J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis are two of the most widely read 20th-century British writers. For both men, the ideals of British-ness centered on the communal life of the village, the heroism of everyday people in great times, and the attempt to bring together a fecund imagination with a faith in a Christian god. Many things shaped their writings, not the least being their scholarship in the medieval English language. Beowulf, Chaucer, and romance adventure gave them a vocabulary for fantasy and faith. Both men looked back, too, to their experiences as soldiers in World War I for the vividness of conflict. And, as they lived through World War II on the home front, their memories came back to them, invigorating imagined places with the gore and grit of the trenches. At the heart of their work is a theme, writes historian and filmmaker Loconte: “the necessity of individual courage to combat evil.” That individual courage had to be found in the ordinary man, the Hobbit, the person like us, who was “not made for perilous quests.” Such men were like the men with whom they fought. And in the 1930s and ’40s, when Tolkien, Lewis, and their contemporaries came together in conversation and scholarship at Oxford, they bonded in the shared need to “cordon” off the fears of combat. The pub, the library, and the college common room made “space for relationships that were meaningful, for conversations rich in wit and wisdom, and for creative work that could inspire and enchant. For Tolkien and Lewis, male friendship fulfilled all of these needs like nothing else.” At their most fantastic, both writers were at their most real and personal.
