Introduction
1. G. J. Meyer, A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914–1918 (New York: Random House, 2006), 220.
2. Ibid.
3. “Carols, Plum Pudding, Beer and Bullets,” in The First World War: An Illustrated History, Special 100th Anniversary Commemoration, 27.
4. Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 110–111.
5. John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 8.
6. Paul Johnson, A History of the American People (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 642.
7. Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911–1918 (New York: Free Press, 2005), 291.
8. Richard Overy, The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars (London: Penguin, 2009), 363.
9. Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory: The First World War: Myths and Realities (London: Headline, 2002), xvii.
10. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 237.
11. Roger Sale, Modern Heroism: Essays on D. H. Lawrence, William Empson, and J. R. R. Tolkien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 3.
12. Churchill, The World Crisis, 293.
13. Max Hastings, Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 548.
14. J. R. R. Tolkien, foreword to The Lord of the Rings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), xxiv.
15. Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. 2 (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 258.
16. K. J. Gilchrist, A Morning After War: C. S. Lewis and WWI (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 218.
17. The phrase appears in Tolkien’s essay “On Translating Beowulf” in Christopher Tolkien, ed., J. R. R. Tolkien: The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (HarperCollins, 2006), 60.
18. Walter Lippman, A Preface to Morals (New York: Time-Life Books, 1961), 16.
19. Lee D. Rossi, The Politics of Fantasy: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), 4.
20. Patricia Meyer Spacks, “Power and Meaning in The Lord of the Rings,” in Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Isaacs, eds., Understanding The Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 54.
21. Carol Zaleski, “C. S. Lewis’s Aeneid,” The Christian Century, June 2, 2011. Walter Hooper has written that “Lewis probably read the Aeneid more often than he did any other book.” Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. 3 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 39.
22. C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 147.
23. Walter Hooper, ed., C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 51–52.
24. Humphrey Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 89.
25. Victor Davis Hanson, The Father of Us All: War and History (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010), 4.
26. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 766.
27. Rossi, The Politics of Fantasy, 85, 134.
28. Walter Hooper, ed., Present Concerns: Essays by C. S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt Jovanovich, 1986), 42.
29. Humphrey Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 75.
30. Tolkien once admitted that “as far as any character is ‘like me’ it is Faramir—except that I lack what all my characters possess (let the psychoanalysts note!) Courage.” Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 232.
31. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 672.
Chapter 1: The Funeral of a Great Myth
1. Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1994), 3.
2. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man (Washington DC: Regnery, 1999), 7–8.
3. Hastings, Catastrophe 1914, 3.
4. Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History, 3.
5. Norman Angell, The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage (Memphis: Bottom of the Hill, 2012), 103.
6. Ibid., 119–120.
7. H. G. Wells, The New World Order (London: Secker and Warburg, 1940), 10.
8. Albert Marrin, The Last Crusade: The Church of England in the First World War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1974), 66.
9. Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Perseus, 2002), 240.
10. Ibid., xxiv.
11. “Crystal Palace to Rise from the Ashes as Chinese Cash Rebuilds Symbol of Empire,” The Times of London, Oct. 4, 2013.
12. Roger Osborne, Civilization: A New History of the Western World (New York: Pegasus Books, 2006), 400, 420.
13. J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (London: HarperCollins, 1988), 63.
14. Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien, 179.
15. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 250.
16. Ibid., 288.
17. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, ed. Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), xiii. Also in Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 146.
18. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 87–88.
19. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 473.
20. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 11.
21. Roger Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 20.
22. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 3, 1480.
23. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 450.
24. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 499–500.
25. Alister McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, 2013), 276.
26. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 353.
27. Ibid., 406.
28. Martin Gilbert, The Somme: Heroism and Horror in the First World War (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006), 66.
29. Gilbert, The First World War, 533.
30. Hastings, Catastrophe 1914, 2.
31. Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991), 319.
32. Osborne, Civilization, 400–401.
33. Herbert Spencer, The Evanescence of Evil Part I, Chapter 2, concluding paragraph.
34. Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 33.
35. Ibid., 35.
36. Ibid., 32.
37. Lesley Walmsley, ed., C. S. Lewis Essay Collection: Faith, Christianity and the Church (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 29.
38. Ibid., 26, 28.
39. James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 201.
40. Richard M. Gamble, The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2003), 37.
41. Christine Rosen, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 25.
42. Francis Galton, “Eugenics as a Factor in Religion,” in Essays in Eugenics (London: Eugenics Education Society, 1909). Cited in Rosen, Preaching Eugenics, 5.
43. Philipp Blom, The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900–1914 (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 339.
44. Rosen, Preaching Eugenics, 3–23.
45. Francis Galton, “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims,” American Journal of Sociology 10 (July 1904): 5. Cited in Rosen, Preaching Eugenics, 5.
46. Ibid., 33–34.
47. Ibid., 99.
48. Michael D. C. Drout, ed., J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 2007), 555.
49. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 190.
50. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 49.
51. C. S. Lewis, Perelandra (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1965), 91.
52. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, 89.
53. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 69–70.
54. Hofstadter, Social Darwinism, 162.
55. Sermon by Rev. Kenneth C. MacArthur, Federated Church (Congregational Baptist), Sterling, Massachusetts, 1926, AES Papers, APS. Quoted in Rosen, Preaching Eugenics, 125.
56. Rosen, Preaching Eugenics, 150.
57. Ibid., 184.
58. Ibid.
59. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 416.
60. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 147.
61. Tolkien, TheLord of the Rings, 232.
62. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 41.
63. Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (New York: Penguin, 2007), 107–108.
64. Ibid., 117.
65. Keegan, The First World War, 27, 73.
66. Gilbert, The First World War, 29.
67. Ferguson, The War of the World, 117.
68. W. M. Spellman, A Short History of Western Political Thought (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 139.
69. Gamble, The War for Righteousness, 32.
70. Osborne, Civilization, 368.
71. James Cronan, “The Lamps Are Going Out All Over Europe,” The National Archives Blog, August 4, 2014, http://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/blog/lamps-going-europe/.
Chapter 2: The Last Battle
1. C. V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War (New York: Book of the Month Club, 1995), 526.
2. Peter Wilson, The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy (London: Penguin, 2009), 5.
3. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War, 526.
4. Wilson, The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy, 753.
5. Philip Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade (New York: HarperOne, 2014), 87–88.
6. Albert Marrin, The Last Crusade: The Church of England in the First World War (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1974), 139.
7. Queen Victoria reigned in England until her death in 1901. Her eldest son, Edward VII, assumed the throne in 1901 and ruled until his death in 1910. Regarding the values defining family, faith, and the social and political order, “the Edwardians were extensions of the Victorians.” Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 130.
8. John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 20–21.
9. Richard Schweitzer, The Cross and the Trenches: Religious Faith and Doubt among British and American Great War Soldiers (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 4.
10. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 50.
11. George Sayer, Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), 77.
12. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 71.
13. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 232.
14. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 43.
15. Carpenter, J .R. R. Tolkien, 91.
16. Don W. King, C. S. Lewis: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001), 55.
17. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 89.
18. Ibid., 88.
19. Ferguson, Empire, 359.
20. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 179.
21. John Ellis, Eye-Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 162.
22. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 179–180.
23. http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/asquithspeechtoparliament.htm.
24. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 236.
25. Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War (London: HarperCollins, 2005), 144–145.
26. Quoted in Marrin, The Last Crusade, 59.
27. Alasdair I. C. Heron, A Century of Protestant Theology (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1980), 75.
28. Joseph Fort Newton, The Sword of the Spirit: Britain and America in the Great War (New York: George H. Coran), xiii, xv.
29. John Spurr, The Post-Reformation: 1603–1714 (Harlow, England: Pearson Longman, 2006), 16.
30. A. J. Hoover, God, Germany, and Britain in the Great War: A Study in Clerical Nationalism (New York: Praeger, 1989), 69.
31. Ibid.
32. Stuart Mews, “Spiritual Mobilization in the First World War,” Theology (1971), 74:258, 259.
33. Hoover, God, Germany, and Britain in the Great War, 69.
34. Marrin, The Last Crusade, 177–186.
35. Conrad Cherry, ed., God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 83.
36. Ibid., 64–65.
37. Woodrow Wilson, “Address to Congress Requesting a Declaration of War Against Germany (April 2, 1917), University of Virginia Miller Center, http://millercenter.org/president/wilson/speeches/speech-4722.
38. Cherry, ed., God’s New Israel, 276.
39. Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 254.
40. Ray H. Abrams, Preachers Present Arms: The Role of American Churches and Clergy in World War I and II with Some Observations on the War in Vietnam (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 1969), 55.
41. Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 444.
42. Hoover, God, Germany, and Britain in the Great War, 94.
43. Ernst Troeltsch, Deutscher Glaube und deutsche Sitte in unserem grossen Kriege (Berlin: n.d.), 19. Cited in Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 442.
44. Ibid., 442.
45. The Allied nations accused the Kaiser and the German people of blasphemy because of their confident intimacy with God, expressed in phrases such as Gott mit uns, a phrase later picked up by the Nazis.
46. Jenkins, The Great and Holy War, 12.
47. Hoover, God, Germany, and Britain in the Great War, 2. Hubbard perished aboard the RMS Lusitania, which was sunk by a German submarine off the coast of Ireland on May 7, 1915.
48. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 83.
49. Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 124.
50. First World War: An Illustrated History, 44.
51. Meyer, A World Undone, 297.
52. Hoover, God, Germany, and Britain in the Great War, 24.
53. Ibid., 29.
54. Ibid., 24.
55. Marrin, The Last Crusade, 137–138.
56. Abrams, Preachers Present Arms, 104.
57. Ibid., 108.
58. Ibid., 104.
59. Hoover, God, Germany, and Britain in the Great War, 9.
60. Gamble, The War for Righteousness, 160.
61. Basil Mathews, ed., Christ: And the World at War (London: James Clarke & Co., 1917), 46.
62. Ibid., 170.
63. Gamble, The War for Righteousness, 3.
64. Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith, 275.
65. Joseph Fort Newton, The Sword of the Spirit: Britain and America in the Great War (New York: George H. Doran, 1918), 38.
66. Gamble, The War for Righteousness, 175.
67. Paul Bull, Christianity and War, quoted in Kevin Christopher Fielden, “The Church of England in the First World War” (Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 1080, 2005), http://dc.etsu.edu/etd/1080.
68. C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 51.
69. Although there have been some excellent studies of the religious faith of soldiers during the war years, we should be careful not to generalize too much about their personal beliefs or their views of the ultimate meaning of the conflict. See Rich Schweitzer, The Cross and the Trenches: Religious Faith and Doubt Among British and American Great War Soldiers (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2003).
70. Ellis, Eye-Deep in Hell, 156.
71. Schweitzer, The Cross and the Trenches, 168.
72. Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 451.
73. Robert Graves, Good-Bye to All That (New York: Vintage International, 1998), 189.
74. Marrin, The Last Crusade, 242–243.
75. Graves, Good-Bye to All That, 189.
76. Schweitzer, The Cross and the Trenches, 259.
77. Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 453.
78. Schweitzer, The Cross and the Trenches, 81–82.
79. Keegan, The First World War, 289.
80. Jonathan Phillips, Holy Warrior: A Modern History of the Crusades (New York: Random House, 2010), 323.
81. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 243.
82. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 197.
83. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 455.
84. C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 178.
85. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 60.
86. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 170.
87. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, 70.
88. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 140.
Chapter 3: In a Hole in the Ground There Lived a Hobbit
1. “The Battle of Jutland, 1916,” Eye Witness to History, 2006, http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/pfjutland.htm.
2. Gilbert, The First World War, 252.
3. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 58–59.
4. Meyer, A World Undone, 361.
5. “The Battle of Verdun,” History Learning Site, 2014, http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/battle_of_verdun.htm.
6. Charles F. Horne, ed., Source Records of the Great War, Vol. IV (National Alumni, 1923), http://www.firstworldwar.com/diaries/verdun_vaux.htm.
7. Meyer, A World Undone, 427.
8. Alistair Horne, The Price of Glory (London: Macmillan, 1962), 236.
9. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 138.
10. The precise date of Tolkien’s Channel crossing with his battalion was June 6, 1916.
11. Tolkien, “The Lonely Isle,” http://webpages.charter.net/sn9/literature/poetry/2tolkienpoems.html.
12. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 62.
13. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 178.
14. Keegan, The Face of Battle, 221.
15. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 41.
16. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 53.
17. Keegan, The Face of Battle, 221.
18. Mathews, Christ: And the World at War, 134–35.
19. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 53.
20. Meyer, A World Undone, 363.
21. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 180.
22. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 188.
23. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 51. Ibid., 52.
24. Keegan, The First World War, 52.
25. Hastings, Catastrophe 1914, 516.
26. Gilbert, The Somme, 194.
27. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 231.
28. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 822.
29. Gilbert, The Somme, 71.
30. Keegan, The Face of Battle, 260.
31. Meyer, A World Undone, 446.
32. David Lloyd George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George, 1915–1916 (Boston: Little Brown, 1933).
33. Gilbert, The Somme, 269.
34. Keegan, The First World War, 295.
35. Churchill, The World Crisis, 667.
36. Gilbert, The Somme, 64.
37. Sir Martin Gilbert, “What Tolkien Taught Me About the Battle of the Somme,” The Cutting Edge, August 25, 2008, http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=716&pageid=23&pagename=Arts.
38. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 155.
39. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 6.
40. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 157.
41. Keegan, The Face of Battle, 231.
42. G. J. Meyer, A World Undone, 261.
43. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 765, italics added.
44. Ibid., 188.
45. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 221.
46. Ibid. The italics are mine.
47. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 161.
48. Ibid., 114.
49. Ibid., 164.
50. Ibid., 166.
51. Keegan, The First World War, 296.
52. Philip Gibbs, The Battles of the Somme (Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild, and Stewart, 1917), 6.
53. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 165–166.
54. Ibid., 166.
55. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 72.
56. Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien, 92.
57. Gilbert, The Somme, 140–141.
58. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 9.
59. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 883.
60. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 193.
61. Ellis, Eye-Deep in Hell, 96.
62. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 808.
63. Ellis, Eye-Deep in Hell, 98.
64. Gilbert, The Somme, 85.
65. Ibid., 220.
66. Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien, 94.
67. Tolkien, ed., The Monsters and the Critics, 60.
68. Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien, 91.
69. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 828.
70. Nancy Marie Ott, “J. R. R. Tolkien and World War I,” at http://greenbooks.theonering.net/guest/files/040102_02.html.
71. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 626.
72. Ibid., 631–32.
73. Ibid., 627–28.
74. Gilbert, “What Tolkien Taught Me About the Battle of the Somme.”
75. Gilbert, The Somme, 239–240.
76. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 303.
77. Ibid., 215. Also in Tom Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 2.
78. Sheffield, Forgotten Victory, 157.
79. Ibid.
80. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 934.
81. Keegan, The Face of Battle, 219.
82. Churchill, The World Crisis, 667–668.
83. Gibbs, The Battles of the Somme, 18.
84. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 158.
85. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 52.
Chapter 4: The Lion, the Witch, and the War
1. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 70.
2. Ibid., 72.
3. Ibid., 113.
4. Ibid., 111.
5. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 42.
6. Homer, The Iliad, Introduction and Notes by Bernard Fox (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 26.
7. Gilchrist, A Morning After War, 27.
8. Ibid., 26.
9. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 125.
10. George MacDonald, Phantastes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), xi.
11. George MacDonald, The Complete Fairy Tales (Penguin Books, 1999), 9.
12. W. H. Lewis, ed., Letters of C. S. Lewis (San Diego: Harcourt, 1988), 179.
13. Ibid., 27.
14. Green and Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, 45.
15. In a letter dated January 21, 1960, Lewis commends MacDonald’s works to John Warwick Montgomery. Hooper, ed., The Letters, Vol. 3, 1125.
16. Sayer, Jack, 107–108.
17. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 129.
18. Ibid., 131.
19. Ferguson, The War of the World, 127.
20. Douglas Gresham, Jack’s Life: The Life Story of C. S. Lewis (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2005), 33.
21. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 171.
22. Ibid., 208–209.
23. Ibid., 204.
24. Ibid., 212.
25. Gilbert, The Somme, 71.
26. Hooper, ed., C. S. Lewis: The Weight of Glory, 51.
27. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 138.
28. Lewis, ed., Letters of C. S. Lewis, 126.
29. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 230.
30. Ibid., 230–231.
31. Ibid., 342.
32. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 158.
33. Sayer, Jack, 122.
34. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 299.
35. Ibid., 310.
36. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 158.
37. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 315.
38. Ibid., 319.
39. Ibid., 338.
40. Ibid., 341.
41. Ibid., 346. Walter Hooper placed Lewis at Monchy-Le-Preux, but K. J. Gilchrist disagrees, believing Lewis was in a staging town west of Arras. See Gilchrist, A Morning After War, 57–58.
42. Ibid., 351.
43. Gilchrist, A Morning After War, 56.
44. Ibid., 63. The descriptions of enemy fire are taken from the diary for Lewis’s battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry, known as the “War Diary or Intelligence Summary.”
45. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 195.
46. Ibid.
47. C. S. Lewis, Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics (Lexington, KY: Emereo, 2013).
48. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life, x.
49. Lewis, Spirits in Bondage, 9.
50. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 123.
51. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 356.
52. Ibid., 363.
53. Gilbert, The First World War, 408.
54. From March 21 until May 2, British casualties hit 280,000. The French sustained 340,000 casualties.
55. Walter Hooper, C .S. Lewis: Companion and Guide (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 11.
56. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 363.
57. Various biographical references to Lewis’s wartime experience incorrectly place him at the 1917 Battle of Arras. In fact, Lewis fought in a different battle, near the village of Arras, in April 1918.
58. Meyer, A World Undone, 652.
59. Gilchrist, A Morning After War, 123.
60. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 96.
61. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 388.
62. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 191.
63. Ibid., 191–192.
64. Ibid., 192.
65. Ibid., 193.
66. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 196.
67. Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead, eds., Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis (New York: Ballantine Books, 1982), 6.
68. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 368.
69. Ibid., 414.
70. Sayer, Jack, 134.
71. Percy Dearmer, ed., Christianity and the Crisis (London: Victor Golancz, 1933), 25–26.
72. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 203–204.
73. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 196.
74. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 375.
75. Ibid., 374.
76. MacDonald, Phantastes, 149.
1. Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919 (New York: Random House, 2003), 15.
2. Ibid.
3. Churchill, The World Crisis, 841.
4. Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (New York: Ballantine, 1990), 523.
5. Dan Todman offers a nuanced look at what is called “the formation of the modern myth of the war.” Views about WWI, he argues, changed over time: “Anyone putting forward in public the idea that the war had been an incompetently run and colossally futile waste of life, unmitigated by any redeeming heroism, would have been chased from the street in the early 1920s.” See Todman, The Great War, 221–230. Niall Ferguson offers a somewhat contrarian view: “As has often been remarked, the memoirs of the 1920s and 1930s were disproportionately the work of public school and university-educated men with little prewar experience of hardship, much less war. Their disillusionment was predicated on the illusions of privileged youth.” Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War: Explaining World War 1 (New York: Penguin Press, 1999), 451.
6. David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1989), 212.
7. It is generally recognized that the Armenian genocide began on April 24, 1915, when the Turkish government arrested and executed several hundred Armenian intellectuals. Soon, Armenians were forced from their homes and men, women, and children were sent on death marches across the Syrian desert to concentration camps. Out of a population of 2 million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire at the start of the war, an estimated 1.5 million died in the genocide.
8. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 255.
9. Gilbert, The First World War, 534.
10. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 342.
11. Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (New York: Ballantine, 1982), 294.
12. Overy, The Twilight Years, 3.
13. Ibid., 15.
14. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), 34.
15. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 393.
16. Ibid., 46.
17. Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien, 108.
18. Ibid., 76.
19. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 250.
20. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 419. After being out of the war for nearly four months because of his injuries, Lewis expected to be sent back into battle; such were the military needs of Great Britain until the day of the Armistice. “Of course in the present need for men, being passed fit by a board would mean a pretty quick return to France,” he wrote his father on September 3, 1918. “Although I am not quite well I am almost ‘fit’ now in the military sense of the word, and depend only on the forgetfulness of the authorities for my continued stay in hospital.” Ibid., 395–396.
21. Ibid., 423.
22. Ibid., 428.
23. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis, 129.
24. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 2, 747.
25. Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 11.
26. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 606.
27. Walter Hooper, ed., All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis, 1922–1927 (San Diego: Harcourt, 1991), 135.
28. Susan Kingsley Kent, The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013), 48.
29. Ibid., 1.
30. Ferguson, The War of the World, 144.
31. Kent, The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919, 2–3.
32. Conversation with Carmella Parrinello, December 28, 2014.
33. Meyer, A World Undone, 513.
34. Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 67.
35. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 502.
36. Burleigh, Sacred Causes, 58.
37. Michael J. Oakeshott, The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), 164–68.
38. Johnson, Modern Times, 103.
39. Gilbert Murray, The Ordeal of This Generation: The War, the League and the Future (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1929), 180–181.
40. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 257.
41. Johnson, Modern Times, 5.
42. Hooper, ed., All My Road Before Me, 212.
43. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 605–606.
44. Johnson, Modern Times, 5.
45. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (London: Hogarth Press, 1927), 28.
46. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 256.
47. Dearmer, Christianity and the Crisis, 68.
48. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 185.
49. Walter Hooper, ed., God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 116.
50. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 250.
51. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, 242.
52. Ibid., 243.
53. Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien, 100.
54. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 78.
55. Ibid., 144.
56. Ibid., 231.
57. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 836.
58. Niall Ferguson contests the claim that the memory of war in literature and art was one of unqualified horror. “The overwhelming majority of the vast number of poems written during the war by combatants and non-combatants alike were patriotic ditties.” Ferguson, The Pity of War, 48–49.
59. Candace Ward, ed., World War One British Poets (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications,1997), 25.
60. Ibid., 36.
61. Todman, The Great War, 155.
62. Graves, Goodbye to All That, 186.
63. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 75–76.
64. Walter Hooper, ed., C. S. Lewis: Of This and Other Worlds (London: Fount, 2000), 100–101.
65. Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, 232.
66. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, xv.
67. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 203.
68. Ibid., 239.
69. This was Lewis’s first article published outside of college publications.
70. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 397.
71. Lewis, Spirits in Bondage, 7.
72. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 364.
73. Churchill, The World Crisis, 4.
74. Jenkins, The Great and Holy War, 223.
75. The Bloomsbury Group was an influential association of English writers, intellectuals, philosophers, and artists, which included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey. They lived and collaborated together near Bloomsbury, London, during the first half of the twentieth century.
76. Hooper, C. S. Lewis: Companion and Guide, 25.
77. Murray, The Ordeal of This Generation, 173.
78. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (New York: Penguin, 1990), 82.
79. Hooper, ed., All My Road BeforeMe, 431–432.
80. Sayer, Jack, 219.
81. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 199–200.
82. C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992), 205.
83. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 509.
84. Ibid., 649.
85. Ibid.
86. Ibid., 850.
87. In a letter to Arthur Greeves dated March 25, 1933, Lewis mentioned a talk with Tolkien “who, you know, grew up on Morris and Macdonald and shares my taste in literature to a fault.” Hooper, ed., The Letters, Vol. 2, 103.
88. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 918.
89. There is no written record of their precise conversation, but Carpenter does an admirable job of reconstructing their talk, based on Tolkien’s poem “Mythopoeia.” I have followed Carpenter’s narrative and added to it based on Tolkien’s and Lewis’s other letters and writings. See Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, 150–152.
90. Ibid., 234–235.
91. Carpenter, The Inklings, 43.
92. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 110–111.
93. Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien, 151.
94. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, 87.
95. Carpenter, The Inklings, 44. See also Lewis’s letter to Arthur Greeves in Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 976.
96. Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien, 151.
97. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, 90.
98. Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien, 151.
99. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 136.
100. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, 974.
101. The first book that Lewis wrote after his conversion to Christianity, The Pilgrim’s Regress, traces his own intellectual and spiritual search for truth.
102. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 225.
103. Hooper, ed., C. S. Lewis: Of This and Other Worlds, 7.
104. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 2, 501.
105. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 388.
106. Ibid., 29.
107. Ibid., 341.
108. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 2, 262.
109. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 209.
110. Ibid.
111. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (New York: Ballantine, 1973), 17.
112. Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography, 180.
113. Tolkien, The Hobbit, 268.
114. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 2, 631.
115. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 388.
116. Ibid., 68.
117. Hooper, ed. Collected Letters, Vol. 2, 990.
118. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 362.
119. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (London: Penguin, 2008), 67.
120. Philip Gibbs, Now It Can Be Told (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1920), 131.
121. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 518.
122. Ibid., 61.
123. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 81.
Chapter 6: That Hideous Strength
1. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 98.
2. Ibid., 99.
3. Meyer, A World Undone, 396.
4. Ibid., 397.
5. Hooper, ed., C. S. Lewis: Of This and Other Worlds, 95.
6. Ibid., 98.
7. Ibid., 102.
8. See Tom Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), xvii–xxxv.
9. Roger Sale, “Tolkien and Frodo Baggins,” in Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo, eds., Tolkien and the Critics: Essays on J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1972), 247.
10. Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel (New York: Penguin, 2004), 71.
11. Meyer, A World Undone, 547.
12. In a letter to Jocelyn Gibb, dated April 16, 1961, Lewis is bemused by the author David Richard Davies, who seemed to discover, because of the Spanish Civil War, that humanity was capable of great wickedness. Wrote Lewis: “Most of us learned this during the First German War.” Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 3, 1254–1255.
13. This is Lyndsay’s description of the biblical Tower of Babel. Lewis borrowed the line for the title of the third book in his science fiction series, That Hideous Strength.
14. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 47.
15. Ibid., 267.
16. Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, 114. I am indebted to Shippey’s excellent treatment of this theme. See 112–160.
17. Ibid., 630.
18. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: MacMillan, 1982), x.
19. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 47.
20. Ibid., 118.
21. Ibid., 62.
22. See Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 173.
23. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 76.
24. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 293.
25. Hooper, C. S. Lewis: Companion and Guide, 240.
26. See Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, 112–160.
27. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 51.
28. Ibid., 268–269.
29. Ibid., 331.
30. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, 298.
31. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 357.
32. Ibid., 358.
33. Hooper, ed., C. S. Lewis: Of This and Other Worlds, 28.
34. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 777.
35. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 82.
36. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 172.
37. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 61.
38. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 271.
39. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 199.
40. Ibid., 222.
41. Drout, J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, 75.
42. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 398.
43. Ibid., 259.
44. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 393.
45. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 203.
46. Ibid.
47. Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, 117.
48. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 267.
49. Ibid., 269.
50. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 246.
51. Isaacs and Zimbardo, eds., Tolkien and the Critics, 36.
52. C. S. Lewis put it this way: “These things were not devised to reflect any particular situation in the real world. It was the other way around; real events began, horribly, to conform to the pattern he had freely invented.” See Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography, 193.
53. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 332.
54. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 945.
55. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 56.
56. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 130.
57. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 125–126.
58. Arthur Weinberg, ed., Attorney for the Damned: Clarence Darrow in the Courtroom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 56.
59. Johnson, Modern Times, 71.
60. Ibid., 70.
61. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 258.
62. Genesis 4:7.
63. Tolkien once received a letter from an admirer, a self-described “unbeliever” who nonetheless found himself drawn to the religious sensibility of the story. “You create a world in which some sort of faith seems to be everywhere without a visible source, like light from an invisible lamp.” Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 413.
64. Hooper, ed., C. S. Lewis: Of This and Other Worlds, 99.
65. Ferguson, The Pity of War, 186.
66. Thomas Hardy, The Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), 509.
67. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 531.
68. Croft, War and the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien, 16–17.
69. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 849.
70. Ibid., 848.
71. Ibid., 631–632.
72. Ibid., 458.
73. Ibid., 823.
74. Croft, War and the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien, 26.
75. Brian Rosebury, Tolkien: A Critical Assessment (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), 126.
76. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 292.
77. Ibid., 170–171.
78. Brian Melton, “The Great War and Narnia: C. S. Lewis as Soldier and Creator,” Mythlore, September 22, 2011. Much of my analysis follows closely that of Melton’s fine treatment of this theme.
79. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 358.
80. Ibid., 732.
81. In an essay exploring his groundbreaking translation of Beowulf, for example, Tolkien explained that the men of these legends “were conceived as kings of chivalrous courts” and that “the imagination of the author of Beowulf moved upon the threshold of Christian chivalry, if indeed it had not already passed within.” Tolkien, ed., The Monsters and the Critics, 57.
82. Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 292.
83. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 650.
84. Ibid., 402.
85. I am indebted to Verlyn Flieger’s analysis of the heroic tradition in The Lord of the Rings in her essay, “Frodo and Aragorn: The Concept of the Hero,” in Zimbardo and Isaacs, eds., Understanding The Lord of the Rings, 122–125.
86. Zimbardo and Isaacs, eds., Understanding The Lord of the Rings, 123.
87. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 171.
88. Ibid., 62.
89. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 258.
90. Hooper, ed., Present Concerns, 15.
91. Lee Rossi, The Politics of Fantasy: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), 2.
92. As Lewis put it in The Discarded Image: “I hope no one will think I am recommending a return to the Medieval Model. I am only suggesting considerations that may induce us to regard all Models in the right way, respecting each and idolizing none.” C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2003), 222.
93. Hooper, ed., Present Concerns, 14.
94. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 160.
95. Ibid., 179.
96. Hooper, ed., Present Concerns, 16.
97. Stephen E. Ambrose, Band of Brothers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 61.
98. Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis (New York: HarperOne, 2006), 88.
99. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 583.
100. Ibid., 244.
101. See Mike Bellah, A Celebration of Joy: Christian Romanticism in the Chronicles of Narnia, http://www.bestyears.com/thesis__7.html.
102. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 87. See Lewis’s excellent treatment of the theme of friendship in this work, 87–127.
103. Kilby and Mead, eds., Brothers and Friends, 284.
104. Lewis, The Four Loves, 104.
105. Alister McGrath convincingly argued that Lewis joined the Somerset Light Infantry so that he could serve alongside his friend Paddy Moore. See McGrath, C. S. Lewis, 65–66.
106. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 105.
107. Ibid., 104.
108. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 88.
109. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 87.
110. Ibid., 940.
111. Members of the Inklings included Lewis and his brother Warren, Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and Hugo Dyson.
112. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 94.
113. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 2, 501.
114. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 303.
115. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 3, 249–250.
116. In his letter to Tolkien, dated November 13, 1952, Lewis does not explicitly refer to the First World War in his mention of “the war” as among the things that Tolkien’s work had helped to make permanent. But it seems unlikely that he would have the Second World War in mind, which had come to an end seven years earlier.
117. Hooper, ed., Collected Letters, Vol. 3, 1458.
118. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 694. Italics are mine.
119. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 341.
120. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 216.
121. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 870.
122. Ibid., 500.
123. Spacks, “Power and Meaning in The Lord of the Rings,” in Zimbardo and Isaacs, eds., Understanding The Lord of the Rings, 60.
124. Ward, ed., World War One British Poets, 25.
125. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 78.
Conclusion: The Return of the King
1. “November 11th 1918,” History Learning Site, http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/november_11_1918.htm
2. Thomas Hardy, “And There Was a Great Calm,” in Ward, ed., World War One British Poets, 58.
3. Meyer, A World Undone, 486.
4. Hooper, C. S. Lewis: Companion and Guide, 444.
5. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 717.
6. Walmsley, ed., Faith, Christianity and the Church, 46.
7. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 111.
8. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 962.
9. Ibid., 950.
10. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 252.
11. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, 68–69.
12. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 255–56.
13. Carpenter, ed., The Letters, 253.
14. Ibid., 69.
15. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 185.
16. Ibid., 737.
17. Ibid., 759.
18. In his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien leaves no doubt about his understanding of the central meaning of Christianity. “The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy.” Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, 72.
19. Isaacs and Zimbardo, eds., Tolkien and the Critics, 248.
20. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, 69.
21. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 954.
22. Ezra 3:11–12.
23. Churchill, The World Crisis, 3–4.
24. Meyer, World Undone, 260.
25. Quoted in Dan Rodricks, “The Sad, Senseless End of Henry Gunther,” Baltimore Sun, November 11, 2008, http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2008–11–11/news/0811100097_1_henry-gunther-11th-month-war-i.
26. Overy, The Twilight Years, 12.
27. T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland and Other Poems (Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Company), 33.
28. Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, 294.
29. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 339.
30. Ibid., 766.
31. MacDonald, Phantastes, 188.
32. C. S. Lewis, ed., George MacDonald: An Anthology (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), xxxv.
33. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 557–558.
34. Lewis, ed., George MacDonald, xxxv.
35. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 968.
36. Joel 3:14.
37. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 953.
38. Revelation 22:5.
A Remembrance
1. The Story of the 91st Division (San Francisco: H.S. Crocker Co., Inc., 1919), 19.
2. Ibid., 32.