By JOSEPH LOCONTE
December 25, 2025
For Christmas 1941, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis sought to find the light amid a dark season.
The days leading up to Christmas in 1941 effectively obliterated any sentimental notions about “peace on earth” and “good will toward men.” Not even Father Christmas could evade the nightmare enveloping the world.
On December 22, 1941, twelve-year-old Priscilla Tolkien received her annual letter from Father Christmas. J.R.R. Tolkien had begun writing and illustrating his “Father Christmas” letters to his children in the 1920s, when they were toddlers. The letters were usually filled with the escapades of the Polar Bear, the chief assistant to Father Christmas, whose comical adventures affected the annual Christmas stock.
In 1933, the same year that Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, the letters took on a more menacing tone, with the introduction of the Goblins. In Tolkien’s Christmas letter of 1941, however, the savagery of the Goblins is front and center.
“I expect you remember that some years ago we had trouble with the Goblins; and we thought we had settled it,” writes Father Christmas. “Well, it broke out again this autumn, worse than it has been for centuries. We had several battles, and for a while my house was besieged.”
Father Christmas noted that fewer children had written to him than in previous years. “I expect it’s because of this horrible war . . . So terribly many people have lost their homes or have left them; half the world seems in the wrong place.”
Merry Christmas, Priscilla! Neither in his epic fantasy, The Lord of the Rings, nor in his letters to his children, did Tolkien attempt to shield his readers from the brutal realities of a world at war.
Tolkien’s Oxford University friend and colleague, C.S. Lewis, shared his basic Christian outlook, as well as his approach to imaginative literature. Two days after hearing a speech by Hitler that was broadcast over the BBC (and simultaneously translated into English), Lewis got the idea for a diabolical satire. It would consist of the secret correspondence between a senior devil, named Screwtape, and his apprentice, as they plotted the ruination of a human soul.
Appearing throughout 1941 as installments in The Guardian, it was published the following year under the title The Screwtape Letters. Among other themes is the Will to Power, a concept advanced by the 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Like a spiritual surgeon, Lewis dissects the taproot of the totalitarian temptation: the habits of mind that corrupt the heart beyond recovery.
“It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and into the Nothing,” counsels Screwtape. “Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
The hellish catastrophe that had descended upon Europe and Asia in 1941 was almost beyond comprehension.
On December 7, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in a surprise attack on the United States, crippling its Navy and inflicting 3297 casualties on service personnel and civilians. On the same day, the Japanese attacked the British outpost of Malaya, sinking several British ships, including the Prince of Wales, ultimately killing 840 sailors. Hong Kong fell on Christmas Day, with reports of the rape and massacre of many civilians. Japan was now at war with America and Great Britain.
Hitler’s Germany, which already controlled virtually all of Central and Western Europe, declared war on the United States on December 11 and quickly formed a military alliance with Japan and Italy. The Nazi assault against the Soviet Union, begun in June and involving 3.6 million troops — the largest invasion force in European history — continued apace. In the previous year, England had survived the Battle of Britain and the Nazi Blitz on London — but just barely. Throughout 1941, Germany kept up the bombing raids on London and other major cities in England.
This was the geopolitical reality on Christmas Day in 1941. To many in England, it really seemed that the forces of barbarism would prevail, that the eclipse of Western civilization was at hand. It really looked as if the survival of Great Britain depended upon the choices of “quite small people” — the ordinary folk upon whom Tolkien’s hobbits were based — who shook off their fears and fought the terror from the skies.
Writing throughout the blackest days of the Second World War, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis captured in fantasy a dimension of the human story — the horror as well as the heroism — that was felt more vividly in their day than perhaps in any other period of history. Rejecting the mood of cynicism and disillusionment that gripped the minds of many in their generation, they created a beachhead of resistance: stories about courage and sacrifice and redemption.
It is a vision expressed in The Lord of the Rings by Sam Gamgee — Tolkien’s “jewel among the hobbits” — in the throes of Mordor. At the sight of a single, penetrating star, hope returns: “For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.”
Just so: During another brutal age, amid the gathering Dark, a star appeared — over Bethlehem — to point the way toward hope. May each of us find the strength, and the grace, and the faith to see it.
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Joseph Loconte is the author of The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945. He is a presidential scholar at New College of Florida and the C.S. Lewis Scholar for Public Life at Grove City College. He hosts the YouTube channel History and the Human Story.
