Why Fantasy Matters: On Fun, Faith, and the Weight of Story

Why Fantasy? Well, for one, Fantasy is FUN.

Who doesn’t want to escape into the Wizarding World of Harry Potter? Their chocolate literally hops out of the wrapper, portraits move and talk, and you can fly on broomsticks. Who doesn’t wish they were Eragon on the back of his dragon Saphira, or envy Captain Lawrence his friendship with the dragon Temeraire? As for me, I am always ready to revisit the tale of the two Hobbits who walked across Middle Earth to throw a cursed ring into an evil sentient volcano. So fun.

Doubt me? Then explain to me how Disney has amassed a fortune selling one thing and one thing only: Fantasy. Dole-whip is great and all, but what we’re really buying with those theme park tickets is something more enjoyable: Fantasy. Why? Because it’s FUN.

But, deep in my soul, I am convinced fantasy is far more than fun. It is important. Essential even. Dare I say, holy? Yes, I dare. The creation of good Fantasy is a spiritual act of God-sized proportions.

And I’m not alone in my conviction. The great fantasy theologian J.R.R. Tolkien wrote at length about the importance of fantasy. (It should be noted that saying Tolkien “wrote at length” about anything is a given. The man was many things, but brief he was not. Don’t even get him started on his thoughts about trees.)

Today, we call the genre “Fantasy,” but Tolkien used the term “Fairy Stories” though he *ahem* went to great lengths to admit that a Fairy Story does not require a fairy to be in the narrative (or an elf or dwarf or ogre, etc). Rather, a Fairy Story is one that takes place in “Faerie.”

What is Faerie? Well, wading through his many words you can distill it down to one element. Faerie is the land of magic. It’s a world like ours, with people like us, but it is suffused with enchantments. He called it “The Perilous Realm.”

A place where adventure and danger happen mutually and never exclusively. A place where things like magic or magical creatures occur beyond what is possible in our natural world. A place where there is always a hero; where the story has a happy ending, though it may not be an easy ending.

Fantasy stories are, of course, fiction. But a unique kind of fiction. Stuffy sort of adults would say Fantasy requires a “suspension of disbelief” because “impossible” and “unnatural” things happen in such stories. But Tolkien disliked the term. He said about “suspension of disbelief” that it:

“does not seem to me a good description for what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator.’ 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.”

Fantasy is true so long as you’re in the story. When Hagrid declares, “Yer a wizard, Harry!” it’s true. And for those of us who’ve read the books, we can attest that not only is Harry a wizard, but he’s a “thumpin’ good’un, I recon.”

Now, if Harry Potter were to step out of the pages into our natural world, then no, he wouldn’t be a wizard. He’d be a muggle just like the rest of us poor saps. But so long as he remains within the world of the story JK Rowling created, Harry is a wizard, and wizards are real. The trueness doesn’t depend on our world, it lives in the world the author has made. Or rather, sub-created. And Rowling’s fat coffers and two Universal Studios theme parks can attest she’s a gifted sub-creator.

Tolkien wrote, “In writing fantasy, the writer becomes a “sub-creator.” But what did he mean by sub-creator?

God alone is Creator. God spoke and, by speaking, created the whole universe; made it all up out of his God-sized imagination. The Earth and all that inhabit it. The whole universe and all that goes on, seen and unseen. He SPOKE creation. God’s words did it.

Tolkien argued, “Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.”

Genesis declares that all humans are “made in the image of God.” This means we have characteristics of God in us: imagination and words to create. Though we do not make out of nothing as God did, we create within the existing creation. Thus, we “sub-create.”

And, in writing Fantasy, we do it God’s way: with words.

Through our writing, we can create all sorts of fantastical things. We can make witches and wizards who wave wands and speak enchantments. “Wingardium Leviosa!” And by doing so, those characters echo the original words spoken “In the beginning…” which had power, or as we sub-creators like to say: magic.

God has real power. We fantasy authors have magic (only on the page).

Tolkien wrote, “Fantasy is, I think, not a lower but a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent.”

Why? Because Fantasy mimics God’s greatest acts.

The most fantastic act of Creation God ever accomplished is in the story of the Gospels.

“The Gospels contain a fairystory, which embraces all the essence of fairy-story. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistical, beautiful, and moving….but this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to fulfillment of Creation…with the Birth of Christ and The Resurrection, this story begins and ends with joy…there is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation….this story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men—and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused.”

The Greatest Fantasy Every Told

In the gospel, you have a virgin birth, a God in the form of a baby. Born in poverty in a stable, with angel choirs announcing the birth in the dead of night to shepherds. Stars light the way for mysterious Magi. You have the Son of God growing up as a carpenter. Grown up, he calls average people like fishermen and tax collectors to join him on his journey. He turns water into wine, stretches a couple of fish and biscuits to feed thousands, raises people from the dead, dies a dramatic and gruesome death, enters hell itself to defeat the devil, raises from the dead with a transformed body, and ascends on a cloud into heaven and sits on a throne of jewels at the right hand of God the Father with angel armies at his beck-and-call.

The bible contains all the elements of the fantasy genre. All of the themes of enchantment, magic, and story are there. But it’s unlike all others. It’s TRUE. True in the truest sense. What Tolkien called "Primary Art." All fantasy stories before and after, are just sub-art, echoes of the Primary Art.

Tolkien called the Gospel “The True Myth.” This very explanation is what eventually led the famous atheist and author, C.S. Lewis, to convert.

Every myth, fantasy, and faerie story echoes the original. God is creator. The author is sub-creator. Our stories will and must have the likeness of the original in some way. Like a child with her father’s countenance, his tilt of the head, color of the eye, we take after the likeness of our heavenly Father. We create with words. And if our stories are to be good, they will be like his.

In writing fantasy myself, I have felt this truth like marrow, deep in my bones. It has sent my knees knocking, my limbs trembling. Tolkien felt this too. Fantasy, Tolkien said,

“has one drawback: it is difficult to achieve…To make a Secondary World credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will require labor and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft. Few attempt such difficult tasks.”

I can attest to just how difficult sub-creation is. Only time, and ultimately, my readers, will tell whether I have accomplished the task or if no amount of “suspension of disbelief” can induce them to believe my story as anything resembling true.

Lord, have mercy.

Excerpts and Quotes from Tolkien's Essay "On Fairy Stories" --> https://coolcalvary.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/on-fairy-stories1.pdf