Christianity and Fantasy
This is the webpage for a Wheaton College course on a body of fantastic literature that embodies, reflects upon, or opposes Christianity. The primary focus of the course is on that group of writers known as the Inklings, but their predecessors and successors — some of the latter quite hostile — are considered as well.
contexts and ancestors
The ballad of Thomas the Rhymer
A fine brief biography of William Morris
Links to Morris’s writings
Wikipedia page on George MacDonald (1824-1905)
Writings of MacDonald online
All about G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
Chesterton’s writings online
Chesterton’s introduction to the book of Job (especially relevant to The Man Who Was Thursday)
William Butler Yeats, The Celtic Twilight (Yeats’s retellings of Irish myths)
Yeats, Rosa Alchemica (one of his magical, occultist texts)
Wikipedia page on Yeats
David Lindsay, A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1921)
The full text of Jessie Weston’s seminal book on the Grail legend, From Ritual to Romance, may be found here. It was vital to Eliot.
Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough (final edition, 1922)
Wikipedia page on The Golden Bough
The several entries on myth in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas are excellent
Charles Williams (1886-1945)
A brief biography
A brief introduction to Williams’s fiction
An essay on Williams by Thomas Howard that may clarify a few things, but then again may not
C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)
A few excerpts from Lewis’s major nonfictional works
A good general site about Lewis
And another one
A thoughtful review of a biography of Lewis
J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973)
Tolkien’s absolutely definitive and seminal essay “On Fairy Stories” is available online as a PDF, though I am not sure it appears legally
A poem by Tolkien: Mythopoeia
A detailed timeline of Tolkien’s life and work
Useful links, including a sound brief biography, from the Tolkien Society
An interesting and thoughtful evaluative essay by Andrew O’Hehir from Salon.com: Part 1 and Part 2
the (relatively) recent past and current events
An introduction to Crowley’s Little, Big
John Crowley, amazingly, has a blog
See this essay on Richard Adams’s Watership Down and fantasy
A page with detailed annotations of Rusell Hoban’s Riddley Walker
A page devoted to T. H. White’s The Once and Future King
The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse, a short story by Susanna Clarke
Crooked Timber’s seminar on Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Wikipedia page on China Miéville
The Miéville Seminar: responses to Iron Council at Crooked Timber
I have had a few things to say about Harry Potter over the years: try this and then this, and oh yes, this — and, finally, this
A His Dark Materials wiki
quotations
C. S. Lewis on Story considered in itself
It is astonishing how little attention critics have paid to Story considered in itself. . . . [T]he subject has been left almost untouched, and this has had a curious result. Those forms of literature . . . in which everything else is there for the sake of the story have been given little serious attention. Not only have they been despised, as if they were fit only for children, but even the kind of pleasure they give has, in my opinion, been misunderstood.
CSL on George MacDonald
What [MacDonald] does best is fantasy — fantasy that hovers between the allegorical and the mythpoeic. And this, in my opinion, he does better than any man. The critical problem with which we are confronted is whether this art — the art of myth-making — is a species of the literary art. The objection to so classifying it is that the Myth does not essentially exist in words at all. We all agree that the story of Balder is a great myth, a thing of inexhaustible value. But of whose version — whose words — are we thinking when we say this?
For my own part, the answer is that I am not thinking of anyone’s words. No poet, as far as I know or can remember, has told this story supremely well. I am not thinking of any particular version of it. If the story is anywhere embodied in words, that is almost an accident. What really delights and nourishes me is a particular pattern of events, which would equally delight and nourish me if it had reached me by some medium which involved no words at all — say by a mime, or a film. And I find this to be true of all such stories. . . .
In this respect stories of the mythical type are at the opposite pole from lyrical poetry. If you try to take the “theme” of Keats’s Nightingale apart from the very words in which he has embodied it, you find that you are talking about almost nothing. Form and content can there be separated only by a false abstraction. But in a myth — in a story where the mere pattern of events is all that matters — this is not so. Any means of communication whatever which succeeds in lodging those events in our imagination has, as we say, “done the trick.” . . . In poetry the words are the body and the “theme” or “content” is the soul. But in myth the imagined events are the body and something inexpressible is the soul: the words, or mime, or film, or pictorial series are not even clothes — they are not much more than a telephone.
Of this I had evidence some years ago when I first heard the story of Kafka’s Castle related in conversation and afterwards read the book for myself. The reading added nothing. I had already received the myth, which was all that mattered.
Most myths were made in prehistoric times, and, I suppose, not consciously made by individuals at all. But every now and then there occurs in the modern world a genius — a Kafka or a Novalis — who can make such a story. MacDonald is the greatest genius of this kind whom I know. But I do not know how to classify such genius. To call it literary genius seems unsatisfactory since it can coexist with great inferiority in the art of words. . . . Nor can it be fitted into any of the other arts. It begins to look as if there were an art, or a gift, which criticism has largely ignored.
J. R. R. Tolkien on fairy stories
I would venture to say that approaching the Christian Story from this direction, it has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt making-creatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospel contains a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy stories. They contain many marvels — peculiarly artistic, beautiful and moving: ‘mythical’ in their perfect self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered history and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfilment of Creation.
Northrop Frye on learned and recondite writers
We notice that many learned and recondite writers whose work requires patient study are explicitly mythopoeic writers. Instances include Dante and Spenser, and in the twentieth century embrace nearly all the ‘difficult’ writers in both poetry and prose. Such work, when fictional, is often founded on a basis of naive drama (Faust, Peer Gynt) or naive romance (Hawthorne, Melville: one may compare the sophisticated allegories of Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis in our day, which are largely based on the formulas of the Boy’s Own Paper). Learned mythopoeia, as we have it in the last period of Henry James and in James Joyce, for example, may become bewilderingly complex; but the complexities are designed to reveal and not to disguise the myth. We cannot assume that a primitive and popular myth has been swathed like a mummy in elaborate verbiage, which is the assumption that the fallacy of reduction would lead to. The inference seems to be that the learned and the subtle, like the primitive and the popular, tend toward a center of imaginative experience.
Spengler on Tolkien
Tolkien is a writer of greater theological depth than his Oxford colleague C S Lewis, in my judgment. Lewis is a felicitous writer and a diligent apologist, but mere allegory along the lines of the Narnia series can do no more than restate Christian doctrine; it cannot really expand our experience of it. Tolkien takes us to the dark frontier of a world that is not yet Christian, and therefore is tragic, but has the capacity to become Christian. It is the world of the Dark Ages, in which barbarians first encounter the light. It is not fantasy, but rather a distillation of the spiritual history of the West. Whereas C S Lewis tries to make us comfortable in what we already believe by dressing up the story as a children’s masquerade, Tolkien makes us profoundly uncomfortable. Our people, our culture, our language, our toehold upon this shifting and uncertain Earth are no more secure than those of a thousand extinct tribes of the Dark Ages; and a greater hope than that of the work of our hands and the hone of our swords must avail us. ( Spengler is a curious and sometimes brilliant columnist for the Asia Times Online)
Lewis on Plato and second meanings
Plato in his Republic is arguing that righteousness is often praised for the rewards it brings—honour, popularity, and the like—but that to see it in its true nature we must separate it from all these, strip it naked. He asks us therefore to imagine a perfectly righteous man treated by al around him as a monster of wickedness. We must picture him, still perfect, while he is bound, scourged, and finally impaled (the Persian equivalent of crucifixion). At this passage a Christian reader starts and rubs his eyes. What is happening?
. . . Plato is talking, and knows he is talking, about the fate of goodness in a wicked and misunderstanding world. But that is not something simply other than the Passion of Christ. It is the very same thing of which the Passion is the supreme illustration. If Plato was in some measure moved to write about it by the recent death—we may almost say the martyrdom—of his master Socrates then that again is not simply something other than the Passion of Christ. The imperfect, yet very venerable, goodness of Socrates led to the easy death of the hemlock, and the perfect goodness of Christ led to the death of the cross, not by chance but for the same reason: because goodness is what it is, and because the fallen world is what it is. If Plato, starting from one example and from his insight into the nature of goodness and the nature of the world, was led to see the possibility of a perfect example, and thus to depict something extremely like the Passion of Christ, this happened not because he was lucky but because he was wise.
. . . There is a real connection between what Plato and the myth-makers most deeply were and meant and what I believe to be the truth. I know that connection and they do not. But it is really there. It is not an arbitrary fancy of my own thrust upon the old words. One can, without any absurdity, imagine Plato or the myth-makers if they learned the truth, saying, “I see . . . So that was what I was really talking about. Of course. That is what my words really meant, and I never knew it.”
Hugh Trevor-Roper on C. S. Lewis
Do you know C.S. Lewis? In case you don’t, let me offer a brief character-sketch. Envisage (if you can) a man who combines the face and figure of a hog-reever or earth-stopper with the mind and thought of a Desert Father of the fifth century, preoccupied with meditations of inelegant theological obscenity; a powerful mind warped by erudite philistinism, blackened by systematic bigotry, and directed by a positive detestation of such profane frivolities as art, literature, and, of course, poetry; a purple-faced bachelor and misogynist, living alone in rooms of inconceivable hideousness, secretly consuming vast quantities of his favorite dish, beefsteak-and-kidney pudding; periodically trembling at the mere apprehension of a feminine footfall; and all the while distilling his morbid and illiberal thoughts into volumes of best-selling prurient religiosity and such reactionary nihilism as is indicated by the gleeful title, The Abolition of Man.
China Miéville on Tolkien
Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious – you can’t ignore it, so don’t even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there’s a lot to dislike – his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien’s clichés – elves ‘n’ dwarfs ‘n’ magic rings – have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was ‘consolation’, thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader.
Philip Hensher, C. S. Lewis fan
Don’t give your children C S Lewis to read; not the Narnia books, not The Screwtape Letters, not that appalling Is God an Astronaut? science fiction. It looks like rich fantasy, but it is the product of a mean, narrow little mind, burrowing into their ideas and pooh-poohing them. Give them anything else—Last Exit to Brooklyn, a bottle of vodka, a phial of prussic acid, even Winnie the Pooh—but keep them away from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. [here]
Philip Pullman, lover of Narnia
One of the most vile moments in the whole of children’s literature, to my mind, occurs at the end of The Last Battle, when Aslan reveals to the children that “The term is over: the holidays have begun” because “There was a real railway accident. Your father and mother and all of you are – as you used to call it in the Shadowlands – dead.” To solve a narrative problem by killing one of your characters is something many authors have done at one time or another. To slaughter the lot of them, and then claim they’re better off, is not honest storytelling: it’s propaganda in the service of a life-hating ideology. But that’s par for the course. Death is better than life; boys are better than girls; light-coloured people are better than dark-coloured people; and so on. There is no shortage of such nauseating drivel in Narnia, if you can face it.
A. S. Byatt on Edwardians and children
The writers of the catalogue repeatedly refer to the Edwardian escape from the dark, serious drawing rooms of the Victorian era into fantasy, brightness, elegance – and, one might add, whimsy. The British, at the beginning of the 20th century, might be said to have been obsessed by childhood. A reviewer remarked that the great books of the time were arguably those written for children – by writers such as E Nesbit, Rudyard Kipling, JM Barrie and Kenneth Grahame. Children and childhood became very real and very important. Nesbit not only created some of the most memorable, cantankerous inhuman creatures – the psammead, the phoenix – but wrote about real children, with real grumbles and anxieties. Kipling’s children – Mowgli, Kim, Dan and Una in Puck of Pook’s Hill – have independence, drama and lives that are taken seriously. There is a vein of writing, perhaps starting with Richard Jefferies’s Wood Magic and Bevis: The Story of a Boy, that created an interwoven nostalgia for the countryside as it once was and for the pursuits of boyhood: camping, fishing, boating. This was the time of the founding of the Boy Scouts, at the end of the Boer war. The end of boyhood is a fall of man – in Kenneth Grahame’s The Golden Age, the end of happiness is the departure for public school. Grahame liked to believe that humans should return to being centaurs – half-untrammelled wild things. He created Rat, Mole, Badger and Toad, animal boy-men, who encountered the inhuman Pan. And then there is the perennial Peter Pan himself, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. It is interesting that four days before the theatrical version of that story opened, Harley Granville-Barker and Laurence Housman opened Prunella – a Pierrot play for grown-up children. (There is some splendid work by Housman in the Dulwich exhibition.) Bernard Shaw remarked that Peter Pan was “really a play for grown-up people; for as you know, when we buy toys for children we take care to select the ones which amuse ourselves”. Rupert Brooke saw the play at least 12 times.