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.
At the same time, Lewis’s influence on his friend would be profound. Tolkien had long believed that the “fairy-story” was really a genre for adults and “one for which a starving audience exists.”109 But that belief remained an untested proposition until Tolkien shared his early work with Lewis, who found it compelling. “If they won’t write the kind of books we want to read,” Lewis told his friend, “we shall have to write them ourselves.”110
Eventually they made good on that pledge. Tolkien began work on The Hobbit, a story set “long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green.”111 Its chief character is Bilbo Baggins, a small, half-elf creature known as a hobbit. He displays the virtues and vices of a middle-class Englishman. He has a comfortable life and shows no interest in adventures: “I can’t think what anybody sees in them.” Explained Tolkien: “The Hobbits are just rustic English people, made small in size because it reflects the generally small reach of their imagination—not the small reach of their courage or latent power.”112
By the time The Hobbit was completed, Bilbo Baggins had endured a perilous quest through Middle-earth and joined an army of elves, men, and dwarves to face goblins and wild wolves in a final terrible battle. “Victory now vanished from hope. They had only stemmed the first onslaught of the black tide.”113
Following the book’s publication in 1937, Lewis praised it as “the adaptation to children of part of a huge private mythology of a most serious kind: the whole cosmic struggle as he sees it but mediated through an imaginary world.”114 This was precisely the task that Lewis himself took up in The Chronicles of Narnia, a series of stories for children about a hidden world caught up in a great contest between Good and Evil.
The instant popularity of Tolkien’s fairy tale set him to work on “a new story about Hobbits.” It is doubtful, though, that Tolkien would have finished his masterwork, The Lord of the Rings, without the enthusiasm and support of his friend. The two spent many hours in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College, with Tolkien reading chapters out loud to a captive audience. “C. S. L. had a passion for hearing things read aloud, a power of memory for things received in that way,” Tolkien explained, “and also a facility in extempore criticism.”115 Tolkien once recalled a lunch at which Lewis browbeat him to pick up the work again, which had stalled for quite some time. “The indefatigable man read me part of a new story!” Tolkien said. “But he is putting the screw on me to finish mine. I needed some pressure, and shall probably respond.”116 Tolkien’s book dragged on for years, unfinished.
“I have drained the rich cup and satisfied a long thirst,” Lewis wrote to Tolkien after reading the typescript of The Lord of the Rings. “No romance can repel the charge of ‘escapism’ with such confidence. If it errs, it errs in precisely the opposite direction: the sickness of hope deferred and the merciless piling up of odds against the heroes are near to being too painful.”117 Reflecting later on Lewis’s long engagement with his story, Tolkien’s gratitude is manifest. “The unpayable debt” he owed to Lewis, he said, was his “sheer encouragement”—over many years—to keep on. “He was for long my only audience,” Tolkien explained. “Only from him did I ever get the idea that my ‘stuff’ could be more than a private hobby. But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more I should never have brought The L. of the R. to a conclusion.”118
Their collaboration, and the literary efforts which grew from it, could hardly come at a moment of greater crisis in the West. The generation of Tolkien and Lewis had passed through the most devastating conflict in history—with almost nothing to show for it. Nearly every noble belief and aspiration of their society seemed a falsehood, a fool’s errand, a child’s nursery tale. The Enlightenment project, with its idolization of reason, had run its course—straight into “that Ditch into which the blind hath led the blind in all ages, and have both there miserably perished.”119
A world that once felt as solid and dependable as granite had become a land of shadows. Philip Gibbs, a journalist and novelist who served as one of Britain’s official correspondents during the war, witnessed the collapse up close. “They had been taught to believe that the whole object of life was to reach out to beauty and love, and that mankind, in its progress to perfection, had killed the beast instinct, cruelty, blood-lust, the primitive, savage law of survival by tooth and claw and club and ax,” he wrote. “All poetry, all art, all religion had preached this gospel and this promise. Now that ideal was broken like a china vase dashed to the ground.”120
THE MORAL IMAGINATION
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.
What explains their enduring influence? As mythmakers they create new worlds. They invent new languages. They transport us into realms of brooding darkness and unforgettable beauty. Yet their mythic imagination only partly accounts for their influence.
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.
The great achievement of Tolkien and Lewis is the creation of mythic and heroic figures who nevertheless make a claim upon our concrete and ordinary lives. Through them we are challenged to examine our deepest desires, to shake off our doubts, and to join in the struggle against evil. For in their voice is a warning: a call to “do the deed at hand” no matter what the cost. In their presence is strength: the grace to “cast aside regret and fear,” grace beyond all hope.121 These are the great themes that dominate their works and continue to delight generations of readers.
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
CHAPTER 6
THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH
In the summer of 430 BC, the civilized world seems to be unraveling in the fog and fury of a great war.
It is the early phase of the Peloponnesian War, a vicious clash of imperial ambitions between the two titans of ancient Greece, Athens and Sparta. When
the Athenian historian, Thucydides, set out to chronicle the war, he expected it would be “more momentous than any previous conflict.” He was right. The war would envelop virtually the whole of the Greek world. It would drag on for twenty-seven years, anticipating the suffering and deprivation associated with modern conflicts: the atrocities, refugees, disease, starvation, and slaughter. It would destroy what was left of Athenian democracy.
In the second year of the conflict, a mysterious plague breaks out in Athens. It spreads rapidly, killing virtually everyone it touches, and sends the population into a state of panic and despair. “No particular constitution, strong or weak, proved sufficient in itself to resist,” wrote Thucydides, “but the plague carried off all indiscriminately, and whatever the regime of care.”1 What follows is the complete breakdown in public and private morality: friends are left to die alone, family members flee their own households, mothers abandon their own children. Thucydides recorded the scene thus:
No one was prepared to persevere in what had once been thought the path of honor, as they could well be dead before that destination was reached. Immediate pleasure, and any means profitable to that end, became the new honor and the new value. No fear of god or human law was any constraint. Pious or impious made no difference in their view, when they could see all dying without distinction.2
We have seen how despair and disbelief afflicted much of the generation that lived through the fires of the First World War. “It rose out of the peculiar conditions of trench warfare,” writes G. J. Myer, “an experience beyond anything the human psyche was built to endure.”3 Soldiers could not grasp what was happening to them. Tens of thousands were overwhelmed by shell shock. In Britain alone, four years after the end of the war, six thousand veterans were confined to insane asylums.4 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.
As for escapism, what we chiefly escape is the illusions of our ordinary life. We certainly do not escape anguish. Despite many a snug fireside and many an hour of good cheer to gratify the Hobbit in each of us, anguish is, for me, almost the prevailing note. But not, as in the literature most typical of our age, the anguish of abnormal or contorted souls; rather that anguish of those who were happy before a certain darkness came up and will be happy if they live to see it gone.6
The same can be said of Lewis’s stories as well. The most memorable scenes in The Chronicles of Narnia or The Space Trilogy typically bear this mark: the admixture of tragedy and hope. Like Tolkien, Lewis clothed his tales in fantasy and myth to convey hard truths about the human condition: its darkness and futility, as well as its virtues and triumphs. “And Man as a whole, Man pitted against the universe,” he wrote, “have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale?”7 Presented as fantasies, these stories are intended to soften our modern prejudices and speak into our imagination. They thus allow us to rediscover truths about ourselves and our world that may otherwise lay hidden.
This helps to explain the extraordinary appeal of their works, which remain popular seventy years or more after first appearing in print. In a 2003 survey conducted by the BBC in Britain, The Lord of the Rings was found to be “the Nation’s best-loved book.” Tolkien has been praised as “the author of the century,” and with good reason.8 “In any study of modern heroism,” writes Roger Sale, “if J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings did not exist, it would have to be invented.”9 Translated into thirty-eight languages, the trilogy has sold more than 150 million copies.
C. S. Lewis has earned comparable acclaim. The Chronicles of Narnia is widely considered a classic in children’s fantasy, alongside the works of Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, and others. The series has sold more than 100 million copies and been translated into forty-seven languages. Even Philip Pullman’s popular trilogy, His Dark Materials, a self-conscious repudiation of Lewis’s work, pays homage to its narrative power. Movie adaptations of The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia have introduced hundreds of millions of people to their essentially Christian vision of the human story.
THE WORLD AS WE FIND IT
What are the basic elements of this vision? As soldiers in the Great War, Tolkien and Lewis endured a human cataclysm that laid a foundation for their mythic imagination. It thrust upon them as young men the experience of combat, suffering, and death that would remain with every war veteran of their generation.
“Your teeth are grinding on the fuse-pin of the hand-grenade. The encounter will be short and murderous,” wrote Ernst Jünger in Storm of Steel, one of the earliest memoirs of the First World War. “You tremble with two contradictory impulses: the heightened awareness of the huntsman, and the terror of the quarry. You are a world to yourself, saturated with the appalling aura of the savage landscape.”10 The German artist Otto Dix survived combat in Champagne, the Somme, and Russia, but it changed him. “Lice, rats, barbed wire, fleas, shells bombs, underground caves, corpses, blood, liquor, mice, cats, artillery, filth, bullets, mortars, fire, steel: that is what war is,” he wrote. “It is the work of the devil.”11
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.
In The Lord of the Rings, Bilbo Baggins, owner of a mysterious Ring, returns home and is greeted by his close friend, the wizard Gandalf. Gandalf insists that Bilbo give the Ring to his young heir, Frodo Baggins. The Ruling Ring has special powers: its wearer, becoming invisible, could see the thoughts of all those who used the lesser rings, and could control and ultimately enslave them. Created by the Dark Lord Sauron, the Ring would become the ultimate weapon in his campaign to dominate all of Middle-earth. Sauron will do anything to retrieve it. As Gandalf explains:
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them,
In the land of Mordor where the shadows lie.
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.
A mortal, Frodo, who keeps one of the Great Rings, does not die, but he does not grow or obtain more life, he merely continues, until at last every minute is a weariness. And if he often uses the Ring to make himself invisible, he fades: he becomes in the end invis
ible permanently, and walks in the twilight under the eye of the Dark Power that rules the Rings . . . sooner or later, the Dark Power will devour him.14
Such a weapon, we learn, cannot be buried or hidden away. It must be destroyed. And the only place where it can be destroyed is the place where it was made: in the flames of Mount Doom in Mordor. “There lies our hope, if hope it be,” says Elrond. “We must send the Ring to the Fire.”15 The Ring must be taken to Mordor. It is decided that Frodo will assume this awesome burden. This becomes his great quest—or, rather, his anti-quest, since his mission is not one of rescue, but of destruction.16
Frodo, as the Ring-bearer, senses a force of evil pressing in upon him as he and his companion, Sam Gamgee, approach the Gates of Mordor. It is the Eye of Sauron, “wreathed in flame,” which searches relentlessly for the Ring in order to draw it home. “That horrible growing sense of a hostile will that strove with great power to pierce all shadows of cloud, and earth, and flesh, and to see you: to pin you under its deadly gaze, naked, and immovable,” wrote Tolkien. “He was facing it, and its potency beat upon his brow.”17
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 Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis set out in seven novels the unfolding history of the imaginary realm of Narnia—a realm torn apart by war. We trace the adventures of English children from the real world (modern-day London) who are magically transported into Narnia, a land of mythical beasts (fauns, satyrs, and centaurs) and talking animals (bears, badgers, moles, and mice). There they meet Aslan, the great Lion and “king of the Wood and son of the great Emperor-beyond-the-Sea.” Aslan calls upon them to help rescue Narnia from a new despotism and to restore the throne of Narnia to its rightful line of kings.
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 Page 14