Episode 328: Best of The Literary Life – "On Fairy Stories" by J.R.R. Tolkien

Summary

Literary Life Podcast, Episode 328:

Best of The Literary Life – "On Fairy Stories" by J.R.R. Tolkien
Hosts: Angelina Stanford, Thomas Banks, Cindy Rollins
Date: May 12, 2026

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Overview

This classic episode revisits J.R.R. Tolkien’s seminal essay "On Fairy Stories," unpacking its purpose, structure, and enduring insight into the genre of fairy tales and the literary imagination. Experienced teachers and readers Angelina, Thomas, and Cindy engage in a vibrant conversation dissecting Tolkien’s ideas, discussing why fairy stories matter, who they're really for, and how Tolkien’s vision continues to shape our understanding of story and reality. The hosts focus on Tolkien’s notion of "sub-creation", the eucatastrophe, and fairy tales as conduits for transcendence, hope, and truth—bringing deep literary tradition into lively, accessible discussion.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Purpose and Structure of Tolkien’s Essay

• Not a Simple Defense of Fairy Stories: Rather than defending fairy stories, Tolkien’s essay critiques misunderstandings, especially from Andrew Lang and the Victorians, about what fairy tales are and are not ([11:52]).
  • “He comes out as only Tolkien can, guns a blazing with everything he thinks is wrong with Andrew Lang…” – Thomas ([11:52])
• Essay Organization:
  • What is a fairy story?
  • Who are fairy stories for?
  • What is the function of fairy stories?

2. Defining Fairy Stories

• Beyond Fairies: Fairy stories aren’t about fairies per se, but about the Fairyland—an enchanted, "other" world ([21:50]).
  • "A fairy story isn't even necessarily about fairies. What it really is, is about the fairyland, or, in other words, the other world." – Thomas ([21:50])
• Elves, Not Fairies: Tolkien prefers the word “elf” to “fairy” for its older, graver connotations ([21:50]; [24:04]).
• Critique of Lang and the Victorian/Enlightenment Traditions:
  • Lang includes too many stories under ‘fairy tale’—some with little to no enchantment, such as Lilliput, and those derived from didactic French sources ([17:02]).
  • “Andrew Lang is not making distinctions about genre that Tolkien thinks he should be making…” – Thomas ([17:17])

French vs. German Folk Tales

• French versions (e.g., Perrault) are more didactic, moralizing; German (Grimm) tales are folk-rooted and, for Tolkien, more authentic ([18:29]).
  • “By definition, a fairy tale has to have a happy ending.” – Thomas ([19:54])
• Disneyfied and Victorian versions are too cute and miss the gravitas and peril found in folklore ([25:10], [30:16]).

Literary Fancy vs. Folklore

• Tolkien values the organic, ancient, and mysterious over "literary fancy"—made-up, cutesy, or allegorical tales ([19:19], [27:41]).

3. Magic and Enchantment

• Magic Must Be Integral, Not Explained Away:
  • "The magic in these stories is never an end in itself, and it's never really about the magic." – Thomas ([35:05])
• The magical elements must be presented as real within the world, not as dreams or allegories ([37:02], [38:20]).
  • Example: Narnia and Oz; Narnia is "really real," while Oz is a dream and thus not a true fairy story.
• Fairy Stories are about Humans in Perilous Realms ([35:24]).
  • “They're about men. They're about the adventures of men in the perilous realm.” – Thomas ([35:24])

4. The Nature and Origin of Fairy Tales

• Their origins are mysterious—there are theories (independent evolution, diffusion, common ancestry), but no certain answers.
  • "We don't know. You're never going to know. Good luck with that.” – Thomas ([39:20])
• Tolkien and the Grimms saw fairy stories as mythic fragments pointing to a lost primordial truth, even gospel truth ([19:19], [27:41], [85:12]).

5. Man as Sub-Creator

• Unique Human Faculty: Humans are “sub-creators,” making worlds as an echo of the Divine Maker ([41:41]).
  • “He gets into the whole world-making aspect of storytelling…when man is sub-creator.” – Thomas ([42:21])
• Magic and technology: Tolkien saw the modern quest for power (via magic or machines) as a threat, divorcing us from wonder and nature ([43:56], [45:49]).

6. Who Are Fairy Stories For?

• Not Only For Children: Fairy tales originally were not written for children; they "drifted" into nurseries after being discarded by adults ([48:06]).
  • “Old discarded things get stuck in the nursery. That's what happened with fairy tales.” – Thomas ([48:06])
• Adults Must Retain Childlike Wonder:
  • "Children are meant to grow up and not to become Peter Pans. Not to lose innocence and wonder, but to proceed on the appointed journey..." – Thomas ([63:20])
• Stretch children with stories beyond their understanding, allowing them to grow into meaning ([65:22]).

Suspension of Disbelief

• Tolkien rejects the phrase; in good fairy stories, belief is natural, inherent—"as long as you are under the spell” ([52:36]).

Children’s Questions: “Is it true?”

• Typically, children want to know if a dragon is contemporary, rather than real; they're distinguishing categories, not debating reality ([56:01]).

7. The Function of Fairy Stories: Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, Consolation

([67:30])

Fantasy

• Not a lower art form, but a higher one, giving us “arresting strangeness.”
  • Fairy tales force us to see with new eyes; they "clean our windows” ([69:00]).

Recovery

• Regaining clear sight and renewing wonder at the ordinary via the strange ([69:00], [72:42]).
  • "We should look at green again and be startled anew…” ([72:42])

Escape

• Escape from the “prison” of modernity isn’t escapism, but a return to what is most real ([75:22]).
  • "We are in a self-imposed prison here in modernity, and we need books to help escape from that.” – Thomas ([75:22])

Consolation

• The “eucatastrophe”: the happy ending, the sudden miraculous turn to joy, is the defining feature of the fairy tale ([81:41]).
  • “The birth of Christ is the EU catastrophe of man's history. The Resurrection is the EU catastrophe of the story of the Incarnation.” – Thomas ([85:12])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Book Burning and Youthful Zeal:
  • “These flames do not only illuminate the final end of the old era, they also light up the new. Never before have the young men had so good a right to clean up the debris of the past… let them grasp that we young men have gone and done it.” ([06:50]; quoted from "When Books Went to War")
• On Imagination and Fairy Land:
  • “The world has to be somehow enchanted...” – Thomas ([34:00])
• On Sub-Creation:
  • “We are the sons and daughters of the Great Maker.” – Angelina ([42:21])
• On Suspicious Modernity:
  • “The notion that motor cars are more alive than, say, centaurs or dragons is curious, that they are more real than, say, horses is pathetically absurd.” — Tolkien, quoted by Thomas ([77:25])
• On the Eucatastrophe:
  • “Good Friday always turns into Easter Sunday. That's the eucatastrophe. It's the terrible thing that happened that turns out to be the twist that brings it all come back to life.” – Thomas ([83:05])
• On Literary Joy:
  • "Fairy stories give you always the promise of a happy ending..." – Thomas ([79:30])
• On Why Fairy Stories Matter:
  • “The Gospel has made all of these stories hallowed... The Gospel is a fairy story.” – Thomas ([85:12])
• On Stories and Growth:
  • "Their books, like their clothes, should allow for growth and their books, at any rate, should encourage it." – Thomas ([65:22])

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Important Segment Timestamps

• [11:52] — Orientation on Tolkien's background, his criticism of Andrew Lang
• [21:50] — Defining Fairy Stories: "not necessarily about fairies"
• [30:16] — Victorian and Renaissance (Shakespeare's) distortion of fairies
• [38:20] — The "other world" must be presented as real, not just a dream/allegory
• [41:41] — “Man as sub-creator,” the theological and imaginative framework
• [48:06] — Children's stories: the migration of fairy tales into the nursery
• [52:33] — Rejection of “suspension of disbelief”
• [63:20] — On adults retaining innocence and wonder; necessity of growing up
• [65:22] — Value of stretching children; literature beyond measure
• [67:30] — Function of fairy stories: Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, Consolation
• [81:41] — The “Eucatastrophe” and fairy stories as redemptive narratives
• [85:12] — Fairy stories and the Gospel: The Christian myth fulfilled

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Final Thoughts

The conversation weaves deep scholarship with warmth, play, and affection for story, folklore, and the humane tradition. The hosts stress Tolkien’s enduring wisdom: Fairy stories are not childish escapes but formational, imaginative acts that recover reality, nurture hope, and point us to ultimate truth. As Thomas says, “Stories will save the world”—a fitting call to take fairy tales, and our reading lives, seriously.

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Closing Poem [90:44]:
“Into my heart an air that kills” by A.E. Housman

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For more:

• Explore Tolkien’s full essay, "On Fairy Stories"
• See C.S. Lewis’s "On Stories" and "When Myth Became Fact"
• Find the hosts at House of Humane Letters, Morning Time for Moms, and join the lively Facebook discussion group, “The Literary Life Podcast Discussion Group.”

Transcript

[Angelina Stanford]

Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. We've grown quite significantly since our debut in 2019, and we've had many requests to highlight older episodes that new listeners may have missed, as well as revisit listener favorites. To honor that request, I present to you this episode of the Best of the Literary Life Podcast.

[Thomas Banks]

This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the skill and art of reading. Well, explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week, we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen, and your commute. The Literary Life is for everyone, because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life Podcast. Hello and welcome back to the Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford and I am here with two of my favorite book people, Thomas Banks and Cindy Rollins. Although I will admit, Cindy, I like Thomas in a slightly different way than I like you. Is that okay?

[Cindy Rollins]

That's perfectly. Actually, I don't love you. Comforting.

[Thomas Banks]

I don't love you equally. I'm just gonna say it right here on this show.

[Cindy Rollins]

Wow. Now I just. I don't even want to be on the show anymore.

[Thomas Banks]

You're giving me the weirdest look right now.

[Angelina Stanford]

I thought you were a loyal friend. No, actually, it's good to be back. It feels like it's been a really long. I mean, I wasn't on last week's episode.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, that's right, you weren't. We kicked you off. Actually, we did not kick you off. You kicked yourself off. So just for the. Just for your loyal fans, we absolutely

[Thomas Banks]

did not kick him off. But you see, one of the things I love about Mr. Banks is his complete love of letting women shine. And who's like, nope, this needs to be all show, and just backed right out. Which was good because there wasn't enough room with all those egos. Oh, now I'm gonna be self conscious because someone on the Literary Life page said that in their family that I'm referred to as the one that laughs loudly. So.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, yeah, maybe we can try to each laugh a little louder.

[Thomas Banks]

Maybe I can do a little tee hee hee. Tee hee hee.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think it's okay to be loud as long as you're charming and you're Charming.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, you're so biased.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's true.

[Thomas Banks]

All right, I'm gonna reign this love fest in. All right, so we are back, and today we are going to talk about J.R.R. tolkien's essay on fairy stories. And I cannot wait to get into this with you guys. Well, now, should we switch to commonplace quotes? Who wants to go first?

[Angelina Stanford]

I'll go first. I have a nice short one from the German poet Heinrich. He. He says one should forgive one's enemies, but only after they are hanged. That seemed practical.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, I like that.

[Thomas Banks]

That is the kind of forgiveness I can get behind. That.

[Cindy Rollins]

That just removes my moral dilemma completely.

[Thomas Banks]

Right. When he told me that earlier, I thought, you know, it's really easy to forgive dead people. That's a piece of cake.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, very good. Oh, I like that one.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, since Thomas went with a German and mine German, I'm gonna go next. So I am reading a book that was getting a great deal of buzz on our Literary Life page called When Books Go to War. Cindy, have you read this?

[Cindy Rollins]

No, but Amazon thinks I should read it.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, I'm really enjoying it a great deal. And it is, of course, about World War II and the role that books had there. Without wasting a lot of time on a big synopsis of the book, I'll tell you that this quote was about how the book banning got started in German. And as I was reading that, I was incredibly struck by some, shall we say, eerie parallels. And I am not one to go to, where is this Nazi Germany? Every time there's a line at the grocery store and we're yelling, it's Nazis, that gets overplayed. But what I saw was a certain revolutionary impulse in university students and youthful zeal, which, if unchecked by the wisdom of the ages, can be a dangerous thing. So this was quite fascinating. So the book burning got started on May 10, 1933, at a university by university students. And what they were excited about was that they felt like they had this kind of moral imperative to free Germany from the debris of the past, that we have some old, unenlightened views that are embarrassing now and do not fit with this progressive vision of Germany that we have. And so we are going to. We're going to. They proudly proclaim they were going to do what the old people weren't willing to do. And they were going to just, you know, chop, chop, cut the ties with the past and make a huge statement to the world that Germany was enlightened and progressive. And then that was the day that the book burning began. And by the time D day rolled around, 120 million books had been destroyed in Europe. Can you believe that? 120 million books. Of course, we know books are very dangerous. But on May 10, 1933, there was a speech given at the university about how great this book burning was. And I just thought that this was eerie in its description, again, like I said, of sort of revolutionary college zeal. Right. They've got all this passion to change the world in a good way and don't necessarily have the wisdom to know how to do that. Right. And then we're all old over here, so we can say that, but it's not a new thing. It's not unique to the students of our own time. This has always been something that young people have struggled with. So here's a quote from a speech that was given. The German folk soul can again express itself. These flames do not only illuminate the final end of the old era, they also light up the new. Never before have the young men had so good a right to clean up the debris of the past. If the old men do not understand what is going on, let them grasp that we young men have gone and done it. The old goes up in flames. The new shall be fashioned from the flame of our hearts.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's strange how every fanatic who lights a fire thinks that it's a refining fire.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, wow.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, it just. You know what I think when I hear that? It's just, bless their heart. The humbling is going to be so painful.

[Thomas Banks]

And that is it. I was thinking the same thing. There's so much hubris. We stand for the future. We are will, you know, we will liberate you from the shackles of the past. And we hear that just over and over through history, you hear, it's the same. No matter, you know, just all you got to do is change the nouns, like, which ideas are they upset about? But there's always a new group of people who are opposing something old.

[Cindy Rollins]

Amen.

[Thomas Banks]

A lot of potential for danger. Which isn't to say that everything about the past is wonderful and should be preserved. There are horrible, dark things about the past.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, what we have to understand is that there are horrible, dark things in our own hearts. And the past is not that much different than the future will be or we are. Yes, we should change. You know, there is a long history of social change. I mean, we talk about Dickens all the time. And we think about what happened when the guys in England. What's his name? Thomas. What's his name? Overthrew slavery in that country. Yes, those men there are. There are. Reformation is an important part of keeping the culture constantly, you know, purified in a way. Although purified is a horrible word because, you know, that can cause as much damage as good, I think.

[Thomas Banks]

No, you're absolutely right. You know, the struggle is to make sure that what you're replacing is not worse than what you got rid of.

[Cindy Rollins]

And when you're young, you don't know that for sure. And that's, you know, you don't know what you're, you know, you sometimes don't have the wisdom to know what to replace with.

[Thomas Banks]

That's right. Of course, as we know, in the case of the Germans, the enlightened vision they had of themselves was a different kind of darkness. And that's what they didn't understand, at least not the beginning.

[Cindy Rollins]

That was just an idea that took off and flourished for a while.

[Thomas Banks]

Exactly. All right, so that's what I'm reading. Cindy, what do you got?

[Cindy Rollins]

Mine is super short, and I actually did Culture Care last week from Makoto Fujimura, the artist. He has a book, Culture Care. In this quote, he's quoting Nigel Goodwin in the book. And I just love this quote. I'm gonna put it somewhere on my wall, but it says human beings are not human doings. And I just really like that.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, that's good.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that is nice. Yeah, I don't think I've ever heard of that writer Nigel Goodwin.

[Cindy Rollins]

I don't know who it is either, but he mentions that that is who he's quoting.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, let us transition, shall we, to Professor Tolkien, as he was called in his day, and on Fairy Stories. So on this podcast, this is the Literary Life podcast, we like to talk about all of the things related to the literary life, which means that we cover novels and short stories and poetry and the lives of readers as well as essays. And one of the things that is unique about this podcast is that these episodes are not book chat as much as they're just one long, extended, ongoing conversation about the world of literature and how stories work and how the universe of literature is inhabited. And so this is. This essay is one more part to understanding how that whole world works. And I've talked on this podcast a lot about how much I think it's important to be oriented into a work before you pick it up. And so I thought I'd orient us on this work that tell us a little bit about who Tolkien is. He's kind of the man that needs no introduction, but we'll give him, just a little one where he gave this talk and why. And then I think that that' help us to understand what's going on, because we might be tempted to think of this as sort of a defense of fairy stories. It's actually not. It's actually Tolkien critiquing what he thinks are all the bad understandings of fairy stories. And he comes out as only Tolkien can, guns a blazing. He comes out guns a blazing with everything that he thinks is wrong with Andrew Lang at an Andrew Lang event.

[Angelina Stanford]

He's kind of drunk. Cheeky, too. And he doesn't stop with Andrew Lang. He even, like, starts going after Shakespeare in some small ways, too. I mean, eventually, when he gets worked up.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes. All right, so here's the deal. Professor Tolkien, of course, the author of the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit and the beloved author of Middle Earth, and also a professor of Anglo Saxon literature and Norse mythology. And he takes these things very, very seriously. He's a professor at Oxford. He was, of course, one of the inklings, along with C.S. lew. C.S. lewis had a student at Oxford, a favorite student, who eventually became a very dear friend. He even went on vacation with Jack and Joy Lewis once, which, can you imagine? Like, I want that story on vacation with Jack and Joy. That's a topic for a novel. Someone should write that.

[Cindy Rollins]

No, no, no. I think. Stop. Please don't start writing that. We've already ruined them enough. Let's leave them be.

[Thomas Banks]

Okay? A real biography about this, not a novel. And he became an honorary Inkling. Also, he was very close to CS Lewis and ended up really working with him on Narnia. In fact, he was the one who came up with the title the Chronicles of Narnia. And that is Roger Lancelin Green, who we know from all of his brilliant retellings, of course, Robin Hood and King Arthur and Tales of Troy and Egyptian Tales. He was a tremendous lover of old stories and really devoted himself to studying these old stories and retelling them from modern audiences. And so his books are classics in their own right. Well, he did his PhD work on Andrew Lang, the great folklorist who gave us, of course, the multicolored fairy books. He and his wife, I should say. And kudos to Tolkien that he said, Andrew Lang and his wife. I really appreciated that because his wife kind of did all the work and he put his name on it.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's kind of like Will and Ariel Durant very much. Ariel Durant gets left out, and she

[Thomas Banks]

did all the work. You're not that guy. Are you, Mr. Banks, you wouldn't let me do all the work and put your name on it, would you?

[Angelina Stanford]

Go all Tolstoy and heavy, take down War and Peace twice in shorthand.

[Thomas Banks]

All right, I'll rein in my snarky comment that I would say in response to that. So when Roger Lancelot Green was doing his PhD dissertation on Andrew Lang, he asked Professor Tolkien to direct that dissertation. Now, just me telling the that story, I start salivating. I was like, what a dream. Can you imagine a dream academic scenario? That is my dream academic scenario. I'm close with C.S.

[Cindy Rollins]

lewis.

[Thomas Banks]

I'm studying with him. Tolkien's directing my dissertation. I mean, you know, what is not to drool about that. Maybe it's just me. Y' all are being awfully quiet. Maybe it is just me. Anyway, because of that, because Tolkien was working with Roger Lancelin Green on his Andrew Lang project, the two of them got invited to give speeches at an Andrew Lang event, kind of a celebration of Andrew Lang's work. And so Tolkien gets up and does what only Tolkien can do to tell all of us that Andrew Lang doesn't know what a fairy story is. I just love everything about that, because I also think Andrew Lang does not know what a fairy story is. I am also irked by Andrew Lang, and so I really appreciated that. But in the conversation where he's saying, this is not what a fairy story is, he's also telling us what is a fairy story. And this is something, of course, that Tolkien took very, very seriously. And as we unpack this essay, I'll kind of put in some things here or there that'll help us to understand why he felt so passionately about these things. I mean, if you know anything about the world that Tolkien created, Middle Earth, you know that he takes these things extremely seriously. Elves and dwarves and other worlds. He is very serious about this. He is not a frivolous fantasy writer. And so he takes the very discussion, what is a fairy story? Very seriously. So the essay is divided, or speech, I should say. And that was re given in 1939. It was revised later and expanded greatly with notes. That's the one I read. And it was included in a Charles Williams memorial collection. But the basic structure is that he's posing some questions, first of all, what is a fairy story? And then tells us again, I love this man so much. Tells us, don't look at the dictionary because they don't have it right. That is always what I tell my students. Don't look up literary terms in a dictionary because they won't get it right. And we'll. And we'll look at that. So what is a fairy story? Who is a fairy story for? And then what is the function of a fairy story? And that's. That's the basic structure of the essay. So if any of you. Do any of you have any introductory remarks?

[Angelina Stanford]

Since you've already talked about his criticism of Andrew Lang, to some measure, it seems that he takes issue with Lang's willingness to include too much rather than too little under the heading of what is a fairy story? So at one point, he brings up Lang's inclusion of the Lilliput section.

[Thomas Banks]

I was so glad. That drives me crazy. That does not belong in the fairy tale.

[Cindy Rollins]

I wonder if that is later, after he had already put out like, you know, Every Color of the Rainbow and, you know, he's starting to dig a little deeper, you know, you know, just looking for more stories.

[Thomas Banks]

I've always wondered if, you know, it was. Andrew Lang has a very different approach to folklore collecting than, say, the Grimm Brothers do. And Tolkien contrasts them quite a few times in this. In this speech, Tolkien was 100% on Team Grimm. He was very, very influenced by the Grimm Brothers, who took all of this stuff very seriously. And so their interest actually was not primarily as folklorist, so where a folklorist would simply kind of sort of without judgment, collect what the folk say. Right. And so Andrew Lang is not making distinctions about genre that Tolkien thinks he should be making, namely that he's using, for example, the French versions of the fairy tales.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, often he uses the same fairy tale several times just from a different angle. I mean, I'm actually a fan. I like Lang. I like the stories. I think they are great to read aloud. I think they're fun. I don't, you know, I don't split hairs over whether this story should be in it or that, you know, I don't know. But I still enjoy. They are enjoyable and I like Grim

[Thomas Banks]

and I recommend them, and I enjoy the Lang ones. My issue with them is that people don't realize that he is Prime. And Tolkien makes his point that he is primarily drawing from the French tales and not the German tales. And while that might seem quibbling, it's actually a pretty huge difference because the Grimm's collections are folk tales that they have collected through extensive work in Germany. The French tales are actually literary tales. And when Charles Perrault wrote the stories, he took stories that were in the folklore tradition and then he change them because he had a very, very intense. Didactic and moral purpose. In fact, he even put morals at the end of the fairy tale.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right. And I can see Lang doing that a little bit. It is more narrative and it's readable.

[Thomas Banks]

Right. So because he uses the French version, a lot of the endings are different. So, for example, the ending of Little Red Riding Hood, which Tolkien mentions in the Lange version, which is based on the Perrault version, ends with Little Red Riding Hood beats eaten, whereas the Grimm version ends with the woodcutter coming in and rescuing her. So in the Lang version, you don't always get that eucatastrophe ending that Tolkien is talking about as necessary in fairy stories. Anybody who's heard me talk about fairy tales knows that I argue, and this is a definition that folklorists use, that by definition, a fairy tale has to have a happy ending.

[Cindy Rollins]

See, I love those scary, awful endings. I think.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, but those are cautionary tales. Huge place, and I love them. They're just.

[Cindy Rollins]

As a mother of boys, I really clung to cautionary tales.

[Thomas Banks]

I absolutely think cautionary tales have their place. I do. The problem comes when you don't realize that Lang is using basically changed, edited, revised adapter.

[Cindy Rollins]

Sure, sure.

[Angelina Stanford]

It sort of seems to me that the difference between the. The French, Perrault and the Grimm stories, I guess their qualitative differences, kind of like that between a hothouse orchid and a bunch of wildflowers.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, sort of. I would say it's more like plastic flowers versus wildflowers. Because Charles Perrault was deliberately trying to give lessons to the licentious court of Louis xiv. He thought that it was an immoral court. And so he was very deliberately moralizing to young girls. And so the moral he puts on, the reason he has Little Red Riding Hood in with an unhappy ending, getting eaten, he throws on the moral of, you know, this is what happens if a young girl gets in bed with a wolf. She's going to be eaten alive.

[Cindy Rollins]

Now, did Lange get all of his stories from the French? All of them.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, so I haven't read all of them, so I don't know. But. But Tolkien says he got them mostly from the French. Again, the distinction I want to make here, the one that I think is important to make, it's not just French versions versus German versions. Charles Perrault's versions, is he took an already existing folktale and changed it. So it would be like if I put out a collection of folktales and I just retold the movie Shrek.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Thomas Banks]

Because Shrek is based on some folk things, but it's a new story that somebody changed, and it's not part of the folk tradition. Well, before we get too much into that conversation that I love, let's go ahead and start with where Tolkien starts, which is, what is a fairy story? He starts off looking up the 1750 definition. So 1750 means this would be smack dab in the Enlightenment. And so we know right away that the Enlightenment did not like fairy tales. Neither did the Puritans. They were the unlikely allies there in hatred of the imagination. They thought that you were telling lies to children. And, of course, the Enlightenment thinker worshipped reason, and thought works of the imagination were highly suspect. So using a definition from 1750, he says, you know, one of the definitions they give is, it's false. Another one, it's unreal. So they're all thinking about it in a very different way. His point here is that a fairy story isn't even necessarily about fairies. That what it really is is about the fairyland or in other words, the other world. And that's what he did in Middle Earth. He doesn't like the word fairy because it's a French word. He prefers the old English word elf. And we see that in his writings. Right, and he uses elf. And the elves, of course, are somber. Well, they're silly in the Hobbit, but they have a sort of gravitas about them. He takes them very seriously. So he gives a lot of emphasis in here about why they're not diminutive, why fairies aren't cute little things. So there are two basic things he's objecting to. One, the French idea of the fairy, and two, the Victorian idea of the fairy. So he's. He's. So as an Edwardian, Tolkien would have looked at the Victorian age as kind of, you know, over the top and misled in a lot of things. And so while a lot of good things came about Victorian and Victorian children's literature, and the golden age of that, bad things came out too, namely, like, cutesy little. Okay, how should I say? You know, how in the 80s, everybody had their precious moments figurines.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, yes.

[Thomas Banks]

Okay. That was fairies for the Victorians, everything was a cutesy little fairy.

[Angelina Stanford]

There was actually a caul celebe, a celebrated case in this would be like 1900. So right at the end of the Victorian era, these two children claimed to have photographic evidence of Harry's and small people, as they called them, in their backyard. And anyway, they showed these old sort of black and white photos around, and it's kind of blurry. Sort of the Loch Ness monster type shots. Arthur Conan Doyle, who always was looking for the marvelous, even when he couldn't find it, he took up this case, these children's allegations, if you will, or their claims, and said that this is the real deal, etc. And anyway, eventually the photographs are proven to be not genuine.

[Thomas Banks]

Was there a movie about that?

[Angelina Stanford]

Arthur Conan Doyle and the fairies? I don't know. Maybe.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, I've heard that story before.

[Thomas Banks]

So, yeah, so that's all apropos. And so what he says about that is all of that is literary fancy. In other words, those are things that have just been made up but don't actually have any connection to folklore. Now, Tolkien is always going to be more interested in folklore than he is in literary fancy, to use his word. Okay, so I don't want to get us too derailed because I gave an entire talk on this topic back at our Literary Life conference in the spring. So if something I said interests you, you can actually purchase that at the House of Humane Letters. I have a whole talk about Tolkien's vision here, but just to give you, like, a nutshell version. So the Grimm Brothers, the reason that they went out and collected all that folklore was because they were medievalists and Christians and they thought that old stories were fragments of gospel truth, which is, of course, my thesis about all of these old stories and that. So again, just to summarize, they felt that in their research, they saw enough consistency in these stories that they thought that they were all little parts of a larger truth. And so they collected all of these fairy stories because they thought that together they were pointing to a bigger reality, that the reason that these, you know, concepts were in the folk imagination were because they actually existed. So Tolkien was very interested in the idea that these folk tales were pointing to some sort of lost truth and that all the fairy tales were basically just fragments of some truth that was held long ago. And Tolkien also talks about, in this essay about how he didn't really get interested in. In fairy stories until he became a philologist. And, okay, so what that's about is when he, as a philologist, he studied language and he had this idea from what he had read of the Grimm Brothers, that the existing folklore is fragments of something that must have been unified, some kind of universal story a long time ago that has just been broken into bits and pieces and we find it as shards nowadays.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's what he means when he takes the Max Muller quote and turns it on its head. Tolkien, disagreeing with him, said that Muller was a famous 19th century German philologist who said that mythology is a disease of language. And Tolkien says, no, that's nonsense. If anything, language is a disease of mythology.

[Thomas Banks]

Right, exactly. And so Jakob Grimm was philologist and was very involved in getting basically the Oxford English Dictionary version of German. And that came out first. And then that inspired the Oxford English Dictionary to be made, of which Tolkien was one of the people who worked on that. So he was a philologist and Wilhelm Grimm was a medievalist. Anyway, when Tolkien started studying language, he started asking himself things like, why do we have stories that are 2000 years old that have the word dwarf? Why, when I study all these different manuscripts, I'm seeing the same words come up again and again and again. Is it because there's some story that's now lost, that's behind all these fragments that would make it all together? So he. Again, I don't want to like spend the whole podcast talking about this, and I did give a whole talk on it. If you're intrigued by this, you can get the talk. But the basic idea is to explain why he takes this so seriously. He's not interested in fantasy that someone just makes up. He's interested in trying to understand how all of these folk elements that exist in these stories universally, what is it that holds them all together? And he and Wilhelm Grimm and Jakob Grimm and C.S. lewis, they all thought that story that held it all together was the gospel and that we've just lost part of it. It. So Tolkien's interest is always going to be in the folklore and the real, not in the made up little fairy. And so you can almost feel him sort of offended at the idea of cutesy little fairies when what he has in mind, the elves of Middle Earth. Just like when he and Lewis went to see Snow White when it came out. No, it's a crack. A story cracks him. And he was so upset at the way the dwarves were portrayed, as you can imagine. I mean, think about the Dwarves in Lord of the Rings and think about Disney's Dwarves. He was offended because that is not a historic dwarf. Historic dwarves represent wisdom and they can't be comic relief. And he was offended. So he takes this stuff really seriously.

[Angelina Stanford]

He and Lewis together thought the Disney cartoons were basically blasphemous. Both of them denounced them in like pretty extreme terms in one or another book. It's kind of funny.

[Thomas Banks]

I always find their reaction to going to see Snow White so, like, illustrative of their personalities. Like Tolkien comes out and was like, I'm offended. What Are these dwarves? Dwarves are supposed to be wise. And he responds exactly like I would have responded. And then Lewis comes out and responds exactly how you would respond, Mr. Banks. And he says, well, it was a great technical achievement.

[Angelina Stanford]

You can imagine Tolkien then standing outside the theater with a, you know, sign and angel sign, you know, save the dwarves or bring back the real dwarves or something like that.

[Cindy Rollins]

What about Peter Jackson? I mean, I think he used dwarves as comic relief at times.

[Thomas Banks]

I don't know what Tolkien would not have liked. Well, Tolkien had a lot to say about what he thought drama and fantasy have in common, and he doesn't have anything in common, at least in the. In the version that I read of the essay. All right, so moving on. He talks about Shakespeare and Michael Drayton. Okay, so again, I don't want to get us bogged down in the minutia, but the Renaissance writers did introduce a new version of fairy, and this would obviously irritate Tolkien greatly. Before we see Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream, a fairy in Celtic lore, for example, was a terrifying figure. They would, you know, they could. If a fairy showed up, that was not a good sign. They might.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, what about the stealing of the babies and stuff? Is that the medieval view of the fairy? They came in, you know, switched the babies? Yeah, absolutely.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. Fairies were very mysterious, and it wasn't necessarily a good omen. If you thought you saw a fairy, what then? Shakespeare changes Puck into this sort of, like, cute little trickster.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, Definitely a cute trickster.

[Thomas Banks]

And. And so that. And that was a fundamental shift, and it's the one that's kind of stuck. And so that's why Tolkien is attacking Shakespeare. And he feels like Andrew Lang has inherited a lot of this and also is a very Victorian in his. Andrew Lang was Victorian. And so, again, we already know that Tolkien thinks the Victorian view of fairies is offensive. Tolkien is the kind of guy who'd be offended. I appreciate that.

[Cindy Rollins]

See, I just wonder if there's room for both, because I like flower fairies.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, there might be. There might be.

[Cindy Rollins]

I get his point. I get it. I get it. They're a new thing, but. Yeah, and they don't represent the old thing at all.

[Angelina Stanford]

I guess it's kind of like when you look at the fairy in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, if you look at Puck, sort of an amusing figure, a mischievous figure, and compare him to his mythic progenitors, the fairies, the elves of medieval folklore, it's kind of the difference between. The same transformation in kind has occurred between A cherub as it appears in the Bible and a cherub as it appears in a Raphael painting in the Renaissance. Like the cherub in the Bible, or

[Cindy Rollins]

a cherub as it appears on wallpaper in your house.

[Angelina Stanford]

Sure, yeah. Like the cherub as a fright angel with, you know, several faces, several wings and all that kind of thing. Versus the cute, chubby, naked baby.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, fat, naked babies with wings.

[Thomas Banks]

So Tolkien continues to develop his definition. He obviously likes Edmund Spencer because Edmund Spencer created a fairyland that he also calls Elf's Land, and Tolkien likes that, too. And so basically what he's getting at here is that fairyland is a place. So it's not just that there would be fairies in the story. In fact, most fairy tales don't have fairies in them, but that there's a magical other world being portrayed there. And he also calls it the perilous realm, and says that in the perilous realm, the characters are on some sort of journey. In archetypal literary studies, that's called the perilous journey. So when he uses that definition, of course, the fairy queen would fit, and he says that King Arthur fit. So King Arthur's stories are fairy stories because they are about a magical other world, an enchanted world in which characters are entering the perilous realm and going on a perilous journey. So this idea that the world has to be somehow enchanted is an essential part of a fairy story.

[Angelina Stanford]

And it's interesting that he says that other elements, laughter, satire, can enter into it, but the magical or the enchanted element of the story, story cannot be an object of fun itself. So Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur's Court wouldn't qualify as a fairy tale in that sense, or for that reason. He also says that Gulliver's Lilliput is,

[Thomas Banks]

again, so for him, a number one thing then, is that the magic in this story can be neither laughed at nor explained away, even if the story itself.

[Angelina Stanford]

He brings in Sir Gawain of the Green Knight, which is itself very funny at parts, but, yeah, it does have a hint of danger in a very real sense, too.

[Thomas Banks]

And I really liked this distinction he made. So fairy stories are not about fairies. They're about men. They're about the adventures of men in the perilous realm. And so you can see that he's absolutely going for that in his stories. All right, so we've covered a bunch of this. Let's see. Yeah. So then, of course, as we've said, he begins to say that Andrew Lange is concluding many things under the title Fairy Story. That are not fairy story, as we've already said. The French influence Gulliver's Travels, which he says is a travel tale, not a fairy tale. Now, this was an interesting distinction to me and an important one, I think. So while it's true that Gulliver is a story of somebody who's going on adventures and it seems to be going on to quote, unquote, other worlds, he says such tales report many marvels, but they are marvels to be seen in this mortal world. And Gulliver's Travels is a satire travel book. It's one of the. It was. It was all the rage at the time because it was the age of exploration. And guys would come back and say, you never believed the crazy things I saw when I went to this, you know, tropical island. And so he's writing in that vein. And he's writing as if the things Gulliver sees really did happen. So it's not a magic world, it's not an enchanted world. Gulliver is just exploring the globe. And, you know, just like you might see volcanoes for the first time or, you know, new types of wildlife or birds. And you'd come back and say, look at the marvels. He's writing in the same way. Look at the miniature people. Look at the marvels. But there. It's not a fairy world. There's no magic. In fact, it's all hyper rational, scientific. It's not. That's one of the things he's satirizing.

[Angelina Stanford]

The fact that he uses Gulliver as his narrator actually makes it more funny, not less. Because Gulliver is. His narration tends to be kind of deadpan, a little bit flat. And he's not a stupid man, exactly, but he's somehow kind of dull. He doesn't have the faculty of. He doesn't have the gift of being surprised, perhaps.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, right. So he's continuing to try to refine that definition. Then what is a fairy story? I love that he said the magic in these stories is never an end in itself and it's never really about the magic. And he talks more about that later. The other kinds of story, he said, does not fit under that is any kind of story where it's a dream that a fairy story, the other world has to be real. So, for example, to use Narnia, right? They go into Narnia through the wardrobe. They come out, they're back in England, but they know but it's real. They know it's real. They keep it a secret amongst themselves, but they know it's real. It's not like I dreamt the whole thing. So an example of this would be like the wizard of Oz, then. The wizard of Oz is a dream tale and it is not a fairy story. Then it's really a dream tale. Allegory has a lot more in common with those old dream stories. We talked about dream stories when we did the Great Divorce. Oh.

[Angelina Stanford]

And, well, you did the Taming of the Shrew also, since that's a dream frame tale.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, yeah. In my class. So, okay, so, yes, everything that happens in a fairy story according to Tolkien then must be presented as true. You can't explain away the magic. It can't be a dream. It has to be dealing with marvels that make sense in the story that's created. He also says that beast fables, while they have a big connection with fairy story stories, are not fairy stories because, again, fairy stories are about men. And in a beast fable, the action of men is secondary. Do you have anything to add to that since you gave a webinar on fables last night?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, I guess that fables don't have to include anything magical in them either.

[Thomas Banks]

Right?

[Angelina Stanford]

I mean, other than.

[Thomas Banks]

Right. The talking animals is not. As a result of magic.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. That's just one of the conditions of the world of the fable.

[Thomas Banks]

Now, I love how when he's outlining these categories, it's clear it's not always cut and dry. Like, he talks about Beatrix Potter and he says that her stories lie near the borders, but outside, I think, so you can see that it's not. The map is not always 90 degree angles. Right. And he says that there are some fairy elements in those stories. All right? Then he gets into the question of where do they come from? And I gotta tell you, somebody who studies this, his answer is completely correct. We don't know. You're never gonna know. Good luck with that. All of the. There are so many theories about where they come from, but none that's definitively accepted. All of which I think have some problem with them. Let's see, he's got. Where does he talk about? So he says basically, there are different theories. That. The independent evolution theory, which is that somehow completely independent from each other, all these different cultures all over the world and all over time have been telling the same story. Isn't that weird? The inheritance from a common ancestry theory, which is that, you know, these stories have been passed down and then the diffusion. And he says that it's really a combination of all of those things, that there is a common Inheritance that we're all dipping in, but we're also being innovative individually over time. And that's why you can see so much variety. And that is the view that I take as well, that these stories are the stories written on human beings hearts. And that's why we continue to see them being told all over the world and all over time in new and innovative ways. It's always variations on a theme, but it's the same theme. He says the history of fairy stories is probably more complex than the physical history of the human race and as complex as the history of human language. Yes, I get this question a lot. Where do they come from? No one knows. That's the honest, legitimate answer. And it's not an answer people really like in this day and age where we're supposed to know everything, but no one knows. There are tons and tons of theories, however. Okay, so then he says that he thinks what's really going on is man as sub creator. And this is one of the most famous parts of this essay that anybody want to. I'm doing all the talking over there.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, man as sub creator. I thought it was interesting that he doesn't actually begin with the theological point that man is a sub creator because he's created in the divine image. Instead he kind of works up to that and clear closes with it. But yeah, man is sub creator, I guess. Lewis in one of his books says that that was something that Tolkien gave a lot of thought to. That particular theme, that particular office of human beings as makers, because we are the sons and daughters of the Great Maker. I guess that's something sort of a pet theory that meant a lot to him.

[Thomas Banks]

One of the things I've always liked when he talks about the sub creator is he gets into the whole world making aspect of storytelling that what man is doing is making a whole world. And within that world things make sense and things are internally consistent. Lewis talks about that too. The more fantastical setting, for example, that you're introducing, the more that human beings have to act in a way that's consistent with human nature. And so we're really creating worlds here when man is separated. He gets into that a little bit more later. I don't know if yours had this one or not, but I love that he went into the origin of the word spell talking about magic and enchantment. The spell means a story that's told as well as a formula of power over living men. He makes a distinction distinction about that in this essay and of course in the Lord of the Rings. Big time. So, you know, an enchanted world for him is a world that is sacramental, a world that is infused with all kinds of mysterious meaning that we don't understand. And so he doesn't have a magician in his book per se. He has Gandalf, who's a different type of creature and who has not knowledge about things that other people don't know. And he contrasts that with what he thinks is the bad magic, namely an attempt to have power over the natural world and other people. He talks about that in this essay.

[Angelina Stanford]

Some sort of preternatural manipulation of power.

[Thomas Banks]

Exactly. And so for him, and Lewis thought the same thing, that in the 20th century, the evils of magic were not people saying spells, but technology. The fact that we could create weapons to have power over men in nature, that we could destroy nature, that we could destroy men. I mean, they had come out of World War I and were deeply affected by that. They deeply affected by what technology could do when it was used for evil. They were both deeply concerned about that. So in the Lord of the Rings, you see that, right? You see the bad guys are always raping the earth. Saruman, when he goes bad, he's raping the earth. He's creating a new kind of evil creature. They're always trying to have power over other people or power over nature. That's what Tolkien thought the real threat of magic was.

[Angelina Stanford]

Tolkien, it might be pressing matters to call him an overzealous Luddite or something like that, but he had a deep distrust of machinery. And that comes up actually a couple of times in the lens of this lecture as well, where he talks about one colleague at Oxford. I think he refers to him as a clerk of Oxford who was glad that some sort of mechanical, some sort of manufactory had been built next to the university, because that put men in touch with real life, and real life is machinery and the techniques that go to the making of machinery. And if our students, in their intellectual pursuit, you know, spend some of their day, at least in the. In the near presence of machines, that will teach them more about the world as it actually is. Because. And then Tolkien goes on to say that, yes, because obviously a lamppost, an electric lamppost, is more real than an elm tree or something like that. I mean, of course, that's not what Tolkien actually believes. But, yeah, he's a man who is suspicious of the tyranny of the. The machine.

[Thomas Banks]

Absolutely.

[Angelina Stanford]

He said that in a letter to his son Christopher. He said that neither the Allies nor the Axis, but the machines won World War II.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Take that how you will.

[Thomas Banks]

That's very true. And he actually talks about that in the expanded essay that I have here. This idea about, is a fairy story real? And he just says, the whole problem is with your definition of real. Why is it factory more real than a cloud? That he thinks we're all screwed up in what we think real is. And by real, we mean modern things, technological things, productive things. Right. And he thinks that fairy elements are more natural and therefore more real in its way. We don't even think about. I mean, so much of our life is digital now. And. And we joke about if it's real or imaginary life. There's a deep truth behind that. What is real? Northrop Fry says that when we talk about real in terms of literature, like, is this realistic or not? He said, what we're really getting at is, is it typical? Which I thought was a fantastic distinction, because this happens with me all the time.

[Angelina Stanford]

Sure. Does it conform to my experience of life?

[Thomas Banks]

That's right. Because. Because a lot of times something will really happen to you enough. And I'll think, oh, if I said this in a story, people would say this wasn't realistic. Yeah, because it's not typical. Right. So. So, yeah, I mean, there's a whole lot of problems even with the question. Okay, so in the next section, he. He addresses the question, who are fairy stories for? And he jumps right in it because he's really upset that Andrew Lange has come out and said in his books, these are for the sweet little children who love fairies. And he says, I don't think you've ever met a child before, because I wasn't a child who loved these things. And he takes issue with that. Now, Lewis also has a lot to say about if children's books are for children.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. And he says that. I mean, you know, every book is, in some sense. I think he says every book is, in some sense, an acquired taste, which some people acquire as children, some as adults, some never. And I hope this isn't hitting close to home, but Lewis brings up the example of the original and how he did not like them as a child and still did not like them as an adult, which is, you know, his loss, of course.

[Thomas Banks]

So Tolkien does conclude that there is nothing special about a child that would make them the intended audience of a fairy tale. And, in fact, children were not the audience of fairy tales. The history behind how that happened, again, go back to the Enlightenment, go back to the Puritans. Fairy tales were for adults. And as Tolkien says, Basically what happens is old discarded things get stuck in the nursery, and old discarded things get stuck in the nursery. And that's what happened with fairy tales. Once adults stopped liking them, they got relegated to children, but there was never anything about them that was specifically for a child. Now, Cindy, you spend so much time thinking about children and the kinds of stories they should read in Charlotte Mason, where do you fall in this conversation about are fairy stories specifically for children?

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, I get the point that they aren't specifically for children. And that is why you have something like a fairy queen. You know, if you use that as a model, that is not a children's story. But I also think there is that sense. And maybe this is because we've moved away from. We're way into rationalism. So anytime we have a story that has that otherness, and by that I mean, like through the use of a fairy, even if she's just a little flower fairy, and a sense of truth also side by side with that, I think that's a very valuable thing for children. I know it isn't. You know, I definitely think after reading the Fairy Queen this year, that that is something other than fairy tales in the traditional sense of what I'm thinking of, which is, you know, I like Grimm, I like Anderson, I like all the Lang fairy tales. I love Russian fairy tales. I think children should be introduced to all of those because I do think it introduces them to something beyond information. It opens the door to wonder and think about even what he's saying, putting the truth in another place. It's still happening in those newer sorts of fairy tales, especially as the culture itself is completely rational and moving into this whole rationale. And a fairy story, it just wakes you up and says, what if this were true and there are truths there that I think children need to hear? I like fairy tales, and I wouldn't quibble over whether they were a folk tale or a fairy tale or something.

[Thomas Banks]

You'll leave that to me, thank you.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, I just like them all. I just like stories. Like you said, stories will save the world. I would not withhold them from my child. Because Tolkien got upset about the darkness.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, I don't think his point is that children should not read fairy tales. In fact, he thinks that they should. And he talks about why in the essay. His issue is that when Lang and others present it as these are stories for children, that means that adults are not going to read them.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right?

[Thomas Banks]

That's Tolkien's issue, that it's not exclusively for children. It's for Everyone and I actually, you

[Cindy Rollins]

know, when I'm reading Lange, of course, I've read it over and over again to my kids and even last year. I'm an adult, I'm enjoying that story. It's not that, but I do see that there's something else going on in the Lord of the Rings or the, and I would say the Lord of the Rings, a story like that is very much like the fairy queen. It's definitely in that genre and not in the genre of, you know, that, you know, you're Tom Thumb or something like that.

[Thomas Banks]

I really liked what he said here about the suspension of disbelief because that is a phrase I'm not crazy about either. And he pulled points out that to talk about the suspension of disbelief with fairy stories is to really miss the point.

[Cindy Rollins]

Absolutely, I agree with that 100% that

[Thomas Banks]

it's not that you're suspending disbelief, it's that you believe the enchantment as long as you are under the spell.

[Cindy Rollins]

Absolutely. If you, if you suspend your belief, then you're not going to get anything out of the story. And that's not, I mean, and I don't mean get anything, but I mean you're not going to be entering into the story.

[Thomas Banks]

Right. That's his whole point. If it's a well crafted story, you're going to come in and it's going to be believable in the story. Right.

[Cindy Rollins]

So it's up to the story to help you, I think, not to do that. I mean, if it's a badly written story, like he says, you know, the worst fairy tale ever, then it has broken that rule especially you cannot suspend, suspend belief. And so it, and I think any story, if you can't suspend belief in the story of any genre, then it is an unworthy story, or at least for you it is.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, yeah, I love that. I love it. He said if they really liked it for itself, they would not have to suspend disbelief, they would believe in this sense. Now that leads him into the question, and this is a question I get a ton and I'm sure you do too. Cindy from Parents. So Tolkien just addresses head on that laying claims. The great children ask about reading these fairy stories. Is, is it true? And he says, no, that is not what's happening. And I completely agree with this. He says what's really happening is the child wants to know what kind of story this is. And actually I thought he was really echoing Edith Nesbit here for her story on the Wings of a Child where she talks about the imagination and she says that to a child, the whole world is magical. Everything is mysterious and weird. And so they look to parents to find out, is this strange? Is this normal grown up stuff? Was this out of the ordinary? Because they don't know. They're looking to us to interpret. It's kind of like when a child falls and they look at you before they cross, cry. They want to know, am I hurt? Was this dangerous? And you say, oh no, you're fine. And they pop right back up. But if you say, oh no now they're like, oh no, I must be hurt. Right? Children are always looking to us to tell them how to respond to things. So Tolkien says, when a child is saying, is it true? They're really saying, is this just like normal grown up stuff? I don't understand. Like, it's science, technology. Right. Because really, every time someone's tried to explain the. To me how a TV works, I just feel like they're, you know, they're just reading out a Latin spell. I have no idea what they're talking about.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Thomas Banks]

So is this like just weird grown up stuff? Is this strange? Is this marvelous? That. That they're not asking, is it true in the way that we as an adult would mean that. That they're trying to find a category for it. He says very often too, that what they really want to know is, was he good, was he wicked? That is, they were more concerned to get the right side and the wrong side clear. He also says that. Let me see if I can find that. He also says one of the real things that they want to know is, is this contemporary? And this is a very good distinction. So when they say, so you're reading a story about a dragon, they say, are dragons real? That what they really want to know is, am I safe in my bed right now? Are there dragons in London right now? Is this contemporary?

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, I think children do that a lot in stories, even history stories says that too.

[Thomas Banks]

That it does it in history as well. Keep going. That's good.

[Cindy Rollins]

No, so I mean, I found with my kids, they were always saying, you know, is he still alive or were you alive?

[Angelina Stanford]

I ask that all the time. Yes, so true. Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

And I mean, for my one son, he was just constantly in a state of disappointment. Disappointment because, you know, as he said, all my friends are dead. But, you know, it was he. He always had that question, is, is he alive? Are they alive? Or One time I think one of my kids said, were you alive when Jesus was on the Earth? It was just like, they have no Concept of time. And they're trying to place these. These things in them. I once gave my mom a book. It was actually Stepping Heavenward. And it's not a true story, although it very much parallels the author's life. And my mom got violently mad at me after she read it when she found out it was fiction. It was a lady's diaries, and she thought they were true. And it really, really upset her to find out that that was just a story. So I don't know what that is. What is that that made her really upset?

[Thomas Banks]

Well, I would think that there are a lot of assumptions about that fiction is not edifying, and that maybe she felt like she had been tricked.

[Cindy Rollins]

Maybe when you're reading something, you know it's not true. Yeah. Something else happens inside of you than when you.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, I'm a big believer in understanding form, so, you know, I do think you have. I don't think that it's wrong to want to know if this is a true book or not.

[Cindy Rollins]

No, no, I don't either. Right.

[Thomas Banks]

What both of y' all are saying about kids wanting to know, were you alive? Are these people still alive? That's exactly what Tolkien's talking about. When they say, are dragons real? They're really saying, are there dragons right now? Should I be scared also, that, like,

[Angelina Stanford]

this desire to have the desire to meet in real life with characters as picturesque as the ones you meet in your books. I remember a few occasions where I was. I don't know, maybe this was a sort of sad disillusion, but I guess I had an idea when I was very young that, you know, the descendants of the people you read about in Greek myth or in the Bible still acted and behaved and dressed kind of like their ancestors. Okay. So I remember once, I think my dad was watching the news or something, and the guy being interviewed, some. Some politician, was a Greek politician. He was just like a modern man in a suit. But. And I remember thinking, I didn't make much of it at the time, but I remember feeling betrayed in that moment. Like, this guy has no right to be dressed like an ordinary man. He should be wearing, like, a armor with a plumed helmet and, you know, be dressed like Achilles and all that kind of stuff. And anyway, those sort of impressions stuck with me.

[Thomas Banks]

He also goes on to say he just. I guess Lange and others had suggested that children were especially suited for fairy stories because they're so cute and young and they actually think these things really happen. But we adults, of course, we know better. And he says that's crazy. I never thought anything in a fairy story when I was a kid was. Was real. He said the enjoyment of the story is not dependent on belief that such things could happen or had happened in real life. Fairy stories were primarily. Were plainly not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability. If they awakened desire, satisfying it, while often wedding it, unbearably, they succeeded. Now he gets into this a little more later, but absolutely, this is what fairy stories do. They awaken desire. They awaken transcendent desire. Lewis talks about. I'll give you an example of what I mean. Lewis talks about how it is so incredibly difficult to portray goodness well in stories. And this is part of the reason why heroes are often boring. And we've seen this, right? The squeaky clean good guy character, like, would someone shoot him, please?

[Angelina Stanford]

David Copperfield, wonderful book. David Copperfield himself is the least interesting thing in it.

[Thomas Banks]

Right? Okay. Dudley do write, like, sometimes the good characters, they're just. They're not complex, they're not well developed. And. And he says it's because we just don't understand goodness. We don't understand the complexity of goodness. And so we're not able to portray it well as storytellers. And he says this is why, you know, you end up with anti heroes and you end up with, you know, bad guys that are super cool, and you end up kind of rooting for them because it's so easy to make evil attractive because we're very good at doing that in our hearts. But it's extremely difficult, he says, to make virtue attractive. One of the things that Tolkien does so extraordinarily well in Lord of the Rings is he makes virtue attractive. Anytime I've led students through those books, I'm just shocked by the way they come out, longing to be elves, longing to be wise and virtuous, longing to have the loyalty of Sam Gamgee. And that's what I think he's talking about here. These stories awaken a desire in you. A desire for goodness, a desire for virtue, a desire for holiness, really is what fairy tales do. And they put you, you know, again, they awaken that desire in you.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, that's a whole other topic because, I mean, you know how it's such a fine line between righteousness and self righteousness, and that is so unattractive. And I think that would be tremendously hard to get right.

[Thomas Banks]

And maybe that's why the really good characters in Tolkien's book are not the main characters. Like, the stories are not told through their perspective. They're more told through the perspective of the Everyman, the Hobbit.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right. Yes.

[Thomas Banks]

And so Narnia is about normal kids having an encounter with Aslan and being in awe. Right. And so that mimics our experience. But if it was told from the perspective of Aslan, of course, it would be very, very different.

[Cindy Rollins]

I'm thinking, you know, that's why C.S. lewis unit. George MacDonald did that very well and Lewis saw that. He saw that here were books where goodness was handled properly.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes, yes. And it's a good. Extraordinarily difficult. We joke about Elsie Dinsmore on this show all the time, but that's bad virtue done poorly. Right. That's where you just. It is just self righteous and, you know, it's that kind of low level piety. It's not real virtue. But that's what you end up with if you don't know how to make virtue desirable and beautiful and lovely and

[Cindy Rollins]

modern people generally just revert. It's just like we were joking about the hard boiled detective. You know, he's going to be the hero of the story. He's going to do all these good things, but he's going to be so flawed as almost most hard boiled detectives nowadays in modern books are painfully flawed to the point of, you know, you would never want to marry one.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, no, exactly. So then he ends this section saying that basically if you're making the argument that there's something unique about children that makes them like fairy stories, then you're saying adults can't read them unless they stay like children. I thought this section was amazing, given how much we're struggling with having people grow up these days. Or maybe they've always struggled with it, but I'm more aware of it, I guess, now that I am at the age of life, that I am. But he says that children, I love this. Children are meant to grow up and not to become Peter Pan's. Not to lose innocence and wonder, but to proceed on the appointed journey, the journey upon which it is certainly not better to travel hopefully than to arrive. Though we must travel hopefully if we are to arrive.

[Angelina Stanford]

Let's just go after all the Scotsman today, because I'm thinking Andrew Lang, James Barry, Robert Louis Stevenson. The travel hopefully is to better. Better than to arrive. It's man, it's just take an aim at Scotland tonight.

[Thomas Banks]

Take aim at the Scots. You're right, he sure is. But that's his point, right? That you don't have to be a child as an adult to like a fairy story. You're a grown up child, but you still have your childlike innocence, your childlike wonder. And then he says, look, adults, if a fairy story as the kind is worth reading at all, it is worthy to be written for and read by adults. Of course, Lewis says the same thing. They will, of course, put more in and get more out than children can. And then he says this, which I thought was fantastic, and Cindy, I know you were applauding it, that he thinks you should stretch children with the stories, give them things that are hard. He says, though it may be better for them to read some things, especially fairy stories, that are beyond their measure rather than short of it. Their books, like their clothes, should allow for growth and their books, at any rate, should encourage it.

[Cindy Rollins]

Absolutely, yes. And I always think that's why, you know, I always aimed our morning time towards the oldest child in the room. I said yes, because the younger kids were going to definitely get something out of that, whereas if you aimed it toward the younger children, you were going to lose the older kids.

[Thomas Banks]

I completely agree with that. And my kind of personal rules that I follow, because when you have kids who are learning how to read, you don't want to give them vocabulary and words that are so difficult that they're just going to be frustrated. So my kind of rule when my kids were learning how to read was things that I read out loud to them were pitched way above them. Right. Like, yes, yes. Shakespeare in Morning Time. Right. And they did fine because I was reading it in my expression, help them know how to interpret it. And things that they read on their own I tried to make at or slightly below their grade level.

[Cindy Rollins]

I think that's a very important point to make here because, yes, there are times to stretch them. And there's also. I get very frustrated with homeschooling catalogs that have a seventh grader reading To Kill a Mockingbird or Moby Dick.

[Thomas Banks]

I've seen that.

[Cindy Rollins]

The Galley wars or something, you know, in the original. So I'm just like, there are. There is a. While you're reading that, that child, you're giving that child that book to read by himself. He's missing all the stories and words that would be making him into the person he could be. And it's just unfortunate. It's just so unfortunate.

[Thomas Banks]

I completely agree with that. So then he goes on, what are the value of these kind of books? And he says, first of all, the value is the same value in any literature. And I completely agree with that. And then he says, secondarily, he thinks that we're dealing with fantasy. Recovery, escape and consolation. All right? So then he gets into fantasy and he says he does not admit to the depreciative tone that people use when they say fantasy. Hear, hear. Tolkien. And listen, it was. It was not in his day. You got to think what all these

[Cindy Rollins]

other guys are writing.

[Thomas Banks]

They're all writing like modernist realistic fiction. And he and Lewis are writing fairy tales. This was not respected at all. And so he says, he thinks that, you know, not only do you not have to apologize for fantasy, that fantasy is a virtue. He thinks it's actually not a lower, but a higher form of art because you have to have this arresting strangeness. And that. That's difficult. That again, that's that other worldness part of what happens in a fairy story. Actually, he says this later on. The way that I explain it is fairy stories give us new eyes to see, right? So when he says that you enter another world and there's an arresting strangeness, okay? That's that moment when you come in and you're. And you're suddenly having a hyper focus. What is that lion doing talking over there? What. What is this creature? What is that? What's this? What's that? You are now learning how to look really closely, right? Part of what fairy stories do is they make you see your own ordinary life in a new way. He says later on the essay, you got to clean your windows. Which I loved that every now and then you got to clean your windows because you have to see better. We have a problem with human beings that we don't see reality, right? We see illusions. We see through a fallen lens. And that affects us in countless ways. So the first thing that the otherworld does is it bring you into enough strangeness that you are woken up. I better pay attention now because that tree is purple. And things are just a little bit different here.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, when you think about the Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis does this every book. He brings somebody in with fresh eyes so that we get a chance once again. We're never completely comfortable with Narnia. We always have to see it with new eyes. And I think that's just a really. It's a very satisfying way to look at a world.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh. Oh. Completely. Completely. And this is the why. In other world stories, there's always a character who is newly introduced to the other world. Always. Like, just think about your basic setup for a sci fi movie. There's always a newbie, right? There's always somebody who's going to Mars for the first time and he's asking all the questions. We, the audience, are asking, what is this? What is happening? And tell me about that. Tell me about that. And that's the narrative device that they can introduce this other world to you in a way that unfolds really naturally without the narrator being like, well, you don't know why this tree's purple. Lewis does Space Trilogy in Narnia. It's Lucy. We enter Narnia through the wardrobe door. Right. With Lucy. So her question or our questions? Where am I? What is this? What is happening? Her questions when she falls in love with Aslan and says, do I have to go back? And he says, you have to go back. You can't stay here. You only came here so you could learn my name in your world. Which, of course, is what Lewis thinks the function of these stories are. Yes, yes. To see new eyes. Trying to find. Exactly.

[Cindy Rollins]

It's like, I love it when I'm watching a movie. I watch a movie. I don't know. There's something so fun if you really like the movie, then to sit down and watch it again with somebody else, more so than just watching it again with yourself. I mean, that's not as fun as having someone who's never seen it before sit down and watch it with you. And you're just sitting there. And books are like that, too. I remember certain books I'd hand my kids, and I was just so excited, thinking this is the first time they're

[Thomas Banks]

gonna go through this. Yes, yes. And then you give you new eyes, too, because you sort of see it through their eyes.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right? Exactly. I mean, I'll even do that with my own book when someone will say to me, oh, I read your book. And maybe it's someone outside the norm of who usually reads it. Sometimes I'll flip back through it to see what did they see in there? Because I've never thought of that kind of person reading it. Now I've just told you something really weird about myself.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, no, I think I understand what you mean. You're probably wondering, you know, how could someone whose life is so different from mine have found anything about my life to relate to? Right, right. See, I knew it wasn't. I wouldn't know when you being superior, I knew you well enough to know you were thinking the other person was superior to have read your book?

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, Yeah. I was like, what? You read this? Oh, what? Did.

[Thomas Banks]

Were you slumming last weekend? That's like. Should I say this? That's like, I always tease Mr. Banks at the weekend when got Engaged. I was dumpster diving in Montana.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I was. I was the beneficiary of that.

[Cindy Rollins]

Were you looking for books?

[Angelina Stanford]

She walked into a used bookstore and I was on sale. I was the 99 cent bin.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, you were. Well, actually, when you read your quote, Angelina, I wanted to mention this and I didn't get a chance, but in our area, the libraries are dumping books like crazy. It's unbelievable. And they're going all digital. So if you want a dumpster dive, now's the two people on this podcast. Get out there.

[Thomas Banks]

Now's the time to go to those libraries. Well, I really do. I feel like now it's just so good that we're all building our personal libraries because I really do think we're the guardians of the future. The digital. I mean, I have a lot of mixed feelings about the digital. I love being able to Google and find a thousand like this because I wouldn't be able to travel to the library where it was. But I think that the physical things ought to exist also. All right, so he ends it then with a section he calls recovery, escape, and consolation. This is beautiful stuff. So recovery is the term he gives for what I was calling have new eyes to see. So he's. We're recovering or regaining, he says, a clear view of things. We're cleaning our windows. That's one of the things that's happening in a fantasy story. You have new eyes to see. I love this. Before we reach such states, we need recovery. We should look at green again and be starved, startled anew, but not blinded by blue and yellow and red. Right? So you go and you encounter this strangeness, this other world, and it gives you new eyes to see your own world. Then he says fairy stories deal largely are the better ones mainly with simple and fundamental things untouched by fantasies. But these simplicities are made all the more luminous by their set. In other words, at its core, Lord of the Rings is about friendship, loyalty. You know Sam Gamgee saying, I made a commitment to you. I said I wasn't gonna. I made a vow. I'm not gonna leave my friend, and I'm not gonna leave my friend, Mr. Frodo, right? So even though it's this epic battle of good versus evil and all these new creatures and new worlds and new languages, in the end, it's a story about a friend, right? And the loyalty of a friend is what undoes evil. Right? No greater man love than this. This. And I'm just tongue tied. Help me out here.

[Angelina Stanford]

Greater love hath no man than this, that he should lay down his life for his friend.

[Thomas Banks]

Thank you. That's what I'm trying to say.

[Angelina Stanford]

John 13.

[Thomas Banks]

His point is that the new setting of the fantasy, that's really not the point. Right. If you read the Fairy Queen, you know, it's all about good and evil and the path to holiness and how does, how do you become sanctified and how do you resist sin? So it's all really fundamental, simple things happening just set against a fantastical background. He says it's made all the more luminous by the setting. So the fact that Sam's loyalty to his friend Frodo happens, you know, at Mount Doom makes it stand out more to us than if it was just, you know, at the corner gas station.

[Cindy Rollins]

Mm.

[Thomas Banks]

Then he deals with the idea of escape. Now he. He feels the same way I do about people who say, oh, that's just escapist fiction. Why would you read that? And his answer to that is, what's so bad about wanting to escape the prison we live in? So his whole point is that we are in a self imposed prison here in modernity and we need books to help escape from that. I put it a little bit differently, but it's the same basic idea that what we're in right now is the unreality. And what we're trying to do is transcend the unreality to remind ourselves what are the true, eternal, permanent things. That's what we forget about in our day to day modern materialist lives. We keep thinking the only thing that's real is what you can see and taste and touch, right? What you can experience it through the senses. And we forget all about holiness and justice and goodness and. And God and all of these things that transcend the physical senses. Right? And so fairy stories help us to remember that the present reality, right, this momentary suffering, to quote Paul, this is not what's real. What's real is all of the things beyond this that we're storing up our treasures in heaven. That's what's real. Not your bank account. However real that might feel. Right.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, the same thing as Christianity is real, is accused of being an escape.

[Thomas Banks]

That's right.

[Cindy Rollins]

And not in a good way.

[Thomas Banks]

No, exactly. We're all just too afraid. So we need to. We need to.

[Cindy Rollins]

We have a crutch. It's a crutch.

[Thomas Banks]

Crutch. There are, like Lewis says, alcohol, tobacco, there are drugs. There are other crutches, my friend. That's Lewis's answer. There are way easier crutches than Christianity. If that's all you want. Oh, this is where he says the notion that motor cars are more alive than, say, centaurs or dragons is curious, that they are more real than, say, horses is pathetically absurd. How real, how startling alive is a factory chimney compared with an elm tree? Poor obsolete thing. Insubstantial dream of an escapist.

[Angelina Stanford]

You know, I don't think that either Tolkien or Lewis ever learned to drive. Oh, I'm not certain, but I think that that is the case.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, I know Lewis had to be picked up for lunch every day by a cab.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

He has a lot to say in this section about the ugliness of modernity and machine guns and bombs and factories and that, you know, one of the things he wants and. And that really was a big, big vision that Lewis and Tolkien both had. Just that modernity was so ugly.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, you can see it in England because it's so small. Every. All the things they put up after the war were. All the housing, everything. They have this rich history, they have this beautiful architecture, and then there's these estates that they put up that were just hideous. And even now, I think they're rethinking that and tearing them down, but just horrifically ugly concrete structures. Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

So he talks a lot about that ugliness, and he thinks that fairy stories can help reintroduce us to beauty, and I think that's true. In Middle Earth, the elves fashion things that are not just useful, but beautiful, and the orcs make things that are ugly and practical. You know, it's so. It's so modern man versus medieval man. And so he's trying to remind us about the beauty of nature and the beauty of things you can make with your hands. He says many stories out of the past have only become escapist in their appeal through surviving from a time when men were, as a rule, delighted with the work of their hands into our time, when many men feel disgust with man made things.

[Cindy Rollins]

Even just knowing that was one thing I took out of the Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles of Narnia. This idea that you knew the tree, you knew its name, you knew its nature, and that's just something we don't have. But that is a reality that isn't. That isn't a fantasy, that the nature of the tree is this.

[Thomas Banks]

No, you're absolutely right. And so he's arguing that these fairy stories help connect us with what is real, and we've been disconnected with what is real because of modernity. And lastly, he says what these stories offer us is consolation. He has a few different definitions of that. One is the consolation of a happy ending. He says tragedy is the true form of drama, its highest function, but the opposite is true of a fairy story. So fairy stories are comic in structure and what that means a comedy is a redemption story. So by definition, a fairy tale, a fairy story has to have a happy, redemptive ending, otherwise it's a different kind of story. And I'm not saying that the only stories that have value have happy endings, because I love a good tragedy. But tragedies are cautionary tales. So it's just a different type of function of story. And that's different from what he's talking about here. He's talking about fairy stories give you always the promise of a happy ending, and he gives up the term the eucatastrophe. So in a nutshell, what he's saying here is very similar to actually what Northrop Fry says about comedy. He says that in tragedy, the fall of the hero is inevitable. You feel it coming, right? No one's shocked Macbeth, really? You killed the king and somehow this all went bad for you. I didn't see that coming. Right? No one says in a tragedy, I didn't see that coming. The whole point is it's inevitable. You crossed a boundary. Now this, you've pulled this avalanche on top of you and you can't get on top of it. It's going to crush you. But that comedy, or the yukatacha, to use Tolkien's term, works on the opposite premise. The reversal, the unexpected reversal at the ending that Tolkien's talking about here is the opposite of inevitable. There's always Naruto. Fry says there is always something miraculous about the happy ending, right? So you think about something like much Ado about nothing. Oh, your bride's dead. Oh, surprise. She's just pretending to be dead. She's really alive. So that's the unexpected twist, the unexpected joy. That's what he's talking about here.

[Cindy Rollins]

Is he the one who coined this word, you, catastrophe?

[Thomas Banks]

He did now.

[Cindy Rollins]

So. So this word has confused me a lot because as I was reading this, it talks about it being the happy ending, the joy, the turning, the catastrophe turned into joy. But I have always taken it to mean be. Be in line with the idea of the Eucharist. So it's like this is what even. But that isn't really. It isn't even philologically close to that. Is that similar?

[Angelina Stanford]

I think what you're responding to is the Greek prefix eu. It means good or well, so a EU catastrophe would be a happy turn.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. And what is the Eucharist? Where does that come from? Where does that come from?

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, a Eucharist would mean. I mean, it is the sacrament of the altar, but also a good greeting.

[Cindy Rollins]

So it is good also Thanksgiving. Yeah. It has a goodness to it. Well, the thing is, to me, that is the heart and soul, the Eucharist, or the Lord's Supper or communion or the blood of Jesus, that to me, is the happy ending catastrophe.

[Thomas Banks]

Right. Because the death of Christ, that's literally the lowest moment in the story. And you think, oh, Satan won.

[Cindy Rollins]

And then it's like, this is a catastrophe. Right. And now we have a EU catastrophe. Let's celebrate.

[Thomas Banks]

Right. So actually. And he talks about how the EU catastrophe is essential in the Gospel, and that's where it comes from.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Thomas Banks]

To understand this, it's the Good Friday turns into Easter Sunday. That's what we're getting at with these stories. There's always the this moment where you think it's all going to go, look at the Lord of the Rings. You really think there's no coming back. They're going to go into Mount Doom and die. And then there's the. I won't ruin the ending of this story, in case anybody hadn't read it. But then there's the unexpected twist. Right. Good Friday always turns into Easter Sunday. That's the EU catastrophe. It's the terrible thing that happened that turns out to be the twist that brings it all come back to life. And he talks about joy, joy, joy. He wrote to his son Christopher about the scene in the Hobbit when the four armies. And they're all trapped and it's looking bad, and Bilbo's pretty sure they're going to die. He looks up and he sees the eagles and he says, the eagles. The eagles. Tolkien wrote in a letter that he cried during that section because that was the new catastrophe. And he felt it, the darkest moment. All is lost. Surely we're gonna die. And then here comes the unexpected twist, the unexpected miracle, and you feel all that joy. And so this is where he brings it all together at the end of the essay. The reason you see that in these stories, because this is the pattern of reality. This is the Christian story. The gospel is a fairy story. Like, he's speaking my love language here. The birth of Christ is the EU catastrophe of man's history. The Resurrection is the EU catastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. Meaning, if the story of the incarnation is God became man and that story ends with, and then he died. That's a tragedy, right? But the resurrection is the thing that twists it on its head. And surprise, it's actually a happy ending. The story begins and ends in joy. And in this section, he's very much tracking with a Lewis essay called When Myth Became Fact. So here he says legend and history have met and fused. So he says there that the Evangelium has not abrogated legends, it has hallowed them. Especially the happy ending here. Here. This is it. This is the heart of all of it. This is why we read the stories. The Gospel has made all of these stories hallowed. It is why we read them, why we come back to them. Right? The Christians have still to work with mind as well as body to suffer hope and die. But he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose which can be redeemed. And then he ends the essay saying, all tales may come true. And yet at the last redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them, as man finally redeemed will be like and unlike the fallen that we know.

[Cindy Rollins]

Amen.

[Thomas Banks]

And that is Tolkien's on fairy stories. That is a fabulous essay.

[Angelina Stanford]

That last sentence kind of deserves to have, you know, some trumpets playing.

[Thomas Banks]

Really?

[Angelina Stanford]

That really is a great. A great ending. I think this is the first time I read this all the way through.

[Thomas Banks]

Really?

[Angelina Stanford]

I've read parts of it before, but, no, this is my. The PDF I read online was a lot longer than what I remembered.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, I enjoyed revisiting it, too. And if you're interested, Lewis has a very short essay, you can find it online called When Myth Became Fact, and he deals with some of these same things.

[Cindy Rollins]

I just hear his conversations with Lewis from having read the other book.

[Thomas Banks]

Bandersnatch.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, Bandersnatch and the other book that went with Bandersnatch by Diana Pavlov Glier. But you can just see their conversations going on and how they influenced one another back and forth, and even how they disagreed with one another here and there. Because I wondered at the beginning if Tolkien was tweaking Lewis when he said something about. Well, I don't always think you should say he said something about. This book is for children from ages 6 to 60. But he said he'd never seen a toy that was put out that amuses infants from 17 to 70. But anyway, I felt like he was tweaking Louis at that point.

[Thomas Banks]

I didn't think so. Did you think that about Nora?

[Cindy Rollins]

I didn't think he was disagreeing with him so much as saying, well, there's more to it than that.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, maybe, maybe, you know, he is.

[Cindy Rollins]

Tolkien was always one to not be as pithy as Lewis, you know.

[Thomas Banks]

No, Tolkien was not the charming one. Lewis was.

[Cindy Rollins]

Lewis, yeah. So he was. Would constantly rearrange it and fix it and be disgruntled about it, but actually agree with him.

[Thomas Banks]

You know, if you've read Surprised by Joy, Lewis talks about how these ideas of Tolkien were so influential in his conversion. You know, Lewis had such a great love of myths and fairy stories, and it was Tolkien who began to suggest to him, well, you know, the reason that you like these stories is, is because they are pointing to some deeper truth, some gospel truth. And you can. You can love Jesus because you've already met him in all these stories. And that really put Lewis on the path. That was one of the big influences in his conversion was. And he talks about that in the essay When Myth Became Fact, that he had met Christ in all these stories. And then, you know, the whole, like you were saying, the whole, like, imagining, like, what if this were real? That that was his question. What if this was all real? And the answer is, it is real for Tolkien and for Lewis, both. Are all these fairy stories real? Yes. Yes, they are. They're all fragments of the real story. And Christ is the real story. He is the prince who came down to slay the dragon and rescue the princess. And now we live happily ever after. And I still believe that that's truth enough to convert someone.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, amen it is.

[Thomas Banks]

Amen. I always feel like I don't know how to wrap these up. Like, it's so anticlimactic. Like, I just want to say, token ladies and gentlemen, now, let's all take a moment and applause.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, we just need a little, like, trumpeter sound.

[Thomas Banks]

Exactly. A little fanfare. Again, we'd like to thank all of our Patreons for supporting this podcast. Thank you to everybody who's left us a rating and a review that means a lot. And if you like this podcast, please leave us a rating or review. You can also join us for lots of lively book conversation on our Facebook page. It's the Literary Life Podcast discussion group. And as always, we will leave you with a poet reading poetry, and we'll see you next time. Until then, keep crafting your literary life, because stories will save the world. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life Podcast, brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with [e-mail] Join the conference conversation at our member Only Patreon Forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks.

[Angelina Stanford]

Into my heart an air that kills. By A.E. housman into my heart an air that kills. From yon far country blows. What are those far remembered hills? What spires, what towns are those? It is the land of lost content. I see it shining plain, the happy highways where I went and cannot go again.