I remember a middle school student in one of my math classes who was unable to pay attention in class because he was devouring a thick novel he held below the desk in his lap. When everyone else was on task and working, I sidled up to him and asked him which was more important: math or reading? He gave the answer he thought I expected. I told him, “No. Reading is far more important to life. You can pick up missed math skills later; what you read now will shape you forever.”
I pointed to the book he was trying to hide from me and asked what he was reading. “Harry Potter,” he said.
“Is it good?”
“It’s the best book I’ve ever read,” the boy said.
This was about 1997, just after the first book of the series was published in the United States.
“Let’s try a few math problems together. If you show me that you understand them, your reward will be to put your nose back in the book.” We did, and he did.
About the same time a furor arose in some Christian circles about the Harry Potter books because they were stories set among wizards and witches at Hogwarts. Without intending any insult to current practitioners of Wicca, it might help us all to remember that Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is a figment of the imagination.
Some of the critics of the series seemed to suggest that Christians should only read non-fiction truth. Or maybe nothing beside the Bible (in their preferred translation). Because the Harry Potter books mention witches, and because the Bible condemns witchcraft, they deduced that the books were anti-God. This shocked me because, first, I know of a certain witch mentioned in the Old Testament who seemed as surprised as anyone else that her necromancy actually worked, and, secondly, because it always amazes me when human beings think they have to defend God. If God is who we know him to be, he is quite capable of defending himself, thank you.
This is just ignorance (and as an educator I have advanced degrees in identifying ignorance and correcting it). The Harry Potter stories are fantasy based on the classic story framework of alchemy. The steps of the alchemical process became central to much English story-telling because they were about seeking purification both spiritually and physically. Americans are so naive about alchemy, thinking it is some form of witchcraft, that the publishers had to change the title of the first book before publishing it in the United States. The original title, that is still used everywhere else in the world, is The Philosopher’s Stone, a direct link to the purification story of alchemy. Knowing that Americans would not get the link, the publisher used The Sorcerer’s Stone here. Sorcery is also condemned in the Bible. It was an unfortunate choice but did almost nothing to diminish the popularity of these fantasy stories.
The fantasy genre arose in the nineteenth century and was the creation of three Christians, all clergymen: George MacDonald, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carrol), and Charles Kingsley. MacDonald and Dodgson were good friends. Soon to follow were the greats of the early twentieth century: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, also life-long friends. Others include G.K. Chesterton, Hans Bemmann, and Madeleine L’Engle.
Not that all fantasy must of necessity be Christian. There have been at least two atheist responders, both creators of excellent fantasy more recently: Phillip Pullman and Terry Pratchett.
Even now, well into the twenty-first century, there is still a type of Christian that condemns the whole genre. The antagonist in the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis is a White Witch. Just the word is enough to get some Christians to lobby schools to have the books removed. This saddens me whenever I see it, because the Narnia books teach the great truths of Christianity and are the most uplifting books any child could read. Obviously, I have felt the need to write these paragraphs you have just read, in defense of fantasy. I have not been alone in this.
George MacDonald said that the main reason some people disparage fantasy is because the stories are not what they expected. They expected allegory like John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. “A fairy tale is not an allegory. There may be allegory in it, but it is not an allegory. He must be an artist indeed who can, in any mode, produce a strict allegory that is not a weariness to the spirit.”
Lewis Carrol warned that fun and enjoyment were not antithetical to godliness. “Some perhaps may blame me for mixing together things grave and gay; others may smile and think it odd that any one should speak of solemn things at all, except in church and on Sunday: but I think — nay I am sure — that some children will read this gently and lovingly, and in the spirit in which I have written it. For I do not believe God means us thus to divide life into two halves — to wear a grave face on Sunday, and to think it out-of-place to even so much as mention Him on a weekday. Do you think He cares to see only kneeling figures, and to hear only tones of prayer — and that He does not also love to see the lambs leaping in the sunlight, and to hear the merry voices of the children, as they roll among the hay?”
J.R.R. Tolkien published a formal lecture on the topic, called On Fairy-Stories. “Faërie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants or dragons; it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves.”
Perhaps the strongest advocate for human imagination as the organ of spiritual understanding was C.S. Lewis. He sent his work “Image and Imagination” to T.S. Eliot in 1931. He and Eliot worked together on the phrasings of the Psalms in the Book of Common Prayer in England. In reference to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he said, “A number of mothers, and still more, school mistresses, have decided that it is likely to frighten children, so it is not selling well. The real children like it, and I am astonished how some very young ones seem to understand it. I think it frightens some adults, but very few children.” He also wrote, about J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, “The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity. The child enjoys his cold meat, otherwise dull to him, by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savory for having been dipped in a story; you might say that only then is it real meat. If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. This book applies the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly.”
G.K. Chesterton said, “There are certain sequences or developments, which are, in the true sense of the word, reasonable….Such are mathematical and merely logical sequences. We in fairyland (who are the most reasonable of creatures) admit that reason and that necessity…But as I put my head over the hedge of the elves and began to take notice of the natural world, I observed an extraordinary thing. I observed that learned men in spectacles were talking of the actual things that happened — dawn and death and so on — as if they were rational and inevitable. They talked as if the fact that tress bear fruit was just as necessary as the fact that two and one trees make three. But it is not. There is an enormous difference by the test of fairyland: which is the test of the imagination. You cannot imagine two and one not making three. But you can easily imagine trees not growing fruit: you can imagine them growing candlesticks or tigers hanging by the tail.”
Despite all that has been said by godly authors in defense of fantasy, it will never be possible to convince some who eschew the genre and who have never touched it. I find this very sad. For imagination is part of the creation of a good God.