Used by permission of The Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL.

Soon after his conversion to Christianity, Lewis embraced a new calling on his life. “Any amount of theology,” he said, “can be smuggled into people’s minds under cover of romance without their knowing it.” During his long career at Oxford, Lewis became one of the twentieth century’s most formidable defenders of the Christian faith, writing more than thirty books, including The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, and The Chronicles of Narnia.

The Master and Fellows of University College, Oxford.

Enrollment at Oxford plummeted during the war years. In 1917, C. S. Lewis (standing in the back row, far right) was among the small cohort of undergraduates at University College. After joining the Officer’s Training Corps, Lewis was sent to Keble College, where he got minimal training before being shipped to the front later that year. “I remember five of us at Keble,” he wrote later, “and I am the only survivor.”

Second Lieutenant J. R. R. Tolkien arrived on the Western Front in June 1916 and was soon caught up in the Battle of the Somme, one of the fiercest concentrations of killing in the history of warfare. The fight raged on for nearly five months, claiming more than 1.2 million dead and wounded. Trench fever took Tolkien out of the war—and probably saved his life. “By 1918,” he wrote, “all but one of my close friends were dead.”

When the Germans launched their massive spring offensive in March 1918, Second Lieutenant C. S. Lewis was part of the British Expeditionary Force that staged a counteroffensive at the French town of Riez du Vinage, near Arras. A shell exploded close by, killing Lewis’s sergeant and wounding him in three places. His injuries kept him off the front lines for the remainder of the war.

Once Britain declared war on Germany, military service became a moral obligation for every able-bodied man. A captain of the rugby team at the King Edward’s School in Birmingham, Tolkien became a cadet at the school’s Officer Training Corps. “In those days,” he wrote later, “chaps signed up or were scorned publicly.”

© IWM (E (AUS) 1220)

The destructive power of the First World War, in addition to its assault on human life, devastated the physical landscape of Europe. Entire forests, like this one at Chateau Wood in Belgium, bore grim witness to man’s cruelty toward nature. In the novels of Tolkien and Lewis, nature herself joins in the war against the forces of evil.

During the last part of the nineteenth century, British social theorist Herbert Spencer reinterpreted Darwin’s theory of biological evolution as a doctrine of social progress. Spencer’s “social Darwinism” fueled a myth of human perfectibility that Tolkien and Lewis confronted throughout their literary careers.

Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, announced in 1905, reinforced the notion that science and technology would help mankind achieve mastery over nature. But the Great War revealed how the fruits of science could be used as instruments of naked power, themes that haunt the worlds of Narnia and Middle-earth.

President Woodrow Wilson arrived in Paris in December 1918, promising a new era of peace and international goodwill. Thousands of war-weary Europeans filled the streets to greet him. “He ceased to be a common statesman,” wrote H. G. Wells. “He became a Messiah.”

The savagery of the First World War seemed to invalidate the liberal democratic values of the West, and totalitarian ideologies rushed to fill the vacuum. By the 1920s and ’30s, as Lewis and Tolkien began to compose their imaginative works, fascist movements like those led by Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler had spread all over Europe.

Ernest H. Mills / stringer/Getty Images

In 1901, a young parliamentarian named Winston Churchill criticized members of his own party for believing that a major European war would be limited, decisive, and beneficial for England. Rather, he warned, it would end “in the ruin of the vanquished” and the “exhaustion of the conquerors.” Churchill fought on the Western Front and served as First Lord of the Admiralty during the war.

Eric Remarque’s World War I memoir, All Quiet on the Western Front, depicts a generation of veterans “weary, broken, burnt out, rootless and without hope.” The book, followed by a Hollywood film, became an international blockbuster. It seemed to capture the psychological gloom that afflicted many writers, artists, philosophers, and public intellectuals in the 1920s and ’30s.

Tolkien and Lewis met for the first time in 1926 at Oxford University, where they took up their academic posts after the war. Tolkien, a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, and Lewis, a tutor in English Language and Literature at Magdalen College (pictured above), shared a deep interest in mythic and romantic literature. They formed the nucleus of the Inklings, a circle of Christian authors and friends who met regularly at Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen and at the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford.

Joseph Loconte

On the evening of September 19, 1931, Lewis took his dinner companions, J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, to Addison’s Walk, a tree-lined footpath that follows the River Cherwell near Magdalen College. They discussed the nature of myths and their relationship to truth, a conversation that Lewis regarded as a breakthrough in his conversion to Christianity.

Joseph Loconte

Tolkien and Lewis often met at Oxford’s Eastgate Hotel to discuss their latest literary efforts over a drink or a meal. In a letter dated March 30, 1944, Tolkien noted that Lewis was pestering him to complete his unfinished manuscript, The Lord of the Rings. “Lunch with C.S.L.,” he wrote. “Quite an outing for me.”

Joseph Loconte

The Thiepval Memorial, located on the Somme battlefields near the French village of Pozieres, is the largest British war memorial in the world. It honors the 72,195 missing British and South African soldiers, most of whom died during the 1916 Battle of the Somme. Among them was Tolkien’s friend, Ralph Payton, whose name is inscribed on the memorial to the missing.