A Hobbit, A Wardrobe and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918
By: Joseph Loconte / Narrated By: Dave Hoffman
Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins
The occasional urge to throttle the narrator did NOT stop this from being a hard-hitting Listen. Filled with Strife; filled with Grace
Yup, gonna start with Dave Hoffman’s narration cuz it soooo stuck in my craw. Where on God’s green earth has he been, and what-all nonsense did they teach him in school? And p’raps SOMEbody could’ve cued him as to proper pronunciations of names, places, and most esPECially battles of WWI?!
Cuz, seriously. By the fifth time he pronounced The Somme as The SO-mah, my fingers were flexed and ready to wrap around his poor dear throat. Good thing voices stay all in the phone/device thing-y, and one canNOT strangle anyone.
> puff, puff <
Okay, got THAT out of my system… Now onto the wonder that is this book!
For some reason, I’m totally into a WWI kick right now, but with a desire to keep myself from drowning in misery as we continue through these fraught political and pandemic times, I didn’t think I could do straight-up war. Knowing that I have sooo loved The Chronicles of Narnia, I was looking forward to this. No, I’ve never read The Lord of the Rings (Tho’ I DO have all of them as audiobooks), but I’ve a bit of a notion as to how they went having gotten dozy during Peter Jackson’s first movie, nodded off during the second movie, and flat-out fell asleep during the third, sooo I’m so totally THERE with this…. :)
Author Joseph Loconte frames the times for us by saying what Europe and America were like. There was a sense that a new era had been reached, a golden and shining era where there could be no more wars as civilization had reached ultimate enlightenment. Eugenics was gaining ground as cultures, most notably America, were touting supremacy of the white race. All was tra la la with arts and sciences flourishing, and Tolkien was meeting with a group of friends, talking ideas the night away, and Lewis was tutored to question belief-systems. War was merely a rumor.
Until it wasn’t. At which point, ALL countries joyfully dived into military might, each country framing it as a Holy War for their country with evil heathens who needed to be crushed, annihilated. God, and Jesus in particular, were on EVERYbody’s side, other countries were damned to hell. Loconte does go deep into history, but I didn’t feel like it was too much especially as we learn that the lowly soldiers, the batmen, were the very individuals whom Tolkien crafted the heroes of his work on. There’s some pretty graphic writing about the mass slaughter (Particularly at the Somme… which is NOT SO-mah!!!), the vaporization of men, men digging foxholes in mud that is all blood, all guts, all gore. It’s what Tolkien, as an officer, did and saw. And both he and Lewis lost many friends; for Tolkien it was his fellowship of friends who were killed one by one, and for Lewis it was a particularly dear man, a father figure.
The mechanization of atrocities, the devastation wrought by these holy wars left each country disillusioned with the concepts of God and Country, mostly God. By the end of the slaughter, CS Lewis wasn’t the only atheist in a foxhole. But neither Tolkien nor Lewis joined the other discontented artists who survived. They continued to think and Lewis continued to question. Loconte then guides us through how their experiences during the war, and how their thinking and questioning shaded their writings. I did NOT feel like Christianity was being shoved down my throat, as one reviewer screeched. This was a very warm, very thoughtful and fact-based consideration of the two men drawn from not only their writings but from diaries and from letters. Tolkien took forEVER to finish LOTR, and some of his letters to his son who was fighting in WWII are indicative of how he was ever-shaped, ever-reminded of the horrors of war. While our author Loconte dips into battle scenes from LOTR and shows us how it “seems true to” the war Tolkien experienced, most of the writing isn’t so shallow or glib. This is a humane and in-depth consideration as the writing progresses.
I didn’t, however, get the sense of the epiphany Lewis had, his acceptance of a divine power and conversion to Christianity. Their after-war professorships brought Tolkien and Lewis together in a friendship based on good wine and plenty of conversation, even unto the wee hours of the morning, and s’pposedly a single comment Tolkien made brought an AHA Moment to Lewis. Lewis had long argued that God and religion were based only on myths told by men, but Tolkien said God gave man myths, myths being a language of the Divine, the way God speaks to us. Apparently that was enough for Lewis, and he defied the jaded and cynical artists of the day (Virginia Woolf wrote a friend that T.S. Eliot was dead to her for falling so low as to become an Anglican Catholic, even going to church and who knows what-all else…) by devoting himself to his newfound sense of Spirit. While Tolkien slaved on LOTR for the most part, Lewis was more prolific, and his science fiction is noted in addition to Narnian tales.
A grand Listen, I got my WWI ya-yas out with this one. Gritty but filled with moments of Grace and tenderness, I was especially taken with how the men fostered fellowships of men even after all they experienced during the chaos and mayhem of war.
Wonderful listening, and thank gosh that this follows what happens AFTER the war, thereby leaving that deplorable SO-mah behind!!!
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