CHAPTER 5

THE LAND OF SHADOW

Three weeks after the German surrender at Compiegne on November 11, 1918, ending the First World War, the American president left for Europe to help broker the peace. In January, Woodrow Wilson had outlined his dream for a new global order, in his Fourteen Points, a document imbued with progressive assumptions about democracy, humanity, and international politics. Wilson’s League of Nations would prevent another war, either through moral suasion or collective security. “They are the principles of mankind,” he told the US Congress, “and they must prevail.”

They would not prevail, of course, but many in Europe were not yet prepared to believe it. They wanted to believe that, under Wilson’s enlightened leadership, democratic principles would govern the nations of the earth. All over Europe there were parks, squares, streets, and railway stations bearing Wilson’s name. Posters declared, “We Want a Wilson Peace.” Italians knelt in front of his image. In France, the left-wing newspaper L’Humanite devoted an issue to praising the American president. Nationalist movements from Korea to Arabia clung to the Fourteen Points as their lodestar.¹

Thus, when Wilson arrived in Paris on December 13, throngs of admirers were there to greet him. They filled the streets, hung from windows, cheered from rooftops. “He was transfigured in the eyes of men,” wrote H. G. Wells. “He ceased to be a common statesman; he became a Messiah.” In a war that had devastated so many lives and nations, Europeans longed for a redemptive outcome. Wilson, as the leader of the only democracy that seemed capable of negotiating a just peace, held out the prospect of redemption. “Wilson kept alive the hope that human society, despite the evidence, was getting better, that nations would one day live in harmony,” writes historian Margaret MacMillan. “In 1919, before disillusionment had set in, the world was more than ready to listen to him.”²

Listening is one thing, however. Wilson believed that, armed only with rhetoric and idealism, he could remake international politics conform to his progressive, humanitarian vision. It was an impossible hope. The old rivalries and prejudices and power politics would reappear. The Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919, proved a profound disappointment to just about everyone involved. The Germans felt betrayed by their leaders, while the victors lacked the will to enforce the treaty’s provisions. “Is this the end?” asked Winston Churchill in The World Crisis. “Is it merely a chapter in a cruel and senseless story?”³

THE END OF ILLUSIONS

Men could not sustain a war of such magnitude and pain without hope—the hope that its very enormity would ensure that it could never happen again and the hope that when somehow it had been fought through to a resolution, the foundations of a better-ordered world would have been laid. . . . Nothing less could give dignity or sense to the monstrous offensives in which thousands and hundreds of thousands were killed to gain ten yards and exchange one wet-bottomed trench for another. When every autumn people said it could not last through the winter, and when every spring there was still no end in sight, only the hope that out of it all some good would accrue to mankind kept men and nations fighting. When at last it was over, the war had many diverse results, and one dominant one transcending all others: disillusion.⁴

Given the scale of human slaughter, how could it be otherwise?⁵ The destructiveness of the First World War exceeded that of all other wars known in human history: more than sixteen million dead, twenty-one million wounded, hundreds of thousands buried in unmarked graves.

Most of the nations of Europe suffered grievous losses. Russia gave up 1.7 million men, another 5 million wounded. In Germany, roughly 465,000 soldiers were killed each year for the duration of the war. The generation of German men from nineteen to twenty-two years of age was reduced by 35 percent. In France, the casualty rate (dead or wounded) was an astonishing 75 percent. About 2 million French soldiers died, or roughly 25 percent of all the men in France, leaving behind 630,000 war widows. In Britain, 921,000 soldiers were dead, more than 2 million wounded; one of every three British households had a man killed, injured, or taken prisoner. The United States, which suffered the fewest casualties among the great powers, lost more than 116,000 men, and twice that number wounded.

Many civilians suffered and died during the war. The Allied blockade of Germany caused roughly 750,000 deaths from starvation and disease. In Serbia, with a prewar population of 5 million, about 125,000 were killed in action. But another 650,000 civilians died from disease or hunger—a total of 15 percent of the population lost. Massacres of civilians were carried out on a shocking scale, most notoriously by the Ottoman Turks against the Armenian minority: men, women, and children by the hundreds of thousands were executed, their bodies dumped in mass graves. “Those who were not killed at once were driven through mountains and deserts without food, drink, or shelter,” writes historian David Fromkin. “Turkish Armenia was destroyed, and about half its people perished.”⁶ It was the first true genocide of the twentieth century.⁷

Europeans immediately embarked on a collective program of remembrance. Cemeteries and memorials devoted to the fallen began appearing all over the Continent. At large sites honoring the soldiers who fought at Verdun, Ypres, the Somme, and Meuse Argonne, the crosses and headstones seem to stretch into eternity. In Belgium, at Tyne Cot, the largest British war cemetery in the world, there are nearly twelve thousand graves. Between 1920 and 1923, Britain delivered four thousand headstones a week to France.⁸ Indeed, Britain’s sacrifice is recalled in virtually every cathedral in France, where a cross and tablet bear this inscription: “To the Glory of God and in memory of one million men of the British Empire who died in the Great War and of whom the greatest number rest in France.” Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, hardly a year passed without a ceremony unveiling another imposing monument.⁹

Beginning in 1919, by the king’s proclamation, Great Britain observed two minutes of silence at 11:00 a.m. on November 11, a tradition that continues to this day. In towns where Christian holidays such as Good Friday might be lightly observed, “it is Armistice Day that draws everyone to church.”¹⁰

THE VERTIGO YEARS

The unprecedented butchery of the war produced not only a deep sense of grief and disillusionment. It created a feeling of helplessness, a psychological gloom among the survivors. It is an outlook expressed poignantly in the final pages of Remarque’s memoir. All Quiet on the Western Front describes a generation of soldiers who will return to civilian life “weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope.”¹¹ The mood was acute among writers, artists, and public intellectuals, but affected ordinary middle-class Europeans as well. “Dismay was a mainstream concern,” writes Richard Overy in The Twilight Years. “For the generation living after the end of the First World War the prospect of imminent crisis, a new Dark Age, became a habitual way of looking at the world.”¹²

Book titles tell much of the story: McCabe’s The End of the World (1920); Freeman’s Social Decay and Degeneration (1921); Webb’s The Decay of Capitalist Civilization (1923); Muret’s The Twilight of the White Races (1926); Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1926–28); Kenworthy’s Will Civilization Crash? (1927); Bond’s Racial Decay (1928); Gibbs’s The Day After Tomorrow: What Is Going to Happen to the World? (1928); Riddell’s Sterilization of the Unfit (1929); Burns’s Modern Civilization on Trial (1931); Milner’s The Problem of Decadence (1931); Auden’s The Dance of Death (1933); and Dearmer’s Christianity and the Crisis (1933).

The fear that civilization was under threat was more than a literary trope. The concepts of decline and collapse, of sickness and death, infected nearly every cultural endeavor: intellectual, artistic, literary, scientific, philosophical, and religious.¹³ For these thinkers, the notion of humanity’s moral and spiritual progress lay in the dustbin of history. “We cannot help it if we are born as men of the early winter of full Civilization,” wrote Spengler, “instead of on the golden summit of a ripe Culture.”¹⁴

Although his Catholic faith remained intact, J. R. R. Tolkien later confessed that he “bemoaned the collapse of all my world” that began with his deployment to the Western Front.¹⁵ Here he seemed to have in mind the frustration of his creative and intellectual longings; the war forced him to mostly put aside his imaginative powers just to survive. “It isn’t the tough stuff one minds so much,” he wrote later. “I was pitched into it all, just when I was full of stuff to write, and of things to learn; and never picked it all up again.”¹⁶

Tolkien was demobilized from the British Expeditionary Force on July 16, 1919, and moved back to Oxford with his wife, Edith, and infant son, John. He joined the staff of the New English Dictionary, a cohort of experts at work on an exhaustive dictionary of the English language. Thrust into the role of the philologist, Tolkien excelled. His intellectual energies—his passion for the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic languages—had found a worthy outlet. As the dictionary’s editor, Henry Bradley, described him at the time: “I have no hesitation in saying that I have never known a man of his age who was in these respects his equal.”¹⁷

After serving as a professor of English Language at Leeds University, Tolkien won a professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford in 1925. Nevertheless, his early academic success could not erase the heartache of war. Oxford University lost nearly one in five servicemen in the conflict. From Exeter College, Tolkien’s college, 141 men had perished. Thus he experienced “a time of sorrow and mental suffering.”¹⁸ The loss of so many friends to the war produced, in the words of his children, “a lifelong sadness.”¹⁹

When C. S. Lewis was demobilized from the army on Christmas Eve, 1918, he could hardly believe that the many months of anxiety—of having to return to the battle—had come to an end. “It is almost incredible that the war is over, isn’t it,” he wrote Arthur Greeves, “not to have the ‘going back’ hanging over my head all the time. This time last year I was in the trenches.”²⁰ Lewis immediately left for Belfast to see his father and brother. “It was as if the evil dream of four years had passed away and we were still in the year 1915,” Warnie wrote in his diary. “In the evening there was bubbly for dinner in honor of the event.”²¹

In January 1919, Lewis returned to Oxford, as did more than eighteen hundred ex-servicemen, to resume his studies in the classics at University College. The place was already abuzz with lectures and debates, making Lewis aware of “a great difference between this Oxford and the ghost I knew before.” When the minutes from a 1914 meeting of one of Lewis’s college clubs were read aloud, though, he was taken aback. “I don’t know any little thing that has made me realize the absolute suspension and waste of these years more thoroughly.”²²

He mourned the passing of old friends. Upon hearing the news of the death of his mentor, William Kirkpatrick, Lewis confessed an internal struggle. “He is so indelibly stamped on one’s mind once known, so often present in thought, that he makes his own acceptance of annihilation the more unthinkable,” he wrote his father in 1921. “I have seen death fairly often and never yet been able to find it anything but extraordinary and rather incredible. The real person is so very real, so obviously living and different from what is left that one cannot believe something has turned into nothing.”²³

Though sensitive to religious questions, Lewis remained uncommitted. Still a young man, he already had experienced deep sorrow and struggle, and it left him with a sober, if not gloomy, view of the world. “The early loss of my mother, great unhappiness at school, and the shadow of the last war . . . had given me a pessimistic view of existence,” he wrote years later. “My atheism was based on it.”²⁴ He turned his heart and mind to literature; academic study absorbed him. “He has read more classics than any boy I ever had,” Kirkpatrick once said of him. “He is a student who has no interest except in reading and study.”²⁵ As Lewis expressed his outlook at the time, apart from the people who were important to him, “work is the only thing . . . that is worth caring about.”²⁶

In the winter of 1922, Lewis recorded in his diary a conversation with Dr. John Askins, the brother of Mrs. Moore, known as “the Doc.” Askins had served as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps and was wounded in January 1917. He had come to stay with his sister for a few weeks, and one evening after dinner Lewis and Askins went for a walk. “We went beyond his lodgings to the end of Iffley village to look at the church and the trees in the starlight,” he wrote. “I don’t know how, but we fell to talking of death—on the material side—and all the other horrors hanging over one. The Doc said that if you stopped to think, you couldn’t endure this world for an hour. I left him and walked home.”²⁷

Many postwar thinkers and writers, in fact, were unwilling to endure the world in its new form: a kind of spiritual vertigo took hold, a frantic search for solutions to the human predicament. Freudian psychology, eugenics, socialism, spiritualism, scientism—these and other ideologies were attempts to solve, or explain away, the horrors that seemed to be hanging over the human race. Though these ideas may have originated before the war, by the 1920s they were gaining ground rapidly in Europe and the United States.

UNLEASHING NEW PLAGUES

Indeed, it can be argued that the Great War launched three of the deadliest forces in the history of the West.

The first was Spanish influenza, which originated at a US Army base in Kansas in March 1918. The virus crossed Europe on crowded American troopships and spread throughout the Continent. Before it ran its course, upward of sixty million people—four times the number killed in the war—died from influenza worldwide. “The morticians worked day and night,” recalled Josie Mabel Brown, a US Naval Nurse. “You could never turn around without seeing a big red truck being loaded with caskets for the train station so the bodies could be sent home.”28 In the midst of the outbreak, George Newman, Chief Medical Officer of Britain’s Ministry of Health, proclaimed that influenza had “destroyed more human lives in a few months than did the European war in five years.”²⁹

Like the conflict that helped to launch the epidemic, the influenza of 1918 disproportionately killed young adults: men and women from fifteen to forty years of age, in the prime of their lives.³⁰ Victims displayed “the dreaded blueness” of the face, the sign of pneumonia, of the patient drowning in the fluids building up in the lungs. “This was an illness without precedent,” writes historian Susan Kingsley Kent, “whose etiology and treatment could not be discerned or determined.”³¹ My grandmother, Esther Aiello, who lived in Brooklyn, New York, at the time, would recall those days with a sense of dread. “We used to watch them carry the bodies out of the houses,” she said. “Everyone was afraid.”³²

The second epidemic was atheistic communism. When Russia pulled out of the war in early 1917, the days of the Tsarist regime were numbered. After the Romanov dynasty—which had ruled Russia for three centuries—finally collapsed, the emergence of a “Provisional Government” stirred hopes of a democratic revolution. “Good Lord, it’s so great that Tsar Nicholas and the autocracy no longer exist!” wrote a Russian soldier in his diary. “This is the dawn of a great new Russia, happy and joyful. We soldiers are free men, we are equal, we are all citizens of Great Russia now!”33

Instead, the Bolsheviks, led by Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin, strangled the nascent republican government in its crib. Enemies of the communist revolution—real and imaginary—were purged without conscience. Announced Trotsky: “We shall not enter into the kingdom of socialism in white gloves on a polished floor.”³⁴ Thus a revolution waged in the name of bread, peace, and the proletariat produced a murderous civil war, mass starvation, and political dictatorship. By 1919, Lenin’s policy of War Communism assimilated five million men into the Red Army, assuring the complete dominance of the Communist Party’s Central Committee for decades to come. A profoundly materialistic, atheistic vision established itself in Russia—and with global ambitions.

The Great War seemed to confirm the fatal weakness of democratic capitalism, creating a susceptibility to all kinds of utopian schemes. When the Communist International held its first World Congress in 1919, it drew delegates from twenty-six European countries, as well as the United States. Socialism and communism found eager recruits in Great Britain. Lewis encountered quite a number of them at Oxford, and was disdainful: “I think we have now arrived at the point where a wise man can do no more than wait for the end with what grace he can,” he wrote in August 1920. “And it is hard to summon much grace if you meet as many traitors and cranks in our own class as I do here, hankering for the blessing of Soviet rule at once.”³⁵

The third epidemic was fascism. It began in Italy in the 1920s, in a society that seemed to be in tatters. The war left the country with a startling degree of poverty and one of the highest inflation rates in Europe. The Italians were politically divided and disappointed; the parliamentary government was hopelessly corrupt, the monarchy unpopular. Many soldiers who returned to life as factory workers or clerks or shopkeepers found civilian life empty and uninspiring.

Enter Benito Mussolini. On October 28, 1922, with forty thousand “Blackshirts” under his command, Mussolini marched on Rome. King Victor Emmanuel and his embattled government lost heart. “Il Duce” became the first European leader to dispense with multi-party democracy. “The century of democracy is over,” he proclaimed. “Democratic ideologies have been liquidated.”36 Mussolini was also the first to proclaim a new fascist regime, a word adopted from the Roman fasces, rods of punishment symbolizing the power of the state. As he wrote in his manifesto: “For the Fascist, everything is in the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State.”³⁷

An avid reader of modern thought, Mussolini, for all practical purposes, was an atheist. His first publication was a book called God Does Not Exist. His anti-clericalism, however, would not prevent him from manipulating the church for political purposes. “The influenza virus of 1918 had enveloped the world in weeks and penetrated almost everywhere,” writes historian Paul Johnson. “The virus of force, terror and totalitarianism might prove equally swift and ubiquitous.”³⁸ It did: by the mid-1920s, fascist groups appeared all over Europe, often supported by church leaders. In each case, they brought with them Mussolini’s taste for political violence. Within a decade, fascist or quasi-fascist regimes would emerge in Spain, Portugal, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Greece, Romania—and Germany.

THE CRISIS OF FAITH

Thus the crisis of faith in postwar Europe was multilayered. There was an erosion of what might be called civilizational confidence, a widespread disillusionment with the West and its supposed cultural achievements. Liberal democracy, constitutionalism, capitalism, progressivism—all seemed in a state of near collapse. Wrote Gilbert Murray in The Ordeal of This Generation (1929): “The system which before the war was considered to be essential to civilization, at any rate if civilization was to advance, is now in peril of its life.”39 Since Christianity was considered integral to Europe’s political and economic system, the perceived failure of that system was a spiritual failure as well.

The disintegration of orthodox Christian belief among all classes of Europeans during the 1920s, though easy to overstate, was real enough. “A profound sense of spiritual crisis was the hallmark of that decade,” writes Modris Eksteins. “It affected rural laborers, large landowners, industrialists, factory workers, shop clerks and urban intellectuals.”⁴⁰ There were numerous causes for the weakening of religious faith, but among the most important was the influence of Freudian psychology, which got an immense boost in the postwar years.

The experience of trench warfare produced many cases of mental disorders among soldiers and war veterans. It became known as shell shock: Well-bred men from upper-class or military families, who fought with distinction, who were decorated for valor, suddenly broke. They were neither cowardly nor insane.⁴¹

Mrs. Moore’s brother, “the Doc,” became stricken with the disorder, brought on by his combat experience. During one of his visits, he suffered repeated outbursts of extreme mental torture—he apparently believed he was going to hell—and was sent off to a hospital. Lewis spent many hours with him, trying to comfort him. “Nothing can wring the ghost of a smile from him,” Lewis wrote in his diary. “For painfulness I think this beats anything I’ve seen in my life.”42 The Doc soon died from heart failure. “Isn’t it a damned world,” Lewis wrote to a friend, “and we thought we could be happy with books and music!”⁴³

Freud seemed to offer an honorable explanation for the condition. His methods of psychoanalysis appeared preferable to the brutal alternatives available for curing mental illness: medication, verbal bullying, or electric-shock therapy. “When the electric current was increased,” writes Paul Johnson, “men died under treatment, or committed suicide rather than face more, like victims of the Inquisition.”⁴⁴

When Freud’s first psychiatric clinic opened in Berlin in 1920, it paved the way for his views about human nature, guilt, and God. Freud proved especially attractive to a generation struggling to find meaning in the war’s aftermath. Religious belief was seen as an attempt to protect against suffering, “a delusional remolding of reality.”⁴⁵ With God discredited, meaning must be found “in life itself, in the act of living, in the vitality of the moment.”⁴⁶ Thus, the new psychology legitimized a new hedonism. Within a decade, W. R. Matthews, the Dean of Exeter, complained of “the decay of institutional religion” because of the “incoherence of the Christian message and its apparent contradiction with modern knowledge.”⁴⁷

All of this helped to produce the modern, secular zealot: the revolutionary who seeks to create heaven on earth. Science, psychology, politics, economics, education—any of these disciplines might be enlisted in the cause. At universities such as Oxford, where Tolkien and Lewis established themselves in the 1920s, a cocktail of experimentation and existential doubt was the order of the day.

What Hemingway wrote in A Farewell to Arms captured the attitude of many soldiers and civilians alike. When laid beside the actual names of men and regiments that perished in the conflict, “abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene.”48 As Lewis recalled the scene many years later, the “mental climate of the Twenties” influenced an entire generation of students and future scholars. “None can give to another what he does not possess himself,” he wrote. “A man whose mind was formed in a period of cynicism and disillusion, cannot teach hope or fortitude.”⁴⁹ The verdict was in: the war to make the world safe for democracy, the holy war to advance Christian ideals, was an unholy delusion.

Given these postwar sensibilities, how did Oxford become the incubator for epic literature extolling valor and sacrifice in war?⁵⁰ Why would the works of Tolkien and Lewis, rooted in a narrative of Christian redemption, ever see the light of day?

TOLKIEN THE MYTHMAKER

The first story that Tolkien ever wrote down, as many of his admirers know, can be traced to his days as a soldier. In early 1917, when he was recovering at Great Haywood from trench fever, Tolkien sketched “The Fall of Gondolin,” a tale that would become part of The Silmarillion, the legends of Middle-earth that predate The Lord of the Rings. In “The Fall of Gondolin” we read of the assault by Morgoth, the prime power of evil, against the last elvish stronghold. Although the city is “beleaguered without hope,” there are “deeds of desperate valor” performed by the leaders of the noble houses and their warriors.51 The tale bears the memories of the combat veteran:

The fume of the burning, and the steam of the fair fountains of Gondolin withering in the flame of the dragons of the north, fell upon the vale of Tumladen in mournful mists; and thus was the escape of Tuor and his company aided. . . . Nonetheless they came thither, and beyond hope they climbed, in woe and misery, for the high places were cold and terrible, and they had among them many that were wounded, and women and children.⁵²

Biographer Humphrey Carpenter sees in Tolkien’s work an unexpected response to the First World War. He suggests that the central part of the story borrows from Tolkien’s experiences on the Somme—“or rather to his reaction to those experiences, for the fighting at Gondolin has a heroic grandeur entirely lacking in modern warfare.”⁵³ Years later, Tolkien admitted to his son, Christopher, then a soldier in the Second World War, that his earliest writings were a way of coping with the violence and suffering and anxieties of war. “I sense amongst all your pains (some merely physical) the desire to express your feeling about good, evil, fair, foul in some way: to rationalize it, and prevent it from festering,” he wrote. “In my case it generated Morgoth and the History of the Gnomes.”54 Morgoth became the equivalent of Satan in Middle-earth, while the gnomes were reinvented as the race of elves who stand against him.

It seems that Tolkien, even in the throes of combat, consciously sought to retrieve a martial tradition that would become a casualty alongside all the other casualties of the First World War. Already he was constructing a mythology about England meant to recall its long history of struggle for noble purposes. “I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought,” he once explained.⁵⁵ Thus he set out “to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own.”⁵⁶

Near the heart of this tradition are the concepts of honor and sacrifice for a just cause, themes that would of course animate The Lord of the Rings: “Now is the hour come, Riders of the Mark, sons of Eorl!” exclaims Théoden in The Return of the King. “Foes and fire are before you, and your homes far behind. Yet, though you fight upon an alien field, the glory that you reap there shall be your own for ever.”⁵⁷ As an English soldier serving in France, Tolkien understood the difficulties of fighting “upon an alien field.” He had his own doubts about the meaning of the war, and witnessed some of its fiercest scenes of slaughter. Yet he did not allow them to overwhelm his distinctively moral vision.

Many other authors, however, were moving in exactly the opposite direction.⁵⁸ Wilfred Owen, wounded three times before being killed in battle, wrote relentlessly in opposition to the war. His poems bear titles such as “Insensibility,” “Mental Cases,” “Futility,” and “Disabled.” In “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” there is not a hint of nobility in the death of his fellow soldiers. “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? / Only the monstrous anger of the guns.”59 Owen’s friend, Siegfried Sassoon, who was awarded the Military Cross for bravery, nevertheless came to view the war as an immoral mistake. In the summer of 1917, Sassoon submitted a letter of protest to his commanding officer, calling the purposes of the war “evil and unjust.” His poems are biting satires of the war and its effect on soldiers, with unsparing descriptions of “the land where all is ruin” and the “foundered trench-lines volleying doom for doom.”⁶⁰

Roughly four hundred “war novels” were published in the 1920s and 1930s, many of which helped to create a mythology of war as inherently ignoble and irrational.⁶¹ One of the best-known works is Goodbye to All That, written by Robert Graves, who eagerly enlisted for officer training eight days after England declared war on Germany. Graves survived the Battle of the Somme, but sustained injuries that haunted him for the rest of his life. Less a memoir than a work of farce and theater, Goodbye to All That savages the absurdities and tragedies that seemed to characterize the war:

The boast of every good battalion was that it had never lost a trench; both our Line battalions made it—meaning that they had never been forced out of a trench without recapturing it before the action ended. Capturing a German trench and being unable to hold it for lack of reinforcements did not count. . . . And, towards the end of the War, trenches could be honorably abandoned as being wholly obliterated by bombardment, or because not really trenches at all, but a line of selected shell-craters.⁶²

Tolkien the ex-soldier could not glamorize combat. His letters to his sons during the Second World War, for example, are filled with great foreboding. “The utter stupid waste of war, not only material but moral and spiritual, is so staggering to those who have to endure it,” he wrote. “But so short is human memory and so evanescent are its generations that in only about 30 years there will be few or no people with that direct experience which alone goes really to the heart. The burnt hand teaches most about fire.”63 Lewis was as familiar with the depredations of trench warfare as Tolkien, and one of the aspects of Tolkien’s story that most impressed him was its realism:

This war has the very quality of the war my generation knew. It is all here: the endless, unintelligible movement, the sinister quiet of the front when “everything is now ready,” the flying civilians, the lively, vivid friendships, the background of something like despair and the merry foreground, and such heaven-sent windfalls as a cache of choice tobacco “salvaged from a ruin.”⁶⁴

Nevertheless, Tolkien never intended to write a trench memoir. Instead, he set his mind to create a mythology worthy of his beloved England.⁶⁵ By 1923, he had nearly completed The Book of Lost Tales (what he would later call The Silmarillion), in which he explored the themes of evil, suffering, heroism, and death. An account of the First Age, it is the ancient drama that creates the historical setting for The Lord of the Rings. The thrust of the story is about the fall of the most gifted among the elves; their exile from Valinor (a kind of paradise); their return to Middle-earth, the place of their birth but now under the control of the Enemy; and their struggle against him, “the power of Evil still visibly incarnate.”66 It is here that Middle-earth first took on form and substance and became the battleground for the great conflict depicted in The Lord of the Rings.

Middle-earth is not, Tolkien insisted, an imaginary world, but rather our world—with its ancient truths and sorrows—set in a remote past. Indeed, any legends cast in the form of a supposed primitive history of this world, he said, must reckon with the tragic reality of human frailty.⁶⁷ As we’ll see, Tolkien envisioned Middle-earth as the embodiment of a world struggling with the consequences of its Fall from Grace. “The theater of my tale is this earth, the one in which we now live. . . . The essentials of that abiding place are all there.”⁶⁸

LEWIS IN THE VALLEY OF DOUBT

C. S. Lewis might well have taken the path of other war authors and embraced the genre of irony and doubt. His earliest war writings suggest he was well on his way. Lewis’s first published work, called “Death in Battle,” appeared in Reveille magazine in 1919. The poem describes “the brutal, crowded faces around me, that in their toil have grown / into the faces of devils—yea, even as my own.”⁶⁹ The work appeared in the same issue containing poems by Sassoon and Graves. In the same year Lewis published a collection of poems, written from 1915–1918, titled Spirits in Bondage. They embody an almost existential view of human life, ensnared in a cruel and unforgiving cosmos. In a letter to a friend, Lewis explained the unifying theme: “that nature is wholly diabolical and malevolent and that God, if he exists, is outside of and in opposition to the cosmic arrangements.”⁷⁰

In “Ode for New Year’s Eve,” Lewis articulated the disenchantment, the sense that something has gone terribly wrong with all the supposed achievements of the West. The age of progress and innocence has vanished, he wrote, as if consumed wholesale in the furnace of the Great War:

And madness is come over us and great and little wars.⁷¹

Lewis’s reference to “the death of nations” was not far off the mark. By the end of the First World War, entire empires had essentially collapsed—the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Tsarist Russia, and the German Empire—touching off revolutions and colonial rebellions around the world. In the process, a frightening share of young men were wiped out by death, emotionally debilitated by trench warfare, or permanently crippled. A small island nation, Britain nonetheless lost close to a million of its citizens. “The effect of the war in Britain was catastrophic,” writes Paul Fussell. “A whole generation was destroyed that might have furnished the country’s jurists, scholars, administrators, and political leaders.”⁷²

Neither can the “madness” of which Lewis wrote be denied. The moral norms of European civilization seemed to perish along with the human casualties. Although war always involves great suffering, something had changed during the years of 1914–1918. “Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa became one vast battlefield on which after years of struggle not armies but nations broke and ran,” observed Winston Churchill. “When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and these were of doubtful utility.”73

The sheer destructive power of the war, the unimaginable number of dead and wounded, the apocalyptic hopes and claims of the participants, and the apparent futility of the outcome—all of this instigated a new season of religious doubts and experimentation.

Indeed, it is hard to overstate the spiritual crisis that overcame many young men and women, particularly among the intellectuals, throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Swiss theologian Karl Barth had been appalled at the wholehearted embrace of Germany’s war by the theologians, and at what he saw as the confusion of enlightened culture with the gospel. The Bible, Barth insisted, contained “divine thoughts about men, not human thoughts about God.” Barth savaged the utopian schemes of liberal Christianity in his monumental Epistle to the Romans (1921). His work “burst like a bombshell on the playground of the European theologians.”⁷⁴

Nevertheless, Barth’s “neo-orthodoxy,” as it came to be called, was being rejected by elite opinion throughout Europe and, increasingly, the United States. It came as a thunderbolt to the literati, for example, when T. S. Eliot was baptized and confirmed into the Church of England in 1927. How could the author of The Wasteland find solace in such a primitive superstition? How could a member of the literary set, London’s Bloomsbury Group, commit such an act of intellectual betrayal?⁷⁵ Virginia Woolf expressed the indignation of her peers in a letter to a friend:

I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic believer in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.⁷⁶

The obscenity of belief in God: such was the tide of elite opinion in much of postwar Europe. To many of the best and brightest, Christianity appeared to lack any explanatory power. It could neither account for the internecine conflict of the supposed Christian nations of Europe, nor offer a realistic hope of achieving a more peaceful and just global order. Rather, the church of the modern age seemed tethered to destructive doctrines and medieval superstitions.

“We find at the present day among the educated classes . . . a great output of new and more or less fantastic superstitions drawn indifferently from the mysterious East or the neurotic West,” wrote Gilbert Murray in The Ordeal of This Generation (1928). “Also a large and outspoken rejection of all religion and particularly of all morality.”⁷⁷ Nietzsche had hailed this latter prospect at the end of the nineteenth century: “Perhaps the most solemn concepts which have occasioned the most strife and suffering, the concepts of ‘God’ and ‘sin,’ will one day seem to us of no more importance than a child’s toy and a child’s troubles seem to an old man.”⁷⁸

THE “GREAT WAR” WITH OWEN BARFIELD

Thus it is no surprise that postwar Oxford was becoming a hotbed of agnosticism, religious indifference, and experimentation. C. S. Lewis found himself entangled in an “unholy muddle” of competing philosophies, from psychoanalysis to rationalism. “And all the time . . . there’s the danger of falling back into the most childish superstitions, or of running into dogmatic materialism to escape them.”⁷⁹ As biographer George Sayer sums up the mood: “Most tutors encouraged their pupils above all to doubt.”⁸⁰

A lively specimen was Owen Barfield, a war veteran studying English literature whom Lewis met in 1919. Although Lewis agreed with Owen on almost nothing—“he has read all the right books but got the wrong thing out of every one”—a lifelong admiration and friendship began. Barfield became a devotee of “anthroposophy,” a spiritual philosophy developed by Rudolf Steiner, which envisioned mankind as an integral part of the creative thought and evolution of the world. Lewis rejected Barfield’s anthroposophy as a kind of Gnosticism, and the two initiated what they called a “Great War” of intellectual debate. It was another relationship that would alter the course of Lewis’s intellectual and spiritual life:

He is as fascinating (and infuriating) as a woman. When you set out to correct his heresies, you find he forsooth has decided to correct yours! And then you go at it, hammer and tongs, far into the night, night after night, or walking through fine country that neither gives a glance to, each learning the weight of the other’s punches, and often more like mutually respectful enemies than friends. Actually (though it never seems so at the time) you modify one another’s thought; out of this perpetual dogfight a community of mind and a deep affection emerge. But I think he changed me a good deal more than I him.⁸¹

In their “perpetual dogfight”—a phrase lifted from the war, of course—Barfield influenced Lewis in at least two profoundly important ways. He persuaded Lewis to abandon his “chronological snobbery,” the assumption that the dominant intellectual fashion of the day makes every mode of thought from the past either suspect or irrelevant. This philosophical pose, given birth by the Enlightenment, grew to maturity after the conflagration of the First World War, into which so many cherished Victorian ideals had vanished.

Barfield also challenged the scientific and materialist view of reality typical among Oxford dons. The “old beliefs” central to Christianity were languishing after a radical assault from various quarters. Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud—in one form or another they and others mocked the notion of the sacred dignity of the individual. A great many educated Europeans and Americans had come to believe that the “aesthetic” experiences—our sense of morality, the longing for joy, and the love of beauty—were essentially meaningless. Though these intellectual movements could be hostile toward one another, Lewis realized they were united in their hatred of the “immortal longings” of ordinary human beings. “These people seemed to me to be condemning what they did not understand.”82

Barfield’s spiritualism, for all its eccentricities, appeared to offer a better explanation for these experiences than that of the materialist. He helped Lewis to consider the possibility that our moral intuitions, our aesthetic experiences, could lead us to objective truth: imagination might be as good a guide to reality as rational argument.

In a letter dated September 25, 1920, Lewis admitted to another Oxford friend that his studies in philosophy were leading him away from dogmatic skepticism. Addressed to Leo Baker, a pilot in the Royal Air Force during the war, the letter revealed a growing frustration with purely materialistic views of the universe. “I have no business to object to the universe as long as I have nothing to offer myself,” he explained.

You will be interested to hear that in the course of my philosophy—on the existence of matter—I have had to postulate some sort of God as the last objectionable theory: but of course we know nothing. At any rate we don’t know what the real Good is, and consequently I have stopped defying heaven: it can’t know less than I, so perhaps things really are alright. This, to you, will be old news, but perhaps you will see it in me as a sign of grace.⁸³

By 1925 Lewis had cast off the stern atheism of his younger days. “It will be a comfort to me all my life to know that the scientist and the materialist have not the last word,” he wrote, “that Darwin and Spencer, undermining ancestral beliefs, stand themselves on a foundation of sand.”⁸⁴ Lewis’s postwar friendships prevented him from adopting the moral indifference—what he called the “shallow pessimisms”—so typical of his generation.85 They pressed upon him questions for which he had no credible answer. “Now that I have found, and am still finding more and more the element of truth in the old beliefs, I feel I cannot dismiss even their dreadful side so cavalierly,” he wrote to Arthur Greeves. “There must be something in it: only what?”⁸⁶

WHEN MYTH BECOMES FACT

This is the question that lies behind the famous late-night debate between C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien in September 1931. It was a remarkable moment: a probing discussion of ancient myths and an ancient faith, it nonetheless speaks to the mystery of the modern predicament. Their exchange—an encounter between intensely creative minds over the meaning of Christianity—should be ranked as one of the most transformative conversations of the twentieth century.

Lewis was elected as a fellow and tutor in English Language and Literature at Oxford’s Magdalen College in May 1925, the same year that Tolkien was elected a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College. The two met for the first time a year later and realized that, despite their different approaches to literature, they had many shared interests and authors, including an attraction to mythologies. When Tolkien started a club among the dons to read Icelandic sagas, Lewis happily joined. It was called the Coalbiters—from the Icelandic Kolbitar—a term meaning “men who lounge so close to the fire in winter that they bite the coal.”

During the next several years, as they met together, Lewis and Tolkien realized that they shared a love for “Northernness,” the mythologies and fairy stories they had first encountered in the works of William Morris and George MacDonald and other authors.87 In a letter to Arthur Greeves dated December 3, 1929, Lewis described one of their exchanges: “I was up till 2:30 on Monday, talking to the Anglo Saxon professor Tolkien, who came back with me to College from a society and sat discoursing of the gods and giants of Asgard for three hours, then departing in the wind and rain—who could turn him out, for the fire was bright and the talk good.”

A deep friendship was taking root. And yet for all their mutual interests in literature, the two men could not agree on the nature of myth and its relationship to belief in God. The argument came to a head on Saturday evening, September 19, 1931.

Lewis had invited Tolkien and another friend, Hugo Dyson, to dine with him at Magdalen College. Dyson, a war veteran, had fought at the Battle of the Somme and was severely injured at the Battle of Passchendaele at Ypres. He was named a Lecturer in English at Reading University. Lewis liked him immensely at their first meeting, describing him as “a man who really loves truth: a philosopher and a religious man.”⁸⁸ After the meal, Lewis took his friends to Addison’s Walk, a tree-lined footpath that snakes along the River Cherwell near Magdalen College. As they walked they discussed and debated their ideas about metaphor and myth.⁸⁹

To Lewis, myths might be beautiful, they might charm our imaginations, but they were lies: inventions that contain no objective truth about the world. This is what troubled Lewis about Christianity. It was like the Norse myth of the dying god Balder, a lovely fiction, “one mythology among many.” Here was the “recognized scientific account” of the growth of religion that Lewis had written about to Arthur Greeves. It is the idea that “most legends have a kernel of fact in them somewhere,” but enthusiasts transform the kernel into a glorified sun god, corn deity, or supernatural messiah. Lewis’s critique represented the dominant academic view of religion by the turn of the century:

When I say “Christ” of course I mean the mythological being into whom he was afterwards converted by popular imagination. . . . That the man Yeshua or Jesus did actually exist, is as certain as that the Buddha did actually exist: Tacitus mentions his execution in the Annals. But all the other tomfoolery about virgin birth, magic healings, apparitions and so forth is on exactly the same footing as any other mythology.90

Tolkien’s view was exactly the opposite: myths did not originate with man, but with God. They are his means of communicating at least a portion of his truth to the world. Because men and women come from God, Tolkien argued, their highest ideals and longings come from him as well. It is not only man’s abstract reasoning, but also his imaginative inventions that find their origin in God.⁹¹ As such, they suggest an aspect of divine truth.

Mythmaking, what Tolkien calls “mythopoeia,” is a way of fulfilling God’s purposes as the Creator. By inventing a myth—by populating a world with elves and orcs, dragons and witches, gods and goddesses—the storyteller tries to retrieve the world he knew before man’s fall from grace. “There was an Eden on this very unhappy earth,” Tolkien explained many years later. “We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of ‘exile.’ ”⁹² The mythmaker, fired by the sense of exile and the desire to return to his authentic home, reflects “a splintered fragment of the true light.”93

Recounting their conversation in his poem “Mythopoeia,” Tolkien insisted that pagan myths were not simply “lies,” as Lewis claimed, but contained intimations of the truth about God and the world he has made, however disfigured:

The heart of man is not compound of lies,

But draws some wisdom from the only Wise

And still recalls him. Though now long estranged,

Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.

Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned,

And keeps the rags of lordship once he owned.⁹⁴

The friends finally returned to Lewis’s study, where they talked until 3:00 a.m. The subject was Christianity. Lewis did not understand the meaning of the central teachings of the faith: the concepts known as “the blood of the Lamb” and “the atonement.” How could the life and death of Jesus have “saved the world”? How could the sacrificial death of someone two thousand years ago help us now? It all seemed irrelevant and incomprehensible.⁹⁵

Tolkien answered him immediately, and in his answer he revealed the core of his own philosophy as a writer and as a Christian thinker.⁹⁶ Yes, the story of Jesus the Christ is a kind of myth: it is the authentic story of the Dying God who returns to life to rescue his people from sin and death and bring them to “the Blessed Land,” where “though they make anew, they make no lie.”⁹⁷ The difference between Christianity and all the pagan myths is that this Dying God actually entered into history, lived a real life, and died a real death.

“Do you mean,” Lewis asked, “that the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth that works on us in the same way as the others, but a myth that has really happened? In that case, I begin to understand.”98

Years later, Lewis explained that his understanding of the nature of myth was crucial to his conversion. He finally concluded that paganism was “only a prophetic dream” and perhaps one of the “good dreams” that God sends to men and women to help guide them in their quest. Lewis’s own quest would lead him back to the life of Jesus, to the Gospels, which he had begun to read regularly in their original Greek. “If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in all of literature was just like this,” he wrote. “Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact.”⁹⁹

Tolkien finally excused himself to return home, while Lewis and Dyson continued to talk until 4:00 a.m. An intellectual barrier to faith had collapsed. Twelve days later Lewis confessed to Arthur Greeves: “I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a great deal to do with it.”¹⁰⁰

THE GREAT COLLABORATION

Lewis would devote much of the rest of his professional life to explaining Christianity to an uncomprehending world. In both his fiction and prose, in works such as The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and Mere Christianity, Lewis traced the movement of a human soul from doubt to belief. By his own account, there were many friendships and authors who played a part in his journey, his “Pilgrim’s Regress.”101 His conversation with Tolkien, though, was the immediate human link in the chain. It left him with no rationalizations to fall back upon. “Everything that I had labored so hard to expel from my own life seemed to have flared up and met me in my best friends,” he wrote. “Everyone and everything had joined the other side.”¹⁰²

Lewis’s conversion was not only deep and vital, it was “the chief watershed in his life,” writes biographer Walter Hooper. “There was no nook or cranny of his being that it did not eventually reach and transform.”¹⁰³ His faith was nurtured by friendship: he and Tolkien formed the nucleus of a small group of writers—nearly all of them serious Christians—who met weekly in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen. They gathered to read aloud and critique each other’s works. “Theoretically to talk about literature,” Lewis explained, “but in fact nearly always to talk about something better.”¹⁰⁴ They called themselves “the Inklings,” those who “dabble in ink.”¹⁰⁵

It was in this setting that Lewis tested his first effort at science fiction as a vehicle for Christian truth. A pupil of his took seriously the dream of interplanetary colonization, which Lewis saw as a scientific attempt to defeat death—and as rival to Christianity. The result was Out of the Silent Planet (1938), the first of a science-fiction trilogy awash in religious themes and imagery. Lewis had read the novel aloud to the Inklings, where, according to Tolkien, it was “highly approved.”¹⁰⁶ The book helped to launch Lewis’s career as a popular writer. Yet without Tolkien’s letter of praise to a publisher—much of it was dismissed as “bunk” by a reader assigned to the manuscript—the story might never have seen the light of day. “I read the story in the original manuscript and was so enthralled that I could do nothing else until I had finished it,” Tolkien said. “I at any rate should have bought this story at almost any price if I had found it in print.”107

Early reviews of the book were mostly positive, but Lewis was stunned to realize that almost no one discerned in it the biblical doctrine of the fall, which anchors the entire story. “If only there were someone with a richer talent and more leisure, I believe this great ignorance might be a help to the evangelization of England,” he wrote to a friend. “Any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people’s minds under cover of romance without their knowing it.”¹⁰⁸ Here is an insight Lewis surely encountered in his many conversations with J. R. R. Tolkien.

At the same time, Lewis’s influence on his friend would be profound. Tolkien had long believed that the “fairy-story” was really a genre for adults and “one for which a starving audience exists.”¹⁰⁹ But that belief remained an untested proposition until Tolkien shared his early work with Lewis, who found it compelling. “If they won’t write the kind of books we want to read,” Lewis told his friend, “we shall have to write them ourselves.”¹¹⁰

Eventually they made good on that pledge. Tolkien began work on The Hobbit, a story set “long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green.”¹¹¹ Its chief character is Bilbo Baggins, a small, half-elf creature known as a hobbit. He displays the virtues and vices of a middle-class Englishman. He has a comfortable life and shows no interest in adventures: “I can’t think what anybody sees in them.” Explained Tolkien: “The Hobbits are just rustic English people, made small in size because it reflects the generally small reach of their imagination—not the small reach of their courage or latent power.”¹¹²

By the time The Hobbit was completed, Bilbo Baggins had endured a perilous quest through Middle-earth and joined an army of elves, men, and dwarves to face goblins and wild wolves in a final terrible battle. “Victory now vanished from hope. They had only stemmed the first onslaught of the black tide.”113

Following the book’s publication in 1937, Lewis praised it as “the adaptation to children of part of a huge private mythology of a most serious kind: the whole cosmic struggle as he sees it but mediated through an imaginary world.”¹¹⁴ This was precisely the task that Lewis himself took up in The Chronicles of Narnia, a series of stories for children about a hidden world caught up in a great contest between Good and Evil.

The instant popularity of Tolkien’s fairy tale set him to work on “a new story about Hobbits.” It is doubtful, though, that Tolkien would have finished his masterwork, The Lord of the Rings, without the enthusiasm and support of his friend. The two spent many hours in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College, with Tolkien reading chapters out loud to a captive audience. “C. S. L. had a passion for hearing things read aloud, a power of memory for things received in that way,” Tolkien explained, “and also a facility in extempore criticism.”¹¹⁵ Tolkien once recalled a lunch at which Lewis browbeat him to pick up the work again, which had stalled for quite some time. “The indefatigable man read me part of a new story!” Tolkien said. “But he is putting the screw on me to finish mine. I needed some pressure, and shall probably respond.”¹¹⁶ Tolkien’s book dragged on for years, unfinished.

“I have drained the rich cup and satisfied a long thirst,” Lewis wrote to Tolkien after reading the typescript of The Lord of the Rings. “No romance can repel the charge of ‘escapism’ with such confidence. If it errs, it errs in precisely the opposite direction: the sickness of hope deferred and the merciless piling up of odds against the heroes are near to being too painful.”117 Reflecting later on Lewis’s long engagement with his story, Tolkien’s gratitude is manifest. “The unpayable debt” he owed to Lewis, he said, was his “sheer encouragement”—over many years—to keep on. “He was for long my only audience,” Tolkien explained. “Only from him did I ever get the idea that my ‘stuff’ could be more than a private hobby. But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more I should never have brought The L. of the R. to a conclusion.”¹¹⁸

Their collaboration, and the literary efforts which grew from it, could hardly come at a moment of greater crisis in the West. The generation of Tolkien and Lewis had passed through the most devastating conflict in history—with almost nothing to show for it. Nearly every noble belief and aspiration of their society seemed a falsehood, a fool’s errand, a child’s nursery tale. The Enlightenment project, with its idolization of reason, had run its course—straight into “that Ditch into which the blind hath led the blind in all ages, and have both there miserably perished.”¹¹⁹

A world that once felt as solid and dependable as granite had become a land of shadows. Philip Gibbs, a journalist and novelist who served as one of Britain’s official correspondents during the war, witnessed the collapse up close. “They had been taught to believe that the whole object of life was to reach out to beauty and love, and that mankind, in its progress to perfection, had killed the beast instinct, cruelty, blood-lust, the primitive, savage law of survival by tooth and claw and club and ax,” he wrote. “All poetry, all art, all religion had preached this gospel and this promise. Now that ideal was broken like a china vase dashed to the ground.”¹²⁰

THE MORAL IMAGINATION

The great achievement of Tolkien and Lewis is the creation of mythic and heroic figures who nevertheless make a claim upon our concrete and ordinary lives. Through them we are challenged to examine our deepest desires, to shake off our doubts, and to join in the struggle against evil. For in their voice is a warning: a call to “do the deed at hand” no matter what the cost. In their presence is strength: the grace to “cast aside regret and fear,” grace beyond all hope.121 These are the great themes that dominate their works and continue to delight generations of readers.

In The Lord of the Rings, it is Gandalf who summons men to battle, whose presence demands a response of the heart. “ ‘And now,’ said the wizard, turning his back to Frodo, ‘the decision lies with you. But I will always help you.’ He laid his hand on Frodo’s shoulder. ‘I will help you bear this burden, as long as it is yours to bear. But we must do something, soon. The Enemy is moving.’ ”¹²²

In The Chronicles of Narnia, it is Aslan whose voice must be reckoned with like no other, a voice that fills every soul with fear or delight. “Aslan threw up his shaggy head, opened his mouth, and uttered a long, single note; not very loud, but full of power. Polly’s heart jumped in her body when she heard it. She felt sure that it was a call, and that anyone who heard that call would want to obey it and (what’s more) would be able to obey it, however many worlds and ages lay between.”¹²³