Joseph Loconte talked about how C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien’s experiences in the First World War affected their lives and future writing. He authored 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. The following is a transcript of the lecture.
Well, hello everybody. How’s everybody doing out there? Hi, can you hear me back there in the bleacher seats? Yeah? What an amazing 24 hours—the speakers, the quality of the speakers, the beautiful venue, and you students, the quality of the questions. I’m so impressed. Mark Tooley is the guy who makes this happen, he and his team. Let’s have a round of applause for Mark Tooley. I’m so impressed. Now that I’ve praised him—I’ve known Mark for many years—I’m going to publicly denounce him because of the calendar, the schedule of speakers, one after another after another. You can’t even get a cookie, or a cup of coffee, or go to the bathroom. Just give us a break next time. I told him I was going to publicly denounce him. How about an amen on that? Oh, that’s right. I warned him. I begged him. He didn’t listen.
We’ve heard from political scientists, philosophers, and moral theologians. I’m none of those. I’m a historian, and I’m not capable of much abstract thought. I’m the great-grandson of a baker, the grandson of a barber, and the son of an eggman from Brooklyn. We don’t do philosophy in the Loconte family. That’s the good news, and there’s no bad news.
J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and war. Just over a century ago—can we close those doors? Could we close those, please, to reduce the background noise? Just over a century ago, the National Peace Council of Great Britain—a group of religious and secular peace organizations—issued this proclamation: “Peace, the babe of the 19th century, is the strong youth of the 20th century. War, the product of anarchy and fear”—let that phrase hang—”war, the product of anarchy and fear, is passing away under the growing and persistent pressure of world organization, economic necessity, human intercourse, and that change of spirit, that social sense, the zeitgeist of the age.”
The National Peace Council made that prediction in the 1914 edition of its Peace Yearbook. Within weeks, the nations of the earth became embroiled in a global conflict: the First World War, the most destructive and dehumanizing war the world had ever seen. So much for liberal delusions about human nature and the nature of human conflict.
Two of the most beloved Christian authors of the last century, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, were thrust into the jaws of the industrial slaughterhouse of the First World War. Both served as second lieutenants with the British Expeditionary Force in France. Remember what soldiers on the Western Front endured: mortars, machine guns, tanks, poison gas, flamethrowers, barbed wire, trenches, and mud. Never before had technology and science so conspired to destroy both man and nature. When it was all over, Winston Churchill wrote, “Torture and cannibalism were the only expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian states had been able to deny themselves.”
C.S. Lewis was nearly killed by a mortar shell that obliterated his sergeant standing nearby. Most of his friends perished in the war. He wrote his father from his hospital bed, “I could sit down and cry over the whole business.” Tolkien fought at the Battle of the Somme, one of the fiercest concentrations of killing in human history. The Brits lost over 19,000 men on the opening day—the bloodiest battle in British military history, and that’s saying a lot. Tolkien wrote, “One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel its full oppression. To be caught up in youth, by 1914, was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead.”
These men had no romantic illusions about war’s horror and cost. As Lewis put it, “We remember the trenches too well.”
It wasn’t only the experience of the trenches that gave them a sober view of war. Twenty years after the First World War, Tolkien and Lewis faced a second, with Great Britain near its center. They approached the onset of this conflict with revulsion, foreboding, and dread. In 1939, what separated the British people from Europe’s barbarism was the English Channel and Winston Churchill—that’s another talk for another day.
Lewis wrote to his friend Dom Griffiths on October 5, 1938, “I was terrified to find how terrified I was by the crisis. Pray for me, for courage.” What crisis? The Munich Crisis. Hitler persuaded the democratic allies to let him absorb part of Czechoslovakia under the false promise of peace.
Tolkien felt similarly. Their personal and professional lives were bracketed by the most devastating wars in human history, when Western civilization seemed to sit on the edge of a knife. Yet, for these two extraordinary authors and friends, the experience of war deepened their spiritual quest and shaped their literary imagination. Out of war came a great friendship. Out of that friendship came their great imaginative works—stories about the conflict between good and evil, about heroism, about sacrifice for a noble cause. Three words: war, friendship, imagination. Tolkien created The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Lewis became famous for The Chronicles of Narnia and The Space Trilogy. These epic tales deal with the struggles, sorrows, and triumphs of war.
What was their approach to war?
Many veterans of World War I wrote blistering anti-war novels and poetry in the 1920s. An entire generation of Christian ministers vowed never to support Britain in another war. In 1933, students at the Oxford Union Society voted, “This House will under no circumstances fight for its King and Country.” Tolkien repeatedly decried “the utter stupid waste of war,” but acknowledged, “It will be necessary to face it in an evil world.”
Lewis, writing in 1944, said, “We know from the experience of the last 20 years”—think about that, writing in ’44 about the last 20 years—”we know from the experience of the last 20 years that a terrified and angry pacifism is one of the roads that leads to war.” Both men fought honorably in World War I and served in the Home Guard during World War II.
What shaped their approach to war? Both were educated in the literary canon of Western civilization—Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton. Lewis said that outside of the Bible, Virgil’s Aeneid had the greatest impact on his professional career. The Aeneid has been described as the most influential literary work of European civilization for two millennia. It’s a war story, a founding myth of ancient Rome, written by Rome’s greatest poet during an identity crisis. Aeneas’s mission is not only to wage war and defeat defiant tribes but also to establish a new civilization.
From the Aeneid: “Roman remember by your strength to rule earth’s peoples for your arts are to be these to pacify, to impose the rule of law, to spare the conquered, to battle down the proud..”
The classical scholar A.T. Reyes says this about C.S. Lewis and his lifelong attachment to the Aeneid: for Lewis, a veteran of the First World War, the beauty and fascination of Virgil’s poem lay in its expression of waste and loss. What affected him most was Virgil’s need to depict the human tragedy within war. It wasn’t only the sense of loss that moved Lewis. He wrote a letter to his friend Dorothy Sayers dated December 29, 1946: “I’ve just re-read the Aeneid again.” He didn’t know how many times he had read and re-read it. “I’ve just re-read it again. The effect is one of the immense costliness of a vocation combined with a complete conviction that it’s worth it.” Tolkien expressed a similar appreciation for Beowulf.
Beowulf is considered the greatest surviving Old English poem and one of the most important works of Western literature. The story of the Scandinavian warrior battling the forces of evil captured Tolkien’s imagination as a young man. He studied it, translated it, and lectured on it for decades. One likely source of Tolkien’s dragon in The Hobbit—the desolation of Smaug—comes from Beowulf, which also features a dragon and stolen treasure. In Beowulf, the hero defeats the demon Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and a fearsome dragon, but at the cost of his own life. Tolkien was fascinated by these tales, with their portrayal of the persistence of wickedness, the danger of pride, and the value of heroic sacrifice for a noble cause.
Tolkien was asked to give a lecture at the Natural History Museum of Oxford for the Christmas program in 1938 or 1939. The topic was dragons, and his book The Hobbit had just come out, making him popular with children. I found this lecture only by visiting the Bodleian Library to see the original manuscript; it’s hard to find in published sources. Here’s a piece of what he told those children about dragons: “The dragon bears witness to the power and danger and malice that men find in the world, and he bears witness also to the wit and the courage and finally to the luck or grace that men have shown in their adventures—not all men, and only a few men greatly.” Then he said, “Dragons are the final test of heroes.” Dragons are the final test of heroes.
Tolkien and Lewis were not warmongers. They were not tempted by jingoism or militant nationalism. On the other hand, unlike many of their peers in the 1920s and 30s, they rejected pacifism.
They navigated between these two extremes, between militarism and pacifism, in their approach to the world. They embraced what we might call Christian realism. Reinhold Niebuhr said, “When the mind is not confused by utopian delusions, it is not difficult to recognize genuine achievements of justice and to feel under obligation to defend them against the threats of tyranny and the negation of justice.” Tolkien and Lewis carried no illusions about war because they had no illusions about the problem of evil, the tragedy of the human condition.
In The Lord of the Rings, Elrond says at the Council of Elrond: “The Elves deemed that evil was ended forever. And it was not so.”
In Tolkien’s children’s story The Hobbit, the goblins are described this way: “Goblins are cruel, wicked, bad-hearted. They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones: hammers, axes, swords, daggers, pickaxes, tongs, and instruments of torture. They make them very well. It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once; for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them.”
What does that sound like? It sounds like the industrialized slaughter of the First World War—the abuse of science and technology.
What do we make of the Ring in The Lord of the Rings? The battle between Mordor and Middle-earth is called the War of the Ring. Why go to war over a ring? The Ring gives its bearer the power of invisibility and control over the other Rings. “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.”
In the 1950s, at the start of the Cold War, many assumed the Ring symbolized atomic power. Tolkien corrected them: “Of course, my story is not an allegory of atomic power, but of power exerted for domination.” He was clear: the Ring symbolizes power exerted for domination.
The Ring embodies the will to power—the desire to exploit, dominate, and control the lives of others. The National Peace Council in 1914 claimed war was “the product of anarchy and fear.” Today’s progressive elites speak as if war could be eliminated through arms control agreements, international treaties, the spread of democracy, global redistribution of wealth, or the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. It won’t do. Modern liberalism refuses to face honestly the problem of the will to power.
Lewis tackles this theme in his essay “Why I Am Not a Pacifist,” which I commend to everyone here. It’s a beautiful essay—empathetic, sympathetic, and realistic. In it, Lewis challenges the claim that wars never do any good. He writes: “How are we to decide whether the total effect would have been better or worse if Europe had submitted to Germany in 1914?” He continues: “It’s true that wars never do half the good which the leaders of the belligerents say they’re going to do. That may be a sound argument for not pitching one’s propaganda too high, but it’s no argument against war.”
Then he writes: “It is certain that a whole nation cannot be prevented from taking what it wants except by war. It is almost equally certain that the absorption of certain societies by certain other societies is a greater evil. The doctrine that war is always a great evil seems to imply a materialist ethic—a belief that death and pain are the greatest evils. But I do not think that they are.”
For Tolkien and Lewis, war was a tragic necessity. This is a major theme in their works, but why? What’s the purpose of war? What good could it achieve? In The Lord of the Rings, Faramir, the captain of Gondor, says: “War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.” The innocent. War as a moral necessity to protect the innocent from great harm, to preserve human freedom, to defend civilization against barbarism. This is the moral core of the Christian just war tradition, from Augustine to Aquinas, Grotius, and beyond.
Tolkien and Lewis wrote epic fantasy, reviving the medieval concept of the heroic quest. Tolkien said that reading medieval works inspired him to create a modern work in the same tradition. This is part of his great achievement. In The Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis presents a realm of kings and queens where a code of honor holds sway, where knighthood is won or lost on the battlefield. Is this medieval nostalgia? Escapism? They were accused of that. Perhaps it’s the opposite. Perhaps the theme of war, the struggle between light and darkness, is essential in an age of moral cynicism. Courage, valor—chivalry in wartime for a just cause—both authors believed this was the only realistic path in a dangerous world.
C.S. Lewis said: “It offers the only possible escape from a world divided between werewolves who do not understand and sheep who cannot defend the things which make life desirable.” Defending the things that make life worth living: freedom, beauty, love, faith. In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien presents two kinds of heroes in wartime: the extraordinary man, the hidden king determined to fight for his people against great evil, and the ordinary man, the hobbit. Any hobbits out there in the audience? Confess now. The hobbit, the person like us who is “not made for perilous quests.”
Where did Tolkien get the idea for the hobbit? Go back to the First World War, to the Western Front, where Tolkien served as a second lieutenant, struggling with his men to survive. “I’ve always been impressed that we are here surviving,” he said, “because of the indomitable courage of quite small people against impossible odds.” The hobbits were made small, he explained, to show “the amazing and unexpected heroism of ordinary men at a pinch.” He was talking about the men he fought alongside in the trenches of France. The British Expeditionary Force was not, for the most part, a professional army. They were citizen-soldiers—shopkeepers, bartenders, clerks, farmers, fishermen, gardeners. “My Sam Gamgee,” Tolkien said, “is indeed a reflection of the English soldier, of the privates that I knew in the 1914 war and recognized as so far superior to myself.” One of the most beloved characters in modern fiction is based on the ordinary English soldier at his post, ready to fight and die for his country, for his band of brothers.
For these two giants of literature, whose lives were profoundly shaped by war, only one truth, one singular event, can end the long war against evil, undo the tragedy of the human condition, and bring lasting peace. Only one thing: the return of the King. In Narnia, the King is Aslan, the great lion, the Christ figure. Only Aslan knows the way to the blessed realm that lies beyond the sea. “The light ahead was growing stronger,” writes Lewis in The Last Battle. “Lucy saw that a great series of many-colored cliffs led up in front of them like a giant staircase. Then she forgot everything else, because Aslan himself was coming, leaping down from cliff to cliff like a living cataract of power and beauty.” This King comes in power and beauty, as the voice of conscience and the source of consolation—as the Lion and the Lamb.
In Tolkien’s story, the King is Aragorn. Aragorn, the chief epic hero of The Lord of the Rings, heir to the kingship of Gondor. His life is devoted to the war against Sauron. His true stature is revealed only after Sauron’s defeat, when he assumes his throne. Here’s how Tolkien describes that moment: “When Aragorn arose, all that beheld him gazed in silence, for it seemed to them that he was revealed to them now for the first time. Tall as the sea-kings of old, he stood above all that were near. Ancient of days he seemed, yet in the flower of manhood. Wisdom sat upon his brow, and strength and healing were in his hands, and a light was about him. And then Faramir cried: Behold the King.”
In these war stories—tales of loss and recovery, cowardice and courage, betrayal and redemption—we find a clue to the meaning of our earthly journey. “Is everything sad going to come untrue?” asks Sam. For the creators of Narnia and Middle-earth, here is the deepest source of hope for the human story: the belief that God and goodness are the ultimate realities, and that the shadow of sin, suffering, and death will finally be lifted. The great war will be won. This King, who brings strength and healing in his hands, will make everything sad come untrue. Thank you for listening.
Q&A
Question: I guess this is more of a comment, and you can respond. C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity was given during World War II, in Britain’s darkest hour. What effect do you think it had on the people? Did it revive their spirit, give them hope, give them meaning for fighting the war?
Answer: That’s a terrific question. What’s your name? Corey. Thank you, Corey. Yes, Mere Christianity came out of a series of radio broadcasts that the BBC asked Lewis to deliver to defend the truths of the Christian faith. That’s how far we’ve come, friends. In 1940, the BBC thought Great Britain needed, in addition to Winston Churchill, a voice to help people find faith, hope, and strength during the Blitz. This was during the Blitz—57 consecutive nights of air raids against London and other cities. Think about the 9/11 attacks. Now imagine 57 consecutive nights of ruin. That’s what the British endured.
The BBC asked Lewis to deliver these broadcasts. I’ve read letters from people who were young at the time, who heard Lewis on the air and later reflected on the strength it gave them. It’s one of the scenes we want to recreate in the documentary film series I’m working on about Tolkien, Lewis, and war. Imagine being in an English pub with Lewis’s voice coming over the radio.
Lewis’s broadcasts had a tremendous impact. At the time, his voice, next to Churchill’s, was probably one of the most recognizable in Great Britain. That’s the reach the BBC had. The broadcasts were later compiled into Mere Christianity, which became a best-seller and influenced countless lives. But in the moment, the British were trying to make sense of their situation: “How could this catastrophe happen again?”
Remember, the First World War devastated Britain. As Americans, we came in late, suffered the least, and came out the strongest. None of the war was fought on our soil. But the British were still reeling from World War I. The idea of enduring another war caused many to lose their faith. Lewis had a profound effect in shoring up their courage and leading many back to faith. There are numerous testimonies waiting to be tracked down. It’s a great dissertation topic for someone. Thanks for the question.
Question: Thank you for the wonderful talk. You mentioned how Tolkien and Lewis were often accused of escapism. I believe Tolkien owned that. He compared escapism to a soldier escaping a prison camp. Maybe this ties into the idea that as Christians, we’re meant for the next life. What do you think about that?
Answer: That’s a terrific question. What’s your name? Greg. Thank you, Greg. You’re right. Tolkien owned it but turned it on its head. He wasn’t talking about escaping reality but escaping the illusions—the lies of the modern world. Tolkien and Lewis both wanted to escape from the falsehoods about human nature, politics, and the human condition.
Tolkien used the genre of fantasy and epic myth to teach deep truths about the human condition. That’s what he does in The Lord of the Rings. Lewis does the same in The Chronicles of Narnia. What do these works reveal? The depth of evil, the persistence of power. Remember Frodo? He’s a hero, but when he reaches Mount Doom, he says, “I am not going to do what I came to do. The Ring is mine.” He puts it back on his finger. The Ring isn’t destroyed by Frodo or the Fellowship—it’s destroyed by Gollum, in what Tolkien called “a sudden turn of grace.”
Tolkien called this “eucatastrophe”—the unraveling of a catastrophe. The point is, even heroes are susceptible to temptation and evil. That’s realism, not escapism. When Lewis reviewed The Lord of the Rings, he said the feeling it gave him wasn’t escapism but dread. Dread—the sense that he couldn’t stay in his little hobbit hole by the fire. There’s a real world out there, and he had to engage with it.
Let me share a personal story. I didn’t start reading The Lord of the Rings until my mid-40s. I was doing academic work at The King’s College, a late bloomer. My friends like to say, “Loconte, you call that blooming?” I was reading John Locke during the day and The Lord of the Rings at night in an English pub—a great way to do it. I didn’t feel like I was escaping reality. I felt fortified for the task at hand, morally invigorated. Tolkien shows us what deceit and cowardice look like, but also what courage and heroism look like.
Terrific question. I hope I took a stab at it.
Thank you. Yes, sir, come on up. As you’re coming up, let me share a quick passage that illustrates this point. This is from Edmund Fuller, a literary critic writing in the late 1960s about Tolkien and Lewis. Fuller was a Christian critic who was disgusted with the cynicism of modern fiction. He defended Tolkien and Lewis, saying:
“It’s not escapist, not in the pejorative sense. Indeed, it may offer temporary refuge and relief from the pressure of our immediate world. But if it is of depth—now he’s talking about epic myth and fantasy—then we are brought to a deeper pondering and insight into central aspects of our actual lives. Our sensitivity is wedded to honor, courage, aspiration, and beauty. No one thinking on these things is escaping reality.”
Couldn’t say it better. Go ahead.
Question: Thank you for your talk, Dr. Loconte. My name is James Diddams, and I work at the Institute on Religion and Democracy. When you opened, you spoke about Tolkien and Lewis growing up in a deep cultural well indebted to Virgil, Homer, Milton, and other greats of the Western canon. Later, you mentioned Tolkien’s symbolism of the grinding wheels of industry, which we often take as symbolic of fascism. I thought you were going to say—and perhaps some scholars would—that it also symbolizes the creaking wheels of industry and technocracy, crushing the culture and beauty of Homer, Virgil, and Milton.
People who study works like Beowulf often find no practical or capitalistic purpose in them. Thinking about what we’ve lost today, I increasingly sense we’re in a new Dark Age. The deep cultural meanings built over thousands of years—these cannot simply be pulled from the air. Few people in this room, I’d wager, have read Virgil, Homer, or Milton. Maybe if you’re an English major, you’ve read one; if you’re a classics major, you’ve read Virgil and Homer. Contrast this with 200 years ago—getting into Harvard required speaking Hebrew and Latin and having a deep knowledge of the Western tradition.
At Wheaton College, where I went, I don’t even know how to explain to someone interested in liberal arts for its prestige alone why it matters. I worry that, as Christians, we pay lip service to the liberal arts and the great tradition. What do you think?
Answer: You have reason to worry. I wouldn’t quite call it a Dark Age, but I hear you. Since the late 1960s and 70s, there has been a deliberate effort to eliminate the Western canon from the curriculum. It’s almost complete. There are holdouts—The King’s College, where I taught for a decade, is one. But back in the late ’60s and early ’70s, the chant at campuses like USC was, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.” And here we are now.
We’ve cut ourselves off from this great cultural inheritance—this classical Christian inheritance. Lewis and Tolkien consciously drew on that inheritance to push back against the darkness. I think there’s room for more attention on how deliberate they were in using this tradition to resist the nihilism of their age.
Consider the ideologies that flourished after the First World War. Communism had been around since Marx, but by 1919-1920, they were holding international conferences. Fascism began in Italy in 1921-22, well before Hitler rose to power. Eugenics, materialism, scientism—all these ideologies took off. Lewis and Tolkien had a ringside seat to this. They used epic myth and literature, drawing from those deep wells, to push back in the best way they could.
They weren’t politicians or philosophers—they were writers. And look at the effect they’ve had. We’re still talking about their books, still making movies and TV series (God help us with what Amazon will do). Their works have been translated into dozens of languages and continue to sell.
So while I wouldn’t call it a Dark Age, there is reason for hope. People respond to beauty, including moral beauty, which is embedded in their works. Does that help answer your question?
Question: Thank you for coming today. My name is Rohan, and I’m from Wheaton College. What kind of remedies would Lewis and Tolkien offer for war, suffering, and the human condition?
Answer: Remedies, Rohan, remedies. That’s a huge question. Could you clarify—what do you mean by remedies?
Question: We’ve discussed the realities of war and suffering. How do Lewis and Tolkien resolve these conditions in their works?
Answer:Their works profoundly acknowledge that no final resolution to suffering exists on this side of the curtain. Think of Frodo after the defeat of Sauron and the destruction of the Ring. Frodo isn’t the same. Some biographers suggest he represents the shell-shocked veteran of World War I. He’s changed—the shadow persists.
For Lewis, too, there’s no ultimate defeat of evil in this world. But they both show us ways to live faithfully in the face of suffering. Consider their sense of vocation. They were academics—they delivered lectures, produced scholarly articles, taught students, graded papers. Tolkien wrote “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” on a blank sheet while grading student exams. He didn’t know why he wrote it, but he did.
They pursued their broader callings as writers on evenings and weekends, unpaid. Their vocation was not limited to their academic duties. God has made us richly complex, with multiple callings—primary and secondary. We won’t always get paid to pursue every aspect of our calling. Renewal requires sacrifice.
Another key point: they worked in community. The Inklings met weekly at The Eagle and Child pub and in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College for 20 years. They critiqued each other’s work—Tolkien read The Lord of the Rings chapter by chapter to Lewis. They pursued their callings together.
We must do the same. Community and faithfulness to our callings are essential steps toward cultural renewal and inoculating ourselves against the lies of our age. Thank you for that question.
