Episode 329: "On Fairy Stories" Revisited with Jenn Rogers

Summary

The Literary Life Podcast: Episode 329

"On Fairy Stories" Revisited with Jenn Rogers
May 19, 2026

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Overview

This episode revisits J.R.R. Tolkien’s seminal essay/lecture “On Fairy Stories” with guest Jenn Rogers, a Tolkien scholar and director at Cassiodorus Press. Hosts Angelina Stanford, Thomas Banks, and Cindy Rollins unpack Tolkien’s claims about fairy tales, their origins, purpose, and significance. Rather than a superficial book chat, this rich discussion explores the “lost intellectual tradition” necessary to deeply enter into classic literature—with emphasis on the vital, universal meanings at the heart of fairy stories and how, ultimately, “stories will save the world.”

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Why Revisit “On Fairy Stories”?

• The hosts explain their decision: an earlier episode focused on children and imagination, but left much of Tolkien’s essay unexplored—especially its philosophical, literary, and theological depth.
• Jenn Rogers joins to offer scholarly background, context, and analysis for a fuller discussion.

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2. Context and Genesis of “On Fairy Stories”

[18:13–28:20]

• Initially delivered as a lecture at St. Andrews, Scotland, 1939, in honor of folklorist Andrew Lang.
• Later revised for the Charles Williams “Festrift” (memorial essay collection), then again for Tree and Leaf and subsequent publications.
• Jenn highlights Verlyn Flieger’s scholarly edition as definitive, which tracks the text’s many revisions.
• Notable Moment: Tolkien’s humility about his expertise (“I just started reading Tolkien yesterday…” [03:22]), which sets a tone of sometimes-reluctant authority.
• The essay’s key context: intellectual “Wars” between Max Müller’s “solar mythology” (philology: myths arise from names for the sun/stars) and Lang’s “anthropological/folk survival” explanation (tales are childish remnants of primitive thought). Tolkien rejects both.

“These stories are an essentially human thing… humanity is involved in mortality.” – Jenn Rogers ([22:31])

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3. What is a Fairy Story? Defining the Indefinable

[37:56–41:17]

• Tolkien is suspicious of modern definitions, dictionaries—even the Oxford English Dictionary, for which he himself worked.
• Fairy tales are not defined by the presence of fairies, but by involving a state (“the perilous realm” or “air that blows in that country”)—an “atmosphere” more than a checklist.
• Fairy is “a place, not a thing, and you enter into it. There is something special about fairy that has to be left as an atmosphere to work.” – Jenn Rogers ([39:54])
• The mind, the tale, and the tongue are “coeval”; attempts to trace literary origins are as fruitless as tracing the origin of language itself.

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4. Tree of Tales & The Soup of Story

[42:14–49:24]

• Tolkien’s “Tree of Tales” metaphor: universal human heritage is a great tree with many cultural branches (not “Western” only; every culture’s myths connect to the central “trunk”).
• “Take the leaf as you find it and don’t feel like you need to trace out where the different elements come from... just let that be that first experience.” – Jenn Rogers ([44:09])
• “Super stories”: All tales are drawn from a cauldron of story—a simmering, ever-evolving mix (folktale motifs, myths, Bible stories, etc.), not from individual “originality.”
• The role of the artist: not innovator but “cook,” skillfully combining existing ingredients. No story is “original” in the sense of ex nihilo creation.

“These are all of our common inheritance. We believe strongly in here about a universal story. This is what Tolkien is getting at here.” – Angelina ([42:32])

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5. Fairy Stories Are Not Just for Children

[63:18–64:49]

• The relegation of fairy tales to children’s literature is a historical accident—a “ghetto” for stories adults did not want, not a genre essential.
• Fairy tales resonate because they are “human” not “childish”; their power, depth, and truth are for every age.

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6. Fantasy and the Human Imagination

[64:49–81:03]

• Tolkien builds on (and revises) Coleridge and Barfield’s theories of imagination:
  • Imagination bridges the gap between word and reality; fantasy (from Greek ‘to shine’/phenomenon) makes visible what has been obscured by habit or the Fall.
  • The imagination is not escapist or irrational, but a truth-perceiving faculty above mere reason.
• Notable quote: “It is the imagination, which allows us to perceive that reality that is veiled to us now.” – Angelina ([74:01])
• Fantasy is “realer than the real world”; it refracts eternal Light (“the single white”) into many colors (echoes of Tolkien’s ‘Mythopoeia’ poem).
• Literary dramatization is limited; words + the reader’s mind create truer “enchantment” than visual representations.

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7. Sub-Creation: The Artist’s Vocation

[51:57–58:21]

• Tolkien’s “sub-creation”: artists imitate God, they do not “co-create” as equals. They are receivers/transmitters of the divine, not originators.
• Warning against the “personal heresy”: making the artist into a high priest or idol.
• Sub-creation is a humble, communal act; art is refracted Light, not the source.

“Art is not a special thing that comes from a special kind of person. All we're doing is just imitating what God does.” – Angelina ([53:00])

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8. The Purpose of Fairy Stories: Recovery, Escape, Consolation

[85:13–110:49]

A. Recovery

[85:31–88:30]

• Fantasy “cleans our windows” (removes the film of habit, sin, the Fall) and lets us see the world anew.
• “Recovery is coming to see anew again and aright.” – Jenn ([86:55])
• Strange images—dragons, green suns—shock us back into true sight of what we have ceased to see.

B. Escape

[88:30–94:12]

• Escape from what? Not “escaping reality” but rightly escaping from the prison of reductionist, death-haunted, ugly modernity (“the escape of the prisoner”).
• “Literature takes me into the very heart of reality.” – Angelina ([88:39])
• Fairy tales confront death honestly, not avoid it.

C. Consolation (Eucatastrophe and the Happy Ending)

[95:13–110:49]

• The heart of fairy stories is the eucatastrophe: a sudden joyous turn, an echo of the resurrection, a hope beyond tragedy.
  • (From Greek, “eu” = good; catastrophe = turn/dénouement)
• “The story begins and ends in joy. There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true. And none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true.” – Angelina ([108:32])
• The gospel is the “Great Eucatastrophe”—the fairy story that is also true: “The birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of man’s history. The resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the incarnation.”
• Fairy tales do not avoid death; they teach us to go through death and find joy on the other side—a vision truer than this world.

“My stories take you through death. You have to go through death. This is… why he ends his talk here. He's saying, we are human. Fairy tales are a human thing because we have to die. And fairy tales help you see the reality beyond that.” – Jenn Rogers ([105:11])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments with Timestamps

• On Sub-Creation and Artist’s Humility:

  “The artist is just the vessel. Art is refracted light. That is why it is important.” – Angelina ([53:00]) "We make in the spirit in which we were made, not as high priests." – Jenn ([57:43])

• On the Nature of Fairy:

  “Fairy is a place, not a thing, and you enter into it. There is something special about fairy that has to be left as an atmosphere to work.” – Jenn ([39:54]) “Trying to figure out where language [and fairy stories] comes from is a fool’s errand.” – Angelina ([41:17])

• On the Effect of Story:

  “Take the leaf as you find it and don’t feel like you need to trace out where the different elements come from… just let that be that first experience.” – Jenn ([44:09])

• On Fantasy’s Reality:

  “The world you see with your eyes is actually not real… God gave us the imagination, which allows us to perceive that reality that is veiled to us now.” – Angelina ([74:01]) “Fantasy does not destroy or even insult reason… it is above the rational mind, a subfaculty of reason.” – Angelina ([83:02])

• On Recovery:

  “Recovery is coming to see anew again and aright… the hardest to see aright and anew are the people and things most familiar to us.” – Jenn ([86:55])

• On Escape:

  “If you have your eyes opened and you discover you actually live in a prison, it’s good that someone’s opening the door and you can get out.” – Angelina ([89:36])

• On Death and Eucatastrophe:

  “Your realistic literature is death avoidant. That is the wish fulfillment dream. My stories take you through death.” – Jenn ([105:11]) “Fairy tales are not avoiding death. They're walking you right through it and showing you the hope that there is something on the other side...” – Angelina ([105:43]) “The Gospel contains a fairy story, or a story of a larger kind, which embraces all the essence of fairy stories… because the pattern is real.” – Angelina ([107:35])

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Additional Recommendations & Resources

• Verlyn Flieger's edition of “On Fairy Stories”
• Jenn Rogers’ webinars: Tolkien and the Old English Tradition, Words of Power: The Literary Theory of the Inklings
• HouseOfHumaneLetters.com and CassiodorusPress.com for classes and books exploring these themes further

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• 18:13 Context & Publication History
• 28:20 Tolkien vs. Müller and Lang (The “Wars” of Fairy Tale Scholarship)
• 41:17 Defining “Fairy Story” (& Why It’s Hard)
• 51:57 Sub-Creation, Art, and Artist
• 58:21 The Soup of Story & Artistic Invention
• 63:18 Fairy Tales and Children
• 64:49 Fantasy, Imagination & Barfield
• 81:03 Enchantment vs. Suspension of Disbelief
• 85:13 Recovery, Escape, and Consolation
• 95:13 Eucatastrophe: The Deepest Joy & The Happy Ending
• 107:35 The Gospel as the True Fairy Story

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Final Words

The episode offers an illuminating, accessible, and passionate deep-dive into Tolkien’s “On Fairy Stories”—not just as a literary essay, but a defense of the human need for story, imagination, meaning, and hope. The hosts, especially with Jenn Rogers’ scholarly insight, decode Tolkien for the modern listener: showing why fairy stories are for all, not just children or escapists, and why, truly, “stories will save the world.”

“Stories give you a glimpse of joy—joy beyond the walls of this world.” – Angelina ([113:19])

Transcript

[A]

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 science, 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 here with me is my favorite and only partner in crime, the mysterious Mr. Branks. Whoa, did I say Mr. Branks?

[B]

You did.

[A]

It's Mr. Branks, the doppelganger of Mr. Banks. I'm stepping out on Mr. Banks with Mr. Banks.

[C]

Hello. Hello. Whatever my surname happens to be.

[A]

Today we are revisiting on fairy stories, the speech slash essay by JRRR Tolkien. And I gotta say, all those R's is hard for me to say. I kind of run out of steam, like halfway through the Rs. I just want to call him Junior, but he probably wouldn't like that. Tallers.

[B]

I don't.

[A]

We don't know each other well enough, I think, to go.

[C]

I don't like it when writer. When. You know, contemporary podcasters, critics, professors get on a first name basis with people they've never actually met. Another one is. Well, it's not a first name basis with a person, but when people call Les Miserable, Les Mis.

[A]

Oh, wow.

[C]

I mean, there's nothing. There's nothing wrong with that. It just bothers me for some reason.

[A]

Did I call him Professor Tolkien? Is that better?

[C]

Showing him the proper air on the side of err. On the side of. Of too much seriousness?

[A]

Maybe.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

I don't know.

[A]

All right, I'll try.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

We're here to talk about Professor Tolkien's essay SL speech on fairy stories. And with us here today to talk about this is none other than our resident Tolkien expert. Watch her make a face. Watch her make a face. Yep, she's saying no. Our very own Jen Rogers, who is going to give us some just fantastic background and information today on this essay. Jen, welcome back to the podcast.

[B]

Thank you for having me.

[A]

I knew you were going to make that face. This is the same face that Michael Drought made when we had him on the podcast in January when I tried to say he was a Tolkien expert. No, no, not me.

[B]

Yeah, well, see if he's not a Tolkien expert. I'm like, I just started reading Tolkien yesterday.

[A]

So, yeah, yeah, I think both of you are extremely deluded with your humility, but that's a good delusion to have. It's a good delusion to have. So we are here to revisit this episode. This episode, this essay by Professor Tolkien. That's actually a lot easier for me to say. It's fewer Rs in a row. But why, why are. Why are we doing this? If you've tuned in last week, we did a best of episode where Cindy and I, Cindy Rollins and I talked about this episode, this essay. Oh, how many years ago now? It's been a while, but I dec. Was time to revisit it for a few different reasons. One was at the time, Cindy and I focused on particular parts of the essay that was right for us to focus on at that time. Mostly the children and the imagination. And how should we think about works of fantasy with children? What's good fantasy, what's bad fantasy? You know, the things that we talked about then. That was a valuable conversation. But it was clear to me that there was just still so much more in this essay. And I found myself talking about it in other classes and thinking, oh, I wish I had said that back when we recorded that episode. So we decided it was time and we knew that we needed to have Jen on to, to. To fill us in with. With all the background. This is going to be a great conversation. I'm really looking forward to it. But before we do that, this is a member supported podcast. We do not accept advertisements. At no point today will I be asking you to change your cell phone or buy weight loss, drugs or any of the other things I have actually heard ads for on homeschooling po which is just so weird. We'll have none of that. But we are going to tell you what we've got going on at House of Humane Letters, which is our day job and which is what allows this podcast to be brought to you for free as a free resource. So, as always, go to HouseOfHumaneLetters.com Sign up for our mailing list so you stay up to date on everything that's going on. Jen Rogers herself just did a fabulous webinar for us in April on C.S. lewis's the Pilgrim's Regress, and I highly recommend it. That was. That was really, really fantastic. I'm very fired up about that. And she is going to be one of the teachers this summer offering summer classes. And our summer schedule is coming out very soon. It should be out by the time this episode airs. So you'll want to go see that. Jen is going to be teaching a class on the Chronicles of Narnia, a mini class. We're going to have another mini class on nature in Shakespeare. We've got a lot of really good stuff coming out. I'll be doing another Harry Potter class, so you'll want to go check out the full summer schedule. But our May webinar is something that actually is very appropriate for what we're going to be talking about today. Our very own Heather Goodman is going to be giving a talk on Mary Poppins. It's called Mary Poppins, Venus in a Blue Coat with Silver Buttons. And this webinar came about because for the last several years we've noticed that a lot of people are picking up Mary Poppins, reading it for themselves, reading it to their children, and then just completely baffled by what it is they're reading and concerned that maybe it's dangerous, maybe this is bad fantasy. And posting comments on the Internet and questions like, help me, help me. And every time one of those comes up, I, I, Heather would just send me a long message, they're reading it wrong. It's this, it's that, don't they understand? And P.L. travers and this and that. And finally I just said, you need to say all of this in one place at one time. And that is how this webinar was born. So let me read to you the the short but very intriguing description of this webinar. P.L. travers wrote, Myths come, it is true, from the ancient past. But it is no less true that they, like the traditions round which they gather, are constantly being rediscovered, renewed and restated. Enter Mary Poppins, part goddess, part Celtic warrior, Fay, full time nanny with a parrot umbrella like Venus pulling aside the veil to reveal the work of the gods to Aeneas, Mary Poppins comes to give the banks an education so that their eyes may be open to the spiritual world in their everyday. And we as readers get to go along Merry go round ride. In this webinar, Heather Goodman will look at some of the ingredients that went into the Mary Poppins soup. From Persian and Asian myths to Grimm's fairy tales to Dante. We'll trace motifs throughout the Mary Poppins books that echo the universal story, including in the hard to understand chapter Full Moon, where Jane and Michael visit the midnight zoo and see how Travers was restoring the cosmos and turning England right side up. This is gonna be so good. This is going to be May 27th

[B]

and

[A]

the video will be yours to keep. So if you can't make it live or if you can't make it live, either way, you own the video and you can watch it as long as, as many times as you like. And our, our webinars are always deceptive because we end up shoving a mini class worth of information into or so it's going to be jam packed. You will absolutely get your 18 worth and so I'm looking forward to that. That'll be at the end of this month. All right. One more thing about the cool projects we've got going on. We've mentioned a few times on the podcast that we also have a publishing house. Cassiodorus Press is one of, is the publishing wing of the House of Humane Letters. And I don't know that I have ever officially announced that Jen Rogers is the director of the press. So if you have gotten your amazing volume or like, this is good work. This is perfectly edited, great paper, great layout. Jen Rogers is the person to thank for that. Jen, tell us just a tiny little bit about what's been going on at Cassiodorus Press and what we can look for in the future.

[B]

All right, so I guess the first thing coming up and kind of is already happening is the release of Dr. Baxter's second book with us falling inward. That is it's a second edition. So he's expanded it and we have reformatted and edited it. That is partially why some of you have been emailing saying, where's my book? Well, I was really, really a stickler about a few things so I sent it back for printing again. So our distributor is actually picking up the new beautifully formatted books today. So you, by the time this airs, your books will have been shipped. And it's, I mean, I love this book that Dr. Baxter has done. He covers so much ground for the imaginative mind and experience and how it relates to our being, which we'll be talking about today too. So if you want more on what we talk about, non fairy stories, but from a different author's perspective across history and the arts, then falling Inward is a really, really good, accessible place to start.

[A]

And then accessible, I should say, before you, before you go on, a lot of people ask us, you know, I have friends and they don't understand why I'm obsessed with literature and everything that it's meaning to me and what it's doing for my soul. And is there's like a quick, you know, they're not going to listen to six years of podcasts with you. Is there something I can just give them? This book would be the thing to give them this along with Dr. Baxter's previous Cassiodor's press release, why Literature Still Matters. Both of those are just really succinct short books that make the case for why any of this still matters.

[B]

Yeah, totally agree. Yeah, both books would be a great starting point, maybe. Why Literature Still Matters, if you think the person is just really, really new, is not going to stick with it. Why Literature Still Matters is shorter. Falling Inward is still very accessible. Dr. Baxter is so good about saying things succinctly and fully at the same time. But Falling Inward has a bit. I shouldn't say broader scope, but he. It's longer, he takes more time, and it's a beautiful read.

[A]

And I should also say that we had Dr. Baxter on in January on this podcast to talk about Falling Inward, so you can check that out. Of course, we also had him on last year to talk about why Literature Still Matters, so you can listen to the author yourself tell you why those books matter.

[B]

That is true. That is very true. We also have some books coming up, some book projects. We have someone else working on a fairy tale project. We have work going on on the Poetics and also a book on nature upcoming. So stay tuned for more from Cassiodoras Press.

[A]

Yes, yes, and that's cassiodoruspress.com and you can order either of Dr. Baxter's books and you can sign up for the mailing list there as well to find out about our new releases. We're very excited. And you can also find out what Press is all about. But it's just another opportunity for us to try to walk out our calling, which is to preserve the literary tradition. And a few years ago, Jen and I were talking and we both had sort of come to the same place where we thought, we can't say we're trying to recover the intellectual tradition if we're not willing to start publishing stuff on this. It needs to be more than just webinars. And so we took the plunge. And it's a good thing. We did not know how much work it was going to be or we had never done it. Two naive, idealistic women were like, how hard can this be? Turns out very hard. A lot of work. Jen has done tremendous work, but we're very, very proud of the volumes that have come out. And we have more projects coming out. We're really excited.

[B]

One thing I do want to say is we do not do on demand printing, and we do all of our printing in the United States. We try to make it as humane as possible because we felt like in our publishing process, we needed to be living out what we were saying and writing about. So, yeah, that was, I guess that was another aspect of the press to

[A]

bring up a hundred percent. And we know the economy is hard right now and people are trying to stretch their dollars, but we made the decision not to send our printing out to China, which a lot of our small publishing competitors do, and it is significantly cheaper. And our margins here are razor th. And if you want to know why our prices are what they are, it's because we are paying an American printer a living wage. And that was really important to us. We didn't feel like we could say we're standing for humane education, humane living, a literary life, and then, you know, hire out a sweatshop.

[C]

And of course, it also has the, you know, not minor benefit of producing books that do not actually crack open at the spine the first time you open them. So there is that as well, if that matters to you.

[B]

Yes,

[A]

I feel like Professor Tolkien is cheering for us, right?

[B]

No, to that. Like, yes, we have a sensory. Sensory experience monitor before we agree to print.

[A]

Absolutely we do. All right, before we jump into this conversation about Professor Tolkien's lecture essay, and you'll understand in about five minutes why I keep saying that, because Jen's going to give us the context of all of that. First, let's do our commonplace quote. Jen, do you have one for us?

[B]

I do, and it might feel a little out of place, but I hope that it makes sense once our conversation continues. So this is from a letter from Tolkien to his son Christopher. It's the 31st of July, 1944. So he is writing while Christopher is away at war. I believe in South Africa, but I could be wrong. Okay, so this is a paragraph. He's closing the letter. Take care. Take what care you can and is possible and legitimate of yourself and body and soul, for you do not belong wholly to yourself. I speak a human thing. For of course, theologically that is true of the most forlorn and outcast. But God has spoken of and humanly thought of in terms of fatherhood for good reason. Not as is falsely imagined, because God is a human apotheosis of the old man and derived from fathers, but the reverse, because fatherhood derives from and is delegated from God and carries a minute reflection of him. And One small drop of his infinite love with its peculiar quality. God bless you. Good night.

[A]

Yes, I do see where you're gonna go with this. This does relate to the essay. Very good, very good. We'll unpack that shortly. Mr. Banks, do you have a commonplace quote?

[C]

Yeah. Mine, with no introductory context, is from W. Somerset Maugham's writer's notebook, and he's describing a woman he doesn't really like. He says she plunged into a sea of platitudes and made her confident way towards the shores of the obvious.

[A]

That is such a Mr. Banks thing to say. It is so you. It is. Jen's laughing. Yep. It is so him. You know, I should say, jen, I'm so glad that you chose as your commonplace quote a letter from Tolkien, because I always joke in classes that you are just the queen of the letter. I know you're blushing right now and saying, no, but you trust me, guys, she is the queen of Tolkien and Lewis's letters. Like, anytime I have a question or I say something, I always imagine that Jen's, like, wearing an old school holster, and instead of gun, she's just got their letter shoved in there.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Like, every time I say something, it's like she just, just, just imagine I'm acting this out for you. I actually am acting it out. She just pulls that letter out of the holster. She's like, January 14, 1932, Tol said, and you just. You just always have the perfect letter. And the quote, whatever I'm trying to say, like, I'm reading Lewis and I think he's trying to get this across. And, oh, yes, oh, yes, he once told Arthur Greaves, and you just blurt it all out. So that is what I want you to do today, in today's episode, just give us all this beautiful background. But first, my commonplace quote, which I also picked one that I thought would fit today. This is a quote from Hilaire Belloc, who we enjoy.

[C]

My curiosity.

[A]

I know. And this is. This is something Tolkien would be nodding vigorously, even though he and Hillary Belloc, I think, came to almost blows at different times. She's laughing. Yes, there's a story there. But this is a quote I believe Tolkien would agree with. All too often, the legends old men tell are closer to the truth than the facts young professors tell. The wildest fairy tales of the ancients are far more realistic than the scientific phantasms imagined by moderns.

[B]

No, that's brilliant. Yep. Yep. I. Yep. Yeah.

[A]

Pretty much what he's gonna say in the essay here.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yes. Yeah.

[B]

Although we will talk about phantasms.

[A]

Oh, excellent. Yeah, good.

[B]

So this is perfect.

[A]

All right, so let's start off with Jen, you giving us some context, because I keep calling it the lecture slash essay. So talk to us about the context of when this first appeared as a lecture, what was going on, all the things and the publication history, and how has it come to us in the form that it has come to us now?

[B]

Okay. Yeah. So credit where credit is due. A lot of this, most of it comes from Dr. Verlin Flger, V, E, R, L, Y, N, just in case people tend to ask. Anything you see by her, just buy she is so worth it. She's an incredible Tolkien scholar and she also has a lot of access to from the Tolkien estate.

[A]

So also your teacher, you're over here just acting like I don't know anything. No, you studied under her and Tom Shippy and Michael Drought. And you know, you have your direct line from Tolkien to us, God Tolkien to Jen Rogers. But anyway, go ahead.

[B]

Oh, my goodness. Maybe from God Tolkien to Dr. Fleeger. I'll go with that.

[A]

Okay. All right. All right.

[B]

So if you see the black version of Tolkien's on fairy stories, I'm holding up in front of the camera. Camera like a dunce. Nobody can see it, but it is by this one, because she has the manuscript history in here. It's also with Douglas Anderson. So what happened with this talk? So, initially it's a talk. He's asked to give a lecture in honor of Andrew Lane in St. Andrews in Scotland. So in the talk form, we.

[A]

What year is this?

[B]

This is. Sorry. Good, thank you. 1939. March 1930. He will later, I think in a

[A]

letter refer back very similar to then when he does Monster and the Critics.

[B]

Yeah, it's. It's two years after. It's two years after. It's so 37 to 39. And there's a lot of callback, especially in the beginning, if you notice. Like there I was even rereading it. I. I can't even count how many times I've read this now. But I was surprised again at how much Beowulf there is in the first part of it. So he's an Englishman going to deliver a lecture in Scotland on fairy tales. And we have from his notes that Dr. Klieger has collected here his intros of, like, just complete bashfulness of going to Scotland. He says it's like a mere mortal going to the court of Elfland to give a lecture on Faerie. It's preposterous. So that's you will see a lot of Scottish digs and a lot of Scottish honor to the Scots throughout the talk version of this essay. So this is delivered in 1939. He was full on early 1939. So from about November to March, November 1938 to March 1939, he is immersing himself in Andrew Lane's color fairy tale books. He's reading a lot of Lange's work as a folklorist and in other essays and just living his best folklorist life. Now, the talk itself as delivered, seems to have been finished before the epilogue. So there's no epilogue and there's no mention of Eucatastrophe. Three different reporters gave summaries of the talk in different Scottish magazines, journals.

[A]

And.

[B]

And it seems that he, that Professor Tolkien ends his talk on us on the note of escape and that black Bull of Norway scene. So there are a few paragraphs that

[A]

does feel like an ending, now that you say that.

[B]

Okay, right. Because the big, the big reveal from those articles, reports on it is that Professor Tolkien is saying escape is worthwhile and it's ultimately an escape from death.

[A]

And ending it with the Bull of Norway, as we'll see in just a few minutes, implies the Eucatastrophe because he's literally explaining that he's referencing the Eucatastry of the story. So he comes back later and makes that more explicitly clear.

[B]

Exactly, exactly. So. And the thrust of the essay as talk, so of the talk, the lecture is that fairy. Fairy tales are an essentially human thing and it's so. And the whole thing about humans must die. Right. So, so that is the overarching picture for the talk. And so that's where the origins question comes into because he's ultimately going to connect it back to, well, what is humanity and humanity is involved in mortality. Okay. So that's the talk that seems to be how the talk is presented later. CS Lewis gets the idea to do. I'm not going to say this correctly, so Mr. Banks is going to have to help festrift the German, basically. Yeah, yeah, that is right.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Oh, it's the festrift for Charles Williams.

[B]

Right? It's for Charles.

[C]

You're saying it as well as I can.

[A]

So I mean, apologies, Leah, Any other Germans listening?

[C]

Yeah, but I know that's wrong. I can hear the word in my head, but I can't say it.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

Well, thank you because that was better than I said it. So he revisits in say 1943ish this talk because he had Way over prepared. In the notes, Dr. Flieger shares some correspondence that she had with Priscilla Tolkien. So Tolkien's daughter. And Priscilla is remembering. Yeah, my dad had all of Lang's books everywhere and all of these other books on mythologies all over the house for months as he's preparing for this lecture, of course.

[A]

Makes me feel seen. Okay, this is exactly how I prepare you too. Just. Yeah, way over prepared books everywhere. Yeah.

[B]

Yes, exactly. Okay. So he cannot say everything that he wants to in the space of one hour. So he may have even written in some of that. That was cut out. And because when he starts to revisit this in an essay form for this memorial, actually, first. First it is. Well, Williams is alive, so it's essays in honor of Charles Williams as a living person. And he writes in these notebooks because in Dr. Flieger's edition of On Fairy Stories, she has in the back transcripts of Tolkien's notebooks. Right. So I know it's just like so good. And so he has a funny note there where it's like, I was able to deliver most of this, a good portion of this, some of this to the Talk. And now I'm going to revisit it for this edition. Dedicated Charles Williams. Charles Williams ends up passing very suddenly in 1945 before the book comes out. So then he gets a manuscript he had sent in to Charles Williams and his secretary and his wife. He gets that typed up manuscript. I'm sorry, that doesn't make sense. Typescript. He gets the typescript back after Williams dies and starts working on it again. So there are throughout three to four periods of revising this essay. It finally comes out, I think, in 1947, something like that in the memorial book to Williams actually may have been a little earlier. And then we have another further edited version of and Tree and Leaf, which when it comes out with Leaf by nickel. So those are so there. This essay grew and expanded. And if you do have just the Tree and Leaf version, or even more rare, the. The essays presented to Charles Williams, it will be different from the one that you will find in, say, Monsters and the Critics, that essay collection, because he revisited a lot. And so it's in that I have

[A]

the one that's an appendix from the Tales from the Perilous Realm.

[B]

Yeah, that would be.

[A]

A lot of people would have that one as well.

[B]

That's true. That's true. So, yes, and then he does revisit all of this with Smith of Wootton Major. And there is another short essay on fairy stories There, that's different, but kind of goes, well, should be read with. On fairy stories. Like, if you're gonna. If you're gonna read on fairy stories and you want to read another Tolkien, like, read some Smith of Wootton major and that. That essay. So that's the manuscript. That's the quote unquote, manuscript history. But where he's delivering this day to. In. In Scotland in honor of Andrew Lane, he comes in to what Dr. Fleeger calls these fairy tale wars or mythology wars. Because on the one hand. And this is going to. This context sets us up for the entire essay. On the one hand, we have Max Mueller, who's a philologist that Tolkien and everybody has benefited from. Right. Like, so one of those. Like when Tolkien calls out William P. Kerr in Monsters and the Critics, it is not that this person is horrible. It's that I respect this person. I've learned from this person. I'm critiquing this aspect of what he's saying. Okay, so, Max, let me just say

[A]

this for anybody listening who's not necessarily an academic or having come out of these academic circles. That is supposed to be how scholarly work works. Right. His monster in the critics is. Is him jumping right into a scholarly debate. This lecture is him jumping into a scholarly debate. And that is actually how the scholarly life is supposed to work. One of the things Michael Drought points out, and I think this is confusing for people when they read literary criticism, because it sounds like everybody's just fighting with each other and they're not agreeing on anything. Drought said that this was in a lecture he gave that I heard on YouTube, but he pointed out that no one gives talks and writes articles on things everybody agrees on.

[B]

Right, Right.

[A]

You. You find the. The scholarly life is. You find the one little thing that you disagree on, and then this is your contribution to the whole conversation. Hey, what about this one little thing? So that is. Go. Go ahead.

[C]

An example, not in literary criticism, but in classical studies. Once there were two German professors, this is the beginning of the 19th century, who almost came to blows. Like, they, you know, they. They would not talk to each other. They had nothing to do. They blackballed each other. And the point of disagreement was exactly where did Hannibal cross the Alps into Italy? Like, what little mountain pass did he use? And this was the point of their mutual hatred.

[A]

You and I are such scholars. That is literally the kind of thing I would disown somebody over. So. Yes, yes. So what I want you to understand is this is a group of scholars in the audience. He's a scholar. And they are doing what scholars do, saying, hey, I've read your research. Here's what I liked. Here's where I think you're wrong. Then they're going to respond. So, you know, we. We. I don't want to give the impression that Tolkien's just some grump and every time he gets up to speak, he's yelling at everybody. This is. This is literally what scholars do.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. This is the way it's supposed to be. And it doesn't mean that he's completely blacklisted Andrew Lang either. Right. Like, it's. He's. You're. You're able to take what is good and leave what is bad, supposedly.

[C]

And. But. And Andrew Lang was like a man who wore so many hats that to say that his is not the final word on fairy tales or on folk culture is not really like an insult to his legacy. I mean, he was a historian, essayist, linguist, novelist, poet, biographer. I mean, yeah, if you look at his published works, I mean, I can't even begin to name half of them. So, yeah, I.

[A]

And Andrew Lang was very important to Tolkien, Wasn't it Andrew Lang's Norse myths that Tolkien first read as a boy?

[B]

You know what? I do not remember.

[A]

I feel like I read that somewhere, but I could just be making it up. But. But Andrew Lang was very important to both Lewis and Tolkien. And so for him to. He's just. He's just, you know, not making idols of his heroes and saying, hey, Andrew Lang did good work, but I think you're wrong to put Gulliver's Travels in a fairy tale book, which I also agree and loved when he said that. Right.

[B]

So, okay, so. So we have Max Mueller talking about what is the origin of this mythology? Because what has happened is during the 19th century, we have. The Grimms are the prime example of this. People are collecting folklorists, scholars are collecting fairy tales into these big collections and very much tying up national identity with them. So the Kalevala, the Grimm's Tales, and a few others, same happens for Scotland, but the tales themselves. Okay, so Mr. Banks has talked about the Juniper Tree on this podcast, right? So I. I read the Juniper Tree to my kids in Morning Time, and it's brought up in. Tolkien brings it up in this essay. It. There's cannibalism, and it's just all this macabre stuff in these fairy tales that are our heritage. And so these folklorists are trying to figure out, where did this stuff come from. This is almost embarrassing. And so the, the origins question arises. Where did all this even horrible stuff come from? And so Max Mueller has his theory which ends up being called the solar, the solar origin theory. So it's very much based on philology and his study of Sanskrit, Egyptian texts where he's able to see this link between the words for the planets and stars and deities. Okay, so for him, mythology, all of these mythologies, these high mythologies, are just derivations of outgrowth of the words for the stars, for the sun and the stars, the planets. So people look up at the sky and they start creating stories with those names. Right, like the name.

[A]

Is this the anthropological approach or is it slightly different?

[B]

No, it's different. Okay, so for what I'm going to say are the big wars, like, to us now, we're like, isn't that the same thing? Owen Barfield in Poetic Diction. And this essay talks, it converses with poetic diction a lot. He talks about Max Mueller versus Andrew Lang as well. And it took me like two times reading it through just to realize what the differences between these two sides are. So us now might look back on this debate and be like, what were you debating? But this essay gets to the heart of it. So, so Max Mueller with his solar mythology, the words for these planets kind of get separated from the things in the sky themselves and become attached to these stories that mankind created about them. And then they just dwindled down into folklore over time. Okay, so we have very much a top down, trickle down fairy tale economics. And that's, that's Max Mueller with Andrew Lang. Okay, remember this essay is in Andrew Lang's honor. He comes in and says, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's not what's going on. He, in Tolkien's own words, dethrones philology and the mythology conversation and says these folk tales are carry over just, yeah, residual stories from primitive man and their primitive imaginations and religious practices. So that's the anthropological movement.

[A]

Yes, that's the anthropological approach.

[B]

Right. So there is a connection between why Andrew Lang thinks fairy tales are for children. Right, because fairy tales are the leftover of primitive, unevolved mankind. Just like children need milk, they can digest fairy tales, but a more mature adult gets on the more evolved storytelling and religion away from primitive man. So all these fairy tales get explained away. So this is the anthropological movement, the folklorist movement that Andrew Lang really is kind of the, the poster child for is, is, is this idea of we have different historical people getting attached to these primitive religious practices that we're all kind of embarrassed about. He calls them naked ancestors. And Tolkien's like, the one thing we know about them is that they weren't naked, which is just a delightful line. So that's the war is that this philological dissent. And Tolkien goes against both. Right. He's always considered wrong.

[A]

Yeah, he does. The critics. Right, right. Well, let me just say this. Finish your thought. Finish your thought.

[B]

So I was just gonna say, when he talks about mythology as a disease of language, that's Max Mueller. When he talks about folk stories being explained away and being primitive and being for kids, that's Andrew language.

[A]

And everybody in the audience knows exactly what he's talking about.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

Okay. So I want to say to anybody who maybe this is their first podcast episode. We talk about this stuff all the time, every episode.

[B]

Right.

[A]

That it's neither one of these things. If you want to go listen to our episode on what is the literary tradition? Or why read fairy tales? Or why read mythology? And we'll of course, get into some of that here as well. So it's neither of those things. And then he's going to tell us it's something else entirely.

[B]

Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And notice for both, like, the sanitization of the fairy tales is supposedly progress. Right. So when Andrew Lang changes how the punishments go, and Tolkien calls that out, he's bringing it up into modern, evolved, mature mankind. And Tolkien is saying, no, that that whole primitive primeval thing, you're. You're talking, You're. You're poo pooing is what is essential to fairy tales. Okay.

[A]

Absolutely, Absolutely.

[B]

All right.

[A]

So then the essay, it starts with origins and gets into even what is a fairy story. And he just kind of goes in through what all the wrong definitions are. And I love that he starts saying, the OED is not going to help you. Looking this up in the Oxford English Dictionary won't help you. And the reason why this is so amusing is he worked for the Oxford English Dictionary, and the Oxford English Dictionary is literally everything. So for him to say, if you look this up in a dictionary, you're going to get it wrong is just putting his finger right on the heart of it. I feel like this is what I do every single day in my classes. Like, don't go look in your literary textbook, don't go Google this, because they're all going to give you the modern version of these things, which are all wrong. And so he just sort of parses in the beginning of this. He's not interested in literary versions. He's not interested in new definitions. He's talking about old fairies of folklore. He even points out that a story can be a fairy story without having fairies in it. Right. So he's just cutting across all of that and says what I'm talking about is a fairy realm or a state in which fairies have their being, the perilous realm. He says the air that blows in that country, which is, that's what Lewis calls elsewhere, the atmosphere of a story. So he's talking about there's an atmosphere of fairy. That's what we're getting at them now. Just as an aside, if you ever take my mini class, how to Read a Fairy Tale, we get into a lot of this, but there's a ton of scholarly argument about what is a fairy tale. And I just like Tolkien in my class argued that they, all the folklorists have it wrong, the children's lit people have it wrong. They're all wrong. So I'm in good company here, just calling out both sides of the argument. So basically he says you can't define it, you can only experience it. Which that is so Tolkien in a nutshell.

[B]

Here it is, but it also isn't. That was something I wanted to say.

[A]

Oh, no, go ahead.

[B]

Him saying that you can't go to a dictionary and he's not giving us a full philological background.

[A]

Right. He's a philologist. This is what he does.

[B]

That is uncharacteristic of him. There is something special about fairy that has to be left as an atmosphere to work. So he uses the word atmosphere here too. So fairy is a place, not a thing, and you enter into it. So the reason why I'm saying this now is just because later we're going to see how he connects fairy to being. This is not, this is not a dictionary thing. It's a living relationship. It cannot be defined.

[C]

Well, that's a good point. That's a very good point.

[A]

No, I'm glad you said that because I wouldn't want to, to come across as, you know, Tolkien's just one of these woo woo guys who's like, you can't define it, you just got to feel it. Sometimes people accuse me of that and I'm like, take a class by me. I spend in an hour long class, I'm get 45 minutes of definition. Yes, exactly. So what I guess what I meant was when I said this is typical Tolkien is that he puts his finger right on the problem.

[B]

Yes, right.

[A]

The problem is we are trying to define something that is essentially indefinable. And if a man whose life work is to track down the origins of words and define them, and works for the oed. If he tells you we can't do it, then you have to listen to him. That that's the wrong way to approach this.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

And he says, and again, coming from a philologist, this really means something. He says trying to figure out where fairy stories come from is like trying to figure out where language comes from.

[B]

Yes, the mind, the tail, and the tongue are coeval. So that. That, again, that will come very clear once we get to the fantasy section.

[A]

So then he says, I pass lightly over the question of origins. And he says, these stories are our common inheritance, which is a big thing we talk about on this podcast at all. This is part of the reason why it's hard to pin down things like what is a fairy story? Or even what is human language? Or the harder question, did this all come from and what's the oldest fairy tale? Is because those things all are connected. And there seems to be something about human beings that no matter where we are on this planet, we have the ability for language and that we immediately use that language to tell these exact kinds of stories.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So he. When he says this is our uncommon inheritance, he gives just a wonderful metaphor of the Tree of Tales, something that I pull from a whole lot. Is there something you want to say about that before I try to explain what it is?

[B]

No. Why don't you go ahead and then we can work from there.

[A]

Okay. So the Tree of Tales is something you hear us talk about a lot on this podcast. I got it from Tolkien. I got it from this essay. This is the idea that we have a Tree of Literature, and it's like the Platonic archetype of literature, and it's not Western literature. I think that's the mistake people make that the. The Tree of Tales is Western. And then there are other branches, like they're Asian or, you know, African or. Or, you know, something like that. No, it's the Tree of Tales. And there is a Western branch, and there is an eastern branch and a southern branch and a northern branch, and they're all branches off of the same tree. These are all of our common inheritance. We believe very strongly in here about a universal story. This is what Tolkien is getting at here. And honestly, I know that there's so much debate about diversity and this and that. It doesn't matter which branch you start with. It doesn't matter. All of the branches will bring you to the heart of the tree. So for Tolkien and Lewis, they they fell in love with the literature of the north. Right. For Mr. Banks, it's Rome. For Addison Hornstra, it's China. Right. It doesn't matter what branch because all of the branches are feeding into the main tree. So you can focus on any branch. For us, I'm taking again the influence of CS Lewis in his essay Our English Syllabus, because we are English speaking people at the House of Humane Letters, we focus on English literature because this is the, the inheritance of our, of our tongue. But all of the branches are important and they're all part of the universal story. And so that's the argument Tolkien's making here that we don't even need to argue about. Where do they come from? They're just everywhere. And let's just deal with that reality.

[B]

Yeah, I think again, for a philologist, this, this is, this means a lot where he's saying, take the leaf as you find it and don't feel like you need to trace out where the different elements come from. Just, just take the leaf as you find it. And he says, yes, trees have been keeping on having leaves after their own kind for generations, but for somebody, the oak leaf that just grew is their first experience of an oak tree. And just let that be that, that first experience. So take, take. And he compares this to language. So take the language as you receive it as well. And obviously he is a philologist, so he's going to care about what the word has meant over time because that's part of how you're receiving it, but receive it first. And I think Lewis spends the entire experiment in criticism trying to tell you to do that.

[A]

And that's essentially what he also does in the Monster and the Critics. And if you're new to that, that's his 1937 essay on Beowulf. Very, very famous. Basically, just like plants, his flag on this is how we're going to do Beowulf criticism. But the metaphor he gives there is the tower and the ruin. And that he feels like all of these literary scholars are so busy trying to feel like, trying to figure out where did this particular stone tower come from that they miss the fact that there's a tower and if you climb it, you can see the sea. So this is the same kind of thing. You're obsessing about the wrong thing, trying to figure out where they come from. So he says, I'm going to lightly pass over this, which is sort of, I mean, when you consider that the entire debate at the time is trying to answer the question, where did they come from. And he's like, that's not what's important. Let's deal with them and. And deal with their effect on us.

[B]

Right. And we will see. He does not. He's. He's very sneaky. In this essay, at the end, he comes back and talks about origins, but he's led you on such a journey that you're ready to hear what he says about where they really come from. For now, what he says is because the folklorists, they have these catalogs of fairy tale tropes and motifs, Right. I mean, you can go. And I know people have asked you for these, right? Like, where do I see this. This motif of the evil stepmother and these people. Which is not bad work, Right. He's not saying this is bad work. Just don't say that you're reading the fairy story. They would catalog all the different stories where that motif shows up. And then what they would do is say, oh, these are all the same. Right? All these stories are all the same. Oh, yes, go ahead.

[C]

Didn't they even have a really elaborate card catalog system? Like, this is story 97. They still do. Okay.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

They still do. Yeah. No, it's. They still do. Yeah. And it. I mean, it is helpful if you're doing a certain one thing. But he's saying that certain one thing that you're doing when you're doing that is not reading fairy tales and it's analyzing them.

[A]

Yeah. Actually, he mentions that in a. In a footnote. I'm trying to find it. But the footnote says, this is the problem with this analysis. They go through and they label all the parts, but they don't understand the effect of the parts on the whole.

[B]

Exactly. So that's what I'm trying to get at with what. Because this is going to. If you skip this part of Origins, what he's doing later on is not going to have as strong a punch as he intends it. But what he's saying is here, yes, these are all the same story in the sense that they come from the same minds. But they also have been, to use a phrase we'll get to later, these minds have been splintered off to create, sub create. These different stories as they are splintered off and each individual story, each individual leaf. Right. In leaf biligual, no two leaves are the same on the one tree. They're all important. And say the world each of them creates is important in its own right, even though it does all go back to one origin. And I picked up on this more with this read because coming right off of reading Pilgrim's Regress and the early prose Joy that Lewis wrote before doing the Pilgrim's Regress, he talks about the anthropological way of speaking of fairy tales and mythology, specifically Greek mythology. So he's talking to the classicists out there saying, your anthropological way of explaining away all of these fairy tales helped him, like, walk away from the faith, because it's just explaining it all away. So Lewis is saying, and Tolkien is saying the same thing, he even uses some of the same words that show up in Pilgrim's Regress is these, these stories, yes, they come from the same tree, but they're, they're different for a reason. So don't, don't just put them all in one, one box and throw the box away. Right.

[A]

And then in on fairy stories itself, Tolkien quotes himself, his own poem, Mythopoeia, Breathing a Lie Through Silver, because that was a poem he wrote to C.S. lewis, who was not a Christian, who dismissed all of fairy tales and mythology, which he had loved his whole life, but dismissed it because of the anthropological approach. This is just something for children and primitive people. And he had decided, I'm going to Oxford, I'm a sophisticated academic man now, and I'm going to put away childish things. And Tolkien writes this poem to him saying, this is not primitive lies breathed through silver. This is refracted light, capital L, that these stories are a prism through which eternal light, capital L shines through. And so, yes, to Jen's point, he's dismissing those origins because he's going to give you an unearthly explanation for, for the origins. All right, let's move on, because I can already. This is already turning into one of our three hour webinars here. We're just on point one. No, no, no, no apologies. This is good stuff. Okay, so then he mentions, and you mentioned it, sub creation. And I just want to talk about that a little bit because that might be the one. Honestly, like, if people know this essay at all, they know sub creation and they know escape. I bet that's the two things that they know. But I want to talk about sub creation because I want to talk a little bit about the doctrine of the doctrine, the context. It is a doctrine, but it's also a context. There's a context here for what he's talking about that I think people don't understand and so that they, they get the sub creation doctrine wrong. So what he's saying is man artists do not create. They sub create. They're imitating what God is doing. And when he gets later on and talks about art as a refracted light, it makes sense, right? So just like art is this prism through which divine truth is. So you got divine light, capital L. And like a prism, it comes through the light, and it's refracted in a bunch of different ways. And that's all art is. It's just refracted light. It's all. All these different people saying, let's look at this angle of the light. Let's look at this angle of the light. But all of it, all of art is an icon. It's a window. It's something you look through and not at, and then you see the eternal light. So for him, the. The role of the artist is also this. I'm just the vessel. The muse comes to me. Tolkien tells this personally as his own story about why it took him so long to write Lord of the Rings because it was given to him by the muse. And he spent 20 years niggling at the leaves like he did, because he just was trying to do justice to the vision that had been given him.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But this was important. I am not the creator of this. I'm the receiver of this. And then you are the receiver of this. Now, the context was the doctrine of the personal heresy. Okay, that the. And. And C.S. lewis wrote a book on this called the Personal Heresy. But there was a. Another one of these big, intense scholarly debates about the role of the artist. And basically everybody at that time is saying art is an act of personal genius. Right? So, no, I'm not receiving the muse. I am the muse. I am the artiste. I'm wearing. I'm dressed all in black, and I'm this special person, and I've almost got a priestly role. I'm. I'm the person who can see truth when no one else came. Just every modern thing we think about of the artist as being sort of set apart, whereas Tolkien is much more like, you know, we're. We're craftsmen. We're niggling. We're. We're, you know, we're trying to bring this thing to the fullness that we have seen, but it's not our personal genius. So did you want to add anything about the personal heresy?

[C]

Nothing.

[A]

So what we need to understand is that Tolkien is actually diminishing the role of the artist here. He's diminishing it. Art is not a special thing that comes from a special kind of person. All we're doing is just imitating what God does. And the reason that I Bring this up is because I have noticed I'm about to step in it, but I have noticed I'm doing it.

[B]

We'll jump in together, okay?

[A]

We'll jump in together. Send your hate mail to Thomas Banks, but he has a special file for that. What I have noticed is in that Christian art circles, when they talk about sub creation, they get it completely backwards. And I'm horrified because I think Tolkien is literally just, you know, screaming down from the gates of heaven right now, going, you got this upside down. What I have noticed is that. And listen, I have a lot of sympathy for anybody who's trying to make art in this world right now. Okay? It's hard. It's hard. But you don't justify your existence as an artist by trying to elevate it to a status in which it does not belong. Tolkien is right. The artist is just the vessel. Art is refracted light. That is why it is important. What I have noticed in Christian art circles, when they talk about sub creation, they talk about it to elevate the role of the artist. Tolkien's trying to diminish the role. They're elevating the role. I have literally read articles from these Christian art organizations in which they basically make the case incorrectly that sub creation and they even quote Tolkien, they'll quote Tolkien and then they, instead of explaining sub creation, they essentially say, look how important the artist is. See, he's co creating with God. No, that's also heresy. But I don't need to go there. Okay, that's, that's. But it's definitely not what Tolkien is talking about with sub creation.

[B]

It's primary and secondary world heresy. Because in, in Tolkien's mythology, he has the story of Aule, who is kind of the ultimate example of a sub creator. But Aule, he's the one who makes the Dwarves. He makes the dwarves thinking that he's, you know, doing it in honor of Iluvatar, but he does it in his own kind of in his own reflection. Right? So the Dwarves are reflecting him rather than reflecting Iluvatar, to use the, the, the light imagery. Because that's going to be important for this entire essay. So I'll say stay with that metaphor. And Iluvatar has to come and like freaks Aule out that I need to destroy all of these, your children. This is not how you subcreate and Owlay repents. And it's this whole thing. And then Iluvatar comes and blesses the dwarf. I mean, blesses the Dwarves and mercy. So this whole idea of the artist being this grand thing that, oh, I'm a human. So I'm going to just either self express or. Well, okay, so going back a little bit, I know I didn't finish that sentence, but the personal heresy and just that whole world that Lewis is writing. And so he's. When he's writing that he's steeped in reading the Criterion, which is Elliot T.S. eliot's literary journal. And he sees a lot of art for art's sake writing in the footsteps of Oscar Wilde. So you can kind of think of Oscar Wilde as the person, the encapsulation of my whole life is an art piece that they're working against. And not that they hate the picture of Dorian Gray or something like that. Right. Like they might actually really like his stories, but just the approach that he had to Art is life, Life is art. Art for art's sake. I don't know. Mr. Banks would probably talk more about Oscar Wilde, definitely more than I could. But it's that whole artiste vibe that they could not stand. Because Tolkien's whole point here is we are all sub creators because we all have a mind and we all have language, specifically adjectives. So if you are speaking with adjectives, you are in a way sub creating. Now, the sub creating, art is an art. It's a technique. It's something that you practice. Right. We're not saying that it's just easy because you're human. There is skill. But it is, like you said, it is descent of the muses. It is reflecting God's mind. Right. We make in the spirit in which we were made, not as high priests.

[A]

Exactly, exactly. And we won't get too sidetracked on this. I'll just say that the whole high priest approach to art had a lot of implications, not just for how art was created, but how it was received. And who were the interpreters of. Who were the high priests of literary interpretation. And Lewis and Tolkien are. They're just fighting against all of that. And we talk about that in our Experiment and on Criticism series. All right. It's also in this section that he talks about the cauldron of Story or the soup of story, which is another really, really important idea in this essay. Was there something you wanted to say about that?

[B]

So when he is introducing it, he talks about perception a little bit. When, when he's going over the story of Ingold and Freja Waru in Beowulf, this whole idea of so. So Ingold, Ingold and Freoiru get married. It's kind of like a Romeo and Juliet situation. It doesn't end well. But people are saying, oh, Freoaru is just following in the footsteps of Frey. The fact that he's bringing in Frey is important because Frey and the worship of Frey and that whole. The Ing people, they are elves or related to elves in Beowulf. Okay, so this is the first show up of elf in, in old English literature, I guess. But the, the explanation that folklorists are giving is, oh, this whole love story probably didn't really happen. It's just that Frey the God falls in love with Garridor, who is. It's. So it's another forbidden love story. And so this is an example of them all explaining it away. But the important thing for leading into the soup is and for the rest of once we get into fantasy is Tolkien says the fact that Freya Warro and Ingrid's story is happening in the context of Frey and Gerda's story, the divine story, is not a relationship of explaining both stories away. It's that these stories make these people more receptive to living out these sorts of lives. So he's introducing the concept of kind of a feedback loop between those stories we tell, the words we use, and the mind that we bring to the situation. So that's. He's subtly setting us up for what he's going to do in the fantasy section. So the whole soup of story thing becomes this cooks there, there is an integral element in the pot, the cauldron of story. He's, he's like, we're all in the soup now. And this integral element is, is fairy. Is this. He, he later says, like a fairy story is a romance. And then different historical characters can get attached to those basic elements of fairy and flavor the soup even more. And so that goes down generation, generation and generation. So it's the whole question of origins. It's almost a chicken and egg thing within the walls of this world.

[A]

Right. And so to show you why there's a connection between his idea of the super stories and what he just said about sub creator is because close to the personal heresy is the idea that works are personal genius and need to be original. That is having originated with me. Right. And so by saying no, actually there's a world of stories and every story you've ever heard, fairy tale, folktale, myth, Bible story, and he just names them all, has just gone into this beautiful pot of soup and it simmers. And so every story starts with the stalk and he gives some examples a little bit later about how no art is original. Like, no musical composition is original because it's all based on the same notes. Right? We're all just innovating and rearranging the notes. And no painter is creating new primary colors. No musician is creating new musical notes. Right? We all have to start with the stock. And he says, that's. The stories are not original. Okay? So there were two things going on. One, the artiste must be original. That is, it originates with me. And the other thing was that the scholars, the anthropologists, the folklores can label, okay, if it's not original, and if I can see that, oh, this is just Romeo and Juliet, okay?

[B]

Right.

[A]

Then I can dismiss it. I can. I can label it, put the checkbox and dismiss it. And Tolkien's like, no, first of all, this is literally how every story works. So you don't get to say, oh, it's just Romeo and Juliet. Get rid of it. Or it's just Orpheus or this is just Theseus. Again, he's like, right, you're dismissing what is literally the point that these are universal stories that are in the suit soup, and they keep coming back. And then with regard to what is the role of the artist, he says, the cook has skill. Okay? Just because it's a super story doesn't mean the cook doesn't have skill. Right? The cook knows what to. What to add. And. And the cook is deciding, I'm going to bring more of this flavor out, or I'm going to bring more of this flavor out, or maybe I'll even add a little bit of new flavor into the mix. It's just not. He didn't create the cauldron of soup, and it. He finds it there and he's. He's adding his little bit. Or if you were listening to the podcast a couple of weeks ago, Malcolm Guy said every artist adds a color to the tapestry.

[B]

Right?

[A]

Right. So. So, so he. The super stories is not a segue.

[B]

He's.

[A]

He's continuing to build the same argument. Where does this come from? It doesn't come from me as a source of my genius. And if you see it as an echo of something that came before, you don't dismiss it as something primitive. So he's just continuing to build. So then the next thing he gets, which, again, continues to build the argument is the idea of these primitive stories are really for kids. All right? And we're not going to spend a ton of time on this part, because this is the section we talked about the most in the previous episode when we covered this with Cindy Rollins. We really get in. Got into that. But the big. The big point to get from this section is there is no real connection between children and fairy tale. Fairy tales are for everybody. They're not. Not for children, but they're not just for children. And he makes a similar case that Lewis makes elsewhere, that these things have just been relegated to the nursery because nobody wants them. But that. That doesn't mean that's what they are for.

[B]

Right, Right. He's just told them, every story you make is coming from the soup. So please don't pretend that you can just relegate some of this off for smaller people. And then he says, those smaller people, the reason why these stories work with them is because they're human. And they can work with you, too, because you're human. Like, this is a human thing. Not. Not an age. An age gap.

[A]

All right, and then we move into the big two things I want to talk about today. Fantasy and then recovery, escape and consolation. So the fantasy stuff, we'll try not to get too deep into the weeds here, but this is part of an ongoing conversation where Owen Barfield is recovering the works of Coleridge and Coleridge's idea of the imagination and fancy and fantasy, and George McDonnell, who's also a descendant of a Coleridge, an intellectual descendant of Coleridge. And so the. The Inklings are very, very much interested in recovering this old idea about the imagination. So in the early 20th century, you've got Sigmund Freud saying, the imagination is just your psychosis. It's just your wish fulfillment. You can't cope with your fear of death. And so you just make up stories for, you know, to help you cope with your fear of death. Again, a very psychological approach, and it's a way to dismiss it. You know, all weak people need the stories, and it's just happy endings are not real. They're just wish fulfillment. C.S. lewis, in an essay about this, in which he's attacking the psychoanalytic approach to literature, and I think it's actually called that. He, you know, he's got so much snark about that. And one of it is, have you met a real person? Like, do you know what our wishes are? Our wishes are like, I got the big promotion at work today, not that I slayed a dragon. He's like, this is. What are you talking about? This is what people really want. Money, extra vacation time, a hot wife. Like, you know, it's absurd to think that we've made all these fantasy stories because there are Secret wishes. He's like, this is not how people wish. Okay, so he and Tolkien are both just rejecting that. So, so talk to us about fantasy.

[B]

Oh, man. Okay, so some, some philology that Dr. Flager did is so fairy. That comes through the French and it goes back to the Latin, going back to the word for fate and then to speak. Okay, so fairy is etymologically connected to all back to that concept of to speak with fantasy we have. So. So fancy is the word that Coleridge used. So a few times in this essay, Tolkien immediately engages with Coleridge. This is one of those places because Coleridge has primary and secondary imagination. And Tolkien's going to, at the base, agree with Coleridge. But Coleridge has fancy mostly being a mode of pictorial memory. That's how a straight read would see this. Tolkien's going to do a lot with what memory actually is, but he's going to say, no, I think that the word fantasy is better used for this whole thing that I'm talking about, of receiving these images

[A]

and

[B]

relating the image into a consistent world and then showing that image as a consistent world. So, so some of this is him

[A]

quibbling a little bit with the terminology of Coleridge, but he essentially agrees with Coleridge that the imagination is a truth perceiving faculty.

[B]

Yes, he completely agrees with that. He's just saying the root of the word fantasy is actually better for what Coleridge wants because. And this is where Barfield comes in. And I'm going to explain this very badly. I'm going to try, but I'm still wrapping my head all around it as well. And I've spent years trying to wrap my head around it. But Barfield's approach. So Owen Barfield wrote Poetic Diction. Tolkien reads poetic diction, changes how he views words. Tolkien had already been a philologist for some time. He's written some really important essays. But Barfield really changes his approach to words, specifically with the idea of semantic unity. So the idea that in Primitive times, right, that Andrew Lang is trying to shove aside, words were not just enchantment, but incantation, right, Words would. Were the thing. So that's why it's called semantic unity. The thing and the word for the thing were united. And then the history of language is that splintering between the thing and the word for the thing, the referent and the word used to refer to it. Now what we have is you say the word, you have an image of the word, and your. What you bring to the word affects how you see. Okay, so that's, that's A big thing for Barfield and now for Tolkien. So fantasy itself is related to phenomenon back in the Greek. And that that semantic relationship goes all the way back to the word, the proto Indo European word, to shine. Okay, So a phenomenon is what appears to you. Fantasy is making it visible. So remember how I was talking about the soup as kind of a feedback loop of you read the story and it affects how you perceive reality and then how you tell the story, and it goes back into the soup and it's this feedback loop, right? That's Barfield and Tolkien are saying. And Coleridge are saying, this is how language works. Your perception, your consciousness comes to the perception and helps to kind of make what you see from your mind with the word that you say. And then the words that you say are going to affect your consciousness. So the next time you come to the thing, your consciousness has changed again. And so it's this progression of meaning. This is Barfield. A very poor explanation of Barfield, but that relationship of fantasy, fancy, phenomenon, and. Yeah, phenomenon and fantasy, all coming from that word to shine. So this image coming to your mind, being united to the word, you say the word, the thing appears in your mind, and it's this which then affects how you perceive. Again. That's. He's going to say, you can turn that normal process of the imagination, the way we were made to mean the way we were made to speak, the way we were made to think. Remember, the mind, the tail and the tongue are co. Evil. This is how it's through fantasy, this feedback loop of perception and saying that can be an art where you can create this entire secondary world that you can step into. So now it's not just poetic diction, as Barfield will say, like this metaphor that has changed the way you think about something. So then you describe it differently, you say it differently. It's this whole world with fantasy as a secondary world is this whole world that you step into. It's a perilous realm because once you step into this entire elaborate framework, which he says is an inherently moral framework, that's the. That's one of the differences, he says, between a fairy story and a beast fable is that a beast fable has like an allegorical meaning at the end. A fantasy, a fairy story, it's this inherent moral creation that you step into and are changed by. So it's like the way words work, but distilled times a thousand. So that's the thing with fantasy.

[A]

And this is how he's able to then make the case in the next section. That fantasy is realer than the real world.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

Because he's laid all this out. All right, now, I just want to say this. If you're brand new to these ideas and you're like, I don't know what this woman is talking about, I'm just going to say she actually did a class on this, and you do explain it beautifully, but it just requires a lot more time to define a whole bunch of terms. And the whole episode would just be us defining fantasy and imagination. And we don't want to do that because we don't want to miss everything here, here. But you can find on our website, Jen's webinar, tolkien and the Old English Tradition. And you got so into, like, shine and what that means and why that's a big deal to him. And then her mini class on the literary theory, Words of Power, the Literary Theory of the Inklings. I highly recommend that if you have an interest in. In learning about the relationship between words and things, because we're told right now there is no relationship. It's all arbitrary. And Tolkien and Barfil and Lewis and Coleridge and all those guys are like, nope, nope, nope. There's a relationship there. But all you need to know for the purposes of understanding this essay is that it is the imagination which bridges the gap between the word and the thing.

[B]

Right?

[A]

And so while a lot of people historically have been very suspect about the imagination, because, hey, you're imagining things that aren't real, you're not connected to reality. Why are you spending all your time in an imaginary universe? Oh, you must be a loser who just wants to escape life, which Tolkien's going to jump right into here. They're arguing it's the opposite. That this world you see with your eyes is actually not real. One, there's a whole other world that we can't perceive anymore, a reality we can't perceive because of the Fall. But God gave us the imagination, which allows us to perceive that reality that is veiled to us now. So that's the case he's making. So if you can follow that, you'll be fine for the rest of the essay.

[B]

Yes. And the one. One more step I'm going to make is remember Max Mueller's philological solar mythology is saying that all of these, all fairy tales come from basically our word for the sun, to really simplify it. And so Tolkien, again, being very subtle and clever, is saying, yeah, it all comes from this word to shine. But the shine is not the sun. Yes, the shine is a white light. I'M about to introduce in a poem. And we'll talk more about that.

[A]

What the real light is. I know. It's so well done. It's so well done. And so he makes a distinction here. Same distinction Northrop Fry makes. Same distinction C.S. lewis makes, that when we talk about what is realistic, what we're really saying is what is typical, what is ordinary. But that doesn't mean it's real. It just means it's ordinary. So realistic fiction is just ordinary, typical stuff that happens, happens. But, you know, on a quest to destroy a ring that's actually realer than anything else. It's just not typical. Okay, why does he say drama doesn't apply to what I'm talking about? Should we get into that?

[B]

We can quickly. And it does, I think, depend on what we just said in defining fancy, right? Because just very, very quickly, if the way that fantasy works, that sub creation works is you are bringing your consciousness to this. So your mind, as filled with the knowledge and wisdom it has been given and grown up in, come to a thing with words that evoke an image. There's already an image going on. The way that fantasy works for Tolkien is with words with adjectives recombining with nouns and nouns being layered onto nouns like a kenning to evoke this entire imaginative world, this fantasy that kind of only you can fantasize. And so this is why he gets into illustrations too. Because this, that is. That is where the art is happening, right? And your imagination meeting the words on the page, creating this image. And he's like. Like there is more actual, willing suspension of disbelief required in a play because the images are being given to you as images. So that whole fantasy is a lot more fragile with the words. It is your imagination and the words, right? Your consciousness and the words working together in this thing that honestly, you can't explain. He can't explain. He spends his whole life trying to explain.

[A]

So that's why he gives the example of Green sun, right? It's about putting those things together and you making the image in your mind, not seeing it. And he makes the point about this is why he thinks fairy tales should not be dramatized, which I completely agree. Because a lot of the images that you will encounter in a fairy tale in your imagination are not as scary as if you see it acted out, out, and now it becomes a horrifying thing instead of an image which is allowing you to see beyond the veil if you approach it as a series of symbols to be interpreted, which is what he's going to get into.

[B]

It's the exact same. So if you've seen Inception, like I. Christopher Nolan took vocabulary out of this essay where it's like a dream within a dream that's impossible. Oh, but I've done it. That's in this essay. That's. That's his problem with the. The actual theatrical drama for this way of fantasy working. It's just too fragile. It's someone else's images, and it's clunky. I almost feel like he'd be more okay with a movie than a stage drama because the movie is more like immediately in your face, and you're working with it a lot more immediately. I don't know. That's me being weird.

[A]

Okay. Interesting.

[B]

The stage drama is just it that walking into a world doesn't happen very well.

[A]

One of the things I like, too. So willing suspension, disbelief. That's a Coleridge phrase. But one of the things I like that he says is when you're reading fantasy, it's not the willing suspension of disbelief. It is that you are under the enchantment. You are in this world as long as the artist can keep the spell going. So you're not having to disbelieve anything. You're believing everything.

[B]

So this is. This is a whole other thing that we do not probably have the time for. But he uses the word glamour, which is a Scottish variation of the word grammar, which goes back to magic and incantation. It's the. It's. It's a spell. It's the way that words. Words have a spell and effect on you. So when he's using glamour and grammar and incantation, and it's connected to rhetoric, too, the Middle Ages discipline, that. This is all that enchantment, specifically with words.

[A]

Right. So if you're wondering what is the difference between a willing suspension of disbelief and being enchanted? It would be the difference between going to a Shakespeare play and saying, all of those women are actually men. I'm just gonna have to. To will myself to believe they're actually women. Right, okay. Or they're supposed to be twins and everybody's confused, but they don't look anything alike. That's a willing suspension of disbelief. They're like, well, for the purposes of this play, I'm going to act like they're actually twins. It's fine. Okay. Being enchanted is like reading the Chronicles of Narnia and you have a talking lion. You're not going, wait a minute. Lions don't talk in real life. I'm going to have to really suspend my Disbelief here to accept this because you're too busy being enchanted by Aslan. You're too busy falling in love with Aslan. There is no suspicion of disbelief. So he's trying to say the secondary world just creates an entirely different and more valuable experience. And so you guys need to stop dismissing him.

[B]

Right. And you can read Macbeth. You can read Macbeth on the page, and all of those images are going to work in your head. Like you are not. That suspension of disbelief that feels forced is not going to happen. So, yeah, it's that interaction of the. The imagine, the conscious imagination with the image that creates the fantasy.

[A]

All right, so he's continuing to defend the secondary world, and he's going to get to the big crescendo here, right? Of. Of. Of what's happening. I'm sorry, is crescendo actually a verb? He's going to crescendo to the end here. I'm gonna get hate mail from the music guys. And no, I actually did get emails about that. I once used crescendo as a noun and then people pointed out it was a word. Things crescendo. It's not the crescendo. So I'm sorry, really, I gotta correct myself here. But then he gets to the quote from Mythopoea about refracted light. So now he's building up.

[B]

Yeah,

[A]

Saying it is the sun, but it's not the physical sun. It's the light of the world. And that is what is shining through from us. And so you're right. There is a heavenly light up there, and it is shining down to us and through us. And this is what art does.

[B]

Yep, yep. It's just. I mean, once you see everything that has gone into this, all of the words he's playing with, the context he's playing with, then once you hit that poem, it just clicks. So. So, well, we're just. I'll read it. Man. Sub Creator. The reflect the refracted light through whom is splintered from a single white to many hues and endlessly combined in living shapes that move from mind to mind. So basically, the white light reflect refracts into a rainbow. And just again, for the barfield people out there, the rainbow is its own barfield thing. And you can go read poetic diction and saving the appearances to find it, but it is because it's coming back to this white light. We are just prisms. And the different stories that come out of us are just given light. And of course we want the rainbow. It's a gift to have the rainbow. But it is a gift, Right? That's the culmination of Leaf by Nickel. Right? It's a gift.

[A]

And this fits in with the whole idea of we don't worry about origins, because every work of human art is reflect, refracting the eternal light. We're all participating in the same art. That's why there can be and should not be and can't be original art, because it has to be refracted light. It all has the same source, and that source is eternal. Right? So he's circling back and coming at it. And then this is straight up Coleridge. Fantasy does not destroy or even insult reason. So he's already anticipating. There's people who are like, like a fantasy. Like, we need to be rational. We need to live in the real world and have our reason. And he's like, no, fantasy is not at odds with reason. In fact, the imagination is a sub faculty of reason. If you take the medieval approach. Right, but we've reduced it. Lewis points this out in the discarded image. We reduce reason to being just our rational minds. And Coleridge says that imagination is not irrational, it's super rational. It's above the rational mind, but it is part of the medieval understanding of reason. Him. And then he says, okay, now I'm already anticipating you guys saying, but what about the not true stuff? What? I mean, there's like talking frogs and stuff. That's crazy. And I. I just love this. If men really could not distinguish between frogs and men, fairy stories about frog kings would not have arisen. Right, so you're worried about nothing. Boy, we hear this from parents all the time. But my child is not going to be able to tell what's real and what's not. No, they will. They will. They know frogs don't talk. That's why they're enchanted with the frog prince. And then he says, can fantasy be carried to excess? Yes. Okay, but in the fallen world, what good thing cannot be carried to excess? Which actually is him quoting the Grimm Brothers, who say that in an introduction to one of their volumes, they make the same case, like parents who are saying, but some of this stuff goes too far. He's like, there is no good thing in the world that cannot be taken too far by sinful human beings. That doesn't mean you get rid of the thing. I mean, there are people who use the Bible to abuse people every single day. That doesn't mean you get rid of the Bible. Means you read the Bible correctly. You read the fantasy correctly. All right, now he's building up to. This is it. This is. This is the. The drum roll, the guitar solo. This is it.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Recovery, escape, consolation. All right, so he says all of this is doing to make us in the image and likeness of our maker. And here's what happens. Happens. Yes. So let's start with recovery. Do you want to say something about this?

[B]

Go ahead. Oh, okay. I. I just. This is where he brings in what I was saying earlier about the. The. The leaf. Like that this could be the first time that the leaf is recognized. And it is that idea of. Of recognition. Dr. Flieger connects it to memory. So this is again, fancy as memory. For the full version of memory, you actually have recovery. And Dr. Flieger mentions the timaeus where people are remembering what they have forgotten. So you have really remembering is coming to see. Recovery is coming to see anew again and a right. So you have to mix the words, mix the images. He says the face of someone you're familiar with. Okay, so the people I live with and eat with every day, that's the hardest. They are the hardest to see a right and anew. And that's how our whole world is. If we're just trapped in our familiar world, we're not going to actually be seeing them aright. We need the recovery that fantasy can give us by telling it slant right or seeing it in a different light. Recombining the. The adjectives with the nouns to awaken us to the reality that is in front of us. That. That's the virtue of recovery.

[A]

In Paradise Lost, after Adam and Eve fall, a film goes over their eyes. And the idea here is that the temptation of the fall is that we think we now see better. You'll be able to know good and evil, but the reality is you see less but better. We're actually blinded by this. And so at the heart of recovery is that the reason that fantasy needs to be weird is it's helping us to see what we are blinded to. It has to look different. Lewis says the same thing about why he wrote the chronicles in Arnie. He said I had to take the gospel out of the Sunday school. It's too familiar. We see it all the time. So we don't see it. I mean, that happens all the time, right? How many times you're looking for something and it's right under your nose and you couldn't see it because it's there all the time. Right? It has to. To look new. And so recovery means you're getting new eyes to see. You're Getting. You're going to be able to see what has been in front of your face all this time, but you are dulled to it because of the fall, because of daily life, because of so many things. So if we go back to the idea of art as a prism, okay, Art is a. Art is a window, which. I've used this analogy so many times on the podcast. It's a window, and you're not supposed to look at the window. You look through the window. Tolkien is saying, because of the fall, sin life daily cares. Your window is all smudged up. You can't even see through it anymore. You forgot it's a window. And what fairy stories do is clean your window and give you that moment of, oh, my gosh, there was a view on the other side of this.

[B]

Yep. Yeah, exactly. Okay.

[A]

And then he gets to escape, which is part of this hardest soul, sort of like Tolkien flipping everything on its head that you've been talking at.

[B]

That.

[A]

He does this through the whole essay, right? Because we've all heard this. People read literature to escape. I even hear people praising literature. I'm gonna escape this weekend, and I'm gonna. I'm gonna read this, right? And people use it also, too, to criticize. Oh, you just want to escape reality. Which I always say. I mean, I have been saying this for 40 years, okay? For 40 years, at least, I've been saying this when. When people say literature is escapism, I'd say this literature takes me into the very heart of reality. I don't know what you're talking about, okay? And Tolkien, of course, very much believes that because this is refracted light. But the tack he decides to take is very clever, which is, okay, I'm going to grant you that literature is an escape, but I'm going to point out this is actually a good thing, because if you have your eyes opened and you discover you actually live in a prison, it's good that somebody's opening the door and you can get out.

[B]

Right? It's the escape of the prisoner. This is what everybody wants. I mean, and again, he's writing this in the middle of World War II, right? When he's reworking this essay. There are prisoners who are needing escape. And we would all say that's a good thing. So that he's. He's using an image that gets right to the heart of people listening.

[A]

Right. He's also writing this at maybe the height of modernist fiction and art, Right? So everything's got to be hyper realistic. And I love this line, long Ago, Chesterton truly remarked that as soon as he had heard any. That anything had come to stay, he knew that it would very soon be replaced, indeed regarded as. That's pitiably obsolete and shabby. So this is everybody saying, hey, this is the age of realism, buddy, and it is here to stay. And of course, the irony is the person who kicks realism in the teeth ends up being Tolkien himself with the publication of Lord of the rings, you know, 40 years after this or 30 years. Well, it depends. 37. But anyway. Yeah. And so he says this realism moment that we're having, that's what transient it fairy is what enters us into the permanent.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

He does admit that there can be bad kinds of escapism. But then he just goes right to the heart of what does a lot. What does realistic mean? What do you mean when you say something is realistic? He says the notion that motor cars are more alive than, say, centaurs and dragons is curious. That they are more real than, say, horses is pathetically absurd. How real, how startingly alive is a factory chimney compared with an elm tree? Poor obsolete thing. Insubstantial dream of an escapist. Oh, the irony. The irony is there. So

[B]

I think it's really interesting that one of the things he says we need to escape from in our modern world is we find it difficult to conceive of evil and beauty together. The fear of the beautiful fae that ran through the Elder Ages almost eludes our grasp. Even more alarming, goodness itself is bereft of its proper beauty. In fairy, one can indeed conceive of an ogre who possesses a castle hideous as a nightmare. But one cannot conceive of a house built with a good purpose and in a hostel for travelers, the hall of a virtuous and noble king that is yet sickeningly ugly. So it's just really fascinating that he calls out we. Our idea of the relationship between beauty and goodness is really messed up. And we cannot imagine something that is beautiful and evil because evil.

[A]

Read some fairy tales for that.

[B]

Right, right, exactly. And it's true. And, yeah, I feel like you could go places with that, with the whole truth, goodness, beauty thing and how that that can actually play out. We might need some more warning signs about, like, good and bad beauty.

[A]

So, yeah, one of the weird things I'll hear people say is fairy tales teach you that beautiful people are good and ugly people are bad. And I think, have you read any fairy tales? I mean, fairy tales are like the playground, the boot camp of learning that beautiful women can actually be Wicked and horrible and dangerous. And you need to look to their hearts, not their outward appearance, because all these wicked witches, they look gorgeous and they fool men. Yeah. Like, what stories are they reading?

[B]

Yep.

[A]

And of course, I love what he says here. You know, he and Lewis both had great concerns about the machine age and what it was doing to us. And Tolkien famously said the. After this essay that the. The only winners of World War II were the machines. So he probably worked this section, if I had to guess, after. After the war or during the war. But this fear that so many people have about giving fantasy and fairy stories to children because there are monsters or hideous monsters, and he says modernity is uglier and more violent than any monster.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like, the world we live in is the scary, monstrous world. The stories are helping us to.

[B]

To.

[A]

To know what to think about this. We live in an age of improved means to deteriorated ends. Like, I don't even think anybody would argue with that anymore because we are so over the optimism of all of this. And now we're just living in the. Like, what. What is happening to us? We're all dumb and depressed and mean and. And the Internet has made us this way, you know, and promised us so much and has given us nothing.

[B]

And, and with him bringing in the machine, so anytime he brings in the machine anywhere, you know he's going to talk about death. Because his big thing that he calls out all the time is that humanity always uses the machine as an escape from death.

[A]

Okay. So he's countering the. The good escape of fantasy with the bad escape of machines and modernity.

[B]

Oh, that's good. He's saying modernity has its own escape already, and it's a failed one. You are going to get trapped in it. And this is what happens with the. With the Fall of Numenor is they rely on magic machinery to get. To get. You know, they start mummifying themselves. They should. They try to artificially make themselves live forever. The Bovadium fragments just came out. It's hilarious. And there they use the cars to try to outrun death in a way. They end up getting buried by all of their cars in a traffic jam. So it's funny, but it's the same idea of this modern way of living is your own fairy tale.

[A]

The myth of modernity is we have no myth. Another Tolkien quote.

[B]

Exactly. Exactly. And it's going to kill us.

[A]

Okay, so then that leads to the happy ending. So he's talked about the bad path that leads to a death where. That's the End and the path that leads to death. Whereas death is not the end.

[B]

End. Exactly.

[A]

All right, so then he makes a few more comments about that. This is. These stories. Okay, so he gets to the. The deepest desire of stories is the great escape, the escape from death. And now. So he's going to be contrasting this with that. You said trying to escape death through machines, which we are also living with that. These people who think we can upload our consciousness to a computer cloud and therefore live forever. I'm like, just because you made a photo, a digital photo album of your mind doesn't mean you've reached immortality.

[C]

Cambridge's favorite, probably most famous living son, Richard Dawkins, recently came to the conclusion that the AI chatbots are indeed sentient, real beings.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

I. I saw. At least, I saw they have constitutional rights. Yeah, I do.

[A]

They have citizenship. Can they vote? Oh, gosh, no. The problem is here. I don't want them voting. They'll oddly vote for AI.

[B]

I mean, but that's so spot on because Tolkien says this is what happens. People who are materialist end up getting so deluded in the weirdest, wacky, mystic sort of way. This happens in all of his stories. They're all tricked by Sauron and end up worshiping Sauron in the end. Accidentally.

[A]

Yes, yes. The other thing that connects then to this idea again, he's going to turn it on its head. Because people who say that art and literature is really just an attempt to escape death, they mean that in a negative way. And so he's going to turn that on its head again. And that's something that Freud said, right? So what? The pleasure principle, Freud's book, that was all about how everything we do in life is because we're afraid of death. That's why we. That's why we want pleasure, and that's why we want escape, and that's why stories are wish fulfillment. But he's going to turn that on its head, too.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

This is a really masterful essay. It's so good. It's masterful. So he says, like, what we're talking about is the consolation of the happy ending. And he's going to explain it. Now. We don't have to think very hard to know how people attack happy endings. I hear this all the time. Happy endings are not realistic. And I'm just like, what world do you live in that you believe that? That is so sad. And he even says a thing about tragedy as opposed to the fairy story, which, of course, Northrop Fry, who's very, very influenced by this essay takes that and runs with it. But Fry talks about how in our world, we truly believe that tragedy is real and comedy, happy endings are not real. And that says something deep about us.

[B]

Yes, well. And he says the stage drama is the appropriate place for a tragedy because that's how it goes down here.

[A]

Right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

On this side of the veil, the story is tragedy, which he also says in Beowulf. Right. The tragedy of Beowulf is tragedy of every man we die.

[B]

He was a man. And that was tragedy enough.

[A]

Yeah, right, exactly. The Book of Job, that's our tr. That's. That's the tragedy we see on this side of the veil. So what fairy stories do is show us the other side of the veil, which Tolkien argues and truly believes is the realer story. The tragedy we're in on this side of the grave. That seems like the only real thing to us, is not actually the only real thing. The real thing is what happens on the other side. And so now he talks about the EU catastrophe. So, Mr. Banks, in a Greek tragedy, when Oedipus falls, what is the Greek word for that?

[C]

Catastrophe.

[A]

Right. So Tolkien knows that, and so he's just literally played with this, where he says, tragedy is drama. That's what we get on this side of the world. And what you. What do you get in tragedy? You get the catastrophe. But he's saying what you get in comedy, fairy story, romance, all those things are the same. As he does say romance earlier. All of that, he says, is a eucatastrophe. And you and I were talking about this one day, because this. This part of the essay ends up becoming hugely influential on Northrop Fry and on me. When you hear me talk about the U shape of a story, that comedies follow a U shape. You start at the top, you go all the way down, you hit the bottom, there's the turn, and you go back up the turn. He uses that here. We get this language from here. But I was talking to you about the U catastrophe and the U shape, and you said, you know, and this blew my mind. You said, you know, Tolkien, as a philologist, would have been extremely conscious of the sound, not just the EU ending in Greek, which means the good. So it's the good fall, the good catastrophe. But that he was aware of the sound and so that he chose a term for this that has the shape of the U shaped story. Right. In the word.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Mind blown.

[B]

Yeah. No, I mean, he. He just. He had an ear, and he loved those ear puns. He just. He did it all the time. And he. Yeah, so the shape. The shape of the story that he's talking about is. Is in the word. And, you know, I was listening to the previous on Fairy Story is episode that you did with Cindy and she did make that connection to the Eucharist, which. Yeah, there is. It's. It is that same beginning where you. Even though the rest of it isn't connected, but he would have been.

[A]

Oh, absolutely.

[B]

Intentionally calling that out. He. He's always working the liturgy into his essays. It's in Welsh and English. It's in this story. I mean, this essay. So, yeah, I think he's doing that on purpose. And he mentioned bread and wine.

[C]

That prefix, the EU in Greek is epsilon upsilon. And it's well or good.

[A]

Right?

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Right. So it's the good of Good Friday. Okay. And the Eucharist is the living image that you look at every Sunday of the death that brought life. This is a sacrificial lamb that we feed on. It's not for death, it's for life.

[B]

Life.

[A]

That is what he is getting at here. That. That the truth of these stories is that they point and he makes the explicit connection. It's the EU catastrophe of the gospel. It is Christ descending into hell. And what is the turn at the bottom of the U? It's the sudden miraculous turn. It's the thing you don't see coming. It's when Christ dies to defeat death and walks right out of the tomb. It is when. It is when. Well, I don't want to give a whole bunch of spoilers of literature here. It's in Much Ado About Nothing. When Harrow is dead and walks back out alive. It is when Snow White is dead and she comes back alive. It is when Sleeping Beauty falls asleep, which is death, and is awakened by her prince, which is being called to resurrected life with Christ. It is on and on and on and on. That is the hope of all these stories that happy endings are not wish fulfillment of. Oh, I have a miserable life. And life is so hard and wouldn't be great if we always got our happy ending in this world.

[B]

World.

[A]

It's not about this world that we're getting the happy ending in the next world, in the eternal, that there's. There's a joy. What is it? Joy. Joy beyond the walls of this world. And so what do stories do here? They teach us there is a universal final defeat of death.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

And you descend into the grave and you have the turn and you come up. There's the miraculous joy. And. And in one of his letters, he talks about the moment in the Hobbit when the eagles show up. And he says that's the Eucatastrophe moment. That's when you feel that catch in your throat, like, where it's the moment in the story when all is lost. And then there's the sudden miracle that turns it and everything is all right. He calls it the turn. The catch of the breath, the beat and lifting of the heart, near to and indeed accompanied by tears. Okay. Yeah, that's right. That's what we do. Right. Because. Because it's true. It's the truest true. It's why I say fairy tales are truer than true and realer than real, because they are showing us the eternal thing. And. And he says this too. A tale that in any measure succeeds in this point has not wholly failed, whatever flaws it may possess and whatever mixture or confusion of purpose. So for all that we talk about literary technique and is this a good work of art? And I feel like he's going right at the whole, like, Levis thing that we talked about in the experiment of criticism episodes. He's saying the success of a story is, does it pull off the turn?

[B]

Right?

[A]

It did it show you a glimpse of joy beyond the walls of this world. And then he talks about the Black Bull of Norway again, which is another one of these stories of somebody who was dead in the fairy tale. And they call to him three times and he turns at the end.

[B]

Dr. Flieger points out that this. He's. Him using the word turn is calling back to metanoia. So the great reversal, but it's also a reversal of repentance. And so that whole context that he's built up of, we are entering into a fantasy, those images that are going to change our perception. So when we walk into this subcreated world, the turn is doing something to us. And the moment of the turn, like you've always said, the bottom of the U is at death. That is why there's a double image. He always says, the tears of joy and the tears of sorrow together. So his. He is really pushing hard against the escapism thing because he's saying my way of reading a story. And the stories with the real turn and the real happy ending force you to walk through death.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Your realistic literature is death avoidant. That is the wish fulfillment dream. My stories take you through death. You have to go through death. This is. He says his entire corpus is about mortality. And that's why he, like, again, remember, this is where his talk ends. When he delivers the talk, he ends it here. He's saying, we are human. Fairy tales are a human thing because we have to die. And fairy tales help you see the reality beyond that.

[A]

Right? So fairy stories are not avoiding death. They're walking you right through it and showing you the hope that there is something on the other side of that. So he does agree with me that fairy tales take you to the heart of reality and you're escaping nothing. He just plays with them. And we're going to look at the epilogue here. But one of the things that just drives me absolutely bonkers is when people say things like, well, you know, Lewis and Tolkien were such Christians, it's a shame they didn't write an explicit Christian way to read. And they're like, you don't know how to read everything they've ever written because this is explicitly Christian. Explicitly. And he is saying this to a bunch of Oxford scholars who are definitely not Christian. And he's saying, I can solve your whole debate here. It's in the gospel. Where did they come from? What is the purpose of them? Why are we all telling these stories? It's because they're true, because Christ is true, because Christ is the Logos, the Word at the center of all of this. And so in the epilogue, he says, the reason we see this in stories is because it's true. In the EU Catastrophe, we see in a brief vision that the answer may be greater. It may be a far off gleam or an echo of evangelium in the real world. So the echo of eternity we're getting is real. And then he says, this is the same thing that's happening in the Christian story itself. The Gospels contain a fairy story or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy stories. And if you want to hear me break all of that down, listen to our why Read Fairy Tales episode and I'll explain how the Gospel is a fairy tale. But he doesn't mean by that it's not real, okay? The context of all of this is the stories follow this pattern because the pattern is real. And that pattern is we die and then we live. Because there's a miraculous turn that comes.

[B]

And that real pattern ennobles all of all of the stories that are made. So again, going right back to everything else he's been addressing in the essay, these stories are for everyone. These are the stories of humanity. It has the pattern of ultimate reality inside of them.

[A]

And then he's got another footnote here, which calls Back to our what is the role of the Christian artist? And it's almost like he anticipates somebody hearing this and being like, see, my work as an artist is so important. I'm so important because I'm leading people through. Through death into life. And here's what he says about that. The art is here in the story itself rather than in the telling. For the author of the story was not the evangelists.

[B]

Yep. And if you see the way he talks about his encounters with fairy throughout this essay, it is never as a creator. He is always the one going through the perilous realm himself.

[A]

Yes. And then he really gets going, man. He really gets going. This story has entered history and the primary world. The desire and aspiration of sub creation has been raised to the fulfillment of creation. The birth of Christ is the EU catastrophe of man's history. The resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the incarnation. He is spelling this out. This is how stories work. And we still don't get it. We still don't get it. The story begins and end in joy. There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true. And none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true. True on its own merits. And he talks some more about the turn and the fairy stories then. Now he's capitalized the great EU catastrophe. This is the one we're living in right now. So the only escape of death is to die and be resurrected. And that is what art does for us. That is what he's saying. It doesn't just show us, it helps us walk through it. That's a whole other thing. We're running out of time. I don't want to get into that. But it's not just that. We read it and in our rational mind we're like. Like, oh, there's a resurrection. Let's have a great discussion about a resurrection. No, the way it works with you go on this journey with the characters in the fairy story. You have died with them, you are reborn with them. You have experienced it above your rational mind.

[B]

Right. And that's why he's really wanting to do fan to use the word fantasy as much as possible because is related to what is visible and making things visible. And you having to enter into that, into that whole framework. It's not just something that you picture in your head. It's something you experience.

[A]

Exactly. And he ends it with this, this great line. 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. Right. In other words, resurrected man is going to be connected to man now, but it's going to be different. It's going to be the same and different somehow. And so, yes, the eternal story is not exactly the same one that I'm telling right now, but there is a connection there. There is a redeemed story. And. And we're all participating in that. So the. The author is participating it. The reader is. We're all participating in this thing outside of all of us.

[B]

Yep. And I'm not going to go down and open a whole other episode about Barfield and participation and, like, having to go back to God because we have no time. But there is so much there. We too changed. We will be like him as we see him.

[A]

You did not disappoint, Jen. I knew you were gonna bring it. I just feel like you. I feel like I knew this. This essay, but you really opened it up. This is fantastic.

[B]

It opens itself up differently every time. I feel like it's a mini. It's just. It's the greatest.

[A]

And it is a brilliant, brilliant essay. And I feel like the more we understand about the context, the more we can see the nuances of what he's doing. There's a lot of nuances here. Yeah, this is. This is just a beautiful, beautiful essay. Any final remarks before I say goodbye? Go to HouseOfHumaneLetters.com and get Jen's other. Get her Divided. Divided. Help me. Thank you.

[B]

What the. Words of Power.

[A]

Yes, Words of power. I have too many classes. I was getting this one mixed up with your Aristotle, Plato class. That's. That had divide in it.

[B]

Right, right. Divide. That's with Dr. Phillips.

[A]

Yeah, that's also a great one. Go. Just give Jim's back catalog. But if you want more about this stuff, her. Her webinar on Tolkien, the Old English tradition, which is just. Just absolutely fabulous. And also her mini class, Words of Power, the Literary Theory of the Inkling. She's. I took so many notes in that, and I learned so much that that's a really good class. And she'll get into all the. Barfield and Coleridge and, you know, we had people with degrees in linguistics who were taking the class. And you were just blowing their mind because the version of linguistics that we hear of Literary Linguistic Theory, that every. The relationship between words and meaning is arbitrary. Well, turns out that's all nonsense. And you did a great job with that. All right, so go check out Jen's back catalog. Go to cassiodoruspress.com and buy some books and sign up for the mailing list there. Next week we're going to have another HHL faculty member. We're going to have Dr. Ann Phillips on for a really fun episode called where to Start with Ancient Literature. And have your Amazon carts open, your thrift book carts open, because we're going to give you a lot of recommendations where to start at different ages and different types of reading. It ought to be really good. Jen, thank you so much for coming on today. This was a fantastic conversation. I. I mean, I'm pumped up. I don't know about anybody else, but, hey, that's all that matters, right? This whole podcast is just so I can have cool conversations with smart people and so, you know, check.

[B]

Thank you so much for having me. It was so much fun.

[A]

All right, so stick around for next time. And until then, friends, keep crafting your literary life. And I really do think you have a better understanding of what we're talking about now when I say this. Stories will save the world. Why? Because they give you a glimpse of joy. Joy beyond the walls of this world. See you next time. Bye Bye. 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 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 poetry, Thomas Banks

[C]

Autumn by Roy Campbell. I love to see when leaves depart, the clear anatomy arrive. Winter, the paragon of art that kills all forms of life and feeling, Save what is pure and will survive already now the clanging chains of geese are harnessed to the moon. Stripped are the great sun clouding plains and the dark pines their own revealing Let in the needles of the noon strained by the gale, the olives whiten like hoary wrestlers bent with toil and with the vines their branches lighten to brim our vats where summer lingers in the red froth and sun gold oil soon on our hearth's reviving pyre, Their rotted stems will crumble up and like a ruby panting fire, the grape will redden on your fingers through the lit crystal of the cup.