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

  The perverse relationship between technology, science, and power became a defining reality of the postwar years. Eugenics, communism, fascism, Nazism: these were the revolutions and ideologies that arose in the exhaustion of the democracies of Europe, all in the name of advancing the human race. All began by promising liberation from oppression; all became instruments of totalitarian control. “Dreams of the far future destiny of man,” wrote Lewis, “were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of Man as God.”46 As Tolkien biographer Tom Shippey explains: “The major disillusionment of the twentieth century has been over political good intentions, which have led only to gulags and killings fields. That is why what Gandalf says has rung true to virtually everyone who reads it.”47

  THE DESCENT INTO DARKNESS

  The power of evil is not confined to a single, swift decision to side with the Enemy. More often it involves a subtle and gradual perversion. This, in fact, is the burden of Tolkien’s story: whether Frodo can resist the soul-destroying influence of the Ring and carry it to its final destination. Because of its great power, the Ring could be used to overthrow Sauron. Yet its power is conditioned to serve its evil maker, and “the very desire of it corrupts the heart.” Elrond explains the inescapable dilemma: “And that is another reason why the Ring should be destroyed: as long as it is in the world it will be a danger even to the Wise. For nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so. I fear to take the Ring to hide it. I will not take the Ring to wield it.”48

  Near the moral center of The Lord of the Rings is the ancient problem of the Will to Power: the universal temptation to exploit, dominate, and control the lives of others. This is the motive force animating the great Enemy of Middle-earth. “But the only measure he knows is desire,” says Gandalf, “desire for power.”49 Because Tolkien wrote his trilogy during and after the Second World War, when the world had entered the atomic age, many assumed that the story of the Ring was an allegorical warning about the horror of nuclear weapons. Tolkien set them straight: “Of course my story is not an allegory of Atomic power, but of Power,” he said, “exerted for Domination.”50

  It may well be, as some scholars contend, that the “gathering darkness” over the remnants of the West in the Third Age of Middle-earth was propelled by the “gathering storm” of European fascism that threatened Western civilization in the 1930s and 1940s.51 Two of Tolkien’s sons, Christopher and Michael, became combatants in the Second World War, and his letters to them during this period contain numerous references to his own war experience. The uncertainties and terrors of a second global conflict in his lifetime undoubtedly worked upon his mind and energies.

  Nevertheless, the appeal of Tolkien’s work lies partly in the fact that contemporary events seemed to conform—tragically—to the pattern of human life expressed in its pages.52 In this, Tolkien understood the problem not merely as the abuse of power: it was the temptation to pride, which the possession of power instigated and elevated into the fatal sin. “It was part of the essential deceit of the Ring,” he explained, “to fill minds with imaginations of supreme power.”53 The possession of such power inevitably placed the unconstrained Self on the throne of the universe.

  Much of the dramatic genius of The Lord of the Rings depends on the fact that none of its characters, not even its noblest, are immune to the danger; any of them might be tempted to betray themselves and their cause. “I have come,” says Frodo, clutching the Ring at the brink of the chasm, at the Crack of Doom. “But I do not choose now to do what I came to do. I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine!” In the end, even Frodo—who sought with all his heart to avoid becoming the Ring-bearer—cannot resist its seductive power.54

  Like Tolkien, Lewis was acutely conscious of the deceptive allure of power. A recurring motif of his works is how soft and subtle compromises can initiate a total corruption. “It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into Nothing,” counsels the senior demon in Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. “Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”55

  This insight is on magnificent display in That Hideous Strength, when Mark Studdock is first enticed by the wicked operatives of the N.I.C.E. They want Studdock to write a false news account of “riots” in Edgestow, which would give the Government an excuse to exercise emergency powers—and tighten its grip on the town. “But how are we to write it tonight if the thing doesn’t even happen till tomorrow at the earliest?” he asks. His companions burst into laughter, and pour him another drink.

  What comes next is a description of an ordinary man’s descent into darkness, a scene no doubt repeated endlessly in the cultural chaos and revolutions following the Great War:

  This was the first thing Mark had been asked to do which he himself, before he did it, clearly knew to be criminal. But the moment of his consent almost escaped his notice; certainly there was no struggle, no sense of turning a corner. . . . But for him, it all slipped past in a chatter of laughter, of that intimate laughter between fellow professionals, which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very bad men.56

  This is why so much is made of Edmund’s entrapment by the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Aware that the children are a threat to her rule, she preys upon Edmund’s weakness of character to betray them to her. How can Edmund—not an obviously wicked boy—be so blind to her machinations? The answer is a twofold desire: “Turkish Delight and to be a Prince.” These become the obsessions of his life. Turkish Delight is Edmund’s favorite sweet, and the White Witch uses it to bait him into her service. If he agrees, she leads him to believe, he can have all the Turkish Delight he craves. She will even make him a prince, allowing him to rule over his brother and sisters.

  Edmund succumbs. He is to blame for his fall into temptation; he gives himself over to gluttony and his inclination to dominate others. Yet there is an outside power at work as well: unknown to Edmund, this was “enchanted Turkish Delight” and “anyone who had once tasted it would want more and more of it, and would even, if they were allowed, go on eating it till they killed themselves.”57 What Lewis was describing, of course, is an addiction, instigated by moral failure—a lust for pleasure and power.

  A PSYCHOLOGY OF GOOD AND EVIL

  The idea of personal moral guilt, however, was widely rejected in the postwar years. Psychology, philosophy, literature, even theology—all these disciplines were helping to erode individual responsibility. Vices and addictions were explained medically or scientifically, not in moral or religious terms. “Collective” or “biological” forces replaced old-fashioned notions of “sin.”

  As early as 1924, for example, attorney Clarence Darrow defended two Chicago men accused of murdering a boy in cold blood by making a novel claim. He insisted that criminal acts were the result of faulty evolution, not a faulty conscience. In his closing arguments, Darrow said the real question before the court was whether it would embrace “the old theory” that a person commits a criminal act “because he willfully, purposely, maliciously and with a malignant heart sees fit to do it,” or the new scientific theory that “every human being is the product of the endless heredity back of him and the infinite environment around him.”58

  The denial of personal responsibility took a political turn as well. The outbursts of revolutionary violence rocking postwar Europe—the purges and assassinations in Lenin’s Russia, for example—were rationalized as a necessary phase toward a utopian vision. An official of the Soviet Secret Police, the Cheka, explained thus: “We are not carrying out war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class.”59 As Paul Johnson writes, shortly after seizing power Lenin “abandoned the notion of individual guilt, and with it the whole Judeo-Christian ethic of personal responsibility.”60

  Tol
kien and Lewis explicitly rejected these views as an assault on human freedom. The characters in their imaginative works are continually tested by the choices set before them. Each is involved in a great moral contest, a struggle against forces that would devour their souls. “ ‘It is very grievous,’ said the Tisroc in his deep, quiet voice. ‘Every morning the sun is darkened in my eyes, and every night my sleep is the less refreshing, because I remember that Narnia is still free.’ ”61 Yet their characters retain the power of choice; there is nothing predetermined about the outcome. It is through their own decisions, their yielding to selfish ambitions, that they invite a spiritual crisis into their lives. The result is not the freedom they imagined, but the deepest slavery of heart and mind.

  The mental outlook of Middle-earth and Narnia could hardly be more out of step with the modern mind: here is an appeal to what might be called a “psychology of evil” as old as the story of Cain and Abel. It is the story of men and women given a birthright of freedom, but abusing their freedom for selfish ends. “Sin is crouching at your door,” God warned Cain before he murdered his brother. “It desires to have you, but you must master it.”62

  Although Tolkien’s work appears to lack a religious framework—there are no prayers or acts of worship, for example—its characters are conscious of a Moral Law, a source of Goodness to which they must give account.63 The conflict between Mordor and Middle-earth occurs in a world of timeless moral truths, where men and women must choose sides in a titanic struggle between light and darkness. “How shall a man judge what to do in such times?” asks Éomer. Aragorn’s response is unequivocal: “As he ever has judged,” he says. “Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them.” In his review of Tolkien’s work, Lewis declared this to be “the basis of the whole Tolkienian world.”64

  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.

  Indeed, a bedrock belief in evil, and in the responsibility to resist it, gives the writings of Tolkien and Lewis their dignity and power. It is the reason their stories, so fantastical in style, seem to speak into our present reality. The war against evil is the moral landscape of our mortal lives: a journey of souls degraded or redeemed, dragged into the Darkness of self or led into the Light of grace.

  THE REALISM OF FANTASY

  As important as these themes are in the works of Tolkien and Lewis, we must not lose sight of the fact that they are embedded in a narrative of brutal, physical warfare. Narnia and Middle-earth are worlds embroiled in violent conflict—no less so than that of their authors during the years 1914–1918. Though considered romances, there is nothing romantic about the scenes of suffering depicted throughout.

  The spectacle of human refugees was one of the defining features of the war. Paris experienced a mass exodus of civilians following the first bombardment of the city in August 1914. By September, about 700,000 people had left Paris, of whom 220,000 were children under the age of fifteen.65 In October, after the Germans entered the Belgian port of Ostend, nearly all of Belgium fell under German occupation. Tens of thousands of refugees fled for England. Wrote Thomas Hardy:

  Then I awoke; and lo, before me stood

  The visioned ones, but pale and full of fear;

  From Bruges they came, and Antwerp, and Ostend. . . .

  Of ravaged roof, and smouldering gable-end.66

  Refugees would continue to pour from the cities, towns, and villages of Europe until the end of the war; the British and American armies encountered thousands of them during Germany’s massive spring offensive of 1918. Thus Tolkien includes scenes of anguished refugees throughout his works. They appear in the form of Tuor and his family, who have escaped the ruined city in “The Fall of Gondolin.” They are the villagers forced from Laketown by the death of Smaug in The Hobbit. In The Lord of the Rings, they are the folk of Westfold—“old and young, children and women”—hiding in the caves at Helm’s Deep.67 And they are the desperate inhabitants of Minas Tirith, escaping by wagon train for the southern hills before the Battle of Pelennor Fields.68

  In The Return of the King, we read of the fierce, existential struggle between the forces of Mordor and the army of Gondor. It is the great battle of this great and vicious war, and its dead are too numerous to count. It leaves the victors “weary beyond joy or sorrow.”69 In his account of the contest at Pelennor Fields, Tolkien might well have been describing No Man’s Land at the Somme:

  Then the Sun went at last behind Mindolluin and filled all the sky with a great burning, so that the hills and the mountains were dyed as with blood; fire glowed in the River, and the grass of the Pelennor lay red in the nightfall. And in that hour the great Battle of the field of Gondor was over; and not one living foe was left within the circuit of the Rammas.70

  Later in the story, as Sam and Frodo pass through the Dead Marshes on their approach to Mordor, they enter a landscape deeply reminiscent of the battlefields in France and Belgium: the bomb-wracked craters swollen with water, filth, and the remains of the fallen; the painful whiff of mustard gas; the noxious stench of death. “The air, as it seemed to them, grew harsh, and filled with a bitter reek that caught the breath and parched their mouths,” wrote Tolkien. “Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about.” Here, as at so many places along the Western Front, was a land desecrated and diseased beyond healing.71

  There are great victories over the forces of darkness in The Lord of the Rings, but not without profound loss. There is determination, but it is often mixed with dread, with a burden of fear that all the efforts of the Fellowship will come to nothing.

  Such is the lot of Merry and Pippin after being captured by the orcs and dragged off to their execution. They manage to escape, but remain in a state of constant danger. “No listener would have guessed from their words that they had suffered cruelly, and been in dire peril, going without hope towards torment and death,” wrote Tolkien, “or that even now, as they knew well, they had little chance of ever finding friend or safety again.”72 Such also is the condition of otherwise stouthearted warriors as the hideous Nazgûl circle overhead. Like soldiers seeking refuge from a hail of mortar fire at Verdun, “they thought no more of war; but only of hiding and of crawling, and of death.”73

  Here is why Tolkien’s work has been called a modern story, a “descent into hell” in its description of the sufferings of war.74 Perhaps, in a sense, Tolkien has written a kind of war diary after all: an account of the pains and terrors of combat, yet clothed in the language of myth. “It might indeed be seen in certain respects as the last work of First World War literature,” writes Brian Rosebury, “published almost forty years after the war ended.”75

  Because Lewis intended his Narnia stories for children, he does not dwell on depictions of physical suffering, nor does he describe the corpses of the fallen in battle. Nevertheless, Lewis does not fully shield his readers from the brutalities of war. In The Horse and His Boy, at the fight at Anvard, Shasta is thrust into the battle. As the Calormene army approaches, the ground narrows between the two advancing armies, and the young and untested soldier is filled with fear. Lewis might have been remembering the moments before his own great test under fire, when he and his battalion went over the top of their trenches at Riez du Vinage: “All swords out now, all shields up to the nose, all prayers said, all teeth clenched,” he wrote. “Shasta was dreadfully frightened. But suddenly it came into his head, ‘If you funk t
his, you’ll funk every battle all your life. Now or never.’ ”76

  In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, we read of Peter’s first experience of combat, an encounter with a giant wolf. The creature turns on him with flaming, ferocious eyes, intent on tearing him apart. Putting aside his fear, Peter plunges his sword into its chest. “Then came a horrible, confused moment like something in a nightmare,” Lewis wrote. “He was tugging and pulling and the Wolf seemed neither alive nor dead, and its bared teeth knocked against his forehead, and everything was blood and heat and hair.” After drawing out his sword from the beast, Peter wipes the sweat off his face. “He felt tired all over.” 77

  Lewis once admitted that his memories of war invaded his dreams for years: his account of Peter’s battle could have been any soldier’s recollection of bayoneting the enemy for the first time.

  As in Tolkien’s trilogy, Lewis’s Narnia series depicts war not as an opportunity for martial glory, but as a grim necessity. When victories are won, there is a striking lack of triumphalism; we find instead amazement and gratitude for surviving the encounter. Battle scenes, though never lengthy, are described with surprising realism.

  Edmund’s contest against the White Witch, for example, might become the stuff of song and legend, but it left him shattered and bloody.78 In Prince Caspian, Reepicheep is wounded so badly in battle that he seemed “little better than a damp heap of fur.” The intrepid mouse is rendered “more dead than alive, gashed with innumerable wounds, one paw crushed, and, where his tail had been, a bandaged stump.” There is hardly a more poignant reminder of suffering during the First World War than the images of soldier amputees, limping from a dugout or infirmary.