Faith & Fantasy: Chesterton, Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling & Other Tellers of Tall Tales

Despite the opposition to J.K. Rowling's novels, I'm a big fan of all the writers mentioned in the title. In other words, I love fantasy in general.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Joseph Pearce

Tall tales are still being told. The light still shines. The torch is still being handed from generation to generation. Thanks be to God, the giver of the light, and thanks be to Chesterton, Tolkien, Lewis, and all other legend-makers and torchbearers of tradition.

Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme
of things not found within recorded time.

           —J.R. R. Tolkien (From “Mythopoeia”)

This is a festive year for all admirers of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. This September will mark the fiftieth anniversary of Tolkien’s sailing into the Mystic West, while this November marks the sixtieth anniversary of Lewis’s passing through the stable door and going further up and further in. It would seem appropriate to celebrate these joyous landmarks with an acknowledgment of the legacy of Tolkien and Lewis and of those who influenced them and were influenced by them.

Let’s begin with the connection between “faith and fantasy” which is inseparable from “faith and reason”, as was made evident by Tolkien in his seminal essay “On Fairy-Stories”:

Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make. If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts or evidence), then Fantasy would languish until they were cured. If they ever get into that state (it would not seem at all impossible), Fantasy will perish, and become Morbid Delusion.

In an age in which Morbid Delusion has become the default defect and deficiency in the culture, these words of Tolkien spring to life as the light by which we see. Far from being an escape from reality, the secondary worlds created by Tolkien and Lewis enable us to escape from the morbid delusion of the zeitgeist into places where primary truths still hold sway. Tolkien tells us in the same essay “On Fairy-Stories” that successful fantasy holds up a mirror to man. It shows us ourselves. But it does more than that. It’s not merely a mirror which reflects the way things are; it is also a magic mirror that shows us the way things should be and the way they shouldn’t be. “Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense,” writes G. K. Chesterton. “It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges the earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticised elfland, but elfland that criticised the earth.”

These words are taken from “The Ethics of Elfland”, a chapter in Orthodoxy, Chesterton’s classic work of Christian apologetics. This particular chapter would prove influential on the imaginative development of both Tolkien and Lewis. It is evident, for instance, that Chesterton’s “Elfland” casts its shadow over Tolkien’s “Fairy-Stories” or, more correctly, we should say that “Elfland” sheds its light on Tolkien’s thought, illuminating it with added lucidity.

Yet the light that Chesterton shines forth is not, strictly speaking, his own, even though his pyrotechnic and paradoxical wit and wisdom can make the light sparkle with dazzling brilliance. The light itself is the gift of creativity, the imaginative faculty which is one of the marks of the imago Dei, the image of God in man. This is best expressed in lines of verse from Tolkien’s marvelous masterpiece, “Mythopoeia”:

[M]an, sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with elves and goblins, though we dared to build
gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sow the seed of dragons, ’twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we’re made.

We are made in the image of an imaginative God, a Creator, who bestowed upon us the gift of creativity. He creates and we create in his image; or rather, as Tolkien insists, God creates, whereas we only sub-create. He makes things from nothing, ex nihilo; we make things from other things that already exist. We take what’s already there and do things with them. This is why the light itself, the gift of creativity, is handed from one generation to the next with the passing on of the torch of tradition. Tolkien and Lewis do things with the light that Chesterton hands to them, whereas all three of them were doing things with the light of George Macdonald, who was a common influence.

“It is obvious,” Chesterton wrote, “that tradition is only democracy extended through time…. [It] may be defined as the extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.”

And so we see how Tolkien and Lewis invite their ancestors to the imaginative feast, each of whom influences their work: the Beowulf poet, the authors of the Norse sagas, the Arthurian poets, Dante, Milton, Bunyan and multifarious others. More recently, J. K. Rowling, author of the hugely successful Harry Potter series, has acknowledged her debt to the torch of tradition handed to her by Tolkien and Lewis, her closest and greatest influences.

Tall tales are still being told. The light still shines. The torch is still being handed from generation to generation. Thanks be to God, the giver of the light, and thanks be to Chesterton, Tolkien, Lewis, and all other legend-makers and torchbearers of tradition.