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

  At the same time, the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings could have had no greater advocate for his imaginative works. Lewis even nominated Tolkien for the Nobel Prize in Literature. “C. S. Lewis is a very old friend and colleague of mine, and indeed I owe to his encouragement the fact that in spite of obstacles (including the 1939 war!) I persevered and eventually finished The Lord of the Rings,” Tolkien wrote. “He heard all of it, bit by bit, read aloud.”114

  When Lewis learned that The Lord of the Rings had been accepted for publication, he wrote to Tolkien to describe his “sheer pleasure of looking forward to having the book to read and re-read.” And then he added a most remarkable perspective on the importance of the book to both their lives: “But a lot of other things come in. So much of your whole life, so much of our joint life, so much of the war, so much that seemed to be slipping away quite spurlos [without trace] into the past, is now, in a sort made permanent.”115

  Such was the quality of their friendship: As with no one else, Tolkien dared to expose one of the great passions of his life, the construction of his epic trilogy, to the critical eyes of his friend and colleague. Lewis, for his part, became wholly invested in the project. Perhaps only Lewis, a soldier like Tolkien in the Great War, could recognize how his story “made permanent” their shared experience of the suffering and heartache of the war.116

  Against the temper of their times, these authors dared to reclaim some of the older beliefs and virtues. Their common Christian faith had much to do with this, but perhaps no more so than their mutual love of mythic and romantic literature. As Lewis described it, they were “both soaked” in Homer, Beowulf, Norse mythology, medieval romance, and George MacDonald’s fairy tales.117 The result was a bond of loyalty and comradeship that transformed both their lives. “Friendship makes prosperity more shining,” wrote Cicero, “and lessens adversity by dividing and sharing it.”

  Their experience reminds us that great friendship is a gift born of adversity: it is made possible by the common struggle against the world’s darkness. “Most gracious host, it was said to me by Elrond Halfelven that I should find friendship upon the way, secret and unlooked for,” Frodo tells Faramir. “Certainly I have looked for no such friendship as you have shown. To have found it turns evil to great good.”118

  Though their friendship experienced periods of frustration and strain, it persevered to the end. “This feels like an axe-blow near the roots,” Tolkien wrote after Lewis’s death in November 1963. “We owed each a great debt to the other, and that tie, with the deep affection that it begot, remained.”119 Given the contemporary infatuation with “virtual” relationships, Tolkien and Lewis’s achievement not only remains but continues to grow in stature. Like few other writers over the past century, they show us what friendship can look like when it reaches for a high purpose and is watered by the streams of sacrifice, loyalty, and love.

  PLAYING OUR PART IN THE STORY

  We have come to neglect this aspect of war. We understand its atrocities, its injustices, its heartbreak, and its horrors well enough. We rightly seek to avoid it, at almost any cost. But Tolkien and Lewis were not satisfied with this version of war.

  They assumed that war would sometimes be necessary to preserve human freedom. “Give me the Narnian wars where I shall fight as a free Horse among my own people!” says Shasta. “Those will be wars worth talking about.”120 They believed that a “Hideous Strength” roamed the earth: a force of evil that sought to destroy human societies. Its perpetual war within and against the souls of men would make peace impossible—impossible, at least, for those who wished to live in freedom. “The soil of the Shire is deep,” explains Merry in The Return of the King. “Still there are things deeper and higher; and not a gaffer could tend his garden in what he calls peace, but for them.”121

  Such knowledge allowed these authors to look at human life, caught in the calamity of a global conflict, without illusions. Indeed, the heroic ideal in their works is made more poignant by their awful realism: in the struggle against evil, the outcome is not assured. “War is upon us and all our friends, a war in which only the use of the Ring could give us surety of victory,” says Gandalf. “It fills me with great sorrow and great fear: for much shall be destroyed and all may be lost.”122 All may be lost. By introducing and sustaining the real possibility of defeat, Tolkien and Lewis draw us into their epic dramas.

  No matter how desperate the circumstances, however, the characters in their stories retain the capacity to resist evil and choose the good. Their moral and spiritual growth depends on whether or not they honor these obligations. “The individual exists in a realm where choice is always necessary,” writes Patricia Meyer Spacks. “The freedom of that choice, for the virtuous, is of paramount importance.”123 As veterans of the most destructive war the word had ever seen, Tolkien and Lewis could not glorify its violence and anguish. But neither could they accept the fatalism and cynicism that had become so prevalent. Wilfred Owen’s raging anthem against war—“the shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells”—could not be the final word.124

  During the Second World War, Tolkien received a letter from his son Christopher, then serving with the Royal Air Force. Sensing his son’s anxieties, he confessed that he knew the feeling of being “the toad under the harrow,” conscripted into a deadly conflict, with fierce enemies all about. “Well, there you are: a hobbit amongst the Urukhai. Keep up your hobbitry in heart, and think that all stories feel like that when you are in them,” he wrote. “You are inside a very great story!”125

  The most influential Christian authors of the twentieth century believed that every human soul was caught up in a very great story: a fearsome war against a Shadow of Evil that has invaded the world to enslave the sons and daughters of Adam. Yet those who resist the Shadow are assured that they will not be left alone; they will be given the gift of friendship amid their struggle and grief. Even more, they will find the grace and strength to persevere, to play their part in the story, however long it endures and wherever it may lead them.

  CONCLUSION

  The Return of the King

  The last soldier to die in the Great War was an American, twenty-three-year-old Henry Gunther, a private with the American Expeditionary Force in France. He was killed at 10:59 a.m., November 11, 1918, one minute before the Armistice went into effect.

  Gunther’s squad, part of the 79th Infantry Division, encountered a roadblock of German machine guns near the village of Chaumont-devant-Damvillers. Against the orders of his sergeant, he charged the guns with his bayonet. German soldiers, aware of the Armistice, tried to wave him off. But Gunther kept coming and was gunned down; he died instantly. His divisional record states: “Almost as he fell, the gunfire died away and an appalling silence prevailed.”1

  Despite the jubilation, the celebrations, the parties and parades marking the end of the First World War, a brutal silence fell over much of the world. It was the stillness of souls anguished and bewildered by the carnage of war. Poet Thomas Hardy, writing upon the signing of the Armistice, undoubtedly spoke for many:

  Some could, some could not, shake off misery;

  The Sinister Spirit sneered: “It had to be!”

  And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, “Why?”2

  Like other young writers of their generation, Tolkien and Lewis sought to make sense of a conflict that claimed so much in blood and treasure and delivered so little to the cause of human happiness. “The Great War was a process by which all the great powers, victors and vanquished alike, transformed themselves from bastions of prosperity into sinkholes of poverty and debt,” writes G. J. Meyer in A World Undone. “Financially as in so many other ways, the war was a road to ruin.”3 To some extent, Tolkien and Lewis were swept along this ruinous road: the realization that the prewar beliefs in mankind’s inevitable progression, in the creation of something like heaven on earth, were cruelly mistaken.

  Indeed, the Will to Power remained a permanent feature of the huma
n predicament. The struggle between Good and Evil would not be resolved within human history. What, then, was the basis for hope?

  WHEN HOPE VANISHES

  There are moments in their stories, it must be said, when hope is virtually extinguished. In The Last Battle, Shift the Ape, a servant of Rishda Tarkaan, and the Calormenes have conquered Narnia. By creating “Tashlan,” a confusion of Aslan with the demon Tash, they threaten to deceive even the most loyal followers of the lion. Truth is rendered a useless weapon against their falsehood. As biographer Walter Hooper explains, this is not the wickedness we expect in an adventure story, but rather “a new and dreadful dimension where ordinary courage seems helpless.”4

  Dreadful indeed. As he lay dying after defending Narnia, Roonwit the Centaur delivers this message: “. . . remember that all worlds draw to an end and that noble death is a treasure which no one is too poor to buy.”5 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

  Tolkien likewise declines to offer a sweet and easy resolution to humanity’s struggle with evil. Writing again to his son Christopher during the Second World War, he lamented “the appalling destruction and misery” of war. “There seem no bowels of mercy or compassion, no imagination, left in this dark diabolic hour.”7 The bitter realism of The Lord of the Rings is what makes the book so irresistibly relevant to our own situation. Not unlike Tolkien’s postwar generation, we tend to be cynical about the ideals of an earlier time and the panaceas offered for our modern problems.

  When Tolkien’s characters are nearly broken by grief, by fear of losing all they hold dear, we cannot help but grieve with them. Think of the exchange between Éowyn and Faramir as they recover from their wounds in battle and wait with deep anxiety while the war for Middle-earth rages. As they look east, they see a “vast mountain of darkness” rising up and seemingly ready to engulf the whole world. “Then you think that the Darkness is coming?” says Éowyn. “Darkness Unescapable?”8

  By the end of his quest, Frodo the Ring-bearer has given up the thought of survival. He has resigned himself to a final defeat: one of the brutal facts about the world as we find it. “Hope fails. An end comes,” he tells Sam. “We have only a little time to wait now. We are lost in ruin and downfall, and there is no escape.”9

  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 begins to dawn on him, to oppress him, until the moment when failure seems inevitable.

  OVERCOMING CATASTROPHE

  The mythic dimension of their stories now reaches its zenith: like the best fairy tales, they provide the consolation of the happy ending, “the sudden joyous turn” toward rescue and redemption. It is the reversal of a catastrophe, what Tolkien calls the eucatastrophe, a decisive act of Grace that promises to overcome our guilt, restore what has been lost, and set things right.11

  Frodo fails in his quest. And yet his quest is accomplished, not by him, but by the most unlikely of creatures: Gollum. “His malice is great and gives him a strength hardly to be believed in one so lean and withered,” says Gandalf. “But he may play a part yet that neither he nor Sauron have foreseen.”12 The wizard’s prophecy is fulfilled. Frodo’s defeat—our defeat—is overturned by a Power stronger than our weakness. Tolkien identified this Power as “that one ever-present Person who is never absent and never named.”13 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

  In the Narnia series, this act of Grace first appears in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Edmund’s betrayal of Aslan and his siblings has come at a great cost. “You know that every traitor belongs to me as my lawful prey,” sneers the White Witch, “and that for every treachery I have a right to a kill.” But Aslan intervenes. He offers his own life for Edmund’s, allowing himself to be killed upon the Stone Table with the Stone Knife. Yet death cannot hold him, and the Lion returns to life and defeats the White Witch and all her forces. This is the “Deep Magic” that was put into the world by the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea: that when a willing victim, free of guilt, exchanges his life for that of a traitor, then “Death itself would start working backwards.”15

  The crowning moment of Grace occurs in The Last Battle, as King Tirian, the children, and a faithful remnant of Narnians fight their way to the entrance of the Stable: the last battle of the last King of Narnia. We are led to believe that inside the Stable is certain death, the stronghold of an all-powerful evil. “I feel in my bones,” says Poggin, “that we shall all, one by one, pass through that dark door before morning. I can think of a hundred deaths I would rather have died.”16 As the company is forced inside its doors, all hope seems lost.

  Here again comes the “joyous turn.” The great Lion has invaded the Stable, cast out the demon Tash, and turned the Stable into a portal to Aslan’s Country. The children watch as Narnia is destroyed and a new world, nearly more beautiful than their hearts can bear, is called into being. “All the old Narnia that mattered, all the dear creatures, have been drawn into the real Narnia through the Door.”17 Lucy captures the simple yet powerful symbolism of the Stable: in the Christian story, it is the birthplace of the Messiah, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, of Jesus the Christ. “In our world too, a Stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.”18

  These epic tales of heroism and sacrifice are strangely familiar to us because we have heard them, or rumors of them, before. They are the stories of men and women overcome by evil, yet loved and redeemed by Grace. They are tales “held together by a central myth that manages to partake of all the myths of all the heroes of the past.”19 As manifestations of eucatastrophe, they point us toward that essential myth that Tolkien and Lewis once debated into the early morning hours at Oxford, the Myth that became Fact.

  OUR INCONSOLABLE SECRET

  Only after all the fighting is done, when the bravest have fallen in battle, when the war against evil has been fought to its bitter end—only after all this—does the Myth as Fact complete the human story. Only then can joy, “joy beyond the walls of the world,” become o
ur permanent possession.20 There is no shortcut to the Land of Peace, no primrose path to the Mansions of the Blessed. First come tears and suffering in Mordor, heartless violence at Stable Hill—and horror and death at Golgotha.

  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.” And the minstrel sang to them, and he kept singing, “until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, over-flowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.”21

  The mingling of grief and joy, so descriptive of our mortal lives, is a recurring theme in the Bible. It is the experience of the Jews in the days of Ezra the prophet: the knowledge of the presence of God after many years of spiritual famine. Returning from bitter years of war and captivity, they begin to rebuild the temple of the Lord—their house of worship that had been destroyed by Israel’s enemies, initiating a long descent into slavery and exile. “And all the people gave a great shout of praise to the LORD, because the foundation of the house of the LORD was laid,” wrote the prophet. “But many of the older priests and Levites and family heads, who had seen the former temple, wept aloud when they saw the foundation of this temple being laid, while many others shouted for joy.”22

  The conclusion of the Great War brought its own mix of celebration and sadness. The soldiers of this war had lived through endless days of mud, stench, slaughter, and death. Nothing like it had ever occurred in the history of the world; it shook the very foundations of civilized life.

  “The Great War differed from all ancient wars in the immense power of the combatants and their fearful agencies of destruction, and from all modern wars in the utter ruthlessness with which it was fought,” wrote Winston Churchill. “All the horrors of all the ages were brought together, and not only armies but whole populations were thrust into the midst of them.”23 Promises of swift victory were replaced by plans for a final “breakthrough” assault, which always ended in stalemate. It was a war that some feared might go on forever. “Whenever one side produced an implement of destruction that promised to tip the scales,” writes G. J. Meyer, “the other came up with a way to preserve the deadlock.”24