Ever since I was a kid I’ve loved fantasy stories. My earliest memory of fantasy was reading the Redwall series by the late Brian Jacques. The ostensible USP of Redwall was that all of the characters were animals, anthropomorphised and playing such roles as novice monks and brave warrior knights. The protagonists were quite often mice. Jacques’ tales would see these diminutive rodents facing off against great evils, threats, and villains much bigger than themselves (usually their real world natural predators, foxes, adders, rats etc in the role of pillaging marauders). I also remember regularly enjoying a large illustrated copy of the legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight being a particular favourite. But at the turn of the millennium, I discovered Tolkien’s legendarium and was immediately in thrall. I had heard that the first instalment of Peter Jackson’s movie adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, was on its way, so 11-year-old me grabbed the 3-in-1 1991 Harper Collins copy off the bookshelf at home and began to read. I vividly remember it’s green cover featuring infamous Tolkien artist John Howe’s beautifully detailed illustration of Gandalf the Grey striding through a rain-soaked Middle Earth. I was enraptured by the world generated from Tolkien’s imagination. I devoured the books, and when The Fellowship of the Ring movie came out the following year my imagination and love for Middle Earth was well and truly fanned into flame.
What is it about fantasy stories that so captures people’s imaginations? The genre of Fantasy, which usually takes place in some kind of reimagined medieval world - presumably because the middle ages were so much more “enchanted” and “magical” than our sterile modern world - seems to speak to the human psyche in a powerful way. Fans of fantasy (which I employ as a broader umbrella term including genres like legend, myth, fairy stories, science-fiction, and superhero - essentially any “fantastical” narrative) include people of all kinds, from celebrities like the footballer Fernando Torres (who sports a large tattoo of tengwar script, one of Tolkien’s elven languages), politicians like Barack Obama, business moguls like Jeff Bezos, and millions upon millions of us ordinary folk who glimpse in these epic tales something deeply human and profoundly moving.
These days the fantasy genre is near ubiquitous in popular culture with the rise and success of television and movie adaptions of novels such as Game of Thrones, The Wheel of Time, not forgetting of course the divisive The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. According to writer and director Kevin Smith - best known for Clerks, Chasing Amy, and Dogma - this phenomenon is fast becoming a “new gospel”, in 2020 he tweeted (or, should I say, X’d?):
Religions have been founded on the Bible, resulting in millions of people drawing inspiration and moral strength from amazing stories about fantastic feats of faith. Hundreds of years from now, our descendants will find divine inspiration from the story of Cap wielding Mjolnir.
Kevin Smith’s contention essentially boils down to the idea that the old threadbare Gospel story will be abrogated by fantastical stories from popular culture like that of Captain America, the superhuman capable of wielding the hammer of the Norse god Thor; an enthralling moment for any fan of the MCU and an apotheosis which Smith thinks will render the story of Christ a relic of the past. The “new atheism” of Dawkins and Hitchens wasn’t the biggest threat to Christianity in recent decades, it was the entertainment industry.
But what Smith has failed to realise is that the Christ-story is the prefiguration of pretty much every piece of fantasy literature and its adaptations in the western world. The heroes we love today are all simply faint imitations of Christ, pale refractions of the hero of God’s history with creation and the human race. Without Jesus there wouldn’t be a Captain America, or a Harry Potter, or a Frodo Baggins.
At times this is conspicuous, as in the Chronicles of Narnia where Lewis’s Aslan is an unabashed allegory of Jesus. At other times it is less obvious but no less real. J.K. Rowling is clearly riffing on a messianic theme with the death and resurrection of her young wizard protagonist (Rowling also makes more direct moves like engraving the headstone of Harry Potter’s parents with a quotation from Paul’s exhortation to the Corinthians, when the Apostle was ruminating on the power of the Gospel about Christ, “And the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death” - 1 Corinthians 15:26). In a piece of personal correspondence, Tolkien once described The Lord of the Rings as “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.” While he disliked the overt allegory which earnt his fellow Inkling C.S. Lewis such success, his Middle Earth was no less rich in Christian symbolism.
The world’s of fantasy are of course not real in the sense that one could literally walk in through a wardrobe and out into a wooded landscape blanketed in snow to be greeted by a faun (although I’m sure many children have tried to much disappointment). This is because these worlds only exist as a construct of the human imagination. However, because they are works of the human imagination they are very much real precisely because the imagination is what powers how we humans perceive the world. “The human imagination…”, writes philosopher James K.A. Smith “…runs off the fuel of images that are channelled by the senses.”1 Fantasy creators reinterpret and reorder the sights, sounds, and smells of the “real” or “primary” world in specific ways to invent “secondary” worlds that are rendered as unfamiliar, strange, or fantastical, but worlds nevertheless made from the same stuff as the one we all actually live in. Tolkien put it plainly, stating that “Fantasy is made out of the Primary World…”2
In such fantasies, Tolkien concluded that “…new form is made; Faёrie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator.”3 The secondary worlds of fantasy are built out of the primary world, but they order the primary world in such a way as to shift perspectives, to highlight, to distil, to rearrange, to reshape, and to abstract those elements. It is what renowned fantasy novelist George MacDonald described as “new embodiments of old truths”.4 It is from this milieu of real-world but abstracted actualities that fantasy takes root.
The power of the human imagination to invent fantasy worlds, however, is not its sole function, it is but one aspect of the imagination which sits atop a deeper and more fundamental work, which in turn constitutes a deeper kind of fantasy. For Malcolm Guite, the imagination is “an essential instrument with which we grasp the truth.”5 For fantasy also aims, not simply to arrest and entertain with the vision of its unfamiliar familiarity, but to convey meaning, morality, and truth. In his essay Vision, Stories, and Character, Christian ethicist Stanley Hauerwas hints at this writing:
Metaphors and stories suggest how we should see and describe the world—that is, how we should “look-on” ourselves, others, and the world—in ways that rules and principles taken in themselves do not.6
Fantasy stories do just this. They are not neutral, but intend or aim at our primary world in some way to shape the way that we perceive it. They do this, not by appealing to rules and principles as Hauerwas put it, but by appealing to our own imaginations.
And more often than not, this appeal comes to us through the characters in the stories, and their formation. Fantasy characters are generally a distillation of types of persons; good and evil, weak and strong, simple and complex, mysterious and plain; they are archetypes and paradigms. Gandalf is not simply a wizard but (put very crudely) he is the personification of wisdom and messianic heroism. Through these characters the nuances of human life, those elements in every person, both good and bad, divine and mundane, are writ large and pushed to the extreme. This is partly what makes these characters so relatable. But it is also the manner in which these characters inhabit the stories and the worlds of which they are a part that helps us to see our own world, and our part in it, in new ways. Philosopher James K.A. Smith writes, “stories capture our imagination precisely because narrative trains our emotions, and those emotions actually condition our perception of the world.”7 Fantasy, therefore, helps to inform and enlighten the way we experience reality.
This insight and depth combined with vivid fantastical imagery is precisely the power of fantasy stories. The way that fantasy intends or “aims” at the real world primes the human imagination in ways that tend toward childlike wonder, awe, reverence, and amazement. G.K. Chesterton put it like this, “Just as we all like love tales because there is an instinct of sex, we all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment.”8 Therein lies the sacramentality of fantasy – fantasy stories point to a deeper, more fundamental, and more “magical” reality. Just as the sacrament of the eucharist opens the door to a deeper reality - the triune God’s story of the creation and redemption - and grace - the Spirit’s power in making the Son present to us in bread and wine - so too do fantasy stories tap into a deeper grace.
James K.A. Smith again writes:
…there is more commensurability between the social imaginary of Christian worship and the imaginative worlds of literature than there is with the staid, buttoned-down discourse of philosophy and theology. Thus one can often find the sacramental imagination better pictured in novels than in dissertations. The very genre of the novel, though still textual, is more visceral and tactile: it functions on the same sort of register as the words and movements of Christian worship.9
That has certainly been my experience; encountering, understanding, and interpreting God in and through the characters, worlds and narratives of fantasy. For me, the Gospel has become far more enriched as a result of my reading and love for fantasy (especially The Lord of the Rings).
The Gospel story works on the human imagination in a similar way. For the Gospel is just that, a story. It’s the story about whomever raised creation from nothing, Israel from slavery, and Jesus from the tomb. The Gospel belongs in a history slightly but not too far removed from the medieval worlds that often shape fantasy stories. It is a narrative set in time and space, but not as we know and experience then today. The Gospel narrative’s distance from my own world and time gives it it’s a distinctly otherworldly feel, for it takes place on a completely different cultural stage, with different standards and norms and people, different sights and sounds and smells. To engage with that story seriously, and without falling prey to crude anachronisms, I must engage my imagination. I cannot conceive of the dusty environs of ancient near eastern Palestine, those characteristics the Gospel is bound to in history, in any other way.
And my imagination also trades in the images of the history that has passed since Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Some of that tradition is helpful - I find Caravaggio’s trademark chiaroscuro compositions of Biblical events possess my imagining of them in profound ways. But also some unhelpful imagery - like the tropes of an angry Arian warrior Jesus.
There is one thing that pretty much all fantasy seems to hold in common though, and of which the Gospel story is triumphantly paradigmatic; the unexpected good turn. This is what makes the Gospel “fantasy” rather than drama or tragedy. Tolkien dubbed this notion, eucatastrophe, a neologism pertaining to a catastrophic event of phenomenally good proportions. He wrote,
The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially 'escapist', nor 'fugitive'. In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.
It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the “turn” comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality.
If one were to define the Gospel narrative more precisely, you could say that the Gospel is a kind of myth. Historical accuracy aside (I'm in no way disputing the Gospel’s historical credibility) the Gospel is the best kind of utterly compelling fantastical story that is rooted in a history and a tradition and a people as all myths are. Myths are stories that cannot be neatly explained by science, or natural law, or historical reconstruction, we can only begin to grasp them with the imagination.
However, the Gospel is not a myth in the sense of something that cannot be proven, or is shrouded in a mystery that can never be known. Quite the opposite, the Gospel is the endlessly knowable myth. For it does not originate as a work of the human imagination which lacks true originality and can only ever sub-create. Instead, the Gospel story originates from God’s imagination which resounds with true originality (bringing something out of nothing), endless possibility, and eternal significance.
This endless story has spoken, and continues to speak, to millions upon millions of people throughout the aeons. But perhaps it's most startling quality is that it is not only peculiar and fantastical, not only mythical and strange, not only compelling and inspiring, but entirely true. It is the one true myth.
James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, Cultural Liturgies, Volume 1 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2009), 57.
Tolkien, 59.
Tolkien, 23.
George MacDonald, Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women, Special Annotated Edition (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008), 276.
Malcolm Guite, Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination, Ashgate Studies in Theology, Imagination and the Arts (Farnham, England: Ashgate Publishing, 2010), 145.
Stanley Hauerwas, ‘Vision, Stories, and Character’, in The Hauerwas Reader, ed. John Berkman and Michael G. Cartwright (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 166.
James K. A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works, Cultural Liturgies, Volume 2 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2013), 32.
G. K Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Tennessee: Cavalier Classics, 1922), 38.
Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 144.