J.R.R Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: When Hope is Born

Many of us were introduced to the fantasy genre through The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. And how many contemporary fantasy authors have tried to emulate The Lord of the Rings? Yet try as they might, no one has been quite able to capture the way in which readers are drawn into the worlds of Narnia and Middle-Earth. I would propose that it's Lewis and Tolkien' s themes of hope, honor and fellowship which continue to inspire generations of fantasy lovers. And yet, these stories of hope came from places of hardship beyond what many readers in the modern Western World could imagine.

Early Years

When Tolkien was four years old, his father died of rheumatic fever. When he was twelve, his mother died of acute diabetes. Likewise, at the age of nine, C.S. Lewis lost his mother to stomach cancer. Fans of The Chronicles of Narnia can note how The Magician's Nephew involves a young boy struggling with the impending death of his mother.

In July of 1914, World War One began, and Great Britain entered into the conflict the following month. Tolkien graduated Oxford the next year and joined the army. In 1916, he was granted leave to marry his childhood sweetheart, Edith, at the age of twenty-four. He was deployed thereafter and participated in the battle of the Somme, occupying the front line trenches. Middle-Earth’s “Mordor” and “The Dead Marshes” were inspired by the battlefield of Somme. World War One marked the nascent age of industrialized warfare, which the corrupt wizard Saruman also used in an attempt to subdue Middle-Earth. Due to the wretched conditions, Tolkien fell seriously ill with trench fever. He was sent back to England to be treated at a hospital in Birmingham. He received word in November that nearly all the men in his unit had either been killed or taken prisoner. In 1917, Tolkien joined the Humber garrison, but continued to suffer health problems. 

That same year, at the age of nineteen, C.S. Lewis had begun his studies at Oxford. He left just a few weeks later to join the army, and also was sent to the trenches in the front line of the Somme Valley. He became close friends with a young man named Paddy Moore. They made a pact: if Lewis died, Moore would take care of his father. If Moore died, Lewis would take care of his mother. The burden of caretaker would fall to Lewis when Paddy Moore was killed in early 1918. 

In Surprised by Joy, Lewis recollected, “The war—the frights, the cold, the smell of H.E. [high explosive], the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night till they seemed to grow to your feet—all this shows rarely and faintly in memory. It is too cut off from the rest of my experience and often seems to have hap­pened to someone else.” (Lewis 196)

Tolkien wrote in the Preface to the 2nd edition of The Lord of the Rings, “By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.” World War One ended that November. We can surmise the lasting impact of the horror and loss that Tolkien experienced, expressed through The Fellowship of the Ring, as Frodo sustains a wound from an attack by the Witch King which never fully heals, causing him chronic pain and psychological trauma. It may be noted that by the end of the trilogy, Frodo shows symptoms of what at the time was called “shell shock,” and now would be likely diagnosed as PTSD.

In April, an artillery shell from a British barrage fell short in proximity to Lewis, fatally injuring two fellow officers standing nearby. Lewis’ war record states that he was “struck by shell fragments which caused 3 wounds.” Lewis was sent back to England to recover, where he connected with Paddy Moore’s mother, Janie. His father did not visit him during his convalescence. Shell fragments in his chest were not removed until 1944.

Lewis’ “Huge and Complex Episode”

After the war, Tolkien settled into domestic life with his wife, Edith. Lewis’ life, meanwhile, took a very different turn. He alluded to this period as “a huge and complex episode” in his memoir. Lewis’ secretary, Walter Hooper, revealed posthumously that fellow Inkling, Owen Barfield, was privy to some intimate details of Lewis’ relationship with Janie Moore;  “Owen Barfield told me that yes, Lewis told him there had been a sexual relationship and it began really at the time, right after he came out of the army.” (Wadecenterblog)

C.S. Lewis was twenty-six years younger than forty-five-year-old Janie Moore. They were both Irish, and the two of them shared a disdain for Christianity at this time. She was separated from her husband, and Lewis was a bitter, war-scarred young man who had been deprived of both maternal and romantic love alike. Their adjacent bedrooms had a connecting door, which provided Lewis with his only access to the rest of the house. He resumed his studies after the war, but kept his relationship with Mrs. Moore a secret from his Oxford friends, as well as from his father.

The Inklings

In 1925, Tolkien became Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford and Lewis was elected a Fellow and Tutor in English Language and Literature. They met at an English faculty meeting the following year and gradually struck up a friendship. Tolkien then played a pivotal role in Lewis’ life by convincing him that Christianity was true through reason and logic. They formed their famous literary discussion group, “The Inklings,” in the early 1930’s.

After his conversion, Lewis would continue to care for Mrs. Moore, but he bolted the door between their rooms. He had a metal staircase installed outside his door and would go outside and round to get into his bedroom. He even started calling her “Mother.” Mrs. Moore’s amiability subsequently gave way to a controlling and overbearing personality. She was likely the inspiration for the domineering mother characters in The Screwtape Letters, and The Great Divorce.

Lewis tried to enlist in World War Two, but was refused. Instead, he encouraged his countrymen over a BBC radio broadcast from 1941 to 1943. Meanwhile, his homelife became increasingly draining between caring for Mrs. Moore and his alcoholic brother, Warren. One of his duties being walking her dog, Lewis wrote to a friend, disclosing, “Dog’s stools and human vomit have made my day today: one of those days when you feel at 11 A.M. that it really must be 3 P.M.” (Jacobs) Eventually he collapsed in his home and was taken to a hospital. He was diagnosed with strep throat, but the doctor expressed concern about stress on his heart.

Later Years

Mrs. Moore was placed in a nursing home in April of 1950 until her death the following year, and Lewis visited her almost every day. It was at that time he became penpals with an American woman named Joy Gresham. They bonded over a mutual love of literature and philosophy. The story of their relationship is a colorful tale in and of itself, culminating in a marriage of convenience which gave way to a profound, romantic love. (This is why the title of his memoir “Surprised by Joy” is a double entendre.) 

Sadly, after just four years of marriage, Joy died of bone cancer at the age of fourty-five. It was then that C.S. Lewis wrote A Grief Observed to process the loss of his wife. In it, he speaks of his deep, all-consuming despair. In the first chapter he penned his famous words, “Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.” (Lewis and Walsh 11) The book begins with an eloquently expressed confrontation of God, in which Lewis says, “Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not 'So there's no God after all,' but 'So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer.” (Lewis and Walsh 5) Lewis also stated, “Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.” (Lewis and Walsh 28)

But Lewis also observes, “If God were a substitute for love we ought to have lost all interest in Him. Who’d bother about substitutes when he has the thing itself? But that isn’t what happens. We both knew we wanted something besides one another-quite a different kind of something, a quite different kind of want. You might as well say that when lovers have one another they will never want to read, or eat -- or breathe.” (Lewis and Walsh 7) Lewis concludes in the final chapter, “How wicked it would be if we could call the dead back! She said not to me but to the chaplain, ‘I am at peace with God.’ She smiled, but not at me. Poi si tornò all’ eterna fontana.” [The Latin phrase being a quote from Dante Alighieri's Paradiso meaning, “Then she turned back to the eternal fountain."] (Lewis and Walsh 89)

C.S. Lewis would die in 1963, three years after the death of Joy. Tolkien passed away ten years later in 1973.

Grief Observed

In a way, A Grief Observed might be seen as a sort of thesis for the life of C.S. Lewis. His raw despair streaming from heavy loss gave way to a well-grounded sense of hope forged in hardship. The same sentiment could be applied to Tolkien, who didn’t express his thoughts and feelings in such a direct manner as Lewis, but whose experiences and inner resiliency manifested in the world of Middle-Earth. Readers who don’t enjoy fantasy may wonder about the appeal of a fictional world. The answer is that well-written fantasy, though fiction, acts as a conduit for a deeper reality.

When Tolkien and Lewis wrote about such dark themes as war, death, grief and heartbreak, no one could argue that they were in any sense strangers to their subject matter. They knew suffering intimately. Their work acknowledged the existence of hardship, and they didn’t treat it as something unexpected. In chapter twelve of his memoir Surprised by Joy, for example, Lewis recollected, “I am surprised that I did not dislike the army more. It was, of course, detestable. But the words ‘of course’ drew the sting. [...] One did not expect to like it. Nobody said you ought to like it. No­body pretended to like it. Everyone you met took it for granted that the whole thing was an odious necessity, a ghastly interruption of rational life. And that made all the difference. Straight tribulation is easier to bear than tribulation which advertises itself as pleasure. The one breeds cam­araderie and even (when intense) a kind of love between the fellow sufferers; the other, mutual distrust, cynicism, con­cealed and fretting resentment.” (Lewis 188)

The expectation and acceptance of evil and suffering as a part of life eases some of the burden of the sufferer, especially when shared with others. This is one of the overarching themes in The Lord of the Rings. The members of the Fellowship of the Ring are burdened with the task of destroying their world’s greatest source of evil: the One Ring. Each of them carries additional personal difficulties, such as the shame Aragorn feels towards his lineage. But with the support of his friends, Aragorn ultimately finds the support he needs to reclaim the throne of Gondor. Frodo, the Ring Bearer, almost fails the Fellowship and is nearly overcome by the One Ring’s evil, but is literally carried through fire by his faithful companion, Sam.

A similar thread can be seen woven throughout The Chronicles of Narnia. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Peter, Susan, and Lucy depend on each other to overcome the evil power of the witch during the hardships of war in winter, and welcome Edmund back into their fellowship once he seeks them out. In The Horse and his Boy, Shasta would have been sold into slavery if not for Bree, and he would not have come into his own if not for Arivis, who stuck with him through many dangerous situations, despite Shasta’s weaknesses and failings.

The Victory of Hope

G.K. Chesterton observed, “Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.” (Chesterton 84–85)

Although Lewis and Tolkien’s books treated hardship as a fact of life, they both continued past this to portray the finite nature of suffering. In terms of Chesterton’s metaphor, they believed in the existence of the St. George as much as they believed in the existence of dragons. Each of the books in the Chronicles of Narnia ends with evil being vanquished. The series ends with the whole of Narnia facing an apocalypse, but the world is then remade in a state of perfection. In The Lord of the Rings, Sauron and his thralls brought devastation upon Middle-Earth, but in the end the One Ring was permanently destroyed, ending his reign of terror. Though Frodo was left with physical and emotional scars, that was not the end for him as he went on to seek healing in The Undying Lands.

The message that light prevails over darkness speaks to a cardinal longing in the human heart. The sense of honor and righteousness which drives the protagonists leads people to find solace in the characters’ stories. A New York Times article observed that for many women, The Lord of the Rings trilogy are comfort movies which they'll watch over and over again; I myself can relate to this personally. In this article, a fan observes, “Nothing feels unsafe because the good guys are all actually good. And there’s no rape, there’s nothing that makes you feel uncomfortable as a woman in the entire trilogy.” (Richardson) Observing the tender and wholesome relationships between men, based on loyalty, trustworthiness, and honor, touches readers on a very deep level.

To authors of the baby-boomer generation, such as George R.R. Martin, and subsequent generations of writers in much of the Western World, the level of suffering which Tolkien and Lewis survived is merely an abstract concept. And this encapsulates one of the biggest issues infecting contemporary fantasy: mistaking gritty “realism” for real depth.

Not that there’s no place for “depressing” literature or harsh realism if it's done with purpose. The Children of Húrin shows that Tolkien was also capable of writing tragedy. This and his other two “Great Tales” served to establish the devastating effects of Morgoth’s evil in Middle-Earth, making the eventual demise of the demonic entity all the more satisfying. 

But what makes Tolkien and Lewis stand out among writers of the 20th century is that not only did they write about the evil and suffering they witnessed firsthand, but they wrote about how it might be overcome. 

The works of Tolkien and Lewis feed a pivotal quality of human nature: a hunger for hope. This is what draws people back to their books. They continue to serve as a reminder that, in the words of Legolas, “Oft hope is born when all is forlorn."

Sources:

Garth, John. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth. HarperCollins Publishers, 2003.

Lewis, Clive Staples. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1956.

Wadecenterblog. “WALTER HOOPER INTERVIEW.” Off The Shelf, 9 Dec. 2021, wadecenterblog.wordpress.com/2021/12/08/walter-hooper-interview

McGrew, Bethel. “The Peculiar Story of C. S. Lewis and Janie King Moore.” First Things, 8 Jan. 2024, firstthings.com/the-peculiar-story-of-c-s-lewis-and-janie-king-moore

Jacobs, Alan. The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis. HarperOne, 2008.

Lewis, C. S., and Chad Walsh. A Grief Observed. Bantam, 1976.

Chesterton, G. K. Tremendous Trifles. Book Jungle, 2007.

Richardson, Nikita. “How ‘Lord of the Rings’ Became ‘Star Wars’ for Millennial Women.” The New York Times, 19 Dec. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/12/19/movies/lord-of-the-rings-millennial-women.html.

Wood, Ralph C. “Conflict and Convergence on Fundamental Matters in C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.” Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature, vol. 55, no. 4, June 2003, p. 315. EBSCOhost, research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=b53a2feb-0281-3433-a5a4-7a1b2305b158

Hartt, Walter F. “Godly Influences: The Theology of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.” Studies in the Literary Imagination, vol. 14, no. 2, Sept. 1981, p. 21. EBSCOhost, research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=f5371826-7e33-3dc5-822a-2a880a41169c