A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War

A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War
© 2014 Joseph Loconte
256 pages

When some future Gibbon writes of the Decline and Fall of Western Civilization, he will have to devote a great deal of attention to the Great War.  However more numerous the deaths of its daughter, the Great War’s damage was more foundational, destroying as it did not only an entire generation of young men and leveling empires, but in derailing the western dream of unstoppable progress.  Western faith in itself and its ideals was fractured, and more damage would follow in the decades to come. The generation that followed was understandable cynical and lost, believing in nothing and pursuing only fleeting pleasures; a war opened with religious zeal ended in despair.  A Wardrobe, a Hobbit, and a Great War  examines the lives and work of two young men who fought in the war, but who survived it with their spirits intact -- who neither entered it as a crusade, or came out of it as jaded warriors.

The book is effectively a brief history of the war as experienced by Lewis and Tolkien, expressed as a two-part biography  that focuses on how the war shaped their writing.  The primary difficulty in supporting the authors' thesis, that Tolkien and Lewis developed ideas about heroism amid their war experience and later applied it to the worlds and stories they later created, is that neither man wrote a great deal about their war experiences.  What few references exist in their letters from the time, and their recollections later, are connected by Jenkins to passages or themes in their stories: Lewis' descriptions of combat in his own life and the depiction of the same in his Narnia stories; Tolkiens' description of Mordor and the corpse-filled bog around it are connected to the horrifying spectacle that was a trench warzone -- where men lived among the dead and the engorged rats that fed on them, sometimes seeing past battles' dead unearthed by artillery strikes.

Loconte's general thesis is that Lewis and Tolkien both rejected the 'myth of progress', that society was growing Better and that men were evolving to become superior beings. They did not counter this with a theory that things were growing worse, but rather shared the conviction of GK Chesterton that things simply were, that the nature of fallen man was such that he could never become anything  new-- he only exist to make his choices day by day, for good or ill.  Heroism, as described by Jenkins and illustrated through the Narnia and Middle Earth novels,  meant ever pushing to do the right choice, even when it was not easy, wise, or safe.

Ultimately, I don't know that there's enough evidence to support the authors specifically being inspired by the war to create the kinds of stories they did. However, I also don't know if there's an upper limit to how much I can read about Tolkien and Lewis, because they were old fogeys in their own time and thereby my countrymen. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this.

On the Shoulders of Hobbits

On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to Virtue with Tolkien and Lewis
© 2012 Louis Markos
235 pages

Fairy tales don't teach children that dragons exist; they know dragons exist. Fairy tales teach children that dragons can be defeated.  GKC declared that, and Louis Markos would support it. Here he demonstrates that fairy tales have much to teach even adults. In On the Shoulders of Hobbits,  Markos uses the Chronicles of Narnia and the Lord of the Rings to guide readers through the Virtues -- four Classical, three Christian -- using the imagery of the Road (complete with obstacles and diversions) to guide the reader along.

 Given his ‘on the road’ subtitle, it’s only appropriate that Markos begins by examining both the Narnian books and LOTR in the light of characters making a hero’s journey, confronted with obstacles and monsters, and eventually fulfilling their destiny.    Some of these application of virtue will be obvious to any reader;   main characters from both series frequently demonstrate courage in the face of adversity, for instance.   Others are less expected, even by the author.  Markos  was raised in a tradition that barred alcohol and tobacco on the grounds of morality, and yet in the world of Tolkien he found characters gaily enjoying pipeweed and strong drink – from time to time.  Their temperance was the temperance of the ancients, the practice of the golden mean. That mean, or balance,  is a necessary component of the practice of the other virtues; for instance, courage is a balance between cowardice and recklessness. Without temperance, courage would not be itself.   The exercise of other virtues distinguishes Tolkien and Lewis’ heroes from their opponents:  for instance,  Faramir practices a prudence about the One Ring that his brother Boromir,  lacks -- though both are equally courageous.  A smaller ending section examines other common lessons the Lewis and Tolkien books teach; the consequences of making a deal with the Devil, for instance,  as illustrated by Narnian characters who view the White Witch as a useful ally, sometimes even as they admit she is tyrannical.  (As a real world example, Markos points to the West’s alliance with Joseph Stalin, whose penchant for mass murder was even more thoroughly exercised than Hitler’s.)

Although On the Shoulders of Hobbits makes for easy reading, it's not superficial. Markos has penned several works on classical education, C.S. Lewis, and philosophy, and here he exhibits a familiarity with the ethical writings of philosophers and popes alike.

Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth

Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth:  Understanding Middle-Earth
© 2002 Brad Birzer
255 pages

How better to kick off Read of England than by visiting the world of Tolkien, who has enraptured readers for decade after decade now?  Tolkien is not merely an English writer; his Middle Earth was composed of English stuff,  its  languages inspired by ancient British tongues, its heroes English yeoman with furry feet.  In Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth, Brad Birzer uses extensive reading of the Tolkien  corpus, in addition to letters and interviews, to understand the influences and imagination which created the world of Middle Earth.  The themes that Birzer shares in  chapters on topics like heroism and evil, are knit together in an argument that Tolkien’s intention was to reinvigorate the west with the memories  of what was best in it -- to remind it, via a new mythology, of ancient truths.

Birzer begins with a biographical sketch of Tolkien, who came of age in the trenches of the Great War – witnessing first hand Europe’s virtually successful attempt to destroy itself – and who spent much of his adulthood in the mire of the 20th century, observing both its progress and its regress with dismay.  Tolkien admired the arrival of automobiles (and the city spaces destroyed to make room for parking lots) about as much as he admired the German bombers that would destroy city blocks later on. They were Nazguls and Orcs to him – noisy, inhuman, unfeeling, and malignant. Tolkien was a man of Old England,  a man of the Shire about which he wrote so lovingly – an gentle and agrarian England composed of farmers and small shopkeepers, who minded their business and got together in crowds only for a good neighborly feast.

 Tolkien’s great dismay with the west was not its embrace of new modes of transportation, however, but with what it left behind. Man once knew his place in the Cosmos; he was part of a celestial story, and if he played his part well, there could be found meaning and joy.  Such was not to be found in the modern story of man,  one of an atomized individual seeking only his own pleasure, liberated from all that had once sought to direct individual energy towards bigger things, even a thing so small but so whole as the family. That ordered Cosmos is present in the world of Middle Earth, for there - -through the Silmarillion – we find an ordered creation disrupted by a rebellious angel (Morgoth), whose servants  work to destroy the good Earth and replace it with their machines and towers of domination.   The entire lore of Middle Earth contains many stories of imperiled fellowships enduring pain and deprivation to resist the schemes of Morgoth;  Frodo’s company is only one episode in a long drama that will only end when Illuvatar, the All-Father, decides to finish the symphony of creation  with a flourish.   Tolkien, as a Catholic, believed that humans on Earth were fighting the same ‘long defeat’ that would eventually end, but until then would demand perseverance.

In explaining the core of Tolkien's mythos -- the distinction he made between Creation and subcreation, the nature of evil and grace, the role of heroism in resisting evil and giving grace tools with which to work --   Birzer throws light on the bounty of Tolkien's imagination.  A reader can only stand in awe of Tolkien's imaginative work; his genius with language, deep appreciation of history, and  integration of pagan and Christian,  characters of fancy and fact.  Although Tolkien's larger world is rooted in a monotheistic order, much of England's pagan past is hailed and 'sanctified', rather like the epic of Beowulf was by whatever Christian monk preserved it for the ages.   Tolkien believed, like Chesterton and Lewis,  that the myths of the Greeks and Norse, among others, reflected parts of the Truth without being True in themselves.   In the Tolkien legendarium, the Good of earlier traditions is united with the Good of the Christian West. For the Tolkien fan, this sort of book should be enormously appealing, even if one is not comfortable with Tolkien's worldview.  (His anti-modernity, for instance, which  is what makes him most delightful to me, personally...) Here are celebrated and made greater, characters of the LOTR lore. We see Aragorn as an Arthur, Gandalf as a wandering Odin figure,  Galadriel as a Marian type. We see the Shire,  Rivendell, and Morder serving as reflections on different relationships between man and nature -- and appreciate Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, and Aragorn as differing types of heroism, from the self-sacrificial to the prophetic and martial.   Considering the actual book is only a little over 150 pages, there's an amazing amount of content here. For good reason was this a favorite last year, and no less fascinating when I re-read it this year.

Related:
Frodo's Journey; Bilbo's Journey, Joseph Pearce