In his book, A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and A Great War (Nelson, 2015), my friend Joe Loconte traces the influence of World War I over two great Christian literary minds of the twentieth century, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Before their friendship blossomed at Oxford, the two writers were ordinary young Brits pulled into a living nightmare of a war that, for its scale and the ferocity of its technological innovation, seemed without precedent. For multitudes of men their age, a tour on the front line meant certain death.
Loconte argues convincingly that these experiences in the “the war to end all wars” formed the plot, locations, characters, and drama found in Lewis’s Narnia and Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. In one section, Loconte reflects on Tolkien’s high view of friendship as an invaluable bond and how that must have been shaped by the real instances of friendship that Tolkien experienced and witnessed during his military service. He imagines, for instance, how the image of Sam carrying Frodo the last few steps to the lava flows of Mt. Doom might have been inspired by similar acts of heroic friendship seen during the war. The vividness of the account seems to find reference in actual experience.
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