Inspiration for the writer of fiction/fantasy/fairy-stories:
Taken from a lecture Tolkien gave where he defended his belief that true ‘fairy-stories’ are not intended for children, but rather for the adult. His point below is just a good reminder for us:
“What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator’ [(Tolkien’s term for the writer of fiction)]. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside…every writer making a secondary world wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it.”
Tolkien goes on to say that it is specifically a Christian venture to write [fairy-tales]:
“The Christian may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation.”
“Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.” ~~ author unknown
Around 1926 C.S. Lewis was admittedly a ‘theist’ but he was not a Christian. Lewis had come from a decidedly atheist position only recently, and the idea of Christ as Savior by death on a cross 2,000 years ago seemed to him without purpose—‘how the life and death of someone else…could help us here and now.” One night, not dissimilar to many nights shared thus together, Lewis was having a discussion with his best friend, a devout Roman Catholic, name J.R.R. Tolkien about the ‘purpose’ of Christ in true religion.
Lewis, a classicist by training, had for years been very fond of mythology. Tolkien pointed out to Lewis that he was demanding unnecessarily something from Christianity that he was not demanding from pagan mythology—when he encountered the idea of sacrifice in the mythology of a pagan religion he admired it and was moved by it; indeed the idea of the dying and reviving deity had always touched his imagination… But from the Gospels Lewis was, so argued Tolkien, requiring something more, a clear meaning beyond the myth. Could he not transfer his comparatively unquestioning appreciation of sacrifice from the myth to the true story?
But, said Lewis, myths are lies, even though lies breathed through silver.
No, said Tolkien, they are not.
“You call a tree a tree, he said, and you think nothing more of the word. But it was not a ‘tree’ until someone gave it that name. You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.”
‘You mean’, asked Lewis, ‘that the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth that works on us in the same way as the others, but a myth that really happened? In that case, he said, I begin to understand.’
Twelve days later Lewis became a Christian.
The power of fiction, myth, of the imagination and the ‘unreal’ is not indifferently avoided, save to one’s folly and misfortune.
*for historical account please see Humphrey Carpenter’s J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, chapter four.