Tolkien, Lewis, And The Battle To Save Western Civilization

[ad_1] It was fairly probably probably the most exceptional literary friendship of the twentieth century.

As younger males, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien each endured the utter devastation of trench warfare throughout World Battle I. Then, as unequalled evil as soon as once more ravaged the European continent through the Nineteen Thirties and ‘40s, these two Oxford professors produced epic works of fiction, masterpieces imbued with ethical function and wonder.

Like many lovers of the classics, Joseph Loconte shares a lifelong fascination with Lewis and Tolkien. As a professor and scholar, Loconte marvels at how the writers produced their most beloved works at the hours of darkness crucible of World Battle II. So, why are their novels — and the movies they impressed — nonetheless thought of among the many best of all time?

Glad you requested. This excerpt from Loconte’s new ebook, “The Battle for Center-Earth,” could assist gentle the way in which. — Joel Kneedler

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Minds Lit by Hearth Midway by way of the Nice Battle, on November 30, 1916, a small group of European leaders managed to attend the funeral of Franz Joseph, ruler over the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In a ceremony scripted by the emperor earlier than his demise, the Grand Cortege carrying his coffin halted exterior the Capuchin Monastery in Vienna, the place all of the Hapsburg emperors have been laid to relaxation.

What transpired was a whisper from an earlier period, a nod to the transcendence of God and the frailty of males. The herald, on behalf of the emperor, knocked on the monastery door.

“Who's knocking?” shouted the abbot inside.

“I'm Franz Joseph, emperor of Austria, king of Hungary.”

“I don’t know you.”

Once more the herald shouted: “I'm Franz Joseph, emperor of Austria, king of Hungary, Bohemia, Galicia, Dalmatia, Grand Duke of Transylvania, Duke of—”

“We nonetheless don’t know who you might be,” interrupted the abbot.

At this second the herald fell on his knees and in entrance of all assembled declared, “I'm Franz Joseph, a poor sinner, humbly begging God’s mercy.”

“Enter then,” the abbot stated. And the gates opened.

The funeral of the Austro-Hungarian emperor symbolized an outlook already in a complicated stage of decay. Settled beliefs in regards to the spiritual dimension to human life have been turning into unsettled. Assumptions in regards to the ethical life, in regards to the existence of excellent and evil, appeared to have vanished into the killing fields of the 1914–18 warfare. By the top of the warfare, the emotional and non secular lives of tens of millions of odd Europeans have been caught up in a no-man’s-land of doubt and disillusionment.

Two of probably the most influential writers of the 20 th century, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, have been troopers within the Nice Battle. They fought within the trenches in France, what one up to date known as “the lengthy grave already dug.” They emerged from the mechanized slaughter of that battle bodily intact—simply barely.

No man might move by way of the fires of the Somme and Arras and stay unchanged. For Tolkien, his warfare expertise created an everlasting sense of unhappiness. But he discovered that his imaginative solid of thoughts, his early style for fantasy, was “quickened to full life by warfare.” For Lewis, the battle deepened his youthful atheism: the rising conviction that if God existed, he was a sadist. Paradoxically, the warfare years launched Lewis on a non secular quest, a want for “Pleasure,” which finally led him on a exceptional journey of religion.

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The lives of those two males intersected after the warfare as they have been launching their educational careers at Oxford College. They quickly shaped a bond of friendship that, given the attain and affect of their novels, should rank as one of the crucial consequential friendships of contemporary instances.

There was nothing inevitable about it. Tolkien was a religious Catholic; Lewis an Ulster Protestant and lapsed Anglican. At their first English college assembly, they circled one another like tigers within the wild. But they quickly found that they beloved most of the identical issues: historic myths, epic poetry, medieval tales of honor, chivalry, sacrifice, and warfare.

The theme of warfare would grow to be a defining function of their skilled and literary lives. Their private lives could be upended by two international conflicts. Barely twenty years after surviving what was probably the most devastating battle in historical past, Tolkien and Lewis would watch in anguish as new forces of aggression gathered and dominated the geopolitical panorama of Europe.

In 1938, a 12 months earlier than the outbreak of the Second World Battle, creator H. G. Wells terrified tens of millions with a radio broadcast primarily based on his novel The Battle of the Worlds , during which an imaginary Martian invasion devastates the earth. Artwork would imitate life. As British historian Niall Ferguson observes, “males proved that it was fairly potential to wreak comparable havoc with out the necessity for alien intervention. All they needed to do was to determine this or that group of their fellow males because the aliens, after which kill them.” This was the horrible sample within the aftermath of the First World Battle. Communism, fascism, Nazism: all produced political methods that drew their power from their hatreds.

The totalitarian states of Europe and Asia, regardless of their variations, shared one other unifying attribute: a contempt for the democratic and spiritual beliefs of the West. Their ambitions made one other international battle virtually inevitable.

“If the primary nice warfare was the seminal disaster,” argues historian Sir Ian Kershaw, “the second was the fruits of this disaster—the whole collapse of European civilization.” Residing and dealing in Oxford, England, Tolkien and Lewis discovered themselves on the storm entrance of this tragedy. Like no different battle in Britain’s lengthy historical past, the Second World Battle created an existential disaster. For a lot of months the political survival of their island nation was an open query.

It was within the crucible of this expertise that Tolkien and Lewis sought one another out. The horror of the First World Battle instigated a cultural backlash, setting unfastened forces that tore on the ethical and non secular foundations of Western civilization. Each males have been decided to battle again. They shaped the nucleus of a gaggle of like-minded writers, all resolved to determine a beachhead of resistance within the warfare of concepts that was raging round them.

The onset of the Second World Battle created a profound sense of urgency. Tolkien and Lewis got here to consider that the soul of their neighbor, in addition to the soul of their civilization, hung within the stability. In methods not totally appreciated, the 1939–45 warfare completely remodeled their lives and literary imaginations. Their most beloved works — together with The Hobbit , The Lord of the Rings , The Screwtape Letters , Mere Christianity , and The Chronicles of Narnia — have been conceived within the shadow of this battle.

“Expertise alone can not make a author,” noticed Ralph Waldo Emerson. “There have to be a person behind the ebook.” Behind the extraordinary works of Tolkien and Lewis stood a cloud of witnesses: people whose contributions to the literary canon of Western civilization offered the inspiration for his or her epic novels. Each authors instinctively seemed to this inheritance and have been nourished by it in wartime.

Because of this, they acquired one thing that our trendy period has largely deserted: perspective. By being rooted within the nice books of the Western custom, they knew the place to search for knowledge, advantage, braveness, and religion. Intimate data of the previous braced them for the disaster years of 1933–45. On this, they bolstered one another’s greatest instincts. “My total philosophy of historical past,” Lewis as soon as informed Tolkien, “hangs upon a single sentence of your personal.”

May a complete philosophy of historical past be summed up in a single sentence? What sentence? It's from a passage in The Lord of the Rings , when Gandalf the Wizard explains to Frodo Baggins one thing of the traditional battle for Center-earth. “There was sorrow then, too, and gathering darkish, however nice valor, and nice deeds that weren't wholly useless.” Right here is an method to historical past — to the horrible historical past of the 20 th century — that invitations reflection.

The lives of Tolkien and Lewis, in any case, have been embedded on this story when one other disastrous warfare unleashed upon the earth a storm of human distress unsurpassed within the catalogue of world catastrophes. “Center-earth, I believe, appears to be like so engagingly acquainted to us, and speaks to us so eloquently,” writes biographer John Garth, “as a result of it was born with the trendy world and marked by the identical horrible beginning pangs.” We can not totally recognize the achievement of those two exceptional authors till we attempt to see the world as they skilled it. They possessed a deep consciousness of life’s sorrows.

But that is solely a part of their story. Their expertise of struggling was held in test by one thing stronger: gratitude. The Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero known as this high quality “not solely the best of virtues, however the dad or mum of all of the others.” Like no different authors of their age, they used their creativeness to reclaim—for his or her era and ours—these deeds of valor and sacrifice and love which have all the time stored a lamp burning even within the deepest darkness.

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Tailored from “THE WAR FOR MIDDLE-EARTH: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945 ,” by Joseph Loconte. Copyright 2025 by Joseph Loconte. Printed by Thomas Nelson. Out there wherever books are offered on November 18, 2025.

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Joseph Loconte, PhD, is an creator, historian, and filmmaker. He serves as Director of The Rivendell Heart in New York Metropolis. He's a Presidential Scholar at New School of Florida and a Senior Fellow on the Sagamore Institute. Mr. Loconte’s commentary seems in shops equivalent to The New York Instances, The Wall Avenue Journal, Nationwide Affairs, The New Criterion, Nationwide Geographic, Regulation and Liberty, The Nationwide Curiosity, and Nationwide Assessment. For ten years Mr. Loconte served as a commentator for Nationwide Public Radio’s All Issues Thought-about. A local of Brooklyn, New York, he divides his time between Washington, DC, and New York Metropolis.