Why do fairy tales and fantasies grip us so? Why do they have such staying power? //

Fantasy takes spiritual realities and makes them physical. Nowhere besides fantasy (at least traditional fantasy) can we find in such a clear-cut manner the difference between good and evil, truth and falsehood, honor and ignominy. The villains in fantasy, such as a dragon or a dark sorcerer, are embodiments of evil itself. Traditionally, they are not complex characters with conflicting motivations. They are evil, pure and simple, because they stand for forces that are utterly corrupt, such as sin, temptation, or the demonic. True fantasy is highly moral in character.

This is not to say that fairy tales are, necessarily, mere allegory. And, in fact, I think the best ones are not. The two great fantasy masters, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, took differing approaches to this issue. Lewis’s fiction was marked by obvious parallels to Christianity, while Tolkien intentionally avoided allegory in his writing, though he did call “The Lord of the Rings” a “fundamentally religious and Catholic work.”

I think a better term than allegory is perhaps “echo.” Fantasy echoes and dramatizes the spiritual and moral struggles that all of us face in life. Monsters and spells, quests and true love—these things are real, perhaps the most real things in life. Each of us fights monsters: depression, poverty, illness, our own sins, injustice, loss, the daily grind, whatever it may be. Each of us encounters spells (both good and bad): the pull of a drug, the enchantment of music, the stillness of a softly settling evening, and the mysterious processes and powers of nature. Each of us faces desperate quests: the career we are chasing, the people we are trying to save, the person we are trying to become—and there are countless dangers that could draw us away from our quests. And there is love. We may not be able to bring a princess back to life through a kiss, but we can raise someone out of despair by showing them our love and kindness. Heroes are no fantasy. //

C.S. Lewis put it this way in a letter to Miss Matthews: “I’ve never met Orcs or Ents or Elves-but the feel of it, the sense of a huge past, of lowering danger, of heroic tasks achieved by the most apparently unheroic people, of distance, vastness, strangeness, homeliness (all blended together) is so exactly what living feels like to me.” //

As an example, writer K.M. Weiland recently mused on the power of Tolkien’s epic, “The Lord of the Rings” to take you “there and back again”—meaning, to bring the reader into the abyss of despair, and then draw him or her out again by restoring hope. Indeed, the trilogy is very much a book about despair, and yet it does not end despairingly. That is part of its immense power, and the power of all the best fantasy literature. This is the point that Tolkien himself makes towards the end of his essay “On Fairy Stories.” I will let the master speak for himself and conclude this essay:

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.