Tolkien, Lewis, and the Realities of War with Joe Loconte

Learning in Wartime with Lewis and Tolkien and Joe Laconte

Trinity Forum Senior Fellow Joe Loconte joins our podcast to discuss the friendship and legacy of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. He highlights how their wartime experiences, and their subsequent refusal to become disillusioned and disenchanted in the aftermath of World War I allowed for some of the greatest works of literature in modern history.

In the moral and cultural tumult of the inter-war years, their example of resilience and imagination is inspiring. As Joe Loconte shared, they were using their art to actively resist the totalizing and dehumanizing ideologies that were ascendent in their day:And it's just no coincidence. They are deliberately pushing back, I think, in a way that, that some biographers have not maybe fully appreciated. They are pushing back in their writings against the totalitarian impulse and trying to defend the role of the individual, the choices that individuals have to make.Joe Loconte reminds us of the surprising return of hope for those who look up—as Samwise Gamgee says in the Lord of the Rings,” In the end the shadow was only a small and passing thing. There was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.”

This podcast is an edited version of an online conversation recorded in 2020. Watch the full video of the conversation here, and learn more about Joe Loconte here.

Authors and books mentioned in the conversation: C.S. Lewis J.R.R. Tolkien The Searchers: A Quest for Faith in the Valley of Doubt, by Joe Loconte The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler's Gathering Storm, by Joe Loconte God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West, by Joe Loconte A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and A Great War, by Joe Loconte Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis John Locke Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien F. Scott Fitzgerald Ernest Hemingway Erich Maria Remarque The Wasteland, by T. S. Eliot The Inner Ring, by C.S. Lewis Owen Barfield Hugo Dyson Phantastes, by George MacDonald The Four Loves, by C.S. Lewis

Related Trinity Forum Readings: A Time to Stand, by Helmuth James von Moltke Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley Children of Light and Children of Darkness, by Reinhold Niebuhr The Golden Key, by George MacDonald

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To listen to this or any of our episodes in full, visit ttf.org/podcast and to join the Trinity Forum Society and help make content like this possible, join the Trinity Forum Society

Special thanks to Ned Bustard for our podcast artwork.