Arguably, there would be fewer Christians today if not for the works of C.S. Lewis, including The Chronicles of Narnia series. And novels by J.R.R. Tolkien, a Catholic who helped convert his atheist friend Lewis to Christianity while they both taught at Oxford University, have resonated across society for decades. Many have suggested that J.K. Rowling, who grew up Anglican and is now a member of the Church of Scotland (i.e., Presbyterian), borrowed heavily from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series and The Hobbit in her Harry Potter series. One reviewer online at IMDB even blasted Tolkien because he “kind of rips off Harry Potter in many ways.”
While Lewis and Tolkien's faith and contributions are well-known, most do not realize they both fought in the First World War as young men. Even fewer recognize how their time in the western front's trenches influenced their faith and later works. However, in A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War, Providence senior editor Joseph Loconteexplains in his typical, approachable prose how the war affected these two men deeply and how those experiences influenced their writings and faith. Whether someone is interested in the war's history, the writer's books, or Christian realist perspectives on war, reading Loconte's work is more than worthwhile. This book also offers the church lessons for today.
When he was 24 years old, Tolkien deployed to France in 1916 as a second lieutenant in the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) that fought in the Battle of the Somme, where there would be over 1.3 million casualties. Loconte recounts some of Tolkien's most hellish days in the trenches, including when his unit assaulted the German-held village Ovillers-la-Boisselle. As this book convincingly argues, the Somme helped inspire fictional battles in The Lord of the Rings and other works. For instance, Tolkien's description for the Siege of Gondor looks eerily like the western front's No Man's Land, including this line: “All before the walls on either side of the Gate the ground was choked with wreck and with bodies of the slain; yet still driven as by a madness more and more came up.” No one should be surprised these fictional war scenes resemble World War I. “Indeed,” Loconte writes, “it would be remarkable if the destruction Tolkien witnessed along the western front did not find expression in his creative works.”
Beyond the war's physical landscape and mass destruction, the soldiers Tolkien fought alongside also seem to make appearances in his works. Loconte demonstrates how hobbits like Sam Gamgee have many similarities with the regular “citizen soldiers” in the BEF. While England's military leaders made blunders, thousands upon thousands of ordinary British men made the routine sacrifices and did the seemingly small work that led their country to victory. “Like the soldiers in that war,” Loconte explains, “the homely hobbits could not have perceived how the fate of nations depended upon their stubborn devotion to duty.”
Around the time Tolkien contracted “trench fever” and so left the battlefield, C.S. Lewis deployed in November 1917 with the BEF to the western front while he was still an atheist. Like Tolkien, he spent months in the trenches and lost his close friends in combat, and he also assaulted another German-held village, Riez du Vinage. While Lewis' regiment took this location in 45 minutes, the next morning the Germans counterattacked. A mortar shell, probably from British friendly fire, exploded near Lewis and killed a sergeant. Though only wounded, a shell fragment lodged into his body so close to his heart that doctors couldn't remove it safely, so Lewis carried it with him for the rest of his life. Experiences with war's reality like this later influenced his writing, such as in the Narnia series. As Loconte shows, Lewis used his war experiences “as a guidepost to moral clarity” without accepting utopianism or cynicism.
The combination of moral clarity, heroism, and realistic Christian hope in Lewis' and Tolkien's works contrasts sharply with the widespread cynicism in Western societies after World War I devastated earlier beliefs. Loconte notes how before the war the overly optimistic “Myth of Progress” had lulled the West into believing it could perfect itself through science, rationality, and other means, so devastating wars had become obsolete. But realities proved this myth false, causing pervasive hopelessness. Many other veterans from the war, including Ernest Hemingway and T.S. Eliot, reflect this disillusionment in their writings.
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