Oxford’s inklings and the Christian imagination

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: You’re listening to a special edition of The World and Everything in It. I’m Lindsay Mast and I’m so excited to share today’s interview with you.

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In a moment, my conversation with historian and author Joseph Loconte.

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In the mid-1930s, a cultural crisis was engulfing the West: modernism, Freudian psychology, the theory of evolution, social Darwinism, and the eugenics movement all took their toll on values and beliefs that had long been taken for granted. Add to that changing geopolitics, and there was, as our guest Joseph Loconte puts it, a gathering storm.

It was in the midst of that storm that C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien set out to fight back…by writing their now-famous fiction. Loconte offers a deep dive into their friendship and how they influenced each other during the years before and during World War II. His new book is called The War for Middle Earth and he joins us now.

MAST: Joseph, good morning.

JOSEPH LOCONTE: Good morning, it's great to be with you, Lindsay. Thanks for having me.

MAST: Sure thing. Joseph, you touch often on aspects of male friendship in this book. So let's just start with why did Lewis and Tolkien's friendship work? They really didn't have a lot in common when they first met.

LOCONTE: Well, it was a rough meeting, the first faculty meeting. They circled each other like tigers in the wild. They had a debate about the curriculum and they were on different sides of the question. But what they discovered pretty quickly is they both loved the ancient myths, the classical myths, the idea of heroism, sacrifice for a noble cause. They love languages, of course, as well. But I think the idea of the heroic figure up against the odds with his back to the wall. They both loved those stories and that really did draw them together in friendship.

MAST: Well, take us to Oxford and correct me if I'm wrong, I believe it would have been the late 1920s shortly after they became friends and they actually led an effort to reform the English school at Oxford. So set the scene for us on what that looked like.

LOCONTE: Yeah, yeah, some of the debate, without getting too much into the weeds, some of the debate is, well, how much of the medieval literature are students gonna be required to learn and also ancient languages, medieval, old English, and the literature associated with old English? And I think what Tolkien is able to do is persuade Lewis that that is a worthy effort. Lewis is a little more inclined to say, look, we can go a little later in the game in terms of the centuries and the literature that we have our students read. Tolkien loves more those ancient languages and literature. He persuades Lewis that this is a good plan. And really at the core, I think is they want to preserve this profound classical Christian inheritance in our languages, in the literature, in the values and ideals that are represented in that literature. They are determined to hang on to that.

And they will ultimately prevail in that debate, at least for a period of time there at Oxford. It's kind of a conspiracy of the dons. It's what it's kind of known in scholarly circles, themselves and others that they bring into that circle to push for this curricular reform. It's not just an idiosyncratic thing though. I think it really is this principled thing. They believe so deeply in that classical Christian inheritance and they wanna make sure it's being preserved at Oxford.

MAST: What were they up against, though? What were the stakes in that department as they tried to do that?

LOCONTE: Well, what's going to happen? They'll be able to secure that at Oxford, at least initially, but there are these, what you might call these kind of modernizing trends and faculty and others who are more interested in, okay, let's get into like romantic literature of the 19th century. And then of course, early 20th century literature, you're getting into the modernist movement. Think about T.S. Eliot and the Wasteland. And this is the kind of literature that both these men deeply resented. They did not want to see this encroaching into the curricula at Oxford. And for a while they were able to hold off those trends. But there's a point at which Lewis says, I think in the early 1930s, he says, T.S. Eliot, this is the one man that I am vigorously opposed to in terms of the impact on literature. Because what was the modernist movement? It was about dehumanization, disintegration, irrationality. Think in terms of art, think about Picasso.

It's anti-heroic. And what these guys are trying to do is to reintroduce the heroic in its best sense. The classical, the medieval, the Christian sense of the heroic. Reinvent that concept for the modern mind, which is one of their great achievements.

MAST: So they wanted to bring out the hero stories. I assume though maybe they had some disagreements about the myths and those sort of, what do you know about their disagreements to that end?

LOCONTE: Yes.

That's, you know, I know more about their agreements than I know about their disagreements. And I'll share one agreement if I could. It's an evening when the friendship is really taking root in around 19, I think, 31, I think it's just before Lewis's conversion. Lewis has Tolkien come into his room there at Mordland and they're talking about the gods, the gods of Asgard and this mythology. And they talk until two o'clock in the morning, Lewis writes about it to his friend Arthur. And he says, this Oxford scholar, philologist Tolkien was in my rooms, speaking of the gods of Asgard until two in the morning, who could turn them out? The fire was bright and the talk was good. And there is something going on there in the foundation for their friendship.

MAST: So fast forward a bit for me and set the geopolitical backdrop for us of what was going on as they started writing their famous fiction.

LOCONTE: Yeah, mean, let's take it, and we'll fast forward here quickly, but from 1933 when Tolkien writes the first draft of The Hobbit, that's in 1933, Lewis publishes his spiritual autobiography Pilgrim's Regress, 1933. That, you could argue, is the beginning of the unraveling of the liberal democratic project. What happens in 1933? Well, for one thing, Adolf Hitler becomes chancellor.

And pretty quickly then assumes complete control of Germany. Other things are going on in the world. Benito Mussolini in Italy is planning to invade Ethiopia. He's drawing up plans. Japan has invaded China. So there's a major war going on there. The Soviet Union is up to its mischief, destroying its peasant population with a mass collectivization project, mass starvation as a result. FDR becomes president of the United States, but America is in an isolationist mood in the 1930s and is going to remain there, you could argue, until Pearl Harbor 1941. That's one of the reasons I think W. Auden, the poet, he describes that decade, the 1930s, as a deeply dishonest decade. So they are kind of coming of age as writers in the early 1930s at a time when the rise of these totalitarian states is starting to threaten the peace of Europe. It begins in 1933 and we can pick up that story say in 1936 and particularly 1938 if you like.

MAST: Yeah, go ahead and do that because these, they're academics, they've never written popular fiction, they're kind of unknown outside of Oxford, and they decide they're going to take on a looming global conflict by writing fiction. It sounds preposterous.

LOCONTE: That's right. It does sound preposterous. They have this conversation in late 1936, sometime in 36, where Lewis turns to Tolkien and his nickname for Tolkien was TOLERS. And he says, TOLERS, if they're not going to write the kinds of books we want to read, we're going to have to write them ourselves. And so you wonder, what are they hoping to accomplish? I think we have to say that both these men, are Englishmen. They love their country. They love their civilization. And they sense that there are threats, external but also internal. The modernist movement in literature, the dehumanizing effect of literature, the rise of these radical ideologies, the anti-heroic mood, the cynical mood of their generation, and they're gonna push back. So they make a literary pact. Tolkien is supposed to write a time travel story, Lewis is supposed to write a space travel story. Tolkien never finishes his time travel story, he's too much of a prof- perfectionist, but he does publish The Hobbit in 1937 and then almost immediately starts writing The Lord of the Rings by December of 1937. He's taking the story on.

Lewis publishes Out of the Silent Planet, the first of the space trilogy. He fulfills his part of that pact and they both agree the stories we're going to be writing, they have to point to the great story, the Christian story ultimately and have a mythic quality to them, this idea of heroic sacrifice. That's what they're gonna start to do. They're gonna create, they determine. And this is what I think other biographers and other admirers of Tolkien and Lewis haven't quite maybe appreciated the way we should appreciate. They deliberately set out to create a kind of beachhead of resistance against the ideological madness that is all around them by 1936, 37, 38, 39, right through the Second World War.

MAST: Do you think they knew of what they were going to be able to do? Again, they're in Oxford, they're in the academic circles. They decide they're going to put up, as you said, this beachhead of resistance. Did they know how big that beachhead was going to get or how long lasting it was going to be?

LOCONTE: Yeah.

That's a terrific question. I don't think anyone could have anticipated the forces of disintegration that would encroach right up to the shores of Great Britain. I think about what happens in 1939 with the onset of the Second World War. Britain is now at war with Germany, September 1st, 1939, and it is unclear whether or not Britain is going to survive. Everyone is expecting a Nazi invasion at any moment, an aerial bombardment. And if you think about it, Lindsay, this becomes a catalyst really for the imagination of both these men. Let's think about C.S. Lewis in 1939. This is when children, evacuees from London go to the English countryside and they start entering the homes of various people out in Oxford. And one of those homes is the homes of C.S. Lewis. This confirmed bachelor suddenly has four girls living with him and Mrs. And now he's suddenly challenged by the presence of these girls. And he writes about it to his friend's sister, Penelope. You know, I never appreciated children until they invaded my home. And then what we know is in 1939, he wrote the opening lines to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the catalyst of war, children being sent out of London to the countryside to live with an old professor. It starts in 1939. That's the catalyst.

Tolkien is writing The Lord of the Rings right through the Second World War. And he's very clear with his publisher early on. He says, you know, it's taking on a darker tone and the crisis, the darkness of the present moment has something to do with it. The sense of foreboding, a second global conflict that no one possibly could have imagined. And the propaganda and the hatreds that are, they're just a wash in because of where they are there in Oxford, in Great Britain. You know, the Americans, we're on the sidelines, Lindsay, as you know, as my British friends like to remind me, we showed up late for that war, just as we showed up late for the First World War. And so we're not feeling the sense of foreboding and urgency and existential crisis that they are feeling in Great Britain beginning 1931, September 1st.

MAST: Talk a little bit about how they supported and encouraged one another as things did, maybe take a darker turn, certainly around them, but even within the writing. How did they support each other?

LOCONTE: Yeah, I mean, they determined to begin meeting. Lewis and Tolkien are the nucleus for this group of Christian authors and friends that'll be known as the Inklings. They meet together in Lewis's rooms in Magdalen College at Oxford. They're meeting every Thursday and then they change to Friday. Every week they are meeting through the 1930s and through the Second World War. Now think about that. They're sharing portions of their work, what they're reading, what they're working on.

And so Tolkien will read chapters of the Lord of the Rings out loud to the Inklings. Lewis will read the early parts of Out of the Silent Planet, his science fiction work, and other works, The Problem of Pain. He'll bring those works for critique to the Inklings. Wouldn't you love to have been a fly on the wall? We don't have a transcript of what those guys talked about, but Lewis did.

MAST: Mm-hmm.

LOCONTE: Make this comment to one of his friends who was wondering about these inklings and he said, you know, we, we gather theoretically to talk about literature, but almost always to talk about something better. When I read that line, I thought, what was the better? What were they talking about? You know, all kinds of things, the big questions of life. so if you think about that, they're writers in community and that takes some humility because as a writer myself, I don't like showing

MAST: Right.

LOCONTE: My work, unfinished work, even to close friends. I don't want to show them anything until I think it's like perfect, you know, it's ready to go. But they're willing to do that because there's a basic humility there and trust that they're going to be able to build each other up as writers and help them to excel in their craft. It's a remarkable story of friendship in the context of war, in the cataclysm of war.

MAST: To diverge from that a little bit. think we often hear people bemoan the downfall of civilization, less Christian than it was, which I think makes us think that past Western culture was perhaps far more Christian than maybe it was because you talk about Lewis finding that he could write fiction that had.

LOCONTE: Yeah. Yeah.

MAST: Biblical themes in it, but no one would even realize those allusions that he was making. Talk to me a little bit about the biblical illiteracy at the time and then Lewis's response to it.

LOCONTE: Yeah.

Yeah, that's a terrific question. I'll give you a couple of examples, one with Out of the Silent Planet and another with Mere Christianity. So remind me of this if I forget here, Lindsay. On Out of the Silent Planet, he publishes the book. It's a deeply Christian work. The space trilogy is about the fall. It's about the doctrine of the fall. Weston, the mad scientist, becomes the unman, this embodiment of radical evil. It's about the fall. And then it's reviewed by about 60 reviewers.

Some of the most intelligent people obviously in Britain are reviewing Lewis's book and he comments to his friend, sister Penelope, who says, know, you'll be both grieved and amused to learn that of the 60 reviewers only two recognized that I was talking about the Biblical fall, that this wasn't some invention of mine, only two. And he goes on to say, you know, if only there was someone with more time and talent, this ignorance could be used as an evangelistic tool. You could smuggle in all kinds of Christian truth now through fiction, through fantasy, because English culture, think about it, Anglican England, a country that thought of itself as a Christian nation is so thoroughly secular. Some of the most educated people in England in 1938 don't recognize the biblical doctrine of the fall when it's hitting them in the face.

In fiction, in literature. That was astonishing. And I think that was a real turning point for Lewis in his career. He realizes there's an opening here, that fiction, mythic literature, epic literature, it could be used to reintroduce the deep truths of the Christian faith for this illiterate audience. And of course, that's what he goes on to do. It transforms his entire academic and professional career. That realization in 1938.

I'll give you another example. Think about Mere Christianity. What becomes Mere Christianity starts out as a series of radio broadcasts. As you know, Lindsay, the BBC, the director of the religious broadcasting division asks Lewis during wartime, 1941, know, give us an explanation and defense of the Christian faith for the British people, because we're in an existential crisis and a lot of people are struggling.

That's where the BBC was in 1941. How far they've fallen, we must say parenthetically, right? And Lewis is not inclined to do it. He hardly listens to the radio. They're only giving him 15 minutes at a time, but he agrees. Travels down from Oxford to London, which was not without risk because London is still being bombed. The BBC have been bombed.

And do you know what the first line, the opening line of his broadcast in 1941, the first line of his radio broadcast that become mere Christianity, the first line is this, Lindsay, “Everyone has heard people quarreling.” Everyone has heard people quarreling. That's where he starts because he will lead people to Jesus ultimately, but he can't start there. He has to start with this understanding that we quarrel because we're appealing to a moral standard. Hey, you took a piece of my fruit, give that back, that wasn't fair. Hey, you promised you were gonna do that, you didn't do it. You're violating a moral code.

People know there's a moral code, it's pressing down on them a moral law, and they know they violated themselves. And he says that's the clue to the meaning of the universe. There's a moral law, we know it, and we violate it. That's where he has to start in 1941, because that's how thoroughly secular his audience is. So 80 plus years later, where do you think we are now with our Western secular culture? That's worth thinking about.

MAST: Well, we all have heard people quarreling, right?

LOCONTE: No quarreling in the Loconte home, of course. That's right.

MAST: I want to talk a little bit about, know, both Tolkien and Lewis fought in World War I. It influenced everything really, but certainly their friendship and their writing. Their friendship deepens in the lead up to World War II, endearing it despite neither of fighting in those. So tell me a little bit about their bond and how it changed over the years from what they had experienced when they were younger and then as they actively fought against the bad ideas of the World War II years.

LOCONTE: Yeah.

Yeah, fabulous question. know, one of the turning points in their friendship, think, Lindsay, was when this is in the 1930s, when Tolkien shares with Lewis a story he's been working on, the story about Baron and Luthien, the immortal elvish princess and the mortal man. It'll become a major theme in The Lord of the Rings. He shares this story, not completed, but he shares it with Lewis. And you think about that.

He's sharing something that's very close to his heart. He said it was kind of his favorite story because it's modeled on his own relationship with his wife, Edith. They had a very close, loving relationship. So he's sharing the story with Lewis. And imagine what Lewis might have done with all the responsibilities and things going on in his life. Tolkien sends him this manuscript to look at and to give him some feedback. He could have easily said, I don't really have time for that, Tuller's. Thanks for sending it. Instead, he sends him this note and says,

I've never had such an enjoyable evening in such a long time reading a work like this. Critique is coming quibbles to follow. He sends him like 10 pages of critique and Tolkien will include many of his suggestions to improve the manuscript. That's a turning point in the relationship. It's like Tolkien is saying, you here's my heart, stab me here. And what he sees with Lewis is this is a friend who understands me. This is a friend who understands what I'm trying to do and wants me to succeed, wants to encourage me. So it's a turning point, it's deepening of the friendship in the early 1930s. And of course that relationship just takes off once Lewis becomes a Christian there in 1931, that great Christian conversion experience that Tolkien is a part of. So now there's this incredibly deep, common understanding of the foundation for their lives, the foundation for their mortal lives and an inspiration for their writing. So that helps them immensely.

I think though with the onset of the Second World War, we're hitting another turning point. There's a point at which Tolkien writes to Lewis. They used to meet, I think, every Wednesday. In addition to the other times that they're meeting with the Inklings, they're meeting just the two of them for lunch on Wednesdays. And I think they're meeting often at the East Gate Hotel. I've been to the East Gate Hotel at Oxford, great little place. And Tolkien writes to Lewis and he says, you know, I'm paraphrasing here. He says, we have to resolve to continue to meet for lunch because the dark forces seem to be conspiring against us. It's a time to come together to, they may talk, you know, university politics, they're sharing bits and pieces of their work, but again, it's that mutual encouragement during wartime, during wartime. And it's hard to overstate the importance of that for these men. Lewis and Tolkien, both veterans of the First World War, the last thing either of them wanted was to have to live through a second world war and to see their loved ones put into harm's way.

Tolkien has two sons serving in the second world war. Lewis's brother, Warnie, will reenlist and be sent to France. Think about the anxiety of that, the regular air raids, the food rations, what you're going through, the worrying about when is the invasion coming, when are the Nazis coming? So the absolute necessity to come together and to meet together and to...create a little haven of sanity and even moral beauty in the midst of that. It's just a remarkable kind of relationship.

MAST: You ask in the book, what is demanded of us as morally responsible people when we face an all-devouring force of evil? So I have two questions on this. The first is, how did Tolkien and Lewis respond to that? And then if you could go forward on that and say, knowing what you know from their example, what's your answer to that question today?

LOCONTE: Yes. Yes.

What is required of us when we face an all-devouring force of evil? That really was the question they faced. And I think what prompted it was the famous, infamous 1933 Oxford Union vote when the students at Oxford voted on this proposition. This House will under no circumstances fight for King and Country. The cream of the crop of Great Britain decides announces they're not gonna fight for king and country in 1933, the year Hitler comes to power, worst possible timing.

So Lewis and Tolkien are gonna spend much of their academic professional lives countering that mood, that outlook of withdrawal, of isolationism, of pacifism, of not taking responsibility for our mortal lives in the face of a great evil. They're gonna spend a lot of their professional lives pushing back against that.

And I think some of the things that are inspiring them, they're drawing back on that classical Christian tradition. This is something we really need to emphasize, hasn't gotten enough attention, I don't think, in the scholarship, and it relates to our situation today. One of the students of Tolkien and Lewis, let me read you a quote here from one of the students, Helen Wheeler. She's studying the classics with these men. She's living through the Second World War.

And she's learning from Lewis and Tolkien. What a place to be in. What an amazing moment. And she says this, what it meant for my generation, hearing and learning from these men and the works that they are bringing before them, Virgil, Homer, Dante, Milton, Beowulf. Here's what she says. What it meant for my generation of English language and literature undergraduates was that what happened in the great books was of equal significance.

to what happened in life, indeed that they were the same. What happened in the great books was like what's happening in life. It's an incredible insight from this young woman that the ideals, the values, the aspirations that are embodied in those great books that so represent the best of the human or literary tradition, but also explaining the tragedy of the human condition, right?

Our dignity and our shame, those ideals and values, we need them now. We need them in the moment of crisis. We need to be reminded of being made in God's image, a great capacity for good, for virtue, for heroism, but also the great capacity for evil, for radical evil. We need those great books now more than ever. That's, I think, is her insight going through that time in the Second World War, studying under Lewis and Tolkien. And I think that's an enduringly important insight.

And I suspect, this is a little bit of my own kind of speculation, Lindsay, but I suspect part of the reason there's so much cultural confusion right now in America in the West is we have let go of that great classical Christian tradition, which could be speaking into our moment if we only knew something about it, if we had ears to hear.

MAST: You know, I don't want to diminish–I mean, they were at Oxford. They were incredibly intelligent people. So to say they started where they were sounds a little more dismissive than how I mean it. But I'm curious if you think there's a lesson here in, you know, they met the moment with what they had, which was words and these stories and this knowledge of myths. Is there a lesson for those of us now when we may meet forces of evil in starting where we are and doing what we can with what we have?

LOCONTE: Yes. Yes.

Yes, that's a wonderful question because if you think about it when they make that literary pact in 1936 to push back against the ideological madness, the dehumanizing effects by writing stories, they're going to do what they can do. The line that comes from the scriptures to me is in Ecclesiastes, cast your bread upon the waters. Cast your bread upon the waters. Do what you can do. The parable of the talents would be another way to think about it. Jesus.

Giving this amazing parable, here are my talents, here's what I have to offer to try to advance God's purposes in this world. So they put themselves out, they stood in the breach in every way they could in their scholarship, in their imaginative literature, in their personal lives, in the way that they're helping people, they're assisting in the war effort in different ways. They're doing what they can do, never imagining that 75, 80 plus years later, we'd still be talking about their work. So I think for each of us, let's take away this huge concept from both of them. The value of the individual person. Every human soul matters before God and has a plan in his great story. And it's not a coincidence that Tolkien made his heroes small, the Hobbit. He said he modeled Sam Gamgee, his Hobbits, on the English soldiers with whom he fought in the First World War. One of the most beloved figures in modern fiction, The Hobbit is based on the ordinary English soldier doing his bit for king and country in the midst of the crisis.

It's not an accident that Lewis's heroes in the Chronicles of Narnia are children and a mouse named Reapicheep. That is very deliberate. They're reinventing the concept of the hero for the modern mind. Every individual, small hands must do those great deeds Tolkien puts it. The wheels of the world are turned by those small hands, the eyes of the great look elsewhere, right? So that is a deeply encouraging message that our individual choices to resist evil in any way we can, those choices can echo into eternity and they will certainly shape us, they'll shape our souls depending on how we respond.

MAST: Well put. Joseph Laconte is a New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, The War for Middle Earth, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933 through 1945, is out now. Joseph, thank you so much for being with us.

LOCONTE: Thank you for having me. Great to be with you.

MAST: You’ve been listening to an extended interview with author Joseph Loconte. He is a New York Times bestselling author and his newest book The War for Middle Earth is out now.

Please, let us know you’re listening. You can email us at editor@wng.org. That’s editor@wng.org. You can also subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast.

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We'll talk to you Monday. Have a great weekend! I’m Lindsay Mast.

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