If poetic serendipity is the language of the Holy Spirit, then perhaps nowhere is it more evident than in friendship. Friendship requires our cooperation, yes. We must choose it, and choose to remain in it. But it requires also that mysterious arrangement of time and circumstance. True friendship always feels like a miracle, probably because that is precisely what it is.
Perhaps no friendship in the 20th century illustrated this better than the one between J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Much has been written about it, so much that it is almost inconceivable that anyone could break new ground on the topic. And yet that is exactly what Joseph Loconte has accomplished in his new book, The War for Middle-Earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933–1945.
In this meticulously researched study, Loconte brings to vivid life the trauma—personal and civilizational—that shaped both men and their work. It is almost impossible for us to imagine today what that time must have been like. In just over two decades, the world changed forever. First, in the great cataclysm of World War I, Christendom’s suicide. Then, in the interwar period, with its poisonous totalitarian ideologies, Bolshevism and fascism, which haunt us to this day. And finally, in the catastrophe of World War II, which claimed the lives of some 80 million people and left so much of the world a smoking ruin.
Both Tolkien and Lewis were veterans of the Great War, where they served in the killing fields of the Somme. Statistically speaking, the odds of any two individual soldiers making it out alive were well below 50%. Now consider the odds that our two survivors—who did not know each other and came from radically different backgrounds—might both end up as Oxford dons afterward. That they might become the closest of friends. That they might, through that friendship, erect the 20th century’s most successful defense against atheism and despair. That their books would go on to sell nearly a billion copies combined and remain undiminished in relevance and popularity a century later. The improbability of it boggles the imagination until one remembers that the universe is governed not by chance but by poetic serendipity.
Loconte describes it thus about midway through his book: “The story of the friendship between Tolkien and Lewis is a story of how two men helped each other to emerge from their own private darkness and climb back into the daylight.” This is certainly true, but it is only part of the story, as Loconte makes clear. There were no doubt millions of friendships that emerged from the shared trauma of the Great War, friendships that soothed the wounds of those involved but that did not give birth to The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, The Abolition of Man, The Hobbit, and Mere Christianity. These friendships are not the subject of books, but echoes of them perhaps survive in the private, oral histories of families. What distinguishes the friendship of Tolkien and Lewis is the profound effect it has had upon the world. “Given the truly global influence of their writing,” Loconte says, “it is hard to think of a more consequential friendship in the 20th century.”
It is in describing the redemptive and purposeful nature of the friendship that Loconte is at his finest. He introduces us to Lewis as a young atheist whose sympathies lie with Milton’s Satan. We see a glimpse of the acid that would later be transformed into holy water in Lewis’s wartime poem “Satan Speaks”:
Come let us curse our Master ere we die,
For all our hopes in endless ruin lie.
The good is dead. Let us curse God most high …
Yet I will not bow down to thee nor love thee,
For looking in my own heart I can prove thee,
And now this frail, bruised being is above thee.
We are still far, far away from the version of Lewis who would use his own experience of bitter atheism in service of God. And yet even at his lowest, Loconte makes it clear that Lewis’s atheism was not of the dismissive, unthinking variety. In another poem during this period, Lewis talks of seeking after a “a sacred court, hidden high upon the mountains,” where “lovely folk breathe in another air and drink of a purer fountain.” He lamented in a letter to his brother, Warnie, that “the trouble about God is that he is like a person who never acknowledges one’s letters and so, in time, one comes to the conclusion either that he does not exist or that you have got the address wrong.” He had an instinctive loathing, however, for the modernist fatalism of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Lewis, it seems, had God on the mind all along. He just wasn’t sure he liked him.
He was drawn instead to another, older work that centered on the wroth and ruin of war: The Aeneid. In Virgil’s classic, Lewis saw the truth of man’s fallen nature but also the possibility of redemption. “It is the nature of a vocation to appear to men in the double character of a duty and a desire, and Virgil does justice to both,” he wrote. “To follow the vocation does not ensure happiness: but once it has been heard, there can be no happiness for those who do not follow.”
A short stroll from Lewis’s rooms at Oxford, J.R.R. Tolkien was serving as professor of Anglo-Saxon language and literature at Pembroke College. A recusant English Catholic whose faith remained undimmed through the trenches of the Somme and the ivied halls of Oxford, Tolkien had a passion for the epic literature of Northern Europe: Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, the Sagas and the Eddas. He loved the very sound of them; Loconte tells us that he was famous among his students for beginning his lectures reciting from these works in a sonorous, transporting voice. But like Lewis, Tolkien was drawn also to the theory of courage and duty encoded in them.
The two men met for the first time at a faculty conference in 1926. Loconte tells us it was a rocky beginning, for they were on opposite sides of a curriculum debate. For his part, Lewis remembered the meeting as follows: “At my first coming into the world, I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at my first coming into the English faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both.” It took several years for the friendship to blossom. It did so over the course of a single, late-night conversation on their shared love of ancient mythology. It was then, Lewis realized, that he and Tolkien were travelers “upon the same secret road.”
Soon after, they began meeting regularly—the beginning of the group that would later be known as The Inklings. Lewis, though now open to Christianity in theory, remained a kind of agnostic deist. It was Tolkien who finally brought him home. The very myths they both loved, Tolkien argued, were not empty of meaning and truth. Rather, they offered “a glimpse” of God’s redemptive purpose, “a splintered fragment of the true light.” As Loconte puts it, “no other individual in the world could have spoken so decisively into Lewis’s mind and shattered his misconceptions about Christianity.” It was no small victory. In bringing Lewis to the faith, Tolkien prepared the way for the single greatest Christian apologist of the last 200 years.
I do not wish to spoil the reader on Loconte’s splendid detail of the growth of their friendship. Over the course of the next decade, the two men grew ever closer. Tolkien was uncharacteristically effusive, later writing that “but for [Lewis’s] interest and unceasing eagerness for more, I should never have brought The Lord of the Rings to a conclusion.” In this, Lewis played the role of the good faithful servant in the parable of the talents. No work of 20thcentury literature did more to open people to the possibility of faith and transcendent truth than Tolkien’s masterpiece.
The men bonded in part over a shared loathing of both communism and fascism, along with the myriad social pathologies of the time. “Every age has its own outlook on the world, a mixture of clarity and blindness,” he wrote. “Yet the moral blindness of the 20th century represented something entirely novel: ideologies that threatened to destroy the foundations of civilized life.” Lewis continued: “The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.” In Loconte’s beautiful description (recalling Russell Kirk), Lewis and Tolkien fought shoulder-to-shoulder in the trenches against “the enemies of the permanent things.”
They believed, as Loconte shows us, that “what happened in the great books was of equal significance to what happened in life.”
Looking at the cultural landscape today, one cannot help but notice certain parallels. Men, we are told, do not read. Universal themes must be purged in favor of tedium concerning identity and gender. Good and evil are illusions, the prescription for which is a thoroughgoing course in “grimdark” of the sort proffered by George R.R. Martin: worlds in which light fades, heroes fail, and transcendent meaning is laughably naive. In the world of speculative fiction (which encompasses both science fiction and fantasy), we are treated to a constant stream of same-voice cynicism and snark. Gene Wolfe once praised Tolkien as “the best introduction to the mountains.” The mountains being, of course, the high vistas of eternal truths and permanent things. Today’s fantasy and science fiction, I’m sorry to say, is a smog designed to make one doubt whether the mountains are even real.
This would come as no surprise to either Tolkien or Lewis, who shared the view that the tumults and conflicts of their time—however dreadful in their particulars—were but a part of a broader war, an eternal war, the only war: that of Lucifer against God for every human heart. Tolkien captured this in a much-quoted passage from The Lord of the Rings:
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
But where, today, are our Tolkien and Lewis? Perhaps they are out there, toiling quietly in the vineyard, separate from the world of mainstream publishing and therefore invisible to it. Lewis once said that “every real Friendship is a sort of secession, even a rebellion. … The little knots of friends who turn their backs on the ‘World’ are those who really transform it.”
If they are, then their eventual discovery will be what Tolkien called eucatastrophe—the outbreak of a sudden and miraculous grace. Eucatastrophe, too, is the work of the Holy Spirit. It is joy unhoped for. It is redemption and transcendence. It is the beating heart of every fairy story and the pregnant possibility of every friendship.
Loconte gives us a taste of this hope toward the end of his book, when he again quotes Russell Kirk: “Imagination, given time, does rule the world.”
The War for Middle-Earth is more than a literary biography—it is an antidote to the grimdark spirit of our own day. In recovering how Tolkien and Lewis answered despair with beauty, truth, and friendship, Loconte points us back toward the mountains. They still stand, after all. They are permanent things, even when hidden, for a time, behind the gray rain-curtain of this world.
