Booksology The War for Middle-Earth: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945 by Joseph Loconte (Nelson Books, 2025).
Having loved Joseph Loconte’s book about J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis in World War I—A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War—I’ve been eagerly looking forward to this follow-up. And all the more because most accounts of the Inklings that I’ve read tend to gloss over World War II somewhat. They note that it was a difficult time for the group, as it was for the nation and the world, and they mention that some fought in the conflict or had family members fight, but they just don’t say a lot about it. There may be other accounts that explore the topic thoroughly, but I haven’t yet come across any (if you know of any, please let me know in the comment section!).
So a book like The War for Middle-Earth was needed; as Loconte himself observes, “Although much has been written about their friendship, not enough attention has been given to how the catastrophe of another world war drew Tolkien and Lewis together in ways that no other set of circumstances could have achieved.” In addition to examining the development of that bond, Loconte has done an excellent job of interweaving the themes that dominated Lewis’s and Tolkien’s work during those war years with the chaos all around them.
He goes back to the subject of his previous book, World War I, to lay the foundations of what was to come. Because he’s not giving us straight history, but rather history mixed with a double literary biography, he keeps his account of world events pretty simple and straightforward. He even oversimplifies a little at times, I think. But the background he provides is very helpful in understanding the ways of thinking that led from one war to the next, even as a jaded and exhausted generation swore never to fight again.
Tolkien and Lewis, both veterans of that first war, were as exhausted as anyone else, yet both saw things differently from most of the other intellectuals around them. Their artistic tastes and their moral and spiritual attitudes (mainly Tolkien’s moral and spiritual attitudes at first, as Lewis took a little while to catch up with him there) kept them from absorbing the cynicism that, not surprisingly, infected so many around them. And that in turn helped them steer clear of the competing ideologies, fascism and communism, that began to rise in Europe.
While so many in their world were either embracing one or the other of these ideologies, or passively accepting the notion that nothing could be done about them, Lewis and Tolkien—firm believers in the value of story—were creating works that by their very nature pushed back.
This was how, as the Nazis were terrorizing and killing Jews, Lewis was writing Out of the Silent Planet, with its three extraterrestrial species “living in perfect harmony and social peace … as a rebuke to the race-based hatreds that … were threatening to destroy civilization on earth.” This was how Tolkien, faced with the rise of powers that considered human beings nothing but a faceless mass that could be starved or tortured or murdered with impunity, reached back to his memories of soldiers he had once served with, and created hobbits to exemplify what he called the “indomitable courage of quite small people against impossible odds.” Aware of a world plagued by unspeakable horrors, these writers and their circle strove to hold up goodness and beauty as a beacon that would give that world something to fight for.
As our own current affairs demonstrate every day, the sort of hatred and contempt for humanity that Lewis and Tolkien witnessed in their time never really goes away, even when defeated in wartime. It just keeps cropping up in different places and forms. Which makes Loconte’s book a reminder of better values and ideals that could not possibly be more important or timely.
(Cover image copyright Nelson Books.)
Book Links:
The War for Middle-Earth on AmazonThe War for Middle-Earth on Bookshop
