On Religion: Tolkien, Lewis And Great Post-World War I Myths
(ANALYSIS) A British soldier began writing “The Fall of Gondolin” while in a hospital bed, stricken by "trench disease" from the lethal front lines of World War I.
A German soldier, the painter Otto Dix, later bemoaned the “lice, rats, barbed wire, fleas, shells, bombs, underground caves, corpses, blood, liquor, mice, cats, artillery, filth, bullets, mortars, fire, steel." Add poison gas to that ordeal.
Young J.R.R. Tolkien wrote: “The fume of the burning, and the steam of the fair fountains of Gondolin withering in the flame of the dragons of the north, fell upon the vale of Tumladen in mournful mists.” The battlefields were “cold and terrible.”
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This was a vision of war from a man who had been there, said Joseph Loconte, author of “A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War.” The book explores the many ways that World War I shaped Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.
“Tolkien wasn't writing escapist fantasy,” said Loconte, reached by telephone. “If this is about escape, it's the writings of a prisoner who has escaped the world of cells, bars and keys. This kind of escapism ... helps us realize that our prisons have windows and we can use them to see better things.”
Tolkien later wrote that he began creating his Middle Earth mythology — the foundation for the future “The Lord of the Rings” — while “in grimy canteens, at lectures in cold fogs, in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candlelight in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire."
Yes, the man who survived days huddled in shell craters and trenches in France would later write, in a blank page in an Oxford student's exam book, these famous words: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”
Tolkien and Lewis remain stunningly popular — in print and on digital screens. A graphic novel by John Hendrix, “The Mythmakers: The remarkable fellowship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien,” will become a feature-length animated film. Netflix recently began filming the latest production based on “The Chronicles of Narnia," the seven novels Lewis wrote for children and families. Another Hollywood film linked to “The Lord of the Rings" — “The Hunt for Gollum” — is scheduled for a 2027 release.
Loconte stressed that the faith woven into the works of Lewis and Tolkien was in sharp contrast to the despair and doubt found in many classic books after “The War to End All Wars,” which killed as many as 40 million soldiers and civilians.
Tolkien was a young, devout, newly married Catholic when he deployed to France. Lewis was a 19-year-old atheist, long before his conversion to Christianity. Neither was a holy crusader for king and country.
But later, as the horrors of World War II unfolded, these two friends were determined to write about fellowship, courage, honor and faith that included sobering truths about the hard choices faced by warriors.
“If they won't write the kind of books we want to read, we shall have to write them ourselves," says Lewis, in one scene from "The Mythmakers." "We need books like your Hobbit, but on a grand scale. Something meant for us. How about we flip for it?"
Tolkien replies: “Flip for what?”
Lewis says, “Heads, you write a story about time travel; tails, you try space travel, and I'll take the other.”
Tolkien thought Lewis was crazy, but — in real life — they flipped that coin. Lewis wrote his “Space Trilogy.” Tolkien attempted a time-travel book. Then he poured his efforts, with Lewis fiercely urging him forward, into “The Lord of the Rings.”
Critics accused them of being a “cultural rearguard of the Middle Ages.” Tolkien said he was trying to offer the English people a vast “mythology of their own.”
Lewis later wrote that “The Fellowship of the Ring,” the first volume of Tolkien's masterwork, was “like lightning from a clear sky." One statement in the epic, Lewis added, captured their shared view of life and history: "There was sorrow then, too, and gathering dark, but great valour, and great deeds that were not wholly vain.”
Loconte explained: “Their goal was to offer Christian realism. There is no cynicism or utopianism here. They wanted to find a middle ground between those great temptations that were so common in the epoch between the two great wars. They rejected despair.”
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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.