THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
‘The War for Middle-earth’ Review: A Faith in Literature
World War II led C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien to infuse their early experiments in fantasy with a sense of moral urgency.
By Michael Lucchese
Jan. 22, 2026 1:17 pm ET
Generations of readers have fallen in love with the fantasy novels of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, in part for the reprieve they offer from the dreary and mundane. But these tales offer something more enduring than mere escapism: the faith in human dignity and virtue that conservative thinkers have called the moral imagination.
The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945 By Joseph Loconte
In “The War for Middle-earth,” Joseph Loconte explores how World War II—one of humanity’s greatest conflicts between good and evil—inspired the literary works of Lewis and Tolkien, among them Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia” series (1950-56) and Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy (1954-55). In this follow-up to Mr. Loconte’s “A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War” (2015), the author traces the lives of these two men through a cataclysmic period and illuminates how their moral messages can ward off the forces of hatred and despair today.
As young men, both Lewis (1898-1963) and Tolkien (1892-1973) served in World War I. Mr. Loconte argues that their time in the trenches endowed them with a tragic sensibility and a perception of true heroism. Across Europe, though, World War I was profoundly demoralizing. Intellectuals turned to the twin drugs of ideology and nihilism to anesthetize the pain.
After the war, Lewis and Tolkien were brought together in 1925, when the two took positions at the University of Oxford. As writers and scholars, Lewis and Tolkien ranked among the most perceptive critics of burgeoning totalitarian movements such as Nazism and communism, in no small part due to their shared Christian faith. While Tolkien had been Roman Catholic since childhood, Lewis converted to Christianity in 1931 under Tolkien’s influence. Mr. Loconte outlines how their belief in the God-given dignity of man set them at odds with foreign despots and those in England with similar political designs.
Not everyone shared these antitotalitarian sentiments. Left shellshocked by World War I, many believed that the best way to deal with the growing threat in Europe was to disarm the democracies and appease the dictators. One of the most troubling manifestations was the Oxford Oath, a resolution passed in 1933 by a university debating society declaring that “this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.”
Lewis and Tolkien were disgusted by this atmosphere of disillusion. The friends became co-conspirators against the prevailing cynicism of the age. Along with other writers at Oxford, they formed a loose fellowship called the Inklings and began articulating a Christian humanism for a new generation.
Much of Mr. Loconte’s history concerns Lewis’s and Tolkien’s efforts as scholars. Their positions in Oxford’s English department gave them authority to promote classic literature as a solution to modern discontent. Tolkien, a scholar of Old English, studied the “theory of courage” found in poems such as the ancient epic “Beowulf,” redeeming what he called the “noble northern spirit” from the fascists who would pervert it. Lewis, meanwhile, sought to recover the ideas of love that animated medieval and Renaissance literature. Both authors admired the way that the medievals combined pagan virtues with Christian theology to sustain a culture that was simultaneously vital and humane.
For Lewis and Tolkien, Mr. Loconte writes, the West’s literary tradition expressed the profound “moral beauty, when an individual, in the face of death itself, forgets himself and expends himself in a struggle to save another soul from a great evil.” Before World War II, England desperately needed a restoration of that kind of moral imagination.
To our benefit, Lewis and Tolkien weren’t content to rummage around for these ideals in dust-covered parchment. Their experiences living under the threat of invasion during World War II, Mr. Loconte writes, persuaded them “to use imaginative literature to remind us that the material world, with its temporal aims, is not the sum and substance of our mortal lives.” The crisis of World War II provided occasion for Lewis and Tolkien to infuse their early experiments in fantasy with a sense of moral urgency.
At times, Mr. Loconte is a bit too eager to speculate about how Lewis and Tolkien may have taken inspiration from particular wartime events. Although a careful reader will notice parallels between the real and imagined worlds, these authors—especially Tolkien—insisted that their stories weren’t simple allegory. Mr. Loconte might also have spent more time addressing the group’s conflict with modernist writers: Lewis and Tolkien intended their projects to refute the efforts of poets such as T.S. Eliot or novelists such as James Joyce, whom they viewed as fragmenting English-speaking culture and twisting tradition.
Nonetheless, Mr. Loconte’s approach in “The War for Middle-earth” is enlightening. “Like no one else,” the author concludes, “Tolkien and Lewis helped a generation to understand that the truths and ideals expressed in the great works of the ancient and medieval worlds bore upon the events of the modern world.”
Today, we are likewise in need of these authors’ wisdom. As in the years after World War I, many in the West doubt or resent our civilization’s ideals, while despots seek to plunge the globe into tyranny. Only courage—the kind inspired by the works of Lewis and Tolkien—can answer the crisis.
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—Mr. Lucchese is the founder of Pipe Creek Consulting, an associate editor of Law & Liberty and a contributing editor to Providence. A trailer for Mr. Loconte’s book can be found here and short film essays about the Tolkien-Lewis-WW2 story can found on his YouTube history channel here.
