CHAPTER 6

THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH

In the summer of 430 BC, the civilized world seems to be unraveling in the fog and fury of a great war.

It is the early phase of the Peloponnesian War, a vicious clash of imperial ambitions between the two titans of ancient Greece, Athens and Sparta. When the Athenian historian, Thucydides, set out to chronicle the war, he expected it would be “more momentous than any previous conflict.” He was right. The war would envelop virtually the whole of the Greek world. It would drag on for twenty-seven years, anticipating the suffering and deprivation associated with modern conflicts: the atrocities, refugees, disease, starvation, and slaughter. It would destroy what was left of Athenian democracy.

In the second year of the conflict, a mysterious plague breaks out in Athens. It spreads rapidly, killing virtually everyone it touches, and sends the population into a state of panic and despair. “No particular constitution, strong or weak, proved sufficient in itself to resist,” wrote Thucydides, “but the plague carried off all indiscriminately, and whatever the regime of care.”1 What follows is the complete breakdown in public and private morality: friends are left to die alone, family members flee their own households, mothers abandon their own children. Thucydides recorded the scene thus:

No one was prepared to persevere in what had once been thought the path of honor, as they could well be dead before that destination was reached. Immediate pleasure, and any means profitable to that end, became the new honor and the new value. No fear of god or human law was any constraint. Pious or impious made no difference in their view, when they could see all dying without distinction.²

We have seen how despair and disbelief afflicted much of the generation that lived through the fires of the First World War. “It rose out of the peculiar conditions of trench warfare,” writes G. J. Myer, “an experience beyond anything the human psyche was built to endure.”³ Soldiers could not grasp what was happening to them. Tens of thousands were overwhelmed by shell shock. In Britain alone, four years after the end of the war, six thousand veterans were confined to insane asylums.⁴ Postwar writers seemed to have no mental category for the nature of the conflict, no set of beliefs to understand it. This fact makes the literary aims of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis all the more remarkable: they steadfastly rejected the sense of futility and agnosticism that infected so much of the output of their era.

When the first book of Tolkien’s trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, appeared in 1955, his Oxford friend wrote a review for Time and Tide. Lewis frankly acknowledged that Tolkien’s story about hobbits and elves and wizards was a romantic, fantastical tale thoroughly out of step with the times. Here, like nowhere else, the heroic romance “has suddenly returned at a period almost pathological in its anti-romanticism.”5 Nevertheless, Lewis insisted, one of the surprising strengths of the story was its realism: the description of a titanic struggle between Good and Evil that navigates between the deadly reefs of illusion and disillusionment.

As for escapism, what we chiefly escape is the illusions of our ordinary life. We certainly do not escape anguish. Despite many a snug fireside and many an hour of good cheer to gratify the Hobbit in each of us, anguish is, for me, almost the prevailing note. But not, as in the literature most typical of our age, the anguish of abnormal or contorted souls; rather that anguish of those who were happy before a certain darkness came up and will be happy if they live to see it gone.⁶

The same can be said of Lewis’s stories as well. The most memorable scenes in The Chronicles of Narnia or The Space Trilogy typically bear this mark: the admixture of tragedy and hope. Like Tolkien, Lewis clothed his tales in fantasy and myth to convey hard truths about the human condition: its darkness and futility, as well as its virtues and triumphs. “And Man as a whole, Man pitted against the universe,” he wrote, “have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale?”⁷ Presented as fantasies, these stories are intended to soften our modern prejudices and speak into our imagination. They thus allow us to rediscover truths about ourselves and our world that may otherwise lay hidden.

This helps to explain the extraordinary appeal of their works, which remain popular seventy years or more after first appearing in print. In a 2003 survey conducted by the BBC in Britain, The Lord of the Rings was found to be “the Nation’s best-loved book.” Tolkien has been praised as “the author of the century,” and with good reason.8 “In any study of modern heroism,” writes Roger Sale, “if J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings did not exist, it would have to be invented.”⁹ Translated into thirty-eight languages, the trilogy has sold more than 150 million copies.

C. S. Lewis has earned comparable acclaim. The Chronicles of Narnia is widely considered a classic in children’s fantasy, alongside the works of Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, and others. The series has sold more than 100 million copies and been translated into forty-seven languages. Even Philip Pullman’s popular trilogy, His Dark Materials, a self-conscious repudiation of Lewis’s work, pays homage to its narrative power. Movie adaptations of The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia have introduced hundreds of millions of people to their essentially Christian vision of the human story.

THE WORLD AS WE FIND IT

What are the basic elements of this vision? As soldiers in the Great War, Tolkien and Lewis endured a human cataclysm that laid a foundation for their mythic imagination. It thrust upon them as young men the experience of combat, suffering, and death that would remain with every war veteran of their generation.

“Your teeth are grinding on the fuse-pin of the hand-grenade. The encounter will be short and murderous,” wrote Ernst Jünger in Storm of Steel, one of the earliest memoirs of the First World War. “You tremble with two contradictory impulses: the heightened awareness of the huntsman, and the terror of the quarry. You are a world to yourself, saturated with the appalling aura of the savage landscape.”10 The German artist Otto Dix survived combat in Champagne, the Somme, and Russia, but it changed him. “Lice, rats, barbed wire, fleas, shells bombs, underground caves, corpses, blood, liquor, mice, cats, artillery, filth, bullets, mortars, fire, steel: that is what war is,” he wrote. “It is the work of the devil.”¹¹

Tolkien and Lewis would essentially agree. Central to their experience was an encounter with the presence of evil: the deep corruption of the human heart that makes it capable of hunting down and destroying millions of lives in a remorseless war of attrition.¹²

A conviction emerged in both these authors, however, that the problem of evil was not explainable only in natural terms. Rather, evil existed as a darkness in the soul of every human being and as a tangible, spiritual force in the world. “The Shadow of that hideous strength,” wrote Scottish poet Sir David Lyndsay, “six miles and more it is of length.”¹³ Like the war they knew on the Western Front, the Shadow is a dehumanizing force. It seeks to dominate or destroy anything that resists its will. This is the irrepressible fact behind their stories, the reality that flings their characters into action.

In The Lord of the Rings, Bilbo Baggins, owner of a mysterious Ring, returns home and is greeted by his close friend, the wizard Gandalf. Gandalf insists that Bilbo give the Ring to his young heir, Frodo Baggins. The Ruling Ring has special powers: its wearer, becoming invisible, could see the thoughts of all those who used the lesser rings, and could control and ultimately enslave them. Created by the Dark Lord Sauron, the Ring would become the ultimate weapon in his campaign to dominate all of Middle-earth. Sauron will do anything to retrieve it. As Gandalf explains:

A mortal, Frodo, who keeps one of the Great Rings, does not die, but he does not grow or obtain more life, he merely continues, until at last every minute is a weariness. And if he often uses the Ring to make himself invisible, he fades: he becomes in the end invisible permanently, and walks in the twilight under the eye of the Dark Power that rules the Rings . . . sooner or later, the Dark Power will devour him.14

Such a weapon, we learn, cannot be buried or hidden away. It must be destroyed. And the only place where it can be destroyed is the place where it was made: in the flames of Mount Doom in Mordor. “There lies our hope, if hope it be,” says Elrond. “We must send the Ring to the Fire.”¹⁵ The Ring must be taken to Mordor. It is decided that Frodo will assume this awesome burden. This becomes his great quest—or, rather, his anti-quest, since his mission is not one of rescue, but of destruction.16

Frodo, as the Ring-bearer, senses a force of evil pressing in upon him as he and his companion, Sam Gamgee, approach the Gates of Mordor. It is the Eye of Sauron, “wreathed in flame,” which searches relentlessly for the Ring in order to draw it home. “That horrible growing sense of a hostile will that strove with great power to pierce all shadows of cloud, and earth, and flesh, and to see you: to pin you under its deadly gaze, naked, and immovable,” wrote Tolkien. “He was facing it, and its potency beat upon his brow.”¹⁷

Lewis understood evil in much the same way: it is an objective power in the world, waging a war for individual souls. It seeks to create a society of slaves, ruled by despots, and “held together entirely by fear and greed.”¹⁸

In The Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis set out in seven novels the unfolding history of the imaginary realm of Narnia—a realm torn apart by war. We trace the adventures of English children from the real world (modern-day London) who are magically transported into Narnia, a land of mythical beasts (fauns, satyrs, and centaurs) and talking animals (bears, badgers, moles, and mice). There they meet Aslan, the great Lion and “king of the Wood and son of the great Emperor-beyond-the-Sea.” Aslan calls upon them to help rescue Narnia from a new despotism and to restore the throne of Narnia to its rightful line of kings.

No sooner do the four Pevensie children—Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy—enter Narnia than they encounter a force of evil. It is the figure of Jadis, the Wicked Queen of Charn. She is a witch, and witches “are not interested in things or people unless they can use them.”19 Though she was once defeated, Jadis has been revived thanks to human folly. “The White Witch? Who is she?” asks Lucy. “Why, it is she who has got all Narnia under her thumb,” says the Faun. “It’s she who makes it always winter. Always winter and never Christmas; think of that!”²⁰

In The Magician’s Nephew, the children hear a sound emanating from the depths of the earth, a wondrous voice—“the First Voice”—a voice almost too beautiful to endure. It belongs to Aslan and it is his summons to the new world: the creation of Narnia. The music of his voice fills the children with joy, although they hardly understand what is happening. “But the Witch looked as if, in a way, she understood the music better than any of them,” Lewis wrote. “Her mouth was shut, her lips pressed together, and her fists were clenched. Ever since the song began she had felt that this whole world was filled with a Magic different from hers and stronger. She hated it.”²¹

In the worlds of Middle-earth and Narnia, evil is a perversion of goodness, which is the ultimate reality. Although Lewis is much more explicit in naming God as the source of everything good in the world, Tolkien shares his Christian belief that evil represents a rejection of God and the joy and beauty and virtue that originate in him.²² Evil is a mutation, a parasite, an interloper. It is an ancient Darkness that fears and despises the Light. At war with the good, it is an immensely powerful force in human life and human societies. “If anguish were visible,” Tolkien once explained, “almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapor, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens!”²³

The presence and power of evil is a dominant theme in Lewis’s science-fiction trilogy. In the first novel, Out of the Silent Planet (1938), we are introduced to Elwin Ransom, a middle-aged university professor who—like Lewis, also wounded in a war—is inclined to mind his own business. He is kidnapped by Dick Devine and Dr. Weston, a mad scientist who will stop at nothing to extend the human race to other planets. They travel to Malacandra (Mars), where we learn that the ruler of Thulcandra (Earth) became “bent” and “it was in his mind to spoil other worlds besides his own.” But “a great war” between him and Maleldil, the ruler of the universe, left Earth estranged from the rest of the solar system.

Ransom’s adventures continue in Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, in which the struggle to remake and subjugate the human race reaches a climax on planet Earth, in the English town of Edgestow. There a sinister force, embodied in the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.), has taken root. Warns Ransom: “The Hideous Strength holds all this Earth in its fist to squeeze as it wishes.”24 It has drawn into its vortex Mark Studdock and his wife, Jane, who realize almost too late the nature of the threat. A struggle of cosmic proportions ensues. Not surprisingly, the abuse of science and technology lies near the heart of the contest. Wrote an early reviewer in Punch magazine: “It is Mr. Lewis’s triumph to have shown, with shattering credibility, how the pitiful little souls of Jane and Mark Studdock become the apocalyptic battlefield of Heaven and Hell.”²⁵

When, in the 1930s, Tolkien and Lewis began to compose their stories, traditional belief in the existence of evil was already out of fashion. As we’ve seen, leaders in educated circles had dispensed with these “medieval” concepts as the vestiges of religious superstition. In our own day, the concept of evil remains perhaps the most controversial idea in any discussion about God, religion, or Christianity. Skeptics see a psychological tool to repress the members of a community or demonize those outside it. They have a point: no one who studies the history of the West could fail to note the abuse of religious doctrine for perverse ends.

Nevertheless, these authors anchor their stories in the ancient idea of the Fall of Man: just as a force of evil entered our world in a distant past, so it inhabits and threatens the worlds of their imaginations. It is the deepest source of alienation and conflict in their stories. Even so, it cannot erase the longing for goodness and joy, so palpably alive in the best and noblest of their characters. They are haunted by the memory of Eden: take away this fundamental idea, and their moral vision collapses.26

DESTINY AND FREE WILL

We might expect their stories, rooted in this belief, to lurch in one of two directions: either toward the triumphalism of the crusader, as we saw during the First World War; or toward fatalism, a cast of mind that renders men and women helpless victims in the storms of life. Instead, the heroes of Middle-earth and Narnia are much more complex. They are often hobbled by their own fears and shortcomings; they resist the burdens of war. Yet we also see in them an affirmation of moral responsibility—an irreducible dignity—even amid the terrible forces arrayed against them.

This tension appears repeatedly—relentlessly—in The Lord of the Rings, from its opening pages to its closing chapters. Immediately after Gandalf explains to Frodo that Sauron the Great, the Dark Lord, has arisen again and returned to Mordor to pursue his wicked designs, Frodo shrinks back. “I wish it need not have happened in my time,” he says. “So do I,” says Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”27

When the Council gathers in Rivendell to determine how to destroy the Ring, Elrond reminds the Company that help will come from “other powers and realms that you know not.” And yet, he warns, the road ahead will be very hard. “This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.”²⁸

Frodo is joined in his quest by his friends from the Shire: Sam, Merry, and Pippin. In addition to the hobbits, there is Aragorn, a Ranger of the North—a “hidden king” of Gondor—whose life is devoted to the war against Sauron; Legolas, king of the elves of Northern Mirkwood; and Gimli, a descendant of Gloin, a noble line of dwarves. Gandalf the Grey has joined them as well, their powerful protector and guide. But Gandalf becomes lost to them, dragged into an abyss by the Balrog at the Bridge of Khazad-Dum, and they are forced to flee for their lives. The loss pierces them with grief. “Frodo heard Sam at his side weeping, and then he found that he himself was weeping as he ran.”²⁹

Yet they carry on. They make their way to Caras Galadhon, home of Lady Galadriel, “the mightiest and fairest of all the Elves that remained in Middle-earth.”³⁰ As they gather before her, she fixes her eyes on each of them and delivers a fierce warning: “Your Quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and it will fail, to the ruin of all.”³¹ What are they to do?

Tolkien’s account of the condition of their hearts is as true to human life in the shadow of death as anything in modern prose. Each of them is faced with the appalling clarity of the choice laid before him: to continue in the quest, into dangers and horrors unspeakable, or to take the safe and easy way and turn back. “All of them, it seemed, had fared alike: each had felt that he was offered a choice between a shadow full of fear that lay ahead, and something that he greatly desired. Clear before his mind it lay, and to get it he had only to turn aside from the road and leave the Quest and the war against Sauron to others.”32

The choice they face is also a summons; not a blind accident, but a Calling on their lives. One may answer the Call—or refuse it, turn away, and walk into Darkness. But indifference to the Call to struggle against evil is not an option; one must take sides. Thus, set before our imagination in the works of Tolkien and Lewis is one of the great paradoxes of our mortal lives: the mysterious intersection of providence and free will.³³

Consider the exchange between Sam and Frodo as they rest for a moment along the stairs at Cirith Ungol, the cleft through the Western Mountains of Mordor. The area is heavily guarded by the Enemy. Forced to rely on the treacherous Gollum as their guide, they are anxious, weary, and short of food and water. Reflecting on their plight, Sam grows philosophical about the events that have brought them to this moment of danger, and the choices they have made along the way.

“I don’t like anything here at all,” said Frodo, “step or stone, breath or bone. Earth, air and water all seem accursed. But so our path is laid.”

“Yes, that’s so,” said Sam. “And we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually—their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t.”34

Here is a truth that Tolkien must have learned during the Great War, an “adventure” he did not seek out, but one that came to him, unwanted. They had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. This freedom to either fulfill or evade the Calling on one’s life is central to Tolkien’s work—and to his understanding of the human condition.

Like Tolkien, Lewis did not limit the need for painful choices to his main protagonists; most everyone is judged by the decisions he makes, or fails to make, when the Call to do battle arrives. In The Magician’s Nephew, the Cabby and his wife, a humble couple from a modest part of London, have been chosen to rule Narnia as its first king and queen. They are warned that there will be challengers to their throne. What, Aslan asks, are they prepared to do?

“And if enemies came against the land (for enemies will arise) and there was war, would you be the first in the charge and the last in the retreat?”

“Well, sir,” said the Cabby very slowly, “a chap don’t exactly know till he’s been tried. I dare say I might turn out ever such a soft ’un. Never did no fighting except with my fists. I’d try—that is, I ’ope I’d try—to do my bit.”

“Then,” said Aslan, “you will have done all that a King should do.”35

We are led to believe that the choices of these characters—their decisions to put away fear and ego and choose goodness—are freely made and yet made with the help of a source of strength outside them. Tolkien was reluctant to name this power, though elsewhere he explained that “the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.”³⁶ Thus, in The Lord of Rings we’re told that Bilbo “was meant to find the Ring,” that Frodo was “appointed” and “chosen” to carry it to Mordor, that even as the Fellowship decides its next move “the tides of fate are flowing.” Destiny and free will are commingled throughout: “But you have been chosen,” says Gandalf, “and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.”³⁷

Lewis’s use of allegory leaves no doubt about the Person who transcends the struggles of our earthly lives, even as he involves himself deeply in them. In The Horse and His Boy, Shasta and Aravis, helped by talking horses, race across the desert to warn Archenland and Narnia of the approaching army of Rabadash, bent on their destruction. Before reaching their goal they are attacked by a lion. Aravis, further behind, is moments from being cut down by the beast. Shasta faces a moment of decision:

“Stop,” bellowed Shasta in Bree’s ear. “Must go back. Must help!”

Shasta slipped his feet out of the stirrups, slid both his legs over the left side, hesitated for one hideous hundredth of a second, and jumped. It hurt horribly and nearly winded him; but before he knew how it hurt him he was staggering back to help Aravis. He had never done anything like this in his life before and hardly knew why he was doing it now.38

The lion, we learn later, was Aslan in disguise. He is determined to guide the children in their journey, even if it means danger and suffering. Though Lewis provided us only with fragments of his wartime experience, we may imagine that, on at least one occasion, he found himself “staggering back to help” a friend under fire, hardly aware of what he was doing. Indeed, the scene would have been familiar to countless soldiers in the Great War, in every war that has ever been fought: the image of a soldier throwing himself into harm’s way to rescue a fallen comrade.

POWER, SCIENCE, AND SEDUCTION

It is one thing to join a struggle against evil in the world, but it is another thing to persevere—to continue to resist the dark temptations inherent in the contest. It cannot be emphasized enough that the human tragedy of the First World War damaged the very idea of free will. After all, millions of men were flung into the pitiless machinery of a conflict that robbed them of their humanity. They were mutilated, bombed, bayoneted, gassed, and obliterated without mercy. The utter helplessness of the individual soldier on the Western Front was a recurring theme of postwar literature.

It is this very idea that Tolkien and Lewis repudiate throughout their works. In The Fellowship of the Ring, for example, we watch Frodo struggle to resist the almost overwhelming desire to use the Ring as the terror of the Dark Riders approaches. He yields to the temptation, and later reproaches himself bitterly: “for he now perceived that in putting on the Ring he obeyed not his own desire but the commanding wish of his enemies.”39 Though fighting his attackers furiously, he is stabbed with the deadly Morgul-knife, the poison of which would bring him under the power of the Dark Lord. Healed by his friends, he marvels at his escape. “Yes, fortune or fate have helped you,” says Gandalf, “not to mention courage. For your heart was not touched, and only your shoulder was pierced; and that was because you resisted to the last.”⁴⁰

In Frodo we are meant to see ourselves: our weaknesses, our rationalizations, and our lack of resolve in combatting evil. But we also get a glimpse into a life of courage and perseverance in the ongoing struggle: you resisted to the last. Tolkien’s story reminds us that evil is a sleepless force in human lives, and that the war against it demands constant vigilance.

After the Council of Elrond, when Frodo agrees to take the Ring to Mordor, he is confronted by Boromir, who has joined the Fellowship. Boromir is “a valiant man,” a mighty warrior, but also a figure torn between honor and pride, power and wisdom.⁴¹ He disagrees with the Council’s decision to destroy the Ring, and accuses them of being timid rather than wise. “True-hearted Men, they will not be corrupted,” he assures Frodo. His motives, he insists, are pure: “We do not desire the power of wizard-lords, only strength to defend ourselves, strength in a just cause,” he says. “And behold! In our need chance brings to light the Ring of Power. . . . It is mad not to use it, to use the power of the Enemy against him.”⁴²

It all sounds so reasonable to modern ears. Yet it is Boromir, by turning on Frodo and forcing him to flee, who breaks the Fellowship and endangers them all. Boromir repents of his treachery, but it costs him his life.

For Saruman, a wizard originally committed to helping Middle-earth in its struggle against Sauron, his betrayal robs him of his soul. In his confrontation with Gandalf, he explains that “a new Power is rising” that cannot be openly resisted. The path of wisdom, he insists, is to join the Power and wait for an opportunity to alter its course. “As the Power grows, its proved friends will also grow; and the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it,” he says. “We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose.”43

Their noble aims would not change, we are assured, only the means to achieve them. This is the exact rationale offered by Nikabrik, one of the black dwarves in Prince Caspian who joins the Narnian resistance against the Telmarines. After the Narnians suffer many defeats, Nikabrik grows pessimistic. At a council of Caspian’s advisors, they decide to blow the horn belonging to the ancient Queen Susan, to summon help from Aslan. When no help arrives, an embittered Nikabrik suggests it is time to turn elsewhere for aid:

“Either Aslan is dead,” said Nikabrik, “or he is not on our side. Or else something stronger than himself keeps him back. . . . You may drop Aslan out of the reckoning. I was thinking of someone else.” There was no answer, and for a few minutes it was so still that Edmund could hear the wheezy and snuffling breath of the Badger.

“Who do you mean?” said Caspian at last.

“I mean a power so much greater than Aslan’s that it held Narnia spellbound for years and years, if the stories are true.”

“The White Witch!” cried three voices all at once. . . .

“Yes,” said Nikabrik very slowly and distinctly, “I mean the Witch. Sit down again. Don’t take fright at a name as if you were children. We want power: and we want a power that will be on our side.”44

Nikabrik’s ruthlessness, his willingness to compromise with evil, becomes his downfall. It is hard to imagine a more cautionary tale for the crusader in all of us: however noble the motives may be, they easily become twisted by the thought of glory and the taste of power.

For Tolkien and Lewis, it was a theme of utmost urgency. In the modern world, new technologies—what Winston Churchill called “the lights of perverted science”—were being used to extinguish human freedom. “The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already, even in Ransom’s own time begun to be warped, had been subtly maneuvered in a certain direction,” wrote Lewis in That Hideous Strength. “Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and concentration upon mere power, had been the result.”⁴⁵

The perverse relationship between technology, science, and power became a defining reality of the postwar years. Eugenics, communism, fascism, Nazism: these were the revolutions and ideologies that arose in the exhaustion of the democracies of Europe, all in the name of advancing the human race. All began by promising liberation from oppression; all became instruments of totalitarian control. “Dreams of the far future destiny of man,” wrote Lewis, “were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of Man as God.”⁴⁶ As Tolkien biographer Tom Shippey explains: “The major disillusionment of the twentieth century has been over political good intentions, which have led only to gulags and killings fields. That is why what Gandalf says has rung true to virtually everyone who reads it.”47

THE DESCENT INTO DARKNESS

The power of evil is not confined to a single, swift decision to side with the Enemy. More often it involves a subtle and gradual perversion. This, in fact, is the burden of Tolkien’s story: whether Frodo can resist the soul-destroying influence of the Ring and carry it to its final destination. Because of its great power, the Ring could be used to overthrow Sauron. Yet its power is conditioned to serve its evil maker, and “the very desire of it corrupts the heart.” Elrond explains the inescapable dilemma: “And that is another reason why the Ring should be destroyed: as long as it is in the world it will be a danger even to the Wise. For nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so. I fear to take the Ring to hide it. I will not take the Ring to wield it.”⁴⁸

Near the moral center of The Lord of the Rings is the ancient problem of the Will to Power: the universal temptation to exploit, dominate, and control the lives of others. This is the motive force animating the great Enemy of Middle-earth. “But the only measure he knows is desire,” says Gandalf, “desire for power.”⁴⁹ Because Tolkien wrote his trilogy during and after the Second World War, when the world had entered the atomic age, many assumed that the story of the Ring was an allegorical warning about the horror of nuclear weapons. Tolkien set them straight: “Of course my story is not an allegory of Atomic power, but of Power,” he said, “exerted for Domination.”⁵⁰

It may well be, as some scholars contend, that the “gathering darkness” over the remnants of the West in the Third Age of Middle-earth was propelled by the “gathering storm” of European fascism that threatened Western civilization in the 1930s and 1940s.51 Two of Tolkien’s sons, Christopher and Michael, became combatants in the Second World War, and his letters to them during this period contain numerous references to his own war experience. The uncertainties and terrors of a second global conflict in his lifetime undoubtedly worked upon his mind and energies.

Nevertheless, the appeal of Tolkien’s work lies partly in the fact that contemporary events seemed to conform—tragically—to the pattern of human life expressed in its pages.⁵² In this, Tolkien understood the problem not merely as the abuse of power: it was the temptation to pride, which the possession of power instigated and elevated into the fatal sin. “It was part of the essential deceit of the Ring,” he explained, “to fill minds with imaginations of supreme power.”⁵³ The possession of such power inevitably placed the unconstrained Self on the throne of the universe.

Much of the dramatic genius of The Lord of the Rings depends on the fact that none of its characters, not even its noblest, are immune to the danger; any of them might be tempted to betray themselves and their cause. “I have come,” says Frodo, clutching the Ring at the brink of the chasm, at the Crack of Doom. “But I do not choose now to do what I came to do. I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine!” In the end, even Frodo—who sought with all his heart to avoid becoming the Ring-bearer—cannot resist its seductive power.⁵⁴

Like Tolkien, Lewis was acutely conscious of the deceptive allure of power. A recurring motif of his works is how soft and subtle compromises can initiate a total corruption. “It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into Nothing,” counsels the senior demon in Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. “Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”55

This insight is on magnificent display in That Hideous Strength, when Mark Studdock is first enticed by the wicked operatives of the N.I.C.E. They want Studdock to write a false news account of “riots” in Edgestow, which would give the Government an excuse to exercise emergency powers—and tighten its grip on the town. “But how are we to write it tonight if the thing doesn’t even happen till tomorrow at the earliest?” he asks. His companions burst into laughter, and pour him another drink.

What comes next is a description of an ordinary man’s descent into darkness, a scene no doubt repeated endlessly in the cultural chaos and revolutions following the Great War:

This was the first thing Mark had been asked to do which he himself, before he did it, clearly knew to be criminal. But the moment of his consent almost escaped his notice; certainly there was no struggle, no sense of turning a corner. . . . But for him, it all slipped past in a chatter of laughter, of that intimate laughter between fellow professionals, which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very bad men.⁵⁶

This is why so much is made of Edmund’s entrapment by the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Aware that the children are a threat to her rule, she preys upon Edmund’s weakness of character to betray them to her. How can Edmund—not an obviously wicked boy—be so blind to her machinations? The answer is a twofold desire: “Turkish Delight and to be a Prince.” These become the obsessions of his life. Turkish Delight is Edmund’s favorite sweet, and the White Witch uses it to bait him into her service. If he agrees, she leads him to believe, he can have all the Turkish Delight he craves. She will even make him a prince, allowing him to rule over his brother and sisters.

Edmund succumbs. He is to blame for his fall into temptation; he gives himself over to gluttony and his inclination to dominate others. Yet there is an outside power at work as well: unknown to Edmund, this was “enchanted Turkish Delight” and “anyone who had once tasted it would want more and more of it, and would even, if they were allowed, go on eating it till they killed themselves.”57 What Lewis was describing, of course, is an addiction, instigated by moral failure—a lust for pleasure and power.

A PSYCHOLOGY OF GOOD AND EVIL

The idea of personal moral guilt, however, was widely rejected in the postwar years. Psychology, philosophy, literature, even theology—all these disciplines were helping to erode individual responsibility. Vices and addictions were explained medically or scientifically, not in moral or religious terms. “Collective” or “biological” forces replaced old-fashioned notions of “sin.”

As early as 1924, for example, attorney Clarence Darrow defended two Chicago men accused of murdering a boy in cold blood by making a novel claim. He insisted that criminal acts were the result of faulty evolution, not a faulty conscience. In his closing arguments, Darrow said the real question before the court was whether it would embrace “the old theory” that a person commits a criminal act “because he willfully, purposely, maliciously and with a malignant heart sees fit to do it,” or the new scientific theory that “every human being is the product of the endless heredity back of him and the infinite environment around him.”58

The denial of personal responsibility took a political turn as well. The outbursts of revolutionary violence rocking postwar Europe—the purges and assassinations in Lenin’s Russia, for example—were rationalized as a necessary phase toward a utopian vision. An official of the Soviet Secret Police, the Cheka, explained thus: “We are not carrying out war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class.”⁵⁹ As Paul Johnson writes, shortly after seizing power Lenin “abandoned the notion of individual guilt, and with it the whole Judeo-Christian ethic of personal responsibility.”⁶⁰

Tolkien and Lewis explicitly rejected these views as an assault on human freedom. The characters in their imaginative works are continually tested by the choices set before them. Each is involved in a great moral contest, a struggle against forces that would devour their souls. “ ‘It is very grievous,’ said the Tisroc in his deep, quiet voice. ‘Every morning the sun is darkened in my eyes, and every night my sleep is the less refreshing, because I remember that Narnia is still free.’ ”⁶¹ Yet their characters retain the power of choice; there is nothing predetermined about the outcome. It is through their own decisions, their yielding to selfish ambitions, that they invite a spiritual crisis into their lives. The result is not the freedom they imagined, but the deepest slavery of heart and mind.

The mental outlook of Middle-earth and Narnia could hardly be more out of step with the modern mind: here is an appeal to what might be called a “psychology of evil” as old as the story of Cain and Abel. It is the story of men and women given a birthright of freedom, but abusing their freedom for selfish ends. “Sin is crouching at your door,” God warned Cain before he murdered his brother. “It desires to have you, but you must master it.”62

Although Tolkien’s work appears to lack a religious framework—there are no prayers or acts of worship, for example—its characters are conscious of a Moral Law, a source of Goodness to which they must give account.⁶³ The conflict between Mordor and Middle-earth occurs in a world of timeless moral truths, where men and women must choose sides in a titanic struggle between light and darkness. “How shall a man judge what to do in such times?” asks Éomer. Aragorn’s response is unequivocal: “As he ever has judged,” he says. “Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them.” In his review of Tolkien’s work, Lewis declared this to be “the basis of the whole Tolkienian world.”⁶⁴

Critics sometimes accuse the authors of creating black-and-white characters to personify their religious beliefs. But the careful reader sees something else entirely: individuals often at war with their own desires. The heroes of these stories are vulnerable to temptation and corruption, while the antagonists are almost never beyond redemption. Here, in fantasy and myth, no one escapes the long and harassing shadow of the biblical fall.

Indeed, a bedrock belief in evil, and in the responsibility to resist it, gives the writings of Tolkien and Lewis their dignity and power. It is the reason their stories, so fantastical in style, seem to speak into our present reality. The war against evil is the moral landscape of our mortal lives: a journey of souls degraded or redeemed, dragged into the Darkness of self or led into the Light of grace.

The spectacle of human refugees was one of the defining features of the war. Paris experienced a mass exodus of civilians following the first bombardment of the city in August 1914. By September, about 700,000 people had left Paris, of whom 220,000 were children under the age of fifteen.65 In October, after the Germans entered the Belgian port of Ostend, nearly all of Belgium fell under German occupation. Tens of thousands of refugees fled for England. Wrote Thomas Hardy:

Then I awoke; and lo, before me stood

The visioned ones, but pale and full of fear;

From Bruges they came, and Antwerp, and Ostend. . . .

Of ravaged roof, and smouldering gable-end.⁶⁶

Refugees would continue to pour from the cities, towns, and villages of Europe until the end of the war; the British and American armies encountered thousands of them during Germany’s massive spring offensive of 1918. Thus Tolkien includes scenes of anguished refugees throughout his works. They appear in the form of Tuor and his family, who have escaped the ruined city in “The Fall of Gondolin.” They are the villagers forced from Laketown by the death of Smaug in The Hobbit. In The Lord of the Rings, they are the folk of Westfold—“old and young, children and women”—hiding in the caves at Helm’s Deep.67 And they are the desperate inhabitants of Minas Tirith, escaping by wagon train for the southern hills before the Battle of Pelennor Fields.⁶⁸

In The Return of the King, we read of the fierce, existential struggle between the forces of Mordor and the army of Gondor. It is the great battle of this great and vicious war, and its dead are too numerous to count. It leaves the victors “weary beyond joy or sorrow.”⁶⁹ In his account of the contest at Pelennor Fields, Tolkien might well have been describing No Man’s Land at the Somme:

Then the Sun went at last behind Mindolluin and filled all the sky with a great burning, so that the hills and the mountains were dyed as with blood; fire glowed in the River, and the grass of the Pelennor lay red in the nightfall. And in that hour the great Battle of the field of Gondor was over; and not one living foe was left within the circuit of the Rammas.⁷⁰

Later in the story, as Sam and Frodo pass through the Dead Marshes on their approach to Mordor, they enter a landscape deeply reminiscent of the battlefields in France and Belgium: the bomb-wracked craters swollen with water, filth, and the remains of the fallen; the painful whiff of mustard gas; the noxious stench of death. “The air, as it seemed to them, grew harsh, and filled with a bitter reek that caught the breath and parched their mouths,” wrote Tolkien. “Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about.” Here, as at so many places along the Western Front, was a land desecrated and diseased beyond healing.71

There are great victories over the forces of darkness in The Lord of the Rings, but not without profound loss. There is determination, but it is often mixed with dread, with a burden of fear that all the efforts of the Fellowship will come to nothing.

Such is the lot of Merry and Pippin after being captured by the orcs and dragged off to their execution. They manage to escape, but remain in a state of constant danger. “No listener would have guessed from their words that they had suffered cruelly, and been in dire peril, going without hope towards torment and death,” wrote Tolkien, “or that even now, as they knew well, they had little chance of ever finding friend or safety again.”⁷² Such also is the condition of otherwise stouthearted warriors as the hideous Nazgûl circle overhead. Like soldiers seeking refuge from a hail of mortar fire at Verdun, “they thought no more of war; but only of hiding and of crawling, and of death.”⁷³

Here is why Tolkien’s work has been called a modern story, a “descent into hell” in its description of the sufferings of war.⁷⁴ Perhaps, in a sense, Tolkien has written a kind of war diary after all: an account of the pains and terrors of combat, yet clothed in the language of myth. “It might indeed be seen in certain respects as the last work of First World War literature,” writes Brian Rosebury, “published almost forty years after the war ended.”⁷⁵

Because Lewis intended his Narnia stories for children, he does not dwell on depictions of physical suffering, nor does he describe the corpses of the fallen in battle. Nevertheless, Lewis does not fully shield his readers from the brutalities of war. In The Horse and His Boy, at the fight at Anvard, Shasta is thrust into the battle. As the Calormene army approaches, the ground narrows between the two advancing armies, and the young and untested soldier is filled with fear. Lewis might have been remembering the moments before his own great test under fire, when he and his battalion went over the top of their trenches at Riez du Vinage: “All swords out now, all shields up to the nose, all prayers said, all teeth clenched,” he wrote. “Shasta was dreadfully frightened. But suddenly it came into his head, ‘If you funk this, you’ll funk every battle all your life. Now or never.’ ”76

In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, we read of Peter’s first experience of combat, an encounter with a giant wolf. The creature turns on him with flaming, ferocious eyes, intent on tearing him apart. Putting aside his fear, Peter plunges his sword into its chest. “Then came a horrible, confused moment like something in a nightmare,” Lewis wrote. “He was tugging and pulling and the Wolf seemed neither alive nor dead, and its bared teeth knocked against his forehead, and everything was blood and heat and hair.” After drawing out his sword from the beast, Peter wipes the sweat off his face. “He felt tired all over.” ⁷⁷

Lewis once admitted that his memories of war invaded his dreams for years: his account of Peter’s battle could have been any soldier’s recollection of bayoneting the enemy for the first time.

As in Tolkien’s trilogy, Lewis’s Narnia series depicts war not as an opportunity for martial glory, but as a grim necessity. When victories are won, there is a striking lack of triumphalism; we find instead amazement and gratitude for surviving the encounter. Battle scenes, though never lengthy, are described with surprising realism.

Edmund’s contest against the White Witch, for example, might become the stuff of song and legend, but it left him shattered and bloody.78 In Prince Caspian, Reepicheep is wounded so badly in battle that he seemed “little better than a damp heap of fur.” The intrepid mouse is rendered “more dead than alive, gashed with innumerable wounds, one paw crushed, and, where his tail had been, a bandaged stump.” There is hardly a more poignant reminder of suffering during the First World War than the images of soldier amputees, limping from a dugout or infirmary.

Likewise, the description of the battle between Caspian and the forces of Miraz redounds with the miscalculations and depredations of the combat soldier:

At last there came a night when everything had gone as badly as possible, and the rain which had been falling heavily all day had ceased at nightfall only to give place to raw cold. . . . Poor Wimbleweather, though as brave as a lion, was a true Giant in that respect. He had broken out at the wrong time and from the wrong place, and both his party and Caspian’s had suffered badly and done the enemy little harm. The best of the Bears had been hurt, a Centaur terribly wounded, and there were few in Caspian’s party who had not lost blood. It was a gloomy company that huddled under the dripping trees to eat their scanty supper.⁷⁹

The military blunders, the fruitless acts of bravery, the bone-chilling rain, the meager rations: there were many days and nights just like these along the Western Front. Imaginary beasts aside, such scenes could have been lifted from the journal of any front-line soldier. Like Tolkien, though, Lewis includes these images not for their own sake, but to provide the matrix for the moral and spiritual development of his characters: “Eustace stood with his heart beating terribly, hoping and hoping that he would be brave.”80 Indeed, the most compelling personalities in their stories face down their fears and find themselves transformed by the crisis of their age.

THE HEROIC QUEST

The evils of the Great War created many cynics and pacifists in the years after peace was established. For them, there could be nothing heroic about the folly of war. Yet, as veterans of this conflict, Tolkien and Lewis chose to remember not only its horrors and sorrows: they wanted to recall the courage, sacrifice, and the friendships that made it endurable.

Retrieving the medieval concept of the heroic quest—reinventing it for the modern mind—is one of the signal achievements of their work. Whether in epics such as Beowulf or romances like Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, Tolkien and Lewis both found in medieval literature a set of motifs and ideals worth recalling.⁸¹ More than that, they believed the genre offered a tonic for the spiritual malaise of the modern age. Biographer John Garth’s judgment of Tolkien applies to Lewis as well: “He did not simply preserve the traditions that the war threatened, but reinvigorated them for his own era.”⁸²

Each of the installments in The Chronicles of Narnia is awash in these traditions. Narnia is a realm of kings and queens, where a code of honor holds sway, where knighthood is won or lost on the field of battle. “This is the greatest shame and sorrow that could have fallen on us,” says the Prince in The Silver Chair. “We have sent a brave lady into the hands of enemies and stayed behind in safety.”83 The heroes of these stories—whether they take the form of princes or mice or Marsh-wiggles—are imbued with the medieval ideals of sacrifice and chivalry. “Sire, my life is ever at your command,” pledges Reepicheep to Prince Caspian, “but my honor is my own.”⁸⁴

Tolkien once said that when he read a medieval work it stirred him to produce a modern work in the same tradition. This is what he has done in The Lord of the Rings.⁸⁵ As Verlyn Flieger observes, two of the central heroic figures of the story, Frodo and Aragorn, carry “a rich medieval heritage.”⁸⁶ Yet in them Tolkien presents us with two kinds of heroes: the extraordinary man, the hidden king determined to fight for his people and regain his throne; and the ordinary man, the hobbit who, like many of us, is “not made for perilous quests” and prefers the comforts and safety of home.

In Aragorn we see the classic elements of the medieval knight: the casting of his broken sword upon the table at the Council of Elrond, his secret love for Arwen, his kingly leadership of the people of Gondor. Yet it is Aragorn’s chivalrous character that holds the greatest appeal. His courage and ferocity in battle occur alongside his mercy and tenderness, especially toward the weak. His commitment to a just cause never devolves into a campaign for personal glory. “I am Aragorn son of Arathorn,” he announces to Frodo and Sam, “and if by life or death I can save you, I will.”⁸⁷

At first glance, Frodo seems to have little in common with Aragorn. His is an orphan, with no kingly lineage. As a hobbit, he is small of stature, reticent by nature. He is no warrior. He views the burden of the Ring resentfully, and accepts it almost by accident. Yet in Tolkien’s treatment, Frodo’s character is deepened and enlarged by the trial he endures. He conquers his fears to face death against the Black Riders. He finds pity for the despicable Gollum. He battles the constant temptation of the Ring and summons the strength to press on, surprising even Gandalf with his courage. “My dear Frodo!” he exclaims. “Hobbits really are amazing creatures, as I have said before. You can learn all that there is to know about their ways in a month, and yet after a hundred years they can still surprise you at a pinch.”88

In the aftermath of the First World War, there was deep cynicism about “the moralistic idealism” that created the slaughterhouse of the Western Front.⁸⁹ Modern liberalism had come to regard man’s combative nature as an evil, and the chivalrous sentiment as the “false glamour” of war.⁹⁰ Even before the Enlightenment, of course, many Europeans (and Americans) had learned to despise the values associated with the medieval world. The forces of democracy, secularism, and feminism would discard them altogether.

No wonder critics accuse Tolkien and Lewis of forming a “cultural rearguard of the Middle Ages.” Writes Lee Rossi: “They exhibit a tremendous nostalgia for the political stability and cultural cohesion of the Middle Ages.”⁹¹ In fact, neither sought a return to the political or social ideals of Christendom.⁹² Nevertheless, they saw its tradition of valor and chivalry as both practical and vital. “It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior,” Lewis observed, “because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson.”⁹³

Thus the noblest characters in their stories display gentleness as well as fierceness, the qualities embodied in the greatest knight in Morte d’Arthur: “Thou wert the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou wert the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.” The heroes of Narnia and Middle-earth do not shrink from the sight of hacked-off limbs and smashed skulls; yet they also are men and women of great humility and modesty. The intended effect of these characters is to retrieve the medieval virtues and make them attractive, even to a modern audience.

Why did Tolkien and Lewis, ignoring the most powerful trends of their culture, embark on this task? Part of the answer lies in the battlefields of France. It was there, as young soldiers, that they encountered these virtues—in the officers and privates and medics at the Western Front. It was there, according to Tolkien, that the inspiration for his most beloved mythic character occurred. The exploits of the hobbits reveal how the “unforeseen and unforeseeable acts of will, and deeds of virtue of the apparently small, ungreat, forgotten in the places of the Wise and Great” shaped the destinies of nations.94

Rejecting equally the moods of militarism and pacifism, these authors charted a middle course: a partial return to the chivalrous ideal. Only a society that upheld this ideal—in its art, literature, and its institutions—could hope to resist the dark and hungry forces arrayed against it. The serene and pacific Rivendell is a vision, perhaps, of the world as it ought to be, but not as we actually find it. “There are in fact things with which it cannot cope,” Tolkien said, “and upon which its existence nonetheless depends.”⁹⁵ The heroic ideal in their stories is not escapism, they argued, but the only realistic path available in a dangerous world. As Lewis explained: “It offers the only possible escape from a world divided between wolves who do not understand, and sheep who cannot defend, the things which make life desirable.”⁹⁶

THE GIFT OF FRIENDSHIP

The heroic quest as understood by Tolkien and Lewis is unlike our modern notions of heroism in at least one other way: it is not a solitary endeavor. Students of war understand this truth better than most. Historian Stephen Ambrose introduced millions of readers to the importance of comradeship in wartime with his book Band of Brothers, the basis for the award-winning HBO miniseries. It is the story of the men of E Company, the 506th Regiment of America’s 101st Airborne Division, from their initial training in 1942 to the end of the Second World War. “Within Easy Company they had made the best friends they had ever had, or would ever have,” writes Ambrose. “They were prepared to die for each other; more important, they were prepared to kill for each other.”97

This fact about the experience of combat was as relevant for the soldiers who went off to fight in 1914 as for those in 1939. The distance of that earlier war from our own time, the ruthlessness of the conflict, the ambiguity of its aims, its disastrous consequences for Western civilization—all these factors combine to prevent us from appreciating the intense sense of comradeship that shaped the lives of millions of young soldiers.

Yet for Tolkien and Lewis, their personal knowledge of the fellowship of men under fire must rank as another defining experience for their literary lives. As Lewis biographer Alan Jacobs observes, friendship is one of the most significant themes in The Chronicles of Narnia.⁹⁸ In The Silver Chair, we watch not only the growing friendship between Eustace and Jill Pole, but the stubborn loyalty of Puddleglum, as he decides to share the dangers of their quest: “Don’t you lose heart, Pole,” said Puddleglum. “I’m coming, sure and certain. . . . Now a job like this—a journey up north just as winter’s beginning, looking for a prince who probably isn’t there, by way of a ruined city that no one has ever seen—will be just the thing. If that doesn’t steady a chap, I don’t know what will.”99

We see the cords of friendship develop between Aravis and Shasta in The Horse and His Boy, as the demands of war force them to work together, slowly replacing their resentments with deep admiration and, eventually, love. “In this idea about Aravis, Shasta was once more quite wrong,” Lewis wrote. “She was proud and could be hard enough but she was as true as steel and would never have deserted a companion, whether she liked him or not.”¹⁰⁰

Indeed, it might be argued that friendship replaces romance as the preeminent expression of love in Lewis’s stories. In The Chronicles of Narnia it flourishes between the children (the “sons and daughters of Adam”); between these children and the noble Narnians (the myriad of talking animals and mythological beasts); and, supremely, between Aslan, the great Lion, and all who serve him in love and obedience.¹⁰¹ “To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue,” wrote Lewis. “The modern world, in comparison, ignores it.”¹⁰² In the world of Narnia—a realm ravaged by war—its essential role in human happiness is affirmed throughout.

Lewis first established friendships of this quality during the war years: with his brother, Warnie, whom he called “my dearest and closest friend,” and in whom he found a confidant who understood the horrors of combat; with Laurence Johnson, who fought alongside him on the Western Front and shared his love of literature and philosophy; and with Edward “Paddy” Moore, who was sent to the Somme and with whom he made a pact to care for each other’s family if either should be killed.103 Years later, reflecting on the nature of friendship, Lewis turned naturally to the experience of war to explain what distinguished the love among friends from all other earthly loves:

Every step of the common journey tests his metal; and the tests are tests we fully understand because we are undergoing them ourselves. Hence, as he rings true time after time, our reliance, our respect and our admiration blossom into an Appreciative love of a singularly robust and well-informed kind. If, at the outset, we had attended more to him and less to the thing our Friendship is “about,” we should not have come to know or love him so well. You will not find the warrior, the poet, the philosopher or the Christian by staring into his eyes as if he were your mistress: better to fight beside him, read with him, argue with him, pray with him.¹⁰⁴

We have seen how Tolkien was devoted to the friends of his school days, the men of the TCBS. In 1916, expecting to be sent soon into the theater of war, they held their own war meeting, “the Council of London.” There they spoke of the ideas that moved them deeply, and pledged to support one another through the storms of war. When Tolkien enlisted with the 19th Lancashire Fusiliers, he hoped, like Lewis, to be going into combat with one of his closest friends.¹⁰⁵

It is no accident, of course, that Tolkien called the first book of his trilogy The Fellowship of the Ring. Part of the immense attraction of the story is watching a contentious assemblage of hobbits, dwarves, and elves put away their differences and fight alongside one another against each new threat and danger. They begin their quest as reluctant allies, suspicious and even distrustful. Before it is complete—and after facing many terrors and setbacks—they are transformed into a fellowship of the noblest kind.

“It all depends on what you want. You can trust us to stick to you through thick and thin—to the bitter end. And you can trust us to keep any secret of yours—closer than you keep it yourself. But you cannot trust us to let you face trouble alone, and go off without a word. We are your friends, Frodo. Anyway, there it is. We know most of what Gandalf has told you. We know a good deal about the Ring. We are horribly afraid—but we are coming with you; or following you like hounds.”106

As vital as the Fellowship of the Ring is to Tolkien’s story, the bond of friendship between Sam Gamgee and Frodo Baggins is one of the great triumphs of the work, inspired, as we have seen, by the rugged service of the batmen and soldiers in the trenches along the front. Like no other, Sam is the friend who would “jump down a dragon’s throat” to save Frodo, “if he did not trip over his own feet.”107 Tolkien once called Sam “this jewel among the hobbits.”¹⁰⁸

Sam’s loyalty is tested from beginning to end, from the decision to leave the Shire to the final approach to Mordor. “It is going to be very dangerous, Sam. It is already dangerous,” warns Frodo. “Most likely neither of us will come back.” Sam doesn’t flinch: “If you don’t come back, sir, then I shan’t, that’s certain. ‘Don’t you leave him!’ they said to me. ‘Leave him!’ I said. ‘I never mean to. I am going with him, if he climbs to the Moon; and if any of those Black Riders try to stop him, they’ll have Sam Gamgee to reckon with.’ ”¹⁰⁹

When Frodo and Sam are at the threshold of Mount Doom, near the very end of their quest, they find themselves nearly without strength to carry on. For Frodo there was “no taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower.” The desolation of the landscape, the black skies, the noxious fumes, the ash and slag and burned stone, and the dark slopes of the Mountain towering over them are almost overwhelming. They stagger toward their goal. Frodo, weakened by the great burden of carrying the Ring, begins to crawl on his hands.

Sam looked at him and wept in his heart, but no tears came to his dry and stinging eyes. “I said I’d carry him, if it broke my back,” he muttered, “and I will!”

“Come, Mr. Frodo!” he cried. “I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you and it as well. So up you get! Come on, Mr. Frodo dear! Sam will give you a ride. Just tell him where to go, and he’ll go.”¹¹⁰

It is a good bet that only men who knew friendships of this kind—who experienced them on the field of combat—could write passages of such compassion, grit, and courage. After the war, Tolkien and Lewis sought to recapture something like the camaraderie that sustained them during the crisis years of 1914–1918. At Oxford they launched the Inklings, the group of friends and fellow scholars who met weekly—Tuesday mornings at the Eagle and Child pub over beer and Thursday evenings in Lewis’s college rooms over various drinks—to discuss their works.111

For sixteen years these men gathered to read, recite, argue, and laugh together. They met faithfully, even during the darkest days of the Second World War. As Tolkien put it in a letter dated September 23, 1944: “The Inklings have already agreed that their victory celebration, if they are spared to have one, will be to take a whole inn in the country for at least a week, and spend it entirely in beer and talk, without any reference to a clock!”¹¹² Lewis read aloud many of his most important works during these gatherings. “What I owe them is incalculable,” he acknowledged. “Is any pleasure on earth as great as a circle of Christian friends by a good fire?”¹¹³

During the course of four decades, Tolkien and Lewis became devoted to each other’s success. Tolkien, through long talks and late evenings, played a crucial role in Lewis’s conversion to Christianity. He helped Lewis find a publisher for his first novel, and was a major force in securing his appointment to the Chair of English at Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1954, after Oxford denied him a professorship.

At the same time, the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings could have had no greater advocate for his imaginative works. Lewis even nominated Tolkien for the Nobel Prize in Literature. “C. S. Lewis is a very old friend and colleague of mine, and indeed I owe to his encouragement the fact that in spite of obstacles (including the 1939 war!) I persevered and eventually finished The Lord of the Rings,” Tolkien wrote. “He heard all of it, bit by bit, read aloud.”114

When Lewis learned that The Lord of the Rings had been accepted for publication, he wrote to Tolkien to describe his “sheer pleasure of looking forward to having the book to read and re-read.” And then he added a most remarkable perspective on the importance of the book to both their lives: “But a lot of other things come in. So much of your whole life, so much of our joint life, so much of the war, so much that seemed to be slipping away quite spurlos [without trace] into the past, is now, in a sort made permanent.”¹¹⁵

Such was the quality of their friendship: As with no one else, Tolkien dared to expose one of the great passions of his life, the construction of his epic trilogy, to the critical eyes of his friend and colleague. Lewis, for his part, became wholly invested in the project. Perhaps only Lewis, a soldier like Tolkien in the Great War, could recognize how his story “made permanent” their shared experience of the suffering and heartache of the war.¹¹⁶

Against the temper of their times, these authors dared to reclaim some of the older beliefs and virtues. Their common Christian faith had much to do with this, but perhaps no more so than their mutual love of mythic and romantic literature. As Lewis described it, they were “both soaked” in Homer, Beowulf, Norse mythology, medieval romance, and George MacDonald’s fairy tales.¹¹⁷ The result was a bond of loyalty and comradeship that transformed both their lives. “Friendship makes prosperity more shining,” wrote Cicero, “and lessens adversity by dividing and sharing it.”

Their experience reminds us that great friendship is a gift born of adversity: it is made possible by the common struggle against the world’s darkness. “Most gracious host, it was said to me by Elrond Halfelven that I should find friendship upon the way, secret and unlooked for,” Frodo tells Faramir. “Certainly I have looked for no such friendship as you have shown. To have found it turns evil to great good.”118

Though their friendship experienced periods of frustration and strain, it persevered to the end. “This feels like an axe-blow near the roots,” Tolkien wrote after Lewis’s death in November 1963. “We owed each a great debt to the other, and that tie, with the deep affection that it begot, remained.”¹¹⁹ Given the contemporary infatuation with “virtual” relationships, Tolkien and Lewis’s achievement not only remains but continues to grow in stature. Like few other writers over the past century, they show us what friendship can look like when it reaches for a high purpose and is watered by the streams of sacrifice, loyalty, and love.

PLAYING OUR PART IN THE STORY

We have come to neglect this aspect of war. We understand its atrocities, its injustices, its heartbreak, and its horrors well enough. We rightly seek to avoid it, at almost any cost. But Tolkien and Lewis were not satisfied with this version of war.

They assumed that war would sometimes be necessary to preserve human freedom. “Give me the Narnian wars where I shall fight as a free Horse among my own people!” says Shasta. “Those will be wars worth talking about.”¹²⁰ They believed that a “Hideous Strength” roamed the earth: a force of evil that sought to destroy human societies. Its perpetual war within and against the souls of men would make peace impossible—impossible, at least, for those who wished to live in freedom. “The soil of the Shire is deep,” explains Merry in The Return of the King. “Still there are things deeper and higher; and not a gaffer could tend his garden in what he calls peace, but for them.”121

Such knowledge allowed these authors to look at human life, caught in the calamity of a global conflict, without illusions. Indeed, the heroic ideal in their works is made more poignant by their awful realism: in the struggle against evil, the outcome is not assured. “War is upon us and all our friends, a war in which only the use of the Ring could give us surety of victory,” says Gandalf. “It fills me with great sorrow and great fear: for much shall be destroyed and all may be lost.”¹²² All may be lost. By introducing and sustaining the real possibility of defeat, Tolkien and Lewis draw us into their epic dramas.

No matter how desperate the circumstances, however, the characters in their stories retain the capacity to resist evil and choose the good. Their moral and spiritual growth depends on whether or not they honor these obligations. “The individual exists in a realm where choice is always necessary,” writes Patricia Meyer Spacks. “The freedom of that choice, for the virtuous, is of paramount importance.”¹²³ As veterans of the most destructive war the word had ever seen, Tolkien and Lewis could not glorify its violence and anguish. But neither could they accept the fatalism and cynicism that had become so prevalent. Wilfred Owen’s raging anthem against war—“the shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells”—could not be the final word.¹²⁴

During the Second World War, Tolkien received a letter from his son Christopher, then serving with the Royal Air Force. Sensing his son’s anxieties, he confessed that he knew the feeling of being “the toad under the harrow,” conscripted into a deadly conflict, with fierce enemies all about. “Well, there you are: a hobbit amongst the Urukhai. Keep up your hobbitry in heart, and think that all stories feel like that when you are in them,” he wrote. “You are inside a very great story!”125

The most influential Christian authors of the twentieth century believed that every human soul was caught up in a very great story: a fearsome war against a Shadow of Evil that has invaded the world to enslave the sons and daughters of Adam. Yet those who resist the Shadow are assured that they will not be left alone; they will be given the gift of friendship amid their struggle and grief. Even more, they will find the grace and strength to persevere, to play their part in the story, however long it endures and wherever it may lead them.