What do fantastic tales have to do with the survival of our civilization?
The world that plunged from one World War to the next with an economic disaster in between demanded full seriousness to survive. Storytelling could surely wait.
In his new book on J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, The War for Middle Earth, Joseph Loconte answers: to the contrary. More than any other time, those years gave rise to stories that have strengthened the souls and minds, the hearts and the hands of all who must deal with darkness. Their stories uncover an inextinguishable flame and the beckoning path it shows back towards home.
Both Lewis and Tolkien were foes of the twisted antisemitism at the heart of the darkness of their day, and their stories are free of cant.
What child did not grow up hearing stories? Who as a parent, friend, or teacher has not told them to children? We know how a story can take hold of a tired child, falling to pieces, and pull that child into the story and back into wholeness. The child’s world that was falling apart just a few minutes ago resolves into a wholeness — the child comes back together, following the flow of the tale into a peaceful sleep.
What makes a story good?
It’s worth the listen — or the read. The story overcomes our resistance to turning elsewhere. We must want nothing more than to keep on reading or listening. It takes us as we are, frazzled, and makes us whole through its tale.
All stories are not equal. As we grow and our wholeness is challenged in every direction, we need stories of greater depth to pull us in. Shallow tales prove inadequate to our life’s needs. They do not address who we are and what we face. They cannot make us whole.
Loconte tells us of two men who gave us resonant stories born in the great darkness of the 20th century. Both fought in the ghastly trenches of the First World War. Both returned to England to its greatest universities and there met the culture of despair.
Religion had already been pushed aside in the academy. The human mind had dissected the great stories of the past, but from their dead parts could only put together a Frankenstein. Monstrous stories arose, told by mighty men employing each an unblinking eye set atop vast structures of compulsion meant to strip bare and subjugate every mind and soul to the Leader-god. First in Moscow, then in Rome, then in Berlin, the old stories were overwritten by the new. The only wholeness now would be complete surrender to the Fuehrer, the Duce, the Engineer of the Locomotive of History. Oxford and Cambridge offered no story in answer, nothing with which to face the onslaught.
So, Tolkien and Lewis did it themselves.
Tolkien was a faithful Catholic, in England a minority used to sacrifice for the sake of its beliefs. Tolkien was drawn towards the great stories of old England, Beowulf and Sir Gawain and in the adjacent Norse stories. Drawn not only to read but to create. Long before he had conceived of hobbits, he read his story about the elven city Gondolin to some of his fellow academics — a story that seeded what would soon crystalize in a full-blown mythic world.
Lewis at Oxford was a skeptic, like so many of his fellows in the 1920s. Loconte tells how Tolkien and another practicing Christian brought Lewis to embrace God with them, and this became the center of Lewis’ life.
Lewis’ was no shallow conversion. As those who had influenced him were serious academics and profoundly intellectual, Lewis did not run away from learning and culture, only from cynicism and despair. Only in religion was there insight deep enough to keep civilization from suicide or betrayal. It alone taught the courage needed to face the growing darkness.
As a professor of English, Lewis knew the great books of antiquity which nourished English literature. He knew the power of the stories there and in the Bible that he now cherished. Although he would become a great apologist for Christianity and write influential works of theology, his greatest popularity came through two multi-volume works of storytelling — his science fiction trilogy and the nine-volume Chronicles of Narnia.
What Lewis wrote about Tolkien’s first published story, The Hobbit, applies as well to his own fantasy oeuvre. While at first, the books, especially the Narnia stories, are charming and childlike, “later, at a tenth or twentieth reading, [one will] begin to realize what deft scholarship and profound reflection have gone into making everything in it so ripe, so friendly, and in its own way so true.”
Loconte points the reader to the core power of these stories — the unique ability of a well-told story to make everything for the reader “ripe … friendly, and in its own way so true.” All three of those elements sprang from the great story traditions of the West that their author’s knew intimately. The element of truth, the last of the three that Lewis mentioned, is the ball that Lewis and Tolkien both believed their culture had dropped. Affirming only facts and abstractions, it could unify neither individual lives nor civilization.
A story’s truth, as Tolkien said in his 1939 lecture “On Fairy Stories,” follows from seeing our primary, shared world truly. This real world can never be reduced to mere disconnected facts or theories. The key to the world’s truth is in its wholeness. In the wholeness of the secondary world of the story, we are reborn to the truth of our own world that darkness had obscured:
[The storyteller] hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) is derived from Reality, or is flowing into it. If he indeed achieves a quality that can fairly be described by the dictionary definition: “inner consistency of reality,” it is difficult to conceive how this can be, if the work does not in some way partake of reality. The peculiar quality of the “joy” in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. It is not only a “consolation” for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question, “Is it true?”
Truth is answered by the story itself, not by anything less.
Both Lewis and Tolkien strove to reach the deepest story, the story that lies at the core of their faith, the story that alone has the power to join all stories together and show the way out of the night of the soul and of the world. Loconte epitomizes this memorably at the end of his book:
That J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis could create stories of such radiance and nobility — when all the world around them was so dark and disfigured — seems itself a mystery of grace.
They are stories firmly based in tradition, yet their truth stands freely and requires of readers no prior commitment. Both Lewis and Tolkien were foes of the twisted antisemitism at the heart of the darkness of their day, and their stories are free of cant. Their stories resonate with all who choose the light.
That light shines in the passage from the Lord of the Rings that Loconte uses to close his book, and it serves to close this review as well. Hopeless in the blasted land of the Dark Lord, the hobbit Sam Gamgee sees a white star twinkle in the sky far above:
The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out on the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.
READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:
Power, Islamism, and the Crisis of Western Rationality
Higher Law and Human Law: The Religious Roots of American Freedom
