“In [his 1939 essay] ‘On Fairy-Stories,’ Tolkien takes the ideas he set forth in [his 1931 poem] ‘Mythopoeia,’ and shows how they are realized in one literary genre, the fairy tale. Tolkien wrote few academic essays, yet, when he did write them, they had enormous influence. His essay on Beowulf, ‘The Monsters and the Critics,’ set the criticism of that poem on a new course, in which its artistic merit was considered rather than just its value as a source of historical data. His essay, ‘On Fairy-Stories,’ sets forth Tolkien’s understanding of where fairy tales come from and what they are for. He wants to take the field in a new direction, rejecting contemporary ideas that fairy tales derive from actual persons or events. Rather, he says, they come out of the ‘story soup,’ the narrative inheritance of mankind, whose ingredients have many points of origin.
“Romantic ideas about perception, the imagination, and truth all lie at the foundation of Tolkien’s theory. Like Coleridge and Hopkins, Tolkien believed that the individual mind had a significant part in the ‘creation’ of the world. The simple viewing of any object depends on the point [of view] of the observer, the purpose of the observation, and the memories the observer brings. At nineteen, Hopkins wrote a poem on the problem, imagining many people observing a rainbow in a waterfall from different positions, none of them seeing the same rainbow. Everyone created a slightly different rainbow, making them, in Tolkien’s terminology, all sub-creators per force, because perception itself is sub-creative, ‘a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. [Coleridge’s famous declaration in Biographia Literaria].
“Tolkien asserts that reading fairy stories is a way to ‘recover’ the world. To see centaurs and dragons is to see afresh shepherds, sheep, dogs and horses; to see dragons is to see wolves again. Especially for modern man, whose world has long been ‘disenchanted,’ entering Faërie opens the senses to new possibilities, to ‘arresting strangeness.’ ‘Recovery’ entails regaining a clear vision of the world as something different and wondrous. A person open to the possibilities of Faërie is likely to be open to the possibilities of sacramentality — and hence, fairy stories can help us recover the world as sacrament.”
— from Craig Bernthal, Tolkien’s Sacramental Vision: Discerning the Holy in Middle Earth (Second Spring, 2014]
Related reading and listening
- How fantasy restores the world — In this 2019 lecture, Alison Milbank shows how fantasy can help restore to us a vision of human flourishing that counters the atomization and meaninglessness of modern life. (43 minutes)
- The (super)natural theology of fairy-tales — Alison Milbank describes Chesterton’s belief that story-telling is an affirmation of transcendent meaning
- Aslan, the Christ-figure of Narnia — Alex Markos explores the transformational power of Aslan as the Christ figure in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. (31 minutes)
- Apprehending the enduring things — Vigen Guroian explains how children’s literature has the capacity to birth the moral imagination in our children, affirming for them the permanent things. (53 minutes)
- The integration of theoretical and mythic intelligence — FROM VOL. 156 William C. Hackett discusses the relationships between philosophy and theology, and of both to the meaning embedded in myth. (29 minutes)
- What hath Hobbiton to do with Jerusalem? — Holly Ordway on the pre-Christian religion in Middle-earth
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- A myth which is also a fact — Holly Ordway on the existentially resonant power of myth
- Middle Earth’s animating logic — In his 1993 article “J. R. R. Tolkien: Lover of the Logos,” Mark Sebanc explains how the heart of Tolkien’s creative work — in stories and essays — is energized by a recognition that the presence of what Balthasar calls the “Christ form” is the source of all meaning and beauty. (60 minutes)
- MYST and mythic guests — Game designers Rand and Robyn Miller explain how their game’s creation was influenced by their love for the fantasy of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. (13 minutes)
- In the house of Tom Bombadil — C. R. Wiley explores the mysterious, “allusive” figure of Tom Bombadil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. (17 minutes)
- Mythopoeic power — Stratford Caldecott on Tolkien’s literary achievement
- Echoes of Middle-earth — Holly Ordway describes the overwhelming influence that J. R. R. Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings has had on the development of the fantasy genre in the past 50 years. (12 minutes)
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Richard Stivers, Holly Ordway, Robin Phillips, Scott Newstok, Junius Johnson, and Peter Mercer-Taylor
- Thomas Howard, R.I.P. — Thomas Howard encouraged in many students and readers an imaginative appropriation of faith and truth. This interview — released at the time of his death in 2020 — includes his discussion of C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces. (55 minutes)
- How myth speaks to deep desires in the human heart — Rolland Hein explains that George MacDonald is a writer of myth functioning rightly, and that such myth affects people a-rationally, stirring something in them much deeper than intellect or emotion alone. (15 minutes)
- Thomas Howard on Charles Williams — From a 1995 interview, literary scholar Thomas Howard describes the texture and depth of the “metaphysical thrillers” of Charles Williams. (16 minutes)
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- Fairy tales and what’s really real — Anna Maria Mendell describes how fairy stories can use the device of magic to call attention to the real nature of things. (13 minutes)
- Vigen Guroian: “Awakening the Moral Imagination: Teaching Virtues through Fairy Tales” — Vigen Guroian contrasts the features of character and virtue with those of what is more modernly called “values,” and examines how these different approaches to moral consideration reflect conflicting ways of understanding self-formation. (48 minutes)
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- The Heav’ns and All the Powers Therein — Michael Ward makes a compelling case that the qualities attributed to the seven planets in the cosmology of antiquity and the Middle Ages are embodied in C. S. Lewis‘s seven books about Narnia. (68 minutes)
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- Maker of Middle-earth — Tom Shippey, Joseph Pearce, and Ralph Wood examine J. R. R. Tolkien and his mythological Lord of the Rings trilogy to explore what makes Tolkien’s work resonant and a vessel for truth. (86 minutes)
- Till We Have Faces and the Meaning of Myth — Literary critic Thomas Howard explains why C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces is best understood not as a novel or fantasy but as a myth. (49 minutes)
