J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: A Literary Rebellion
Once he became prime minister in 1940, Churchill played an indispensable role in mobilizing the British people for war and sustaining their war spirit over the next five years. Yet the reconstitution of “moral health” and “martial vigor” was also a cultural task.
They did so not as wartime propagandists, but as Oxford academics and authors who believed that their scholarship, teaching, and imaginative literature could help shake a generation loose from its moral cynicism and spiritual lethargy. And, especially during the crisis years of 1939-45, they vigorously sought each other out in friendship. “Every real Friendship is a sort of secession,” Lewis observed, “even a rebellion.”
Their rebellion—a literary revolt—was against the spirit of the age: the substitute religions of Modernism, materialism, fascism, communism, and totalitarianism. Lewis and Tolkien formed the nucleus of a small group of like-minded authors and friends who met weekly to share and discuss their works in progress. They called themselves “the Inklings,” and together they created a beachhead of resistance against the forces of disintegration threatening not only Great Britain, but also the civilized world.
In this endeavor, Lewis and Tolkien drew from deep wells: the collective wisdom of the literary canon of Western civilization.
As instructors of English literature at Oxford University, they brought this wisdom into their classrooms: ideas about good and evil, courage, virtue, honor, and sacrifice for a noble cause. Helen Tyrell Wheeler was a pupil of Lewis and attended lectures by Tolkien during the Second World War. War news, often wrenching, was unavoidable. “But at few times can there have been such splendidly exciting lectures and such overflowing lecture halls,” she recalled. “What it meant for my generation of English Language and Literature undergraduates was that what happened in the great books was of equal significance to what happened in life, indeed, that they were the same.”
What happened in the great books was of equal significance to what happened in life.
Here is a remarkable insight from a young woman who came under the influence of these two scholars. Lewis and Tolkien helped a generation to understand that the truths expressed in the great works of literature from the ancient and medieval worlds bore upon the events of the modern world—a world at war.
Tolkien began writing The Lord of the Rings in December 1937 and, despite the terrors of wartime, nearly completed it before the Allied victory in 1945. The geo-political realities of these years—the cult of the dictator, the utopian schemes to perfect humanity, the malevolent march of Nazism—could not have been kept out of the author’s mind.
Consider: Just as Sauron, the Dark Lord, had acquired a fortress in the mountains from which to execute his evil designs, so, too, did the Führer at the Kehlstein in the Berchtesgaden Alps: the Eagle’s Nest. “My story is about power,” Tolkien explained, “exerted for domination.” The contagion of war, the lust for power, the existence of radical evil, and the courage required to resist it: The catastrophic events of the war brought all of these concepts into focus in The Lord of the Rings.
“I am a bachelor,” C.S. Lewis told his friend, sister Penelope, “and never appreciated children till the war brought them to me.” Four children, all girls—part of the great evacuation from London—appeared at Lewis’s doorstep the day after the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939. Shortly afterwards, Lewis scribbled what would form the opening lines of The Chronicles of Narnia. “This book is about four children…They were sent to stay with a relation of Mother’s who was a very old Professor who lived by himself in the country.”
In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first book in the series, the Pevensie children flee the terrors of a world at war only to enter Narnia, where another war is being waged: between the forces of Aslan the Lion King and those of the White Witch.
Art was imitating life—and life was imitating art.
The cataclysm of the Second World War laid waste to the beliefs that had built the West: the concept of a Moral Law, the value of every human life, the existence of a loving God. As the Sibyl warns the hero of The Aeneid, “The descent to the Underworld is easy.” Human civilization had descended into utter darkness, and Lewis and Tolkien were caught up in the maelstrom. “Night and day gates of shadowy Death stand open wide, but to retrace your steps, to climb back to the upper air—there the struggle, there the labor lies.”
The story of the friendship between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien is a story of how two men helped each other to endure the midnight years of the twentieth century and to climb back into the daylight. Together with their other friends, the Inklings, they created a sanctuary of moral beauty and intense creativity in a world gone mad with malice and rage.
“Talent alone cannot make a writer,” observed Ralph Waldo Emerson. “There must be a man behind the book.” Behind the extraordinary works of these authors stood a cloud of witnesses: the classical-Christian inheritance of Western civilization. Lewis and Tolkien instinctively looked to this inheritance and were nourished by it in wartime.
Cambridge poet Malcom Guite argues that their mastery of this literature accounts for the enduring power of their epic works. “I think they saw in the ancient resources they had, in the older books they were reading, not an irrelevant world into which you could escape,” Guite explains, “but curiously enough exactly the diagnostic tool they need to critique the world they were in.”
And they did so to magnificent effect: Like no other authors of their age, Lewis and Tolkien used their imagination to reclaim—for their generation and for ours—those deeds of valor and sacrifice and love that have always kept a lamp burning, even in the deepest darkness.
-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 serves as director of The Rivendell Center in New York City and hosts the YouTube channel History and the Human Story.
