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

  40. Richard M. Gamble, The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2003), 37.

  41. Christine Rosen, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 25.

  42. Francis Galton, “Eugenics as a Factor in Religion,” in Essays in Eugenics (London: Eugenics Education Society, 1909). Cited in Rosen, Preaching Eugenics, 5.

  43. Philipp Blom, The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900–1914 (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 339.

  44. Rosen, Preaching Eugenics, 3–23.

  45. Francis Galton, “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims,” American Journal of Sociology 10 (July 1904): 5. Cited in Rosen, Preaching Eugenics, 5.

  46. Ibid., 33–34.

  47. Ibid., 99.

  48. Michael D. C. Drout, ed., J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 2007), 555.

  49. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 190.

  50. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 49.

  51. C. S. Lewis, Perelandra (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1965), 91.

  52. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, 89.

  53. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 69–70.

  54. Hofstadter, Social Darwinism, 162.

  55. Sermon by Rev. Kenneth C. MacArthur, Federated Church (Congregational Baptist), Sterling, Massachusetts, 1926, AES Papers, APS. Quoted in Rosen, Preaching Eugenics, 125.

  56. Rosen, Preaching Eugenics, 150.

  57. Ibid., 184.

  58. Ibid.

  59. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 416.

  60. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 147.

  61. Tolkien, TheLord of the Rings, 232.

  62. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 41.

  63. Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (New York: Penguin, 2007), 107–108.

  64. Ibid., 117.

  65. Keegan, The First World War, 27, 73.

  66. Gilbert, The First World War, 29.

  67. Ferguson, The War of the World, 117.

  68. W. M. Spellman, A Short History of Western Political Thought (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 139.

  69. Gamble, The War for Righteousness, 32.

  70. Osborne, Civilization, 368.

  71. James Cronan, “The Lamps Are Going Out All Over Europe,” The National Archives Blog, August 4, 2014, http://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/blog/lamps-going-europe/.

  Chapter 2: The Last Battle

  1. C. V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War (New York: Book of the Month Club, 1995), 526.

  2. Peter Wilson, The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy (London: Penguin, 2009), 5.

  3. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War, 526.

  4. Wilson, The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy, 753.

  5. Philip Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade (New York: HarperOne, 2014), 87–88.

  6. Albert Marrin, The Last Crusade: The Church of England in the First World War (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1974), 139.

  7. Queen Victoria reigned in England until her death in 1901. Her eldest son, Edward VII, assumed the throne in 1901 and ruled until his death in 1910. Regarding the values defining family, faith, and the social and political order, “the Edwardians were extensions of the Victorians.” Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 130.

  8. John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 20–21.

  9. Richard Schweitzer, The Cross and the Trenches: Religious Faith and Doubt among British and American Great War Soldiers (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 4.

  10. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 50.

  11. George Sayer, Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), 77.

  12. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 71.

  13. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 232.

  14. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 43.

  15. Carpenter, J .R. R. Tolkien, 91.

  16. Don W. King, C. S. Lewis: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001), 55.

  17. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 89.

  18. Ibid., 88.

  19. Ferguson, Empire, 359.

  20. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 179.

  21. John Ellis, Eye-Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 162.

  22. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 179–180.

  23. http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/asquithspeechtoparliament.htm.

  24. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 236.

  25. Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War (London: HarperCollins, 2005), 144–145.

  26. Quoted in Marrin, The Last Crusade, 59.

  27. Alasdair I. C. Heron, A Century of Protestant Theology (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1980), 75.

  28. Joseph Fort Newton, The Sword of the Spirit: Britain and America in the Great War (New York: George H. Coran), xiii, xv.

  29. John Spurr, The Post-Reformation: 1603–1714 (Harlow, England: Pearson Longman, 2006), 16.

  30. A. J. Hoover, God, Germany, and Britain in the Great War: A Study in Clerical Nationalism (New York: Praeger, 1989), 69.

  31. Ibid.

  32. Stuart Mews, “Spiritual Mobilization in the First World War,” Theology (1971), 74:258, 259.

  33. Hoover, God, Germany, and Britain in the Great War, 69.

  34. Marrin, The Last Crusade, 177–186.

  35. Conrad Cherry, ed., God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 83.

  36. Ibid., 64–65.

  37. Woodrow Wilson, “Address to Congress Requesting a Declaration of War Against Germany (April 2, 1917), University of Virginia Miller Center, http://millercenter.org/president/wilson/speeches/speech-4722.

  38. Cherry, ed., God’s New Israel, 276.

  39. Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 254.

  40. Ray H. Abrams, Preachers Present Arms: The Role of American Churches and Clergy in World War I and II with Some Observations on the War in Vietnam (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 1969), 55.

  41. Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 444.

  42. Hoover, God, Germany, and Britain in the Great War, 94.

  43. Ernst Troeltsch, Deutscher Glaube und deutsche Sitte in unserem grossen Kriege (Berlin: n.d.), 19. Cited in Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 442.

  44. Ibid., 442.

  45. The Allied nations accused the Kaiser and the German people of blasphemy because of their confident intimacy with God, expressed in phrases such as Gott mit uns, a phrase later picked up by the Nazis.

  46. Jenkins, The Great and Holy War, 12.

  47. Hoover, God, Germany, and Britain in the Great War, 2. Hubbard perished aboard the RMS Lusitania, which was sunk by a German submarine off the coast of Ireland on May 7, 1915.

  48. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 83.

  49. Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 124.

  50. First World War: An Illustrated History, 44.

  51. Meyer, A World Undone, 297.

  52. Hoover, God, Germany, and Britain in the Great War, 24.

  53. Ibid., 29.

  54. Ibid., 24.

  55. Marrin, The Last Crusade, 137–138.

  56. Abrams, Preachers Present Arms, 104.

  57. Ibid., 108.

  58. Ibid., 104.

  59. Hoover, God, Germany, and Britain in the Great War, 9.

  60. Gamble, The War for Righteousness, 160.

  61. Basil Mathews, ed., Christ: And the World at War (London: James Clarke & Co., 1917), 46.

  62. Ibid., 170.

  63. Gamble, The War for Righteousness, 3.

  64. Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith, 275.r />
  65. Joseph Fort Newton, The Sword of the Spirit: Britain and America in the Great War (New York: George H. Doran, 1918), 38.

  66. Gamble, The War for Righteousness, 175.

  67. Paul Bull, Christianity and War, quoted in Kevin Christopher Fielden, “The Church of England in the First World War” (Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 1080, 2005), http://dc.etsu.edu/etd/1080.

  68. C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 51.

  69. Although there have been some excellent studies of the religious faith of soldiers during the war years, we should be careful not to generalize too much about their personal beliefs or their views of the ultimate meaning of the conflict. See Rich Schweitzer, The Cross and the Trenches: Religious Faith and Doubt Among British and American Great War Soldiers (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2003).

  70. Ellis, Eye-Deep in Hell, 156.

  71. Schweitzer, The Cross and the Trenches, 168.

  72. Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 451.

  73. Robert Graves, Good-Bye to All That (New York: Vintage International, 1998), 189.

  74. Marrin, The Last Crusade, 242–243.

  75. Graves, Good-Bye to All That, 189.

  76. Schweitzer, The Cross and the Trenches, 259.

  77. Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 453.

  78. Schweitzer, The Cross and the Trenches, 81–82.

  79. Keegan, The First World War, 289.

  80. Jonathan Phillips, Holy Warrior: A Modern History of the Crusades (New York: Random House, 2010), 323.

  81. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 243.

  82. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 197.

  83. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 455.

  84. C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 178.

  85. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 60.

  86. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 170.

  87. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, 70.

  88. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 140.

  Chapter 3: In a Hole in the Ground There Lived a Hobbit

  1. “The Battle of Jutland, 1916,” Eye Witness to History, 2006, http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/pfjutland.htm.

  2. Gilbert, The First World War, 252.

  3. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 58–59.

  4. Meyer, A World Undone, 361.

  5. “The Battle of Verdun,” History Learning Site, 2014, http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/battle_of_verdun.htm.

  6. Charles F. Horne, ed., Source Records of the Great War, Vol. IV (National Alumni, 1923), http://www.firstworldwar.com/diaries/verdun_vaux.htm.

  7. Meyer, A World Undone, 427.

  8. Alistair Horne, The Price of Glory (London: Macmillan, 1962), 236.

  9. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 138.

  10. The precise date of Tolkien’s Channel crossing with his battalion was June 6, 1916.

  11. Tolkien, “The Lonely Isle,” http://webpages.charter.net/sn9/literature/poetry/2tolkienpoems.html.

  12. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 62.

  13. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 178.

  14. Keegan, The Face of Battle, 221.

  15. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 41.

  16. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 53.

  17. Keegan, The Face of Battle, 221.

  18. Mathews, Christ: And the World at War, 134–35.

  19. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 53.

  20. Meyer, A World Undone, 363.

  21. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 180.

  22. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 188.

  23. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 51. Ibid., 52.

  24. Keegan, The First World War, 52.

  25. Hastings, Catastrophe 1914, 516.

  26. Gilbert, The Somme, 194.

  27. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 231.

  28. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 822.

  29. Gilbert, The Somme, 71.

  30. Keegan, The Face of Battle, 260.

  31. Meyer, A World Undone, 446.

  32. David Lloyd George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George, 1915–1916 (Boston: Little Brown, 1933).

  33. Gilbert, The Somme, 269.

  34. Keegan, The First World War, 295.

  35. Churchill, The World Crisis, 667.

  36. Gilbert, The Somme, 64.

  37. Sir Martin Gilbert, “What Tolkien Taught Me About the Battle of the Somme,” The Cutting Edge, August 25, 2008, http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=716&pageid=23&pagename=Arts.

  38. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 155.

  39. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 6.

  40. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 157.

  41. Keegan, The Face of Battle, 231.

  42. G. J. Meyer, A World Undone, 261.

  43. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 765, italics added.

  44. Ibid., 188.

  45. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 221.

  46. Ibid. The italics are mine.

  47. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 161.

  48. Ibid., 114.

  49. Ibid., 164.

  50. Ibid., 166.

  51. Keegan, The First World War, 296.

  52. Philip Gibbs, The Battles of the Somme (Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild, and Stewart, 1917), 6.

  53. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 165–166.

  54. Ibid., 166.

  55. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 72.

  56. Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien, 92.

  57. Gilbert, The Somme, 140–141.

  58. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 9.

  59. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 883.

  60. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 193.

  61. Ellis, Eye-Deep in Hell, 96.

  62. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 808.

  63. Ellis, Eye-Deep in Hell, 98.

  64. Gilbert, The Somme, 85.

  65. Ibid., 220.

  66. Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien, 94.

  67. Tolkien, ed., The Monsters and the Critics, 60.

  68. Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien, 91.

  69. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 828.

  70. Nancy Marie Ott, “J. R. R. Tolkien and World War I,” at http://greenbooks.theonering.net/guest/files/040102_02.html.

  71. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 626.

  72. Ibid., 631–32.

  73. Ibid., 627–28.

  74. Gilbert, “What Tolkien Taught Me About the Battle of the Somme.”

  75. Gilbert, The Somme, 239–240.

  76. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 303.

  77. Ibid., 215. Also in Tom Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 2.

  78. Sheffield, Forgotten Victory, 157.

  79. Ibid.

  80. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 934.

  81. Keegan, The Face of Battle, 219.

  82. Churchill, The World Crisis, 667–668.

  83. Gibbs, The Battles of the Somme, 18.

  84. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 158.

  85. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 52.

  Chapter 4: The Lion, the Witch, and the War

  1. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 70.

  2. Ibid., 72.

  3. Ibid., 113.

  4. Ibid., 111.

  5. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 42.

  6. Homer, The Iliad, Introduction and Notes by Bernard Fox (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 26.

  7. Gilchrist, A Morning After War, 27.

  8. Ibid., 26.

  9. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 125.

  10. George MacDonald, Phantastes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), xi.

  11. George MacDonald, The Complete Fairy Tales (Penguin Books, 1999), 9.

  12. W. H. Lewis, ed., Letters of C. S. Lewis (San Diego: Harcourt, 1988), 179.

  13. Ibid., 27.

  14. Green and Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, 45.

  15. In a letter dated January 21, 1960, Lewis commends MacDonald’s works to John Warw
ick Montgomery. Hooper, ed., The Letters, Vol. 3, 1125.

  16. Sayer, Jack, 107–108.

  17. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 129.

  18. Ibid., 131.

  19. Ferguson, The War of the World, 127.

  20. Douglas Gresham, Jack’s Life: The Life Story of C. S. Lewis (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2005), 33.

  21. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 171.

  22. Ibid., 208–209.

  23. Ibid., 204.

  24. Ibid., 212.

  25. Gilbert, The Somme, 71.

  26. Hooper, ed., C. S. Lewis: The Weight of Glory, 51.

  27. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 138.

  28. Lewis, ed., Letters of C. S. Lewis, 126.

  29. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 230.

  30. Ibid., 230–231.

  31. Ibid., 342.

  32. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 158.

  33. Sayer, Jack, 122.

  34. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 299.

  35. Ibid., 310.

  36. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 158.

  37. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 315.

  38. Ibid., 319.

  39. Ibid., 338.

  40. Ibid., 341.

  41. Ibid., 346. Walter Hooper placed Lewis at Monchy-Le-Preux, but K. J. Gilchrist disagrees, believing Lewis was in a staging town west of Arras. See Gilchrist, A Morning After War, 57–58.

  42. Ibid., 351.

  43. Gilchrist, A Morning After War, 56.

  44. Ibid., 63. The descriptions of enemy fire are taken from the diary for Lewis’s battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry, known as the “War Diary or Intelligence Summary.”

  45. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 195.

  46. Ibid.

  47. C. S. Lewis, Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics (Lexington, KY: Emereo, 2013).

  48. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life, x.

  49. Lewis, Spirits in Bondage, 9.

  50. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 123.

  51. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 356.

  52. Ibid., 363.

  53. Gilbert, The First World War, 408.

  54. From March 21 until May 2, British casualties hit 280,000. The French sustained 340,000 casualties.

  55. Walter Hooper, C .S. Lewis: Companion and Guide (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 11.

  56. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 363.

  57. Various biographical references to Lewis’s wartime experience incorrectly place him at the 1917 Battle of Arras. In fact, Lewis fought in a different battle, near the village of Arras, in April 1918.