THE CITY

The City
one of the world’s top scholars in the highly demanding academic field of
philology – and he did not set aside his use of reason when he made use
of his imagination. As he writes in his seminal essay “On Fairy-stories”:
Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or
even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for,
nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary.
The keener and clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make. 2
A story such as The Lord of the Rings does not offer a direct argument,
appealing straight to the intellect, but rather an imaginative and
experiential approach – but this indirect approach is entirely compatible
with more direct approaches as well. Literary apologetics provides an
imaginative engagement with truth in fictional form; the reader’s (or
viewer’s) encounter with images, characters, stories, and ideas in an
imaginative mode can indeed whet the appetite to learn more, and prepare
the reader to recognize and assimilate truth in rational and propositional
forms. Tolkien himself was very much aware both of the Christian
message of his work, and the importance of presenting it indirectly:
through symbols, imagery, and (as we will see) the very structure of the
fantasy story itself.
THEOLOGY AND FANTASY:
TOLKIEN’S “ON FAIRY-STORIES”
There is a great deal that could be said on this topic; here we will
consider the concepts that Tolkien introduces in his seminal essay “On
Fairy-stories,” which is an extended analysis of the workings of fantasy
literature. His ideas are applicable to literature and the arts more broadly
speaking, and to the discipline of literary apologetics.
“On Fairy-stories” had its origins as a public lecture that Tolkien gave
at the University of St Andrews in 1939. The lecture came at a pivotal
point in Tolkien’s development as a fantasist. He was well established as
a scholar of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English; he had been working for
many years on the various stories and poems of the Silmarillion, he had
recently published The Hobbit, and he had begun work on The Hobbit
sequel that would become The Lord of the Rings. An expanded version of
the lecture was published in 1947 in Essays Presented to Charles Williams,
2
J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” in Tolkien On Fairy-stories, ed. Verlyn Flieger and
Douglas A. Anderson (London: HarperCollins, 2014), 65.
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