Volu m e II - Purdue University Calumet

presenting his faith in fiction, he is also writing allegory: “Beneath the surface, at the allegorical level,
several of his stories come close to being myths of total explanation; all the great events in salvation-history
are included: creation, fall, atonement, judgment, and renovation” (75 Urang). Tolkien claims in his
preface to The Fellowship of the Ring that he “detests” allegory, but he is also inaccurately assessing his own
work. It was inevitable that allegory would play the main part in all of these pieces by deeply religious men
who believed that the true myth would be told over and over again and that it was intrinsically tied to the
human unconscious.
It is clear through the allegories by each of these men that true myth was not merely something
they believed in, but also something that was not a strict, uniform way of seeing Christianity or mythology.
Urang quotes Lewis expounding on his true myth theory:
Man‟s Sehnsucht – his intense longing – and the myths in which he expresses it, point him toward something
which has objective reality. Myths are not mere projections of human longing. They are “good dreams” sent
by God, real though unfocused gleams of divine truth falling on the human imagination from the great,
sovereign, uncreated, unconditioned Reality at the core of things. (Urang, 31)
These „gleams of divine truth‟ are just that: gleams. Something different is revealed to each author in a
different way, all adding up to the myth of Christ, but not without flexibility for dissimilar belief systems
within the umbrella of Christianity. Tolkien, a Roman Catholic, presented his true myth in a way deeply
founded in both tradition and subtlety. The dogmatic and straightforward Lewis‟s myth exactly mirrored
that of his strong belief in the evangelical Anglican church, both obvious and reaching to anyone willing to
hear its message. Williams, entrenched in ritual and obsessed with ceremony, focused on presenting his
myth based on his ideas of coinherence and sacrifice, looking to the biblical and church fathers‟ examples of
rites and sacrament as the way he took in and presented true myth. They were associated with Oxford
scholarship and all wrote fiction in the twentieth century, as well as poetry they are far less known for.
These men of different backgrounds and beliefs had barely more than that in common, but were still drawn
255