Review - "The War for Middle Earth," Joseph Loconte, PhD

 While familiarity with J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis will add to your appreciation of this book, that is not necessary to realize the pertinence of this story to today’s world where evil still exists in the China, Russia, North Korea and Iran axis.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

The War for Middle Earth, Joseph Loconte

March 14, 2026

 

“Societies cannot thrive under conditions of disorder, disorientation and degeneration. The human soul craves

meaning and purpose. The new political religions of the twentieth century promised to deliver the goods.”

                                                                                The War for Middle Earth, 2025, Joseph Loconte, PhD

                                                                                                                                

Following World War I, Europe searched for answers amidst devastation. Civilization suffered and so did religion. Why, people asked, would God permit such suffering? Dictatorships, in Russia, Italy and Germany, rose to meet the challenge, becoming the “new political religions” that Mr. Loconte refers to in the epigraph. Following the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in 1917, Lenin became the leader of Communist Soviet Russia. The Fascist Mussolini was appointed Prime Minister by King Victor Emmanuel in 1922; eleven years later the Nazi Party leader Adolph Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg. All three men used violence in their accession to and maintenance of power. The people of those three countries, devastated by four years of war, were willing to accept totalitarian leadership.

 

It was in that environment – the end of innocence and the end of faith – that two friends, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, both Oxford professors of English literature and both veterans of the Great War, decided a new path was necessary: a path based on the virtues embedded in their Country’s Judeo-Christian heritage and in the individual liberalism inherent to Western civilization, a path that followed ancient tales and myths of heroes and villains, of fights won against great odds. As the Second World War commenced, Loconte writes “There was a savage war of aggression devouring the European continent and threatening the survival of Great Britain. Yet there was also an ideological war: the widespread assault on the classical and Christian ideals that had nourished Western civilization for centuries.” This is the story Joseph Loconte tells.

 

He follows Tolkien and Lewis, and how the rise of tyranny influenced their careers. “They began writing their epic stories (The Lord of the Ring and The Chronicles of Narnia.) when the darkest shadow of modern history was cast over the West and, for a crucial part of that time, over England in particular.”

 

In 1939, the Allies were unprepared: “The failure to imagine the likelihood of this act of aggression (Pearl Harbor), given Japan’s brutal war in China – indeed the reluctance to believe in the capacity for human wickedness on a vast scale – remains one of the enigmas of the Second World War.”

 

By September 1945, the Fascists in Italy, Nazis in Germany and the Japanese Imperialists had been defeated. Forty-five years later the Soviet Union collapsed. Western civilization, which Tolkien and Lewis did so much to preserve during those middle years, prevailed. 

 

His tale is pertinent today. The world is not static. We must ever be mindful that there will always be those whose desire for power threatens the West – our governments, history, culture and lives. While they assume different forms, the world will never be rid of a Sauron or a White Witch. But there will always be individuals, like Frodo and the Pevensie siblings, willing to sacrifice their comforts, and there will always be a Gandolf or Aslan to guide us. This is both a compelling and pertinent read.