No sooner do the four Pevensie children—Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy—enter Narnia than they encounter a force of evil. It is the figure of Jadis, the Wicked Queen of Charn. She is a witch, and witches “are not interested in things or people unless they can use them.”19 Though she was once defeated, Jadis has been revived thanks to human folly. “The White Witch? Who is she?” asks Lucy. “Why, it is she who has got all Narnia under her thumb,” says the Faun. “It’s she who makes it always winter. Always winter and never Christmas; think of that!”20
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. “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
The presence and power of evil is a dominant theme in Lewis’s science-fiction trilogy. In the first novel, Out of the Silent Planet (1938), we are introduced to Elwin Ransom, a middle-aged university professor who—like Lewis, also wounded in a war—is inclined to mind his own business. He is kidnapped by Dick Devine and Dr. Weston, a mad scientist who will stop at nothing to extend the human race to other planets. They travel to Malacandra (Mars), where we learn that the ruler of Thulcandra (Earth) became “bent” and “it was in his mind to spoil other worlds besides his own.” But “a great war” between him and Maleldil, the ruler of the universe, left Earth estranged from the rest of the solar system.
Ransom’s adventures continue in Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, in which the struggle to remake and subjugate the human race reaches a climax on planet Earth, in the English town of Edgestow. There a sinister force, embodied in the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.), has taken root. Warns Ransom: “The Hideous Strength holds all this Earth in its fist to squeeze as it wishes.”24 It has drawn into its vortex Mark Studdock and his wife, Jane, who realize almost too late the nature of the threat. A struggle of cosmic proportions ensues. 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.
Nevertheless, these authors anchor their stories in the ancient idea of the Fall of Man: just as a force of evil entered our world in a distant past, so it inhabits and threatens the worlds of their imaginations. It is the deepest source of alienation and conflict in their stories. Even so, it cannot erase the longing for goodness and joy, so palpably alive in the best and noblest of their characters. They are haunted by the memory of Eden: take away this fundamental idea, and their moral vision collapses.26
DESTINY AND FREE WILL
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
When the Council gathers in Rivendell to determine how to destroy the Ring, Elrond reminds the Company that help will come from “other powers and realms that you know not.” And yet, he warns, the road ahead will be very hard. “This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.”28
Frodo is joined in his quest by his friends from the Shire: Sam, Merry, and Pippin. In addition to the hobbits, there is Aragorn, a Ranger of the North—a “hidden king” of Gondor—whose life is devoted to the war against Sauron; Legolas, king of the elves of Northern Mirkwood; and Gimli, a descendant of Gloin, a noble line of dwarves. Gandalf the Grey has joined them as well, their powerful protector and guide. But Gandalf becomes lost to them, dragged into an abyss by the Balrog at the Bridge of Khazad-Dum, and they are forced to flee for their lives. The loss pierces them with grief. “Frodo heard Sam at his side weeping, and then he found that he himself was weeping as he ran.”29
Yet they carry on. They make their way to Caras Galadhon, home of Lady Galadriel, “the mightiest and fairest of all the Elves that remained in Middle-earth.”30 As they gather before her, she fixes her eyes on each of them and delivers a fierce warning: “Your Quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and it will fail, to the ruin of all.”31 What are they to do?
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.33
Consider the exchange between Sam and Frodo as they rest for a moment along the stairs at Cirith Ungol, the cleft through the Western Mounta
ins of Mordor. The area is heavily guarded by the Enemy. Forced to rely on the treacherous Gollum as their guide, they are anxious, weary, and short of food and water. Reflecting on their plight, Sam grows philosophical about the events that have brought them to this moment of danger, and the choices they have made along the way.
“I don’t like anything here at all,” said Frodo, “step or stone, breath or bone. Earth, air and water all seem accursed. But so our path is laid.”
“Yes, that’s so,” said Sam. “And we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually—their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t.”34
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?
“And if enemies came against the land (for enemies will arise) and there was war, would you be the first in the charge and the last in the retreat?”
“Well, sir,” said the Cabby very slowly, “a chap don’t exactly know till he’s been tried. I dare say I might turn out ever such a soft ’un. Never did no fighting except with my fists. I’d try—that is, I ’ope I’d try—to do my bit.”
“Then,” said Aslan, “you will have done all that a King should do.”35
We are led to believe that the choices of these characters—their decisions to put away fear and ego and choose goodness—are freely made and yet made with the help of a source of strength outside them. Tolkien was reluctant to name this power, though elsewhere he explained that “the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.”36 Thus, in The Lord of Rings we’re told that Bilbo “was meant to find the Ring,” that Frodo was “appointed” and “chosen” to carry it to Mordor, that even as the Fellowship decides its next move “the tides of fate are flowing.” Destiny and free will are commingled throughout: “But you have been chosen,” says Gandalf, “and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.”37
Lewis’s use of allegory leaves no doubt about the Person who transcends the struggles of our earthly lives, even as he involves himself deeply in them. In The Horse and His Boy, Shasta and Aravis, helped by talking horses, race across the desert to warn Archenland and Narnia of the approaching army of Rabadash, bent on their destruction. Before reaching their goal they are attacked by a lion. Aravis, further behind, is moments from being cut down by the beast. Shasta faces a moment of decision:
“Stop,” bellowed Shasta in Bree’s ear. “Must go back. Must help!”
Shasta slipped his feet out of the stirrups, slid both his legs over the left side, hesitated for one hideous hundredth of a second, and jumped. It hurt horribly and nearly winded him; but before he knew how it hurt him he was staggering back to help Aravis. He had never done anything like this in his life before and hardly knew why he was doing it now.38
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.
POWER, SCIENCE, AND SEDUCTION
It is one thing to join a struggle against evil in the world, but it is another thing to persevere—to continue to resist the dark temptations inherent in the contest. It cannot be emphasized enough that the human tragedy of the First World War damaged the very idea of free will. After all, millions of men were flung into the pitiless machinery of a conflict that robbed them of their humanity. They were mutilated, bombed, bayoneted, gassed, and obliterated without mercy. The utter helplessness of the individual soldier on the Western Front was a recurring theme of postwar literature.
It is this very idea that Tolkien and Lewis repudiate throughout their works. In The Fellowship of the Ring, for example, we watch Frodo struggle to resist the almost overwhelming desire to use the Ring as the terror of the Dark Riders approaches. He yields to the temptation, and later reproaches himself bitterly: “for he now perceived that in putting on the Ring he obeyed not his own desire but the commanding wish of his enemies.”39 Though fighting his attackers furiously, he is stabbed with the deadly Morgul-knife, the poison of which would bring him under the power of the Dark Lord. Healed by his friends, he marvels at his escape. “Yes, fortune or fate have helped you,” says Gandalf, “not to mention courage. For your heart was not touched, and only your shoulder was pierced; and that was because you resisted to the last.”40
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.
After the Council of Elrond, when Frodo agrees to take the Ring to Mordor, he is confronted by Boromir, who has joined the Fellowship. Boromir is “a valiant man,” a mighty warrior, but also a figure torn between honor and pride, power and wisdom.41 He disagrees with the Council’s decision to destroy the Ring, and accuses them of being timid rather than wise. “True-hearted Men, they will not be corrupted,” he assures Frodo. 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.
For Saruman, a wizard originally committed to helping Middle-earth in its struggle against Sauron, his betrayal robs him of his soul. In his confrontation with Gandalf, he explains that “a new Power is rising” that cannot be openly resisted. The path of wisdom, he insists, is to join the Power and wait for an opportunity to alter its course. “As the Power grows, its proved friends will also grow; and the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it,” he says. “We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose.”43
Their noble aims would not change, we are assured, only the means to achieve them. This is the exact rationale offered by Nikabrik, one of the black dwarves in Prince Caspian who joins the Narnian resistance against the Telmarines. After the Narnians suffer many defeats, Nikabrik grows pessimistic
. At a council of Caspian’s advisors, they decide to blow the horn belonging to the ancient Queen Susan, to summon help from Aslan. When no help arrives, an embittered Nikabrik suggests it is time to turn elsewhere for aid:
“Either Aslan is dead,” said Nikabrik, “or he is not on our side. Or else something stronger than himself keeps him back. . . . You may drop Aslan out of the reckoning. I was thinking of someone else.” There was no answer, and for a few minutes it was so still that Edmund could hear the wheezy and snuffling breath of the Badger.
“Who do you mean?” said Caspian at last.
“I mean a power so much greater than Aslan’s that it held Narnia spellbound for years and years, if the stories are true.”
“The White Witch!” cried three voices all at once. . . .
“Yes,” said Nikabrik very slowly and distinctly, “I mean the Witch. Sit down again. Don’t take fright at a name as if you were children. We want power: and we want a power that will be on our side.”44
Nikabrik’s ruthlessness, his willingness to compromise with evil, becomes his downfall. It is hard to imagine a more cautionary tale for the crusader in all of us: however noble the motives may be, they easily become twisted by the thought of glory and the taste of power.
For Tolkien and Lewis, it was a theme of utmost urgency. In the modern world, new technologies—what Winston Churchill called “the lights of perverted science”—were being used to extinguish human freedom. “The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already, even in Ransom’s own time begun to be warped, had been subtly maneuvered in a certain direction,” wrote Lewis in That Hideous Strength. “Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and concentration upon mere power, had been the result.”45
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 15