Once Britain declared war on Germany, military service became a moral obligation for every able-bodied man. A captain of the rugby team at the King Edward’s School in Birmingham, Tolkien became a cadet at the school’s Officer Training Corps. “In those days,” he wrote later, “chaps signed up or were scorned publicly.”
© IWM (E (AUS) 1220)
The destructive power of the First World War, in addition to its assault on human life, devastated the physical landscape of Europe. Entire forests, like this one at Chateau Wood in Belgium, bore grim witness to man’s cruelty toward nature. In the novels of Tolkien and Lewis, nature herself joins in the war against the forces of evil.
During the last part of the nineteenth century, British social theorist Herbert Spencer reinterpreted Darwin’s theory of biological evolution as a doctrine of social progress. Spencer’s “social Darwinism” fueled a myth of human perfectibility that Tolkien and Lewis confronted throughout their literary careers.
Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, announced in 1905, reinforced the notion that science and technology would help mankind achieve mastery over nature. But the Great War revealed how the fruits of science could be used as instruments of naked power, themes that haunt the worlds of Narnia and Middle-earth.
President Woodrow Wilson arrived in Paris in December 1918, promising a new era of peace and international goodwill. Thousands of war-weary Europeans filled the streets to greet him. “He ceased to be a common statesman,” wrote H. G. Wells. “He became a Messiah.”
The savagery of the First World War seemed to invalidate the liberal democratic values of the West, and totalitarian ideologies rushed to fill the vacuum. By the 1920s and ’30s, as Lewis and Tolkien began to compose their imaginative works, fascist movements like those led by Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler had spread all over Europe.
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In 1901, a young parliamentarian named Winston Churchill criticized members of his own party for believing that a major European war would be limited, decisive, and beneficial for England. Rather, he warned, it would end “in the ruin of the vanquished” and the “exhaustion of the conquerors.” Churchill fought on the Western Front and served as First Lord of the Admiralty during the war.
Eric Remarque’s World War I memoir, All Quiet on the Western Front, depicts a generation of veterans “weary, broken, burnt out, rootless and without hope.” The book, followed by a Hollywood film, became an international blockbuster. It seemed to capture the psychological gloom that afflicted many writers, artists, philosophers, and public intellectuals in the 1920s and ’30s.
Tolkien and Lewis met for the first time in 1926 at Oxford University, where they took up their academic posts after the war. Tolkien, a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, and Lewis, a tutor in English Language and Literature at Magdalen College (pictured above), shared a deep interest in mythic and romantic literature. They formed the nucleus of the Inklings, a circle of Christian authors and friends who met regularly at Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen and at the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford.
Joseph Loconte
On the evening of September 19, 1931, Lewis took his dinner companions, J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, to Addison’s Walk, a tree-lined footpath that follows the River Cherwell near Magdalen College. They discussed the nature of myths and their relationship to truth, a conversation that Lewis regarded as a breakthrough in his conversion to Christianity.
Joseph Loconte
Tolkien and Lewis often met at Oxford’s Eastgate Hotel to discuss their latest literary efforts over a drink or a meal. In a letter dated March 30, 1944, Tolkien noted that Lewis was pestering him to complete his unfinished manuscript, The Lord of the Rings. “Lunch with C.S.L.,” he wrote. “Quite an outing for me.”
Joseph Loconte
The Thiepval Memorial, located on the Somme battlefields near the French village of Pozieres, is the largest British war memorial in the world. It honors the 72,195 missing British and South African soldiers, most of whom died during the 1916 Battle of the Somme. Among them was Tolkien’s friend, Ralph Payton, whose name is inscribed on the memorial to the missing.
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 24