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 1914–1918

by Joseph Loconte

  Instead, the Bolsheviks, led by Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin, strangled the nascent republican government in its crib. Enemies of the communist revolution—real and imaginary—were purged without conscience. Announced Trotsky: “We shall not enter into the kingdom of socialism in white gloves on a polished floor.”34 Thus a revolution waged in the name of bread, peace, and the proletariat produced a murderous civil war, mass starvation, and political dictatorship. By 1919, Lenin’s policy of War Communism assimilated five million men into the Red Army, assuring the complete dominance of the Communist Party’s Central Committee for decades to come. A profoundly materialistic, atheistic vision established itself in Russia—and with global ambitions.

  The Great War seemed to confirm the fatal weakness of democratic capitalism, creating a susceptibility to all kinds of utopian schemes. When the Communist International held its first World Congress in 1919, it drew delegates from twenty-six European countries, as well as the United States. Socialism and communism found eager recruits in Great Britain. Lewis encountered quite a number of them at Oxford, and was disdainful: “I think we have now arrived at the point where a wise man can do no more than wait for the end with what grace he can,” he wrote in August 1920. “And it is hard to summon much grace if you meet as many traitors and cranks in our own class as I do here, hankering for the blessing of Soviet rule at once.”35

  The third epidemic was fascism. It began in Italy in the 1920s, in a society that seemed to be in tatters. The war left the country with a startling degree of poverty and one of the highest inflation rates in Europe. The Italians were politically divided and disappointed; the parliamentary government was hopelessly corrupt, the monarchy unpopular. Many soldiers who returned to life as factory workers or clerks or shopkeepers found civilian life empty and uninspiring.

  Enter Benito Mussolini. On October 28, 1922, with forty thousand “Blackshirts” under his command, Mussolini marched on Rome. King Victor Emmanuel and his embattled government lost heart. “Il Duce” became the first European leader to dispense with multi-party democracy. “The century of democracy is over,” he proclaimed. “Democratic ideologies have been liquidated.”36 Mussolini was also the first to proclaim a new fascist regime, a word adopted from the Roman fasces, rods of punishment symbolizing the power of the state. As he wrote in his manifesto: “For the Fascist, everything is in the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State.”37

  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 It did: by the mid-1920s, fascist groups appeared all over Europe, often supported by church leaders. In each case, they brought with them Mussolini’s taste for political violence. Within a decade, fascist or quasi-fascist regimes would emerge in Spain, Portugal, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Greece, Romania—and Germany.

  THE CRISIS OF FAITH

  Thus the crisis of faith in postwar Europe was multilayered. There was an erosion of what might be called civilizational confidence, a widespread disillusionment with the West and its supposed cultural achievements. Liberal democracy, constitutionalism, capitalism, progressivism—all seemed in a state of near collapse. Wrote Gilbert Murray in The Ordeal of This Generation (1929): “The system which before the war was considered to be essential to civilization, at any rate if civilization was to advance, is now in peril of its life.”39 Since Christianity was considered integral to Europe’s political and economic system, the perceived failure of that system was a spiritual failure as well.

  The disintegration of orthodox Christian belief among all classes of Europeans during the 1920s, though easy to overstate, was real enough. “A profound sense of spiritual crisis was the hallmark of that decade,” writes Modris Eksteins. “It affected rural laborers, large landowners, industrialists, factory workers, shop clerks and urban intellectuals.”40 There were numerous causes for the weakening of religious faith, but among the most important was the influence of Freudian psychology, which got an immense boost in the postwar years.

  The experience of trench warfare produced many cases of mental disorders among soldiers and war veterans. It became known as shell shock: Well-bred men from upper-class or military families, who fought with distinction, who were decorated for valor, suddenly broke. They were neither cowardly nor insane.41

  Mrs. Moore’s brother, “the Doc,” became stricken with the disorder, brought on by his combat experience. During one of his visits, he suffered repeated outbursts of extreme mental torture—he apparently believed he was going to hell—and was sent off to a hospital. Lewis spent many hours with him, trying to comfort him. “Nothing can wring the ghost of a smile from him,” Lewis wrote in his diary. “For painfulness I think this beats anything I’ve seen in my life.”42 The Doc soon died from heart failure. “Isn’t it a damned world,” Lewis wrote to a friend, “and we thought we could be happy with books and music!”43

  Freud seemed to offer an honorable explanation for the condition. His methods of psychoanalysis appeared preferable to the brutal alternatives available for curing mental illness: medication, verbal bullying, or electric-shock therapy. “When the electric current was increased,” writes Paul Johnson, “men died under treatment, or committed suicide rather than face more, like victims of the Inquisition.”44

  When Freud’s first psychiatric clinic opened in Berlin in 1920, it paved the way for his views about human nature, guilt, and God. Freud proved especially attractive to a generation struggling to find meaning in the war’s aftermath. Religious belief was seen as an attempt to protect against suffering, “a delusional remolding of reality.”45 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.”47

  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.

  Given these postwar sensibilities, how did Oxford become the incubator for epic literature extolling valor and sacrifice in war?50 Why would the works of Tolkien and Lewis, rooted in a narrative of Christian redemption, ever see the light of day?

  TOLKIEN THE MYTHMAKER

  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.51 The tale bears the memories of the combat veteran:

  The fume of the burning, and the steam of the fair fountains of Gondolin withering in the flame of the dragons of the north, fell upon the vale of Tumladen in mournful mists; and thus was the escape of Tuor and his company aided. . . . Nonetheless they came thither, and beyond hope they climbed, in woe and misery, for the high places were cold and terrible, and they had among them many that were wounded, and women and children.52

  Biographer Humphrey Carpenter sees in Tolkien’s work an unexpected response to the First World War. He suggests that the central part of the story borrows from Tolkien’s experiences on the Somme—“or rather to his reaction to those experiences, for the fighting at Gondolin has a heroic grandeur entirely lacking in modern warfare.”53 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.”56

  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.

  Many other authors, however, were moving in exactly the opposite direction.58 Wilfred Owen, wounded three times before being killed in battle, wrote relentlessly in opposition to the war. His poems bear titles such as “Insensibility,” “Mental Cases,” “Futility,” and “Disabled.” In “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” there is not a hint of nobility in the death of his fellow soldiers. “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? / Only the monstrous anger of the guns.”59 Owen’s friend, Siegfried Sassoon, who was awarded the Military Cross for bravery, nevertheless came to view the war as an immoral mistake. In the summer of 1917, Sassoon submitted a letter of protest to his commanding officer, calling the purposes of the war “evil and unjust.” His poems are biting satires of the war and its effect on soldiers, with unsparing descriptions of “the land where all is ruin” and the “foundered trench-lines volleying doom for doom.”60

  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.61 One of the best-known works is Goodbye to All That, written by Robert Graves, who eagerly enlisted for officer training eight days after England declared war on Germany. Graves survived the Battle of the Somme, but sustained injuries that haunted him for the rest of his life. Less a memoir than a work of farce and theater, Goodbye to All That savages the absurdities and tragedies that seemed to characterize the war:

  The boast of every good battalion was that it had never lost a trench; both our Line battalions made it—meaning that they had never been forced out of a trench without recapturing it before the action ended. Capturing a German trench and being unable to hold it for lack of reinforcements did not count. . . . And, towards the end of the War, trenches could be honorably abandoned as being wholly obliterated by bombardment, or because not really trenches at all, but a line of selected shell-craters.62

  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 Lewis was as familiar with the depredations of trench warfare as Tolkien, and one of the aspects of Tolkien’s story that most impressed him was its realism:

  This war has the very quality of the war my generation knew. It is all here: the endless, unintelligible movement, the sinister quiet of the front when “everything is now ready,” the flying civilians, the lively, vivid friendships, the background of something like despair and the merry foreground, and such heaven-sent windfalls as a cache of choice tobacco “salvaged from a ruin.”64

  Nevertheless, Tolkien never intended to write a trench memoir. Instead, he set his mind to create a mythology worthy of his beloved England.65 By 1923, he had nearly completed The Book of Lost Tales (what he would later call The Silmarillion), in which he explored the themes of evil, suffering, heroism, and death. An account of the First Age, it is the ancient drama that creates the historical setting for The Lord of the Rings. The thrust of the story is about the fall of the most gifted among the elves; their exile from Valinor (a kind of paradise); their return to Middle-earth, the place of their birth but now under the control of the Enemy; and their struggle against him, “the power of Evil still visibly incarnate.”66 It is here that Middle-earth first took on form and substance and became the battleground for the great conflict depicted in The Lord of the Rings.

  Middle-earth is not, Tolkien insisted, an imaginary world, but rather our world—with its ancient truths and sorrows—set in a remote past. Indeed, any legends cast in the form of a supposed primitive history of this world, he said, must reckon with the tragic reality of human frailty.67 As we’ll see, Tolkien envisioned Middle-earth as the embodiment of a world struggling with the consequences of its Fall from Grace. “The theater of my tale is this earth, the one in which we now live. . . . The essentials of that abiding place are all there.”68

  LEWIS IN THE VALLEY OF DOUBT

  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. In a letter to a friend, Lewis explained the unifyin
g theme: “that nature is wholly diabolical and malevolent and that God, if he exists, is outside of and in opposition to the cosmic arrangements.”70

  In “Ode for New Year’s Eve,” Lewis articulated the disenchantment, the sense that something has gone terribly wrong with all the supposed achievements of the West. The age of progress and innocence has vanished, he wrote, as if consumed wholesale in the furnace of the Great War:

  On upward curve and easily, for them both maid and man

  And beast and tree and spirit in the green earth could thrive.

  But now one age is ending, and God calls home the stars

  And looses the wheel of the ages and sends it spinning back

  Amid the death of nations, and points a downward track,

  And madness is come over us and great and little wars.71

  Lewis’s reference to “the death of nations” was not far off the mark. By the end of the First World War, entire empires had essentially collapsed—the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Tsarist Russia, and the German Empire—touching off revolutions and colonial rebellions around the world. In the process, a frightening share of young men were wiped out by death, emotionally debilitated by trench warfare, or permanently crippled. A small island nation, Britain nonetheless lost close to a million of its citizens. “The effect of the war in Britain was catastrophic,” writes Paul Fussell. “A whole generation was destroyed that might have furnished the country’s jurists, scholars, administrators, and political leaders.”72

  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