J.R.R. TOLKIEN AND C.S. LEWIS CONFRONT THE TOTALITARIAN TEMPTATION

By Joseph Loconte

“I don’t know if I’m weaker than other people,” wrote C. S. Lewis to his brother on July 20, 1940, “but it is a positive revelation to me that while the speech lasts it is impossible not to waver just a little.”

Adolf Hitler had delivered a menacing speech to the German Reichstag the night before, simultaneously translated into English by the BBC. In it, he blamed the war in Europe on “the big capitalist clique of war profiteers” and “the international Jewish poison.” The rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s — in Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union — depended upon millions of people succumbing to the political propaganda of regimes that drew their strength from their hatreds.

Yet Lewis, a scholar at Oxford University, along with his friend, J. R. R. Tolkien, were never taken in by it. Like no other authors of their day, they used their literary imagination to expose the roots of the totalitarian temptation. Given the violent and degraded condition of America’s political culture, they have much to teach us.

At Lewis’s urging, Tolkien began writing The Lord of the Rings, his sequel to The Hobbit, in 1937 and worked on it throughout the war years. After it was finally published, in the 1950s, many readers assumed that the story of the Ring was a warning against the atomic bomb. Tolkien set them straight: “Of course my story is not an allegory of Atomic power, but of power, exerted for Domination.”

Tolkien used the genre of fantasy to explore this aspect of the human condition with extraordinary depth and insight. The Lord of the Rings, in fact, delivers a moral psychology of the “Will to Power” — as expressed by Friedrich Nietzsche — that was ravaging the world just as he was composing his epic story.

In Book II, at “The Council of Elrond” — a war council — the defenders of Middle-earth face a cruel dilemma. They possess the Ring of Power, a fearsome weapon that could defeat Sauron and the forces of Mordor. But they cannot use it without falling under its evil influence. “If any of the Wise should with this Ring overthrow the Lord of Mordor, using his own arts, he would then set himself on Sauron’s throne, and yet another Dark Lord would appear,” warns Elrond, leader of the Elves. “The very desire of it corrupts the heart.”

The council learns of Saruman’s attempt to lure Gandalf the Wizard into a pact with Sauron. “We must rule,” Saruman explained. “But we must have power, power to order all things as we will, for that good which only the Wise can see.” To achieve their noble aim, the only sensible decision was to be on the right side of Sauron’s regime, with the intention of directing it. “There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means.”

Since most of Tolkien’s story was completed after the fall of France in 1940, it seems likely that he had in mind the political rationalizations, betrayals, and compromises that enabled Hitler to dominate the European continent. Indeed, in Gandalf’s rebuttal to Saruman, we can discern the moral naïveté of European society: “I have heard speeches of this kind before, but only in the mouths of emissaries sent from Mordor to deceive the ignorant.”

In the aftermath of the First World War, disillusionment — with democracy, tradition, and religion — was the dominant mood in Europe. The Modernist movement in literature, by rejecting settled beliefs about man’s dignity and rationality, deepened the cultural crisis. As Lewis described it: “A man whose mind was formed in a period of cynicism and disillusion cannot teach hope or fortitude.”

Tolkien and Lewis made a literary pact between them: They would write novels to undeceive their generation and quicken the moral imagination.

And then, while sitting in church, two days after hearing Hitler’s speech over the BBC, 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 against the “Enemy” (God) to secure the soul of their “patient” for everlasting perdition.

The result, The Screwtape Letters (1942), exposed how fear, hatred, and ambition could be manipulated to serve the lust for power. The devil and his minions want people “hag-ridden” by the future, Lewis writes, “haunted by visions of imminent heaven or hell on earth.” Once individuals become obsessed with controlling the future, they will be “ready to break the Enemy’s commands [God’s moral law] in the present” in order to attain the one or avoid the other.

Art was imitating life. To defeat capitalism and achieve its utopian vision of a classless society, freed from the vices of envy and competition, Soviet communism waged a war against its own population: the abolition of private property, show trials, executions, and gulags. To prevent “the bacillus of mankind” from polluting and destroying German society, Hitler launched his “final solution” against the Jews: the ghettos, the deportations, the sterilization policies, and the death camps.

Thus, the dictatorships of the left and the right — political religions without God — each claimed to be the solution to an approaching apocalypse. Each demanded unquestioned loyalty to their political agendas. As Tolkien described Sauron: “He brooked no freedom nor any rivalry, and he named himself Lord of the Earth.”

Tolkien and Lewis formed the nucleus of a small group of like-minded writers — known as the Inklings — who created a beachhead of resistance to this totalitarian outlook.

Their most beloved stories — The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Ransom Trilogy, The Chronicles of Narnia — upheld the irreducible dignity of the individual. Against the literary establishment, they reclaimed the concept of heroism and reinvented it for the modern mind: Their unlikely protagonists include the children of Narnia and the homely inhabitants of the Shire. As Gandalf described the hobbits: “Soft as butter they can be, yet sometimes as tough as old tree-roots.”

During the crisis years of 1933 to 1945, when the world descended into an abyss of grievances, propaganda, and state-sanctioned violence, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis stood together in the breach. They offered a vision of human life — rooted in a deeply Christian outlook — that embraced humility, self-denial, and the rejection of worldly power.

“I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me,” Frodo tells Sam after completing their quest to destroy the Ring. “It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: Someone has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.”

Here is a concept of renunciation, embodied in an ancient story, that needs retelling in our age of rage.

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Joseph Loconte 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. His forthcoming book, The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945, will be released November 18, 2025 by HarperCollins.