The Chronicles of War Repercussions in J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis’s Life and Work by Nora Alfaiz B.A. in English, May 2007, King Saud University M.A. in English, May 2011, American University A Dissertation submitted to The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 31, 2020 Dissertation directed by Marshall Alcorn Professor of English The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Nora Alfaiz has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of May 06, 2020. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation. The Chronicles of War Repercussions in J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis’s Life and Work Nora Alfaiz Dissertation Research Committee: Marshall Alcorn, Professor of English, Dissertation Director Kavita Daiya, Associate Professor of English, Committee Member Maria Frawley, Professor of English, Committee Member ii © Copyright 2020 by Nora Alfaiz All rights reserved iii Dedication To the writer of The Hobbit. And to my mother, who nudged me towards bookshops and calls me her Precious. iv Acknowledgments I could not have made it this far without my Dissertation Director, Marshall Alcorn, whose class lectures spurred my interest in trauma studies and eventually led to years of office visits and samosa meetings as I looked more into the Great War’s influence on my writers. I am also grateful to Kavita Daiya and Maria Frawley for their invaluable support from the first classroom discussion till the end of my doctoral experience. I would also like to thank my readers, Daniel DeWispelare and Aparajita De, for graciously offering their time to this project. In addition to the professors I met at George Washington University, I am thankful to the many I met during my summer programs at Oxford University, and the academics who embraced and challenged my thoughts on Tolkien at the T. S. Eliot Summer Program in London. And then, of course, there is my fellowship, who kept me company and generously offered me space to think aloud when the Ring was far too heavy a weight to carry: Patrick Henry, Amy Fox, Meg Smith, Lynette Ballard, Jenny Lorenzo, Patricia Martini, Anthony Cirilla, Nellie Berri, David Tokarz, mom, Sarah, Fahad, and my cats Sylvia and Toffee. Thank you for your continued encouragement and companionship. v Abstract of Dissertation The Chronicles of War Repercussions in J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis’s Life and Work This dissertation examines the influence of the Great War on the lives and fantasy works of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. By situating the influence of the Great War on these fantasy writers, along with the longstanding popularity of their works, I place them on the forefront of post-war studies. Ultimately, I examine moments of personal and fictional responses to war to argue that Tolkien and Lewis generated reparative fantasies to respond to the horrors they witnessed. They did so by embracing the threats of war as necessities in the epic battles of good versus evil, and such responses helped them find meaning in the chaos of war. My first chapter examines the historical and biographical accounts of Tolkien’s experiences in World War I, where I argue he uses fantasy fiction to represent horrifying experiences rooted in his times in the trenches. The second chapter analyzes The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to contend that Tolkien uses the fantasy genre as an avenue to express his frustrations with war, particularly military technology and post-war national memory. The third chapter traces Lewis’s similar war experiences, where I argue both writers used the fantasy genre as a unique refraction to articulate their war frustrations. The fourth chapter analyzes The Chronicles of Narnia to argue that Lewis represents his war frustrations in the way he addresses familial loss, governmental ascendancy, and traditional patriotic war portrayals. The coda presents a plethora of ideas for prospective biographical and analytical advances that show how a single war can generate many studies on the influence of war on Tolkien, Lewis, and other fantasy writers of the twentieth century. vi Table of Contents Dedication ....................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ...........................................................................................................v Abstract ........................................................................................................................... vi Table of Contents .......................................................................................................... vii Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1. “Something Has Gone Crack”: J. R. R. Tolkien and Mythologizing the Great War ............................................................................................................20 Chapter 2. The Lord of the Wars: Post-war Memory and Military Technology in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Works ......................................................................................63 Chapter 3. “Friendship with Lewis Compensates for Much”: Lewis’s Wartime Influences and His Friendship with Tolkien ........................................................104 Chapter 4. The Lion, the Witch, and the (War)drobe: Familial Loss and Governmental Ascendancy in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia ............................................147 Coda. The Breaking of the Fellowship of Tolkien and Lewis’s Life and Works ........................................................................................................................184 Works Cited and Consulted ......................................................................................... 194 Appendix ........................................................................................................................ 206 vii Introduction Both J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis participated in World War I and used fantasy to help represent their traumatic war experiences. The war caused insurmountable loss that marked both writers. In a touching statement, the philologist Tolkien lamented, “By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead” (The Fellowship of the Ring 44). The declaration, taken from his foreword to The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955), echoed his fellow Lewis’s recollection: “I remember five of us [training] at Keble, and I am the only survivor” (Letters 1: 317-319). The two of them lost their friends to the war, a time in which war veterans became disillusioned over political good intentions: all were sent to the trenches and to a potentially inevitable death. Tolkien and Lewis found fantasy to be the appropriate literary genre to address their horrifyingly unreal war experiences and losses. Both adopted Tolkien’s fantasy related concept of eucatastrophe, a lifting of heart as a result of reading fantasy, to imagine ways to make meaning out of war as their nation moved towards even more loss and chaos in World War II. As such, I argue that Tolkien and Lewis, responding to the traumatic suffering of their war experiences, were generating reparative fantasies. These fantasies do not represent trauma in a clinical sense, but they do respond to near traumatic suffering and seek to create new formulations for meaning and social engagement. As such, they embraced the threats of war without fear and instead find the fears to be an essential element of the necessary and epic battles of good versus evil. Many similarly experienced contemporaneous post-war soldiers became writers and used literature to address the dark matter of war and human corruption, though 1 Tolkien and Lewis were unique in their usage of fantasy. For example, there is George Orwell’s witnessing of the uprise of fascism in the Spanish Civil War and his reactionary Animal Farm (1945) followed by Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) as a post-WWII commentary, Robert Graves’ memoir Good-Bye to All That (1929) tracing his bleak days in World War I, and Siegfried Sassoon’s asylum formed friendship with Wilfred Owen and their resulting towering presence as authoritative poets on World War I. Within the authors listed above and their publications of memoirs, biographies, poetry, and fiction, the only comparable writer with exceptional similarity to the two authors examined in this book is Orwell and his dystopic piece of science-fiction Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell’s dystopic metaphorical mode of representing a significantly traumatic event of the twentieth century was by using science-fiction, while our two authors turned to the mode of fantasy to powerfully comment on and communicate their experiences in the Great War when other forms of writing weren’t adequate enough for the war horrors they wanted to represent. Tolkien and Writing After WWI Tolkien was busy inventing his own mythopoeia and a national myth for England, and he wrote in the trenches while other soldiers were reading old mythologies to escape their present situations and stresses in the trenches. As Fussell words it, World War I was a time in which soldiers were reading old mythologies and believing in un-modern superstitions in a war “especially fertile in rumor and legend” (The Great War and Modern Memory 15). “I was not a good officer,” (Letters 90), confessed Tolkien to