When classes ended in May, I was with my wife in the hospital, so I couldn’t wrap up my classes appropriately. Instead, I recorded brief audio lectures. Below you’ll find a transcription (with links added) of the lecture I sent to my class on Fantasy. I have resisted the temptation to clean it up, to nuance my arguments, etc. This is almost exactly what I said, for better or worse.
In one sense, as I told you back at the beginning of class, fantasy is the normal or typical mode of storytelling. If you go back to the Odyssey, or if you go even further back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, you have gods, demigods, supernatural forces, witches, haunted forests, people with superhuman strength — the whole package, basically. And that is the mode. You still see that mode of storytelling — not as dominant, but you still see it — in the sixteenth century, in, for instance, Spenser’s Faerie Queene. You have, of course, as I described in class, all those border ballads, like “Thomas the Rhymer,” from anywhere between the twelfth and the sixteenth century. (All this just in Britain: there are comparable events elsewhere in Europe.)
And then what happens with the emergence of what Charles Taylor calls the Modern Moral Order, in which we are perceived as rational and sociable creatures operating within what Taylor also calls “the immanent frame” — that is, without reference to transcendence — is that we get novels. The genre of the novel emerges, and it is about rational, sociable beings living within the immanent frame. The transcendent, the supernatural, the miraculous, the magical are all ruled out. And not long after people began to feel that this account of human life was too constraining; thus you began to see the re-emergence of the fantastic in literature.
So, for instance, just at the time that the English novel reaches its pinnacle in the writings of George Eliot and Charles Dickens, we get the creation of modern fantasy. This happens in part — and I don’t think I talked about this much in class — through a restoration of fairy tales and folk tales, their discovery by researchers into folklore. (This was pioneered by the brothers Grimm in Germany.) All this is also, by the way, a kind of response to the MMO: a sense that the traditional lore that has been left behind by modernity is valuable, or at the very least interesting. These anthropological enquiries remind people of all the old stories. You also get a recovery of interest in medieval literature — in things like Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (perhaps especially because they were so nearly lost). So there are scholarly resources available for people who want to reclaim certain earlier forms of storytelling.
Now, some people want to do this for reasons that have nothing to do with Christianity or indeed with religion of any kind. William Morris, for instance, whose epic fantasies had a great influence on Lewis and Tolkien, was really interested in the lost culture of the Middle Ages, which he felt was a more organic and unified culture, ruled by relationships rather than just money, and he wanted to restore the attitudes and practices of that lost world. But for MacDonald, as we saw, fantasy is really about trying to make Christianity plausible to people — about opening up their imaginations. Lewis would say later that reading MacDonald, which he did when he was an atheist, “baptized my imagination,” and that was exactly the sort of thing MacDonald wanted to do. So we saw that in fantasy there is a way of approaching Christian faith and belief from a peculiar and unexpected direction. It is rarely explicitly Christian, because its explicit materials are those from pre-Christian Europe. But it is moving towards, or encouraging people to move towards, the Christian faith. You see this in Tolkien, who said that his work was implicitly but very deeply Christian — and indeed specifically Catholic — and then of course in the Narnia books.
I think the Christian faith is deeply implicated in the Harry Potter books as well, which becomes explicit in the final book of the series. I wrote about that at some length here.
But in general, what we have seen in recent decades is a kind of repaganizing of fantasy. You certainly see that in the Earthsea books, which take no account whatsoever of Christianity, though I think Le Guin may have been influenced a little more by the Christian story than she would acknowledge, probably through the influence of Tolkien: Ged’s final struggle in The Farther Shore matches that of Frodo at many points. In general, however, Le Guin certainly does not see the world as morally and spiritually ordered in the way that it is in the Christian cosmos — I see no place for the Christian story in her work at all. And then, of course, it is traditional Chinese folk culture that plays a role in Ken Liu’s “The Paper Menagerie.”
I think that sort of repaganization is even true of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell — I say “even” because Susanna Clarke is a Christian. But what she is imagining is a world in which Christianity is decentered, in which there is another source of power that seems to have nothing to do with Christianity. In that sense, though, she may be following Tolkien’s lead. Tolkien, in imagining Men and Elves, seems to me to be suggesting that Christ is the savior of Men — but there is no indication of what becomes of the Elves, since Christ comes after the elves have left Middle-earth, and is Himself the reckoning with the sins endemic to men. Tolkien suggests that there is no reason to think God would use exactly the same means of redemption for all creatures made in His image. It is possible that the Elves are saved in some other way, and it is also possible that the elves are not “saved” at all — that God did not make them in order to have them united with him eternally. We do not know, and we cannot put constraints upon God in that respect. Clarke may be working in that tradition.
Nevertheless, with the possible exception of the Harry Potter books, as I survey the landscape of fantasy today it seems to me to have essentially rejected the use that MacDonald put it to. I find that regrettable and a little sad. But there is still a great body of wonderful fantasy that Christians can read, enjoy, profit from, and be spiritually enriched by, which is very good news. And the story of the genre of fantasy is not yet completed. I hope for the emergence of new Christian writers of fantasy who can do for their generation what Tolkien and Lewis did for earlier generations.
Thanks for joining me on this ride, and blessings to you all!
