Joseph Loconte's Blog

This review from KIRKUS describes my book as “a riveting explanation of what literature can achieve in a time of rising tyranny and fear.” The review draws attention to the quality of the audio book, thanks to my British friend, Greg Marston, whose “authoritative tone” captures the high-stakes drama of the story: www.kirkusreviews.com/audiobook-reviews/joseph-loconte/the-war-for-middle-earth/

I’m grateful for this generous review in Law & Liberty of my book THE WAR FOR MIDDLE-EARTH: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945. As Graham McAleere notes from my book, “Their battlefield experiences informed a ‘literary counteroffensive’ against the grim ideologies of the twentieth century.” His review is here: lawliberty.org/book-review/lewis-and-tolkien-at-war/

 

I joined Podcaster and New York Times bestselling author Andy Andrews on his program “The Professional Noticer” for a delightful and down-to-earth conversation about my new book THE WAR FOR MIDDLE-EARTH: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKOCZLBmHzc

 

THE INKLINGS IN BATTLE: I sit down with Chris Scalia (son of the famous Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia) for his podcast The Back of the Book to talk about my book THE WAR FOR MIDDLE-EARTH: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945. The 1-hour interview is here: www.aei.org/podcast/inklings-in-battle/

J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: A Literary RebellionC.S. LewisFeb 04, 2026Five days after the 1938 Munich Pact was signed—the agreement that gave Hitler’s Germany a strategic portion of Czechoslovakia in exchange for the promise of peace—Winston Churchill condemned it as “a total and unmitigated defeat.” He predicted disaster for Great Britain “unless, by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.”

Once he became prime minister in 1940, Churchill played an indispensable role in mobilizing the British people for war and sustaining their war spirit over the next five years. Yet the reconstitution of “moral health” and “martial vigor” was also a cultural task.

Two of the twentieth century’s most influential Christian authors, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, took up this obligation—and transformed the direction of modern literature in the process.

They did so not as wartime propagandists, but as Oxford academics and authors who believed that their scholarship, teaching, and imaginative literature could help shake a generation loose from its moral cynicism and spiritual lethargy. And, especially during the crisis years of 1939-45, they vigorously sought each other out in friendship. “Every real Friendship is a sort of secession,” Lewis observed, “even a rebellion.”

Their rebellion—a literary revolt—was against the spirit of the age: the substitute religions of Modernism, materialism, fascism, communism, and totalitarianism. Lewis and Tolkien formed the nucleus of a small group of like-minded authors and friends who met weekly to share and discuss their works in progress. They called themselves “the Inklings,” and together they created a beachhead of resistance against the forces of disintegration threatening not only Great Britain, but also the civilized world.

In this endeavor, Lewis and Tolkien drew from deep wells: the collective wisdom of the literary canon of Western civilization.

As instructors of English literature at Oxford University, they brought this wisdom into their classrooms: ideas about good and evil, courage, virtue, honor, and sacrifice for a noble cause. Helen Tyrell Wheeler was a pupil of Lewis and attended lectures by Tolkien during the Second World War. War news, often wrenching, was unavoidable. “But at few times can there have been such splendidly exciting lectures and such overflowing lecture halls,” she recalled. “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 of equal significance to what happened in life.

Here is a remarkable insight from a young woman who came under the influence of these two scholars. Lewis and Tolkien helped a generation to understand that the truths expressed in the great works of literature from the ancient and medieval worlds bore upon the events of the modern world—a world at war.

Tolkien began writing The Lord of the Rings in December 1937 and, despite the terrors of wartime, nearly completed it before the Allied victory in 1945. The geo-political realities of these years—the cult of the dictator, the utopian schemes to perfect humanity, the malevolent march of Nazism—could not have been kept out of the author’s mind.

Consider: Just as Sauron, the Dark Lord, had acquired a fortress in the mountains from which to execute his evil designs, so, too, did the Führer at the Kehlstein in the Berchtesgaden Alps: the Eagle’s Nest. “My story is about power,” Tolkien explained, “exerted for domination.” The contagion of war, the lust for power, the existence of radical evil, and the courage required to resist it: The catastrophic events of the war brought all of these concepts into focus in The Lord of the Rings.

“I am a bachelor,” C.S. Lewis told his friend, sister Penelope, “and never appreciated children till the war brought them to me.” Four children, all girls—part of the great evacuation from London—appeared at Lewis’s doorstep the day after the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939. Shortly afterwards, Lewis scribbled what would form the opening lines of The Chronicles of Narnia. “This book is about four children…They were sent to stay with a relation of Mother’s who was a very old Professor who lived by himself in the country.”

In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first book in the series, the Pevensie children flee the terrors of a world at war only to enter Narnia, where another war is being waged: between the forces of Aslan the Lion King and those of the White Witch.

Art was imitating life—and life was imitating art.

The cataclysm of the Second World War laid waste to the beliefs that had built the West: the concept of a Moral Law, the value of every human life, the existence of a loving God. As the Sibyl warns the hero of The Aeneid, “The descent to the Underworld is easy.” Human civilization had descended into utter darkness, and Lewis and Tolkien were caught up in the maelstrom. “Night and day gates of shadowy Death stand open wide, but to retrace your steps, to climb back to the upper air—there the struggle, there the labor lies.”

The story of the friendship between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien is a story of how two men helped each other to endure the midnight years of the twentieth century and to climb back into the daylight. Together with their other friends, the Inklings, they created a sanctuary of moral beauty and intense creativity in a world gone mad with malice and rage.

“Talent alone cannot make a writer,” observed Ralph Waldo Emerson. “There must be a man behind the book.” Behind the extraordinary works of these authors stood a cloud of witnesses: the classical-Christian inheritance of Western civilization. Lewis and Tolkien instinctively looked to this inheritance and were nourished by it in wartime.

Cambridge poet Malcom Guite argues that their mastery of this literature accounts for the enduring power of their epic works. “I think they saw in the ancient resources they had, in the older books they were reading, not an irrelevant world into which you could escape,” Guite explains, “but curiously enough exactly the diagnostic tool they need to critique the world they were in.”

And they did so to magnificent effect: Like no other authors of their age, Lewis and Tolkien used their imagination to reclaim—for their generation and for ours—those deeds of valor and sacrifice and love that have always kept a lamp burning, even in the deepest darkness.

-Joseph Loconte is the author of The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945. He serves as director of The Rivendell Center in New York City and hosts the YouTube channel History and the Human Story.

My podcast interview with the UK’s Nick Dixon to discuss my new book THE WAR FOR MIDDLE-EARTH: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945: www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFhQuqpdSjw

 

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

‘The War for Middle-earth’ Review: A Faith in Literature

World War II led C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien to infuse their early experiments in fantasy with a sense of moral urgency.

By Michael Lucchese

Jan. 22, 2026 1:17 pm ET

Generations of readers have fallen in love with the fantasy novels of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, in part for the reprieve they offer from the dreary and mundane. But these tales offer something more enduring than mere escapism: the faith in human dignity and virtue that conservative thinkers have called the moral imagination.

The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945 By Joseph Loconte

In “The War for Middle-earth,” Joseph Loconte explores how World War II—one of humanity’s greatest conflicts between good and evil—inspired the literary works of Lewis and Tolkien, among them Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia” series (1950-56) and Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy (1954-55). In this follow-up to Mr. Loconte’s “A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War” (2015), the author traces the lives of these two men through a cataclysmic period and illuminates how their moral messages can ward off the forces of hatred and despair today.

As young men, both Lewis (1898-1963) and Tolkien (1892-1973) served in World War I. Mr. Loconte argues that their time in the trenches endowed them with a tragic sensibility and a perception of true heroism. Across Europe, though, World War I was profoundly demoralizing. Intellectuals turned to the twin drugs of ideology and nihilism to anesthetize the pain.

After the war, Lewis and Tolkien were brought together in 1925, when the two took positions at the University of Oxford. As writers and scholars, Lewis and Tolkien ranked among the most perceptive critics of burgeoning totalitarian movements such as Nazism and communism, in no small part due to their shared Christian faith. While Tolkien had been Roman Catholic since childhood, Lewis converted to Christianity in 1931 under Tolkien’s influence. Mr. Loconte outlines how their belief in the God-given dignity of man set them at odds with foreign despots and those in England with similar political designs.

Not everyone shared these antitotalitarian sentiments. Left shellshocked by World War I, many believed that the best way to deal with the growing threat in Europe was to disarm the democracies and appease the dictators. One of the most troubling manifestations was the Oxford Oath, a resolution passed in 1933 by a university debating society declaring that “this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.”

Lewis and Tolkien were disgusted by this atmosphere of disillusion. The friends became co-conspirators against the prevailing cynicism of the age. Along with other writers at Oxford, they formed a loose fellowship called the Inklings and began articulating a Christian humanism for a new generation.

Much of Mr. Loconte’s history concerns Lewis’s and Tolkien’s efforts as scholars. Their positions in Oxford’s English department gave them authority to promote classic literature as a solution to modern discontent. Tolkien, a scholar of Old English, studied the “theory of courage” found in poems such as the ancient epic “Beowulf,” redeeming what he called the “noble northern spirit” from the fascists who would pervert it. Lewis, meanwhile, sought to recover the ideas of love that animated medieval and Renaissance literature. Both authors admired the way that the medievals combined pagan virtues with Christian theology to sustain a culture that was simultaneously vital and humane.

For Lewis and Tolkien, Mr. Loconte writes, the West’s literary tradition expressed the profound “moral beauty, when an individual, in the face of death itself, forgets himself and expends himself in a struggle to save another soul from a great evil.” Before World War II, England desperately needed a restoration of that kind of moral imagination.

To our benefit, Lewis and Tolkien weren’t content to rummage around for these ideals in dust-covered parchment. Their experiences living under the threat of invasion during World War II, Mr. Loconte writes, persuaded them “to use imaginative literature to remind us that the material world, with its temporal aims, is not the sum and substance of our mortal lives.” The crisis of World War II provided occasion for Lewis and Tolkien to infuse their early experiments in fantasy with a sense of moral urgency.

At times, Mr. Loconte is a bit too eager to speculate about how Lewis and Tolkien may have taken inspiration from particular wartime events. Although a careful reader will notice parallels between the real and imagined worlds, these authors—especially Tolkien—insisted that their stories weren’t simple allegory. Mr. Loconte might also have spent more time addressing the group’s conflict with modernist writers: Lewis and Tolkien intended their projects to refute the efforts of poets such as T.S. Eliot or novelists such as James Joyce, whom they viewed as fragmenting English-speaking culture and twisting tradition.

Nonetheless, Mr. Loconte’s approach in “The War for Middle-earth” is enlightening. “Like no one else,” the author concludes, “Tolkien and Lewis helped a generation to understand that the truths and ideals expressed in the great works of the ancient and medieval worlds bore upon the events of the modern world.”

Today, we are likewise in need of these authors’ wisdom. As in the years after World War I, many in the West doubt or resent our civilization’s ideals, while despots seek to plunge the globe into tyranny. Only courage—the kind inspired by the works of Lewis and Tolkien—can answer the crisis.

***

—Mr. Lucchese is the founder of Pipe Creek Consulting, an associate editor of Law & Liberty and a contributing editor to Providence. A trailer for Mr. Loconte’s book can be found here and short film essays about the Tolkien-Lewis-WW2 story can found on his YouTube history channel here.

 

 

I had the privilege of joining Russell Moore, editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, to discuss my new book, THE WAR FOR MIDDLE-EARTH: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945. It is a wide-ranging discussion about the power of faith, friendship, and the imagination in the face of radical evil. You can watch the conversation here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFLEJLr1cmk

 

By JOSEPH LOCONTE

December 25, 2025

For Christmas 1941, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis sought to find the light amid a dark season.

The days leading up to Christmas in 1941 effectively obliterated any sentimental notions about “peace on earth” and “good will toward men.” Not even Father Christmas could evade the nightmare enveloping the world.

On December 22, 1941, twelve-year-old Priscilla Tolkien received her annual letter from Father Christmas. J.R.R. Tolkien had begun writing and illustrating his “Father Christmas” letters to his children in the 1920s, when they were toddlers. The letters were usually filled with the escapades of the Polar Bear, the chief assistant to Father Christmas, whose comical adventures affected the annual Christmas stock.

In 1933, the same year that Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, the letters took on a more menacing tone, with the introduction of the Goblins. In Tolkien’s Christmas letter of 1941, however, the savagery of the Goblins is front and center.

“I expect you remember that some years ago we had trouble with the Goblins; and we thought we had settled it,” writes Father Christmas. “Well, it broke out again this autumn, worse than it has been for centuries. We had several battles, and for a while my house was besieged.”

Father Christmas noted that fewer children had written to him than in previous years. “I expect it’s because of this horrible war . . . So terribly many people have lost their homes or have left them; half the world seems in the wrong place.”

Merry Christmas, Priscilla! Neither in his epic fantasy, The Lord of the Rings, nor in his letters to his children, did Tolkien attempt to shield his readers from the brutal realities of a world at war.

Tolkien’s Oxford University friend and colleague, C.S. Lewis, shared his basic Christian outlook, as well as his approach to imaginative literature. Two days after hearing a speech by Hitler that was broadcast over the BBC (and simultaneously translated into English), Lewis got the idea for a diabolical satire. It would consist of the secret correspondence between a senior devil, named Screwtape, and his apprentice, as they plotted the ruination of a human soul.

Appearing throughout 1941 as installments in The Guardian, it was published the following year under the title The Screwtape Letters. Among other themes is the Will to Power, a concept advanced by the 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Like a spiritual surgeon, Lewis dissects the taproot of the totalitarian temptation: the habits of mind that corrupt the heart beyond recovery.

“It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and into the Nothing,” counsels Screwtape. “Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

The hellish catastrophe that had descended upon Europe and Asia in 1941 was almost beyond comprehension.

On December 7, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in a surprise attack on the United States, crippling its Navy and inflicting 3297 casualties on service personnel and civilians. On the same day, the Japanese attacked the British outpost of Malaya, sinking several British ships, including the Prince of Wales, ultimately killing 840 sailors. Hong Kong fell on Christmas Day, with reports of the rape and massacre of many civilians. Japan was now at war with America and Great Britain.

Hitler’s Germany, which already controlled virtually all of Central and Western Europe, declared war on the United States on December 11 and quickly formed a military alliance with Japan and Italy. The Nazi assault against the Soviet Union, begun in June and involving 3.6 million troops — the largest invasion force in European history — continued apace. In the previous year, England had survived the Battle of Britain and the Nazi Blitz on London — but just barely. Throughout 1941, Germany kept up the bombing raids on London and other major cities in England.

This was the geopolitical reality on Christmas Day in 1941. To many in England, it really seemed that the forces of barbarism would prevail, that the eclipse of Western civilization was at hand. It really looked as if the survival of Great Britain depended upon the choices of “quite small people” — the ordinary folk upon whom Tolkien’s hobbits were based — who shook off their fears and fought the terror from the skies.

Writing throughout the blackest days of the Second World War, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis captured in fantasy a dimension of the human story — the horror as well as the heroism — that was felt more vividly in their day than perhaps in any other period of history. Rejecting the mood of cynicism and disillusionment that gripped the minds of many in their generation, they created a beachhead of resistance: stories about courage and sacrifice and redemption.

It is a vision expressed in The Lord of the Rings by Sam Gamgee — Tolkien’s “jewel among the hobbits” — in the throes of Mordor. At the sight of a single, penetrating star, hope returns: “For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.”

Just so: During another brutal age, amid the gathering Dark, a star appeared — over Bethlehem — to point the way toward hope. May each of us find the strength, and the grace, and the faith to see it.

***

Joseph Loconte is the author of The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945. He is a presidential scholar at New College of Florida and the C.S. Lewis Scholar for Public Life at Grove City College. He hosts the YouTube channel History and the Human Story.

NATIONAL REVIEWBy Bradley J. Birzer

December 18, 2025 4:47 PM

The War for Middle-earth: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933–1945, by Joseph Loconte (Thomas Nelson, $29.99)

In one of the most famous and beloved moments of The Lord of the Rings, the elven queen Galadriel cautions the Fellowship of the Ring: “Your Quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and it will fail, to the ruin of all.” Beautiful and stirring at once. Author Joseph Loconte speculates that J. R. R. Tolkien may very well have been thinking about the dangerously precarious position of Western civilization at the very beginning of the Second World War.

Tolkien stressed that The Lord of the Rings was not about the Second World War or Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler or any other immediate thing. That it was simply about itself. Loconte, however, makes a very persuasive case that global events, especially in the critical years between 1933 and 1945, could not but affect Tolkien and his closest friends — C. S. Lewis and the Inklings, a group of scholars at Oxford — as they “struggled to make sense of the world around them.”

To be sure, many excellent scholars, John Garth especially, have focused on the First World War’s influence on Tolkien and Lewis, but Loconte might be the first to examine the influence of the interwar years, the Depression years, or the Second World War on the Inklings. He does so brilliantly and with a beautiful narrative flow. The reader experiences nothing short of a sense of awe as Loconte poetically interweaves the story of Western civilization with the personal stories of Lewis and Tolkien. Indeed, though I knew much about these authors, I was much less familiar with the lead-up to and execution of World War II. Loconte tells the story of the possible subversion of Western civilization from within and of its potential inability to defend itself. While he wisely never makes this explicit, it’s clear that this is a timeless problem that must be addressed in every generation.

Over the past several years, Loconte has fully immersed himself in all things Lewis and Tolkien — evident in his equally excellent New York Times bestseller, A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War (2015) — and he has become quite a force in Tolkien, Lewis, and Inklings scholarship. Certainly, I hope that Loconte follows up this book with one covering the final years of Lewis’s life.

In The War for Middle-earth, Loconte does several critical things very well.

First, in addition to offering a riveting narrative of a declining civilization (think Livy or Winston Churchill), he offers the mythic and legendary antidotes provided by Tolkien and Lewis. As every reader of their work innately knows, but as so few scholars have pointed out, the two authors make everything around them beautiful. They make good look good. Here’s Loconte on the subject: “This is one of the great achievements of The Lord of the Rings: to make the qualities of courage and fortitude deeply attractive to an otherwise skeptical generation.” Unlike most other authors of the 20th century, Tolkien and Lewis provide us with characters — Frodo, Aragorn, Gandalf, Sam, Tom Bombadil, Aslan, Ransom, etc. — who embody truth, goodness, and beauty. We want to emulate them.

Second, like Tolkien and Lewis, Loconte knows how to write heroically without its coming across as false or contrived. For example: “The young soldiers did not cower for cover: they stormed the beaches and, with help from the air, overwhelmed the Nazi defenses. Within a few days of their June 6 landing, more than 326,000 troops, 50,000 vehicles, and 100,000 tons of equipment arrived at Normandy to join them in the assault. It was the beginning of the end of Nazism.” After reading this, the modern reader wants to sign up.

Third, Loconte has the great knack for finding sources that humanize his subjects. Take this description of Lewis by a refugee whom Lewis had housed during World War II:

My first impression of C.S. Lewis was that of a shabbily clad, rather portly gentleman, whom I took to be the gardener and told him so. . . He roared — boomed! — with laughter. . . he never reproached us . . . and during the next year, when both of us were preparing to take school-leaving certificates, he would invite us many an evening into his smoke-laden den, go through our homework with us and impart ideas.

Could one find a more perfect description of the man? An Oxford don, a bachelor, arguably the greatest apologist of Christianity of the 20th century, sitting with a number of homeless children and helping them with homework?

As a testament to how much I enjoyed this book — and I guarantee that any admirer of Tolkien, Lewis, or Churchill will — the moment I finished the advanced review copy provided by the publisher, I ordered a personal copy. Yes, I wanted to support Loconte, and the book is simply that good.