A story starts “once upon a time.” It weaves through a tried-and-true narrative: a maiden in paradise violates a single prohibition, she is captured by a dragon, rescued by a knight in shining armor, and lives with him happily ever after. The shape of this tale is like an old blanket, familiar and comforting. But I wonder, when you hear stories like this, do you call them fairy-stories or echoes of the gospel?
If you are inclined to say both, you’re in good company. Though we often think of fairy-stories as frivolous, childish, and, by definition, untrue, J.R.R. Tolkien did not. In his monumental lecture “On Fairy-stories,” he declares, “The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories” (78).
Far from making light of the gospel with this statement, Tolkien aims to show the majesty, the grandeur, the gigantic joy of God’s story — the sprawling epic of creation, catastrophe, Christ, cross, resurrection, church, and consummation.
But how exactly does the gospel display all the essence of a fairy-story? Well, for Tolkien, a fairy-story is a tale about the Perilous Realm, the place where mundane and magic, natural and supernatural, seen and unseen, men and elves meet. I have mentioned elsewhere that Tolkien boils the “essence of fairy-stories” down to four makers (what he calls “uses”): Fantasy, Escape, Recovery, and Consolation. So, let’s practice a kind of Faerian free association and explore how the gospel fulfills each aspect of a fairy-story.
Fantasy: Glimpsing Other Worlds
Tolkien defines fantasy as “the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds” (55). As a subcreator, man can imitate God’s world-building and cosmic storytelling by making worlds that have “the inner consistency of reality” and “arresting strangeness” (60).
So then, how is the gospel an example of fantasy? First, God’s story displays supremely “the inner consistency of reality” because, of course, it is reality. Myth has become fact. Good fairy tales put our ear right up against the gospel so we can hear the rhythm of the real — the enchanted world, the deadly thou-shalt-not, the unlikely hero, the triumph of good, the happy ending. The fairy-tale structure is the gospel pattern of reality written by the very finger of God.
Second, Tolkien holds that the great allure of fantasy is “the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires.” In fantastic stories, we talk to animals, plumb the ocean depths, explore past and future, and even escape death. Fairy tales succeed if “they awaken desire, satisfying it while often whetting it unbearably” (55). What a perfect description of the gospel! God’s cosmic story sates all the longings above and oh so much more. It inflames and satisfies the most ancient desire of man’s soul, the desire sweeter than any other having, the desire that will thrill or torture him for eternity — the desire for God.
Escape: Fleeing from Prison
For Tolkien (and for C.S. Lewis), the escape provided by fairy-stories is good. We become prisoners of our technologies and social imaginaries, our culture’s sins and blind spots, and it is good to escape from that prison. Lewis minces no words: “You and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness” (The Weight of Glory, 31). Escaping into story reminds us of what’s real and what’s not, what’s good and what’s bad, what’s beautiful and what’s ugly, and then we are sent back into the real world ready for revolt.
The gospel provides such an escape. It is “an oasis of sanity in a desert of unreason” (71). Take just one example: the gospel helps us escape from the lie that only what we can sense is real. In our age, materialism pervades everything. Modernity is at war with wonder and mystery. It denies the unseen realm at the cost of its own soul. But the gospel shatters this illusion.
Like all good myths and fairy-stories, the gospel presents the conjunction of the seen and unseen realms. You cannot “demythologize” this tale without changing it into something wholly different. As an experiment, try reading from Genesis to Revelation highlighting every time a spiritual being invades the tale. Your pages will be painted in yellow.
The gospel forces us to see the unseen everywhere. It reminds us the stars really do sing, fight, and fall (Job 38:7; Judges 5:20; Isaiah 14:12–15). It reveals that nations can really be under the sway of cosmic powers (Deuteronomy 32:8; Isaiah 24:21; Psalm 82). Perhaps most importantly, the gospel shows that our world teems with monsters. A dragon fell when the cross was raised, and we are locked in combat daily with his legions (Ephesians 6:12). The god of this world seeks to close our eyes to all that is unseen, but the gospel illuminates the way of escape and revolt (2 Corinthians 4:4).
Recovery: Seeing Again
One way fairy-stories enable escape is through recovery. For Tolkien, fairy-stories help us see anew those things we fail to see precisely because we see them all the time. Too often, seeing makes us blind. Yesterday’s marvels become today’s mundane. We need the heat of novelty to defrost our windows, and fairy-stories provide the flame. When familiar things appear in the enchanted realm of fairy, they become not so much reenchanted as simply reseen. Trees are almost too potent a magic in the real world. The golden forests of Lothlorien merely reveal what we forgot.
The gospel preeminently serves this recovery. It unveils the wild wonder of men and angels, mountains and gardens, bread and wine, lions and lambs. But most importantly, the gospel, in every sense, helps us recover the triune God — the being most blurred by familiarity.
When we flip through the pages of the gospel, we find a being who shatters our trite clichés and theological boxes, a towering figure whose glory cannot be domesticated, who could not be farther removed from the modern picture of a kindly gray grandfather, older than time and accepting of as many “lifestyles” as his innumerable years. His giant generosity renders the Scrooge-like miser myth utterly laughable.
No, the gospel shows us an extraordinary being greater than any elf, wizard, or god man can imagine. In the beginning, his magic words made worlds. He flourished his pen, and planets began to sing. Somehow he managed to stamp the massive imprint of his majesty (which the whole cosmos cannot contain) on a particular patch of dirt, and when he blew the dust away, man stood tall, glorious as the gods and humorous enough to furnish comedy for ages. This omnipotent, omniglad God then commissioned the newly living dust to reign on his behalf and hung the fate of the world on the skinny stem of one piece of fruit.
We see this God promise death yet provide life by promising one Life who would swallow death. And just pages later, this ocean of mercy seemingly dries up and wrath rains down on almost all life with drops uncountable as the stars, who wept at the sight. In tempest and thunder, cloud and fire, in the haunting stillness of a whisper, from the tongues of donkeys and madmen, kings and babes, this unseen Seer reveals himself, dominating the greatest story ever told.
Then he writes himself into the tale, taking on his own dusty frame, and all hell breaks loose. Bigger than being, he squeezes into a virgin womb, and the night sky sings as he’s born. The hero of this tale smells like a mortal. He looks like the son of a carpenter gilt in sawdust. He is an unlikely hero. But of course, as in all fairy tales, looks are often deceiving. He grows up not to be a mild-mannered monk but a man like a god — hushing hurricanes, tossing tables, healing anyone from anything, putting the fear of God into demons with words like thunder and eyes of fire. And just when his enthralling strangeness is most striking, he grapples death to death, loses, and yet lives — toppling cosmic thrones and awing angels.
This being is so real his name is “I Am.” A Character so beyond personality he is tri-personal. An Author so inescapable in him the story lives and moves and has its being. How can God and his wild doings be anything less than a fairy-tale, simple enough for a child to understand and grand enough to be told for eternity?
Consolation: Enjoying Happily Ever After
Yet the gospel would not be complete without the greatest mark of fairy-stories: “the Consolation of the Happy Ending” (75). This joy depends on the shape of the whole story and is crowned by the moment of eucatastrophe — the moment when darkness seems impenetrable and the dragon unassailable, yet unlooked for, unexpected, even beyond hope, a “miraculous grace” breaks in and turns the whole tale — the moment when Aslan cracks the stone table and destroys the White Witch. Every note of this joy in fairy-stories echoes the tune of “the gospel of the glory of the happy God” (1 Timothy 1:11).
Here’s Tolkien at his best:
The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels — peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving. . . . Among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world. . . . The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the “inner consistency of reality.” There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. . . . This story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men — and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused. (78)
The gospel is the greatest fairy story because it is the story all other fairy tales point us to. The fantasy, recovery, escape, and consolation — especially the thrill of eucatastrophe — in lesser tales have “the taste of primary truth” (78).
This romance of God and man, the defeat of death by death, our Lord’s breathtaking triumph over the grave, this story where light conquers darkness, comedy erupts from tragedy, beauty blazes out of evil, this tale of God dying so man can live, of God taking on the misery of man so man can take up the happiness of God, of Heaven coming to Earth so Earth can become Heaven — this fairy-story is not too good to be true. No, it is too good not to be true.
Do you believe it?
