” he wrote to a friend. “Any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people’s minds under cover of romance without their knowing it.”108 Here is an insight Lewis surely encountered in his many conversations with J. R. R. Tolkien.

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. Here we are not left as orphans, for a force of Goodness stands ready to help. Here we meet Gandalf the Grey, the wisest and best of wizards, engaged in a titanic struggle against the Shadow that threatens Middle-earth; and Aslan, the fearsome Lion, who will pay any price to rescue Narnia from the “force of evil” that has entered it.

In The Lord of the Rings, it is Gandalf who summons men to battle, whose presence demands a response of the heart. “ ‘And now,’ said the wizard, turning his back to Frodo, ‘the decision lies with you. But I will always help you.’ He laid his hand on Frodo’s shoulder. ‘I will help you bear this burden, as long as it is yours to bear. But we must do something, soon. The Enemy is moving.’ ”122 In The Chronicles of Narnia, it is Aslan whose voice must be reckoned with like no other, a voice that fills every soul with fear or delight. “Aslan threw up his shaggy head, opened his mouth, and uttered a long, single note; not very loud, but full of power. Polly’s heart jumped in her body when she heard it. She felt sure that it was a call, and that anyone who heard that call would want to obey it and (what’s more) would be able to obey it, however many worlds and ages lay between.”123

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. “If anguish were visible,” Tolkien once explained, “almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapor, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens!”23

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.

Critics sometimes accuse the authors of creating black-and-white characters to personify their religious beliefs. 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. Here, in fantasy and myth, no one escapes the long and harassing shadow of the biblical fall.

In the aftermath of the First World War, there was deep cynicism about “the moralistic idealism” that created the slaughterhouse of the Western Front.89 Modern liberalism had come to regard man’s combative nature as an evil, and the chivalrous sentiment as the “false glamour” of war.90 Even before the Enlightenment, of course, many Europeans (and Americans) had learned to despise the values associated with the medieval world. The forces of democracy, secularism, and feminism would discard them altogether.

The heroes of Narnia and Middle-earth do not shrink from the sight of hacked-off limbs and smashed skulls; yet they also are men and women of great humility and modesty. The intended effect of these characters is to retrieve the medieval virtues and make them attractive, even to a modern audience.

Lewis is insistent on this point—that despite all our effort and sacrifice, even to the point of death, we cannot prevent a final defeat. The present world, always in the grip of Darkness, can never evolve into an earthly paradise. Rather, it will draw to a sudden and violent close: “an extinguisher popped on the candle, a brick flung at the gramophone, a curtain run down on the play.”6

For all the accusations of “medieval escapism,” Tolkien comes closer to capturing the tragedy of the human condition than any postmodern cynic. At the climax of his journey, at the fires of Mount Doom, despite all his courage and strength, Frodo fails in his quest: he chooses not to destroy the Ring, but instead succumbs to its power and places it once again on his finger. “But one must face the fact,” Tolkien wrote, “the power of Evil in the world is not finally resistible by incarnate creatures, however ‘good.’ ”10

Here is where Tolkien and Lewis depart most radically from the spirit of the age. Our modern tales of heroism—the gallery of superheroes, super cops, and super spies—offer a protagonist who invariably saves the day by his (or her) natural intelligence and strength of will, usually with lots of firepower at hand. The idea that the hero would need outside help—from a supernatural deity, for example—strikes many as a cheat. It robs human beings of their “dignity” and diminishes “the human spirit.” In the Star Wars franchise, the nebulous “Force” that aids Luke Skywalker in his struggle against Lord Vader even now seems quaint, out of date. We prefer Batman in The Dark Knight Rises, the brooding, obsessive figure who overcomes his demons to rescue Gotham more or less on his own. (Even Bruce Wayne’s faithful butler, Alfred, disappears for most of the movie.)

The heroic ideal in the works of Tolkien and Lewis, however, is qualified in a much more profound way. 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 begin...

So it is that Gollum, driven by his lust to dominate, bites off Frodo’s finger that bears the Ring, only to slip and plunge to his death in the fire. The Ring is destroyed, not by Frodo or by the Fellowship, but by “a sudden and miraculous grace.”14

Perhaps this is why the eucatastrophe is always mixed with grief: the knowledge of the sorrows endured in the struggle against evil lingers on in the human heart. “And all the host laughed and wept, and in the midst of their merriment and tears the clear voice of the minstrel rose like silver and gold, and all the men were hushed.”

After returning to England from the front, Tolkien and Lewis might easily have joined the ranks of the rootless and disbelieving. Instead, they became convinced there was only one truth, one singular event, that could help the weary and brokenhearted find their way home: the Return of the King.