Trinity Forum Conversations - Tolkien, Lewis, and the Realities of War with Joe Loconte

Jan 08 2024 29 mins 20

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

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