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

  58. Meyer, A World Undone, 652.

  59. Gilchrist, A Morning After War, 123.

  60. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 96.

  61. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 388.

  62. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 191.

  63. Ibid., 191–192.

  64. Ibid., 192.

  65. Ibid., 193.

  66. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 196.

  67. Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead, eds., Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis (New York: Ballantine Books, 1982), 6.

  68. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 368.

  69. Ibid., 414.

  70. Sayer, Jack, 134.

  71. Percy Dearmer, ed., Christianity and the Crisis (London: Victor Golancz, 1933), 25–26.

  72. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 203–204.

  73. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 196.

  74. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 375.

  75. Ibid., 374.

  76. MacDonald, Phantastes, 149.

  Chapter 5: The Land of Shadow

  1. Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919 (New York: Random House, 2003), 15.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Churchill, The World Crisis, 841.

  4. Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (New York: Ballantine, 1990), 523.

  5. Dan Todman offers a nuanced look at what is called “the formation of the modern myth of the war.” Views about WWI, he argues, changed over time: “Anyone putting forward in public the idea that the war had been an incompetently run and colossally futile waste of life, unmitigated by any redeeming heroism, would have been chased from the street in the early 1920s.” See Todman, The Great War, 221–230. Niall Ferguson offers a somewhat contrarian view: “As has often been remarked, the memoirs of the 1920s and 1930s were disproportionately the work of public school and university-educated men with little prewar experience of hardship, much less war. Their disillusionment was predicated on the illusions of privileged youth.” Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War: Explaining World War 1 (New York: Penguin Press, 1999), 451.

  6. David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1989), 212.

  7. It is generally recognized that the Armenian genocide began on April 24, 1915, when the Turkish government arrested and executed several hundred Armenian intellectuals. Soon, Armenians were forced from their homes and men, women, and children were sent on death marches across the Syrian desert to concentration camps. Out of a population of 2 million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire at the start of the war, an estimated 1.5 million died in the genocide.

  8. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 255.

  9. Gilbert, The First World War, 534.

  10. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 342.

  11. Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (New York: Ballantine, 1982), 294.

  12. Overy, The Twilight Years, 3.

  13. Ibid., 15.

  14. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), 34.

  15. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 393.

  16. Ibid., 46.

  17. Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien, 108.

  18. Ibid., 76.

  19. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 250.

  20. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 419. After being out of the war for nearly four months because of his injuries, Lewis expected to be sent back into battle; such were the military needs of Great Britain until the day of the Armistice. “Of course in the present need for men, being passed fit by a board would mean a pretty quick return to France,” he wrote his father on September 3, 1918. “Although I am not quite well I am almost ‘fit’ now in the military sense of the word, and depend only on the forgetfulness of the authorities for my continued stay in hospital.” Ibid., 395–396.

  21. Ibid., 423.

  22. Ibid., 428.

  23. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis, 129.

  24. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 2, 747.

  25. Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 11.

  26. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 606.

  27. Walter Hooper, ed., All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis, 1922–1927 (San Diego: Harcourt, 1991), 135.

  28. Susan Kingsley Kent, The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013), 48.

  29. Ibid., 1.

  30. Ferguson, The War of the World, 144.

  31. Kent, The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919, 2–3.

  32. Conversation with Carmella Parrinello, December 28, 2014.

  33. Meyer, A World Undone, 513.

  34. Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 67.

  35. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 502.

  36. Burleigh, Sacred Causes, 58.

  37. Michael J. Oakeshott, The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), 164–68.

  38. Johnson, Modern Times, 103.

  39. Gilbert Murray, The Ordeal of This Generation: The War, the League and the Future (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1929), 180–181.

  40. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 257.

  41. Johnson, Modern Times, 5.

  42. Hooper, ed., All My Road Before Me, 212.

  43. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 605–606.

  44. Johnson, Modern Times, 5.

  45. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (London: Hogarth Press, 1927), 28.

  46. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 256.

  47. Dearmer, Christianity and the Crisis, 68.

  48. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 185.

  49. Walter Hooper, ed., God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 116.

  50. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 250.

  51. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, 242.

  52. Ibid., 243.

  53. Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien, 100.

  54. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 78.

  55. Ibid., 144.

  56. Ibid., 231.

  57. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 836.

  58. Niall Ferguson contests the claim that the memory of war in literature and art was one of unqualified horror. “The overwhelming majority of the vast number of poems written during the war by combatants and non-combatants alike were patriotic ditties.” Ferguson, The Pity of War, 48–49.

  59. Candace Ward, ed., World War One British Poets (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications,1997), 25.

  60. Ibid., 36.

  61. Todman, The Great War, 155.

  62. Graves, Goodbye to All That, 186.

  63. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 75–76.

  64. Walter Hooper, ed., C. S. Lewis: Of This and Other Worlds (London: Fount, 2000), 100–101.

  65. Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, 232.

  66. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, xv.

  67. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 203.

  68. Ibid., 239.

  69. This was Lewis’s first article published outside of college publications.

  70. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 397.

  71. Lewis, Spirits in Bondage, 7.

  72. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 364.

  73. Churchill, The World Crisis, 4.

  74. Jenkins, The Great and Holy War, 223.

  75. The Bloomsbury Group was an influential association of English writers, intellectuals, philosophers, and artists, which included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey. They lived and collaborated together near Bloomsbury, London, during the first half of the twentieth century.

  76. Hooper, C. S. Lewis: Companion and Guide, 25.

  77. Murray, The Ordeal of This Generation, 173.

  78. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond G
ood and Evil (New York: Penguin, 1990), 82.

  79. Hooper, ed., All My Road BeforeMe, 431–432.

  80. Sayer, Jack, 219.

  81. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 199–200.

  82. C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992), 205.

  83. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 509.

  84. Ibid., 649.

  85. Ibid.

  86. Ibid., 850.

  87. In a letter to Arthur Greeves dated March 25, 1933, Lewis mentioned a talk with Tolkien “who, you know, grew up on Morris and Macdonald and shares my taste in literature to a fault.” Hooper, ed., The Letters, Vol. 2, 103.

  88. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 918.

  89. There is no written record of their precise conversation, but Carpenter does an admirable job of reconstructing their talk, based on Tolkien’s poem “Mythopoeia.” I have followed Carpenter’s narrative and added to it based on Tolkien’s and Lewis’s other letters and writings. See Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, 150–152.

  90. Ibid., 234–235.

  91. Carpenter, The Inklings, 43.

  92. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 110–111.

  93. Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien, 151.

  94. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, 87.

  95. Carpenter, The Inklings, 44. See also Lewis’s letter to Arthur Greeves in Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 976.

  96. Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien, 151.

  97. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, 90.

  98. Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien, 151.

  99. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 136.

  100. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, 974.

  101. The first book that Lewis wrote after his conversion to Christianity, The Pilgrim’s Regress, traces his own intellectual and spiritual search for truth.

  102. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 225.

  103. Hooper, ed., C. S. Lewis: Of This and Other Worlds, 7.

  104. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 2, 501.

  105. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 388.

  106. Ibid., 29.

  107. Ibid., 341.

  108. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 2, 262.

  109. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 209.

  110. Ibid.

  111. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (New York: Ballantine, 1973), 17.

  112. Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography, 180.

  113. Tolkien, The Hobbit, 268.

  114. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 2, 631.

  115. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 388.

  116. Ibid., 68.

  117. Hooper, ed. Collected Letters, Vol. 2, 990.

  118. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 362.

  119. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (London: Penguin, 2008), 67.

  120. Philip Gibbs, Now It Can Be Told (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1920), 131.

  121. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 518.

  122. Ibid., 61.

  123. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 81.

  Chapter 6: That Hideous Strength

  1. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 98.

  2. Ibid., 99.

  3. Meyer, A World Undone, 396.

  4. Ibid., 397.

  5. Hooper, ed., C. S. Lewis: Of This and Other Worlds, 95.

  6. Ibid., 98.

  7. Ibid., 102.

  8. See Tom Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), xvii–xxxv.

  9. Roger Sale, “Tolkien and Frodo Baggins,” in Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo, eds., Tolkien and the Critics: Essays on J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1972), 247.

  10. Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel (New York: Penguin, 2004), 71.

  11. Meyer, A World Undone, 547.

  12. In a letter to Jocelyn Gibb, dated April 16, 1961, Lewis is bemused by the author David Richard Davies, who seemed to discover, because of the Spanish Civil War, that humanity was capable of great wickedness. Wrote Lewis: “Most of us learned this during the First German War.” Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 3, 1254–1255.

  13. This is Lyndsay’s description of the biblical Tower of Babel. Lewis borrowed the line for the title of the third book in his science fiction series, That Hideous Strength.

  14. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 47.

  15. Ibid., 267.

  16. Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, 114. I am indebted to Shippey’s excellent treatment of this theme. See 112–160.

  17. Ibid., 630.

  18. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: MacMillan, 1982), x.

  19. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 47.

  20. Ibid., 118.

  21. Ibid., 62.

  22. See Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 173.

  23. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 76.

  24. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 293.

  25. Hooper, C. S. Lewis: Companion and Guide, 240.

  26. See Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, 112–160.

  27. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 51.

  28. Ibid., 268–269.

  29. Ibid., 331.

  30. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, 298.

  31. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 357.

  32. Ibid., 358.

  33. Hooper, ed., C. S. Lewis: Of This and Other Worlds, 28.

  34. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 777.

  35. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 82.

  36. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 172.

  37. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 61.

  38. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 271.

  39. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 199.

  40. Ibid., 222.

  41. Drout, J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, 75.

  42. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 398.

  43. Ibid., 259.

  44. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 393.

  45. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 203.

  46. Ibid.

  47. Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, 117.

  48. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 267.

  49. Ibid., 269.

  50. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 246.

  51. Isaacs and Zimbardo, eds., Tolkien and the Critics, 36.

  52. C. S. Lewis put it this way: “These things were not devised to reflect any particular situation in the real world. It was the other way around; real events began, horribly, to conform to the pattern he had freely invented.” See Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography, 193.

  53. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 332.

  54. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 945.

  55. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 56.

  56. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 130.

  57. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 125–126.

  58. Arthur Weinberg, ed., Attorney for the Damned: Clarence Darrow in the Courtroom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 56.

  59. Johnson, Modern Times, 71.

  60. Ibid., 70.

  61. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 258.

  62. Genesis 4:7.

  63. Tolkien once received a letter from an admirer, a self-described “unbeliever” who nonetheless found himself drawn to the religious sensibility of the story. “You create a world in which some sort of faith seems to be everywhere without a visible source, like light from an invisible lamp.” Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 413.

  64. Hooper, ed., C. S. Lewis: Of This and Other Worlds, 99.

  65. Ferguson, The Pity of War, 186.

  66. Thomas Hardy, The Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), 509.

  67. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 531.

  68. Croft, War and the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien, 16–17.

  69. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 849.

  70. Ibid., 848.

  71. Ibid., 631–632.

  72. Ibid., 458.

  73. Ibid., 823.

  74. Croft, War and the Works of J. R. R. Tolkie
n, 26.

  75. Brian Rosebury, Tolkien: A Critical Assessment (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), 126.

  76. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 292.

  77. Ibid., 170–171.

  78. Brian Melton, “The Great War and Narnia: C. S. Lewis as Soldier and Creator,” Mythlore, September 22, 2011. Much of my analysis follows closely that of Melton’s fine treatment of this theme.

  79. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 358.

  80. Ibid., 732.

  81. In an essay exploring his groundbreaking translation of Beowulf, for example, Tolkien explained that the men of these legends “were conceived as kings of chivalrous courts” and that “the imagination of the author of Beowulf moved upon the threshold of Christian chivalry, if indeed it had not already passed within.” Tolkien, ed., The Monsters and the Critics, 57.

  82. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 292.

  83. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 650.

  84. Ibid., 402.

  85. I am indebted to Verlyn Flieger’s analysis of the heroic tradition in The Lord of the Rings in her essay, “Frodo and Aragorn: The Concept of the Hero,” in Zimbardo and Isaacs, eds., Understanding The Lord of the Rings, 122–125.

  86. Zimbardo and Isaacs, eds., Understanding The Lord of the Rings, 123.

  87. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 171.

  88. Ibid., 62.

  89. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 258.

  90. Hooper, ed., Present Concerns, 15.

  91. Lee Rossi, The Politics of Fantasy: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), 2.

  92. As Lewis put it in The Discarded Image: “I hope no one will think I am recommending a return to the Medieval Model. I am only suggesting considerations that may induce us to regard all Models in the right way, respecting each and idolizing none.” C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2003), 222.

  93. Hooper, ed., Present Concerns, 14.

  94. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 160.

  95. Ibid., 179.

  96. Hooper, ed., Present Concerns, 16.

  97. Stephen E. Ambrose, Band of Brothers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 61.

  98. Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis (New York: HarperOne, 2006), 88.

  99. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 583.

  100. Ibid., 244.

  101. See Mike Bellah, A Celebration of Joy: Christian Romanticism in the Chronicles of Narnia, http://www.bestyears.com/thesis__7.html.

  102. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 87. See Lewis’s excellent treatment of the theme of friendship in this work, 87–127.