Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

For a certain group, JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis are such a part of the literary, imaginative, and spiritual landscape that their insights are taken for granted. The timeless qualities of their work have divorced it from any consideration of the time in which the two men lived and wrote. Familiarity has bred contempt. What Joseph Loconte attempts in A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War is to place Tolkien and Lewis firmly back into their historical context, to throw their work into relief by looking at the world in which they wrote. Central to all of this is the war. The two men, who became fast friends as professors at Oxford, would seem to have had little in common. Lewis was an Irishman of Ulster Protestant extraction and, by the time he went to war, a confirmed atheist. Tolkien was a devout cradle Catholic reared in England. For both men, the experience that most shaped them was the war. Loconte begins the book by examining the world into which they were born and through which they approached the war. He gives time to explaining the Idea of Progress, the belief in the steady upward march of Europe’s scientific, enlightened culture, and its embodiment in social policies like eugenics. He looks into Freudian psychology and the marriage of the era’s Christianity to nationalism, a union that produced war fever and the demonization of the enemy. Scientific progress, the devaluation of human life, disregard for the soul and spirit, and the prostitution of religion to the nation combined to make World War I uniquely ferocious. Into this war marched millions of young men, and Loconte by no means ignores the rest in his focus on Tolkien and Lewis. He draws examples of how these young men reacted from classic sources like Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Ernst Jünger, and Erich Maria Remarque. Their testimonials demonstrate the way the war cruelly, almost mechanically, ground down the spirits of the men sent into its trenches. Tolkien and Lewis both suffered. Tolkien served on the Somme, one of the notorious meat grinders of the war, and was eventually invalided out of the fight. Lewis arrived later and, despite distinguished service including the capture of a number of German prisoners, was also wounded and spent months in hospital, out of the action. This experience was, for both of them as for many others, a source of bonding after the war. References to it in their letters and papers are numerous; it formed part of a shared vocabulary that informed and gave body to their imaginations. Loconte does an excellent job of demonstrating this by drawing on their writings, not just well-known works like The Hobbit or The Chronicles of Narnia, but their academic work, letters, and diaries. I have to admit that I was skeptical about some of this at first, as a few of the examples seemed to be little more than superficial comparisons of events in, for example, The Lord of the Rings to conditions on the Somme. But Loconte digs deep and provides explicit comparisons from the writers themselves. Tolkien is particularly forthcoming about the influence of the war on his fiction: “My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflection of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself” (xvii). And again, “The Dead Marshes . . . owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme” (74). But beyond simply providing inspiration for specific scenes or landscapes in their work, the war gave Tolkien and Lewis thematic material, friendship, loss, and the desperate courage that makes up real heroism foremost among them. Both men lost friends in the war. Virtually the entirety of a prewar club to which Tolkien had belonged was killed off one by one in the fighting. Lewis saw an older sergeant, a man who had become “almost like a father” to the young officer, senselessly killed in what may have been a friendly fire incident. Like Tolkien, he lost many of his school friends and fellow officers as well: "Nearly all my friends in the Battalion are gone" (99-100). It was well after the war in the quiet environs of Oxford that Tolkien and Lewis met and formed their famous friendship. Under the influence of Tolkien and others, Lewis--by now an agnostic--moved to a vague theism and finally Christianity. It was this friendship that made both men so productive and gave the world their still-beloved and timeless work. Loconte’s book has two great strengths. First, it vividly depicts the reality of World War I combat in general and the actions in which Tolkien and Lewis were involved specifically. I’ve read a number of biographies of both men, and they tend to skimp on detail about their combat experience. (I assume this is because most of these bios were written by literary scholars; in addition to being a fan of Tolkien and Lewis, I’m a military historian, so this book scratched an itch I’ve been feeling for a while.) Like the rest of their generation, Tolkien and Lewis were shaped in profound ways by the horror of the war, and Loconte does an excellent job of showing that. Second, the focus in the early portions of the book on the world before the war, and the comparison of Tolkien and Lewis’s experiences to those of others of their generation, makes their work fresh again. Loconte shows just how countercultural these familiar men really were, moving against the intellectual, social, and spiritual currents of their day--scientism, chronological snobbery, and the denial of goodness, heroism, and truth. Their works aren’t "relevant" or "timeless" because they appeal to a generic Christian audience, their work is timeless because they were men who looked outside their ruined generation for the eternal and did their best to reflect that back into the world through the imagination. This, to me, is the central insight of Loconte’s book, and that alone makes it well worth reading. A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War is an excellent introduction to an often overlooked aspect of the lives of two literary and intellectual giants and their place in history. Highly recommended.