Against domination

Joseph Loconte on one of the reasons Tolkien and Lewis remain relevant beyond just entertainment:

.... Tolkien and Lewis made a literary pact between them: They would write novels to undeceive their generation and quicken the moral imagination. ....

The result, The Screwtape Letters (1942), exposed how fear, hatred, and ambition could be manipulated to serve the lust for power. The devil and his minions want people “hag-ridden” by the future, Lewis writes, “haunted by visions of imminent heaven or hell on earth.” Once individuals become obsessed with controlling the future, they will be “ready to break the Enemy’s commands [God’s moral law] in the present” in order to attain the one or avoid the other.

Art was imitating life. To defeat capitalism and achieve its utopian vision of a classless society, freed from the vices of envy and competition, Soviet communism waged a war against its own population: the abolition of private property, show trials, executions, and gulags. To prevent “the bacillus of mankind” from polluting and destroying German society, Hitler launched his “final solution” against the Jews: the ghettos, the deportations, the sterilization policies, and the death camps.

Thus, the dictatorships of the left and the right — political religions without God — each claimed to be the solution to an approaching apocalypse. Each demanded unquestioned loyalty to their political agendas. As Tolkien described Sauron: “He brooked no freedom nor any rivalry, and he named himself Lord of the Earth.” ....

Their most beloved stories — The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Ransom Trilogy, The Chronicles of Narnia — upheld the irreducible dignity of the individual. Against the literary establishment, they reclaimed the concept of heroism and reinvented it for the modern mind: Their unlikely protagonists include the children of Narnia and the homely inhabitants of the Shire. As Gandalf described the hobbits: “Soft as butter they can be, yet sometimes as tough as old tree-roots.”

During the crisis years of 1933 to 1945, when the world descended into an abyss of grievances, propaganda, and state-sanctioned violence, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis stood together in the breach. They offered a vision of human life — rooted in a deeply Christian outlook — that embraced humility, self-denial, and the rejection of worldly power. .... (more)

Joseph Loconte, "Lessons About Power from Middle-earth," National Review, Nov. 8, 2025.