"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."
-Thomas Carlyle

by Daniel Morgan

I know of a fellow who loved climbing as a boy. Trees, mountains, countertops, anything. While most of people stopped climbing trees after they reached puberty and pretended to be adults, he continued to scrabble up anything in eyeshot. If pressed for a reason, he might pose philosophical and give the classic "because it's there" quip, or if he is in a reminiscent mood, he may claim it is to impress the girls. But I've never known any of the feminine sex whose heart has suddenly skipped the proverbial beat by watching a college graduate scale some particularly lofty flagpole. Evidently, there seems to be more to the story than juvenile antics.

I've come across a similar curiosity in G.K. Chesterton. You remember him: the counter-intuitive Anglo-Catholic writer who defined a paradox as truth standing on its head to get attention. Many of his works do just that. In Manalive, a romp of a novel if there ever was one, with a wind that "bore drama into undramatic lives, and carried the trump of crisis across the world," Innocent Smith goes around committing any number of social faux pas and seeming illegalities, parts of which predate the insane logic of Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club. But he is first introduced uncouthly climbing a tree before some tenants to attain a hat that had been blown there as per Shakespeare's line: "For valour: Is not love a Hercules, / Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?" As Innocent Smith begins his adventures on the arboreal note, one of the cases in A Club of Queer Trades concludes on the theme. Even dour Robert Frost agrees that "One could do worse than be a swinger of birches." I believe if we can come to the crux interpretum, it is that grown-ups, whether they always know it or not, indeed want to play and dance in faėrie-circles like campfire Gypsies or raving Pentecostals, but for some sinister reason have had their daydreams slapped away as unconventional and self-deprecating.

I wonder about that even more than I do my climber friend. Anyone who wants to observe the faēade of absolute adult maturity and composure need only go to the neighborhood grocery store to see how complete strangers will act in public around a newborn. Invariably, they will make any of the standard sorts of babbling nonsense common to mankind with the addition of their unique facial contortions of a simian nature. The same antic adoration goes for nearly any domesticated animal, unless said stranger happens to carry a bias of cat over dog or vice versa. And if caught in the privacy of their own home, the newborn's parents (or animal owners) eschew all inhibitions and decorum for vicarious delight in their child's elfish laughter.

But if we look to the professional world, the picture is much different. One may watch a film like Patch Adams or Dead Poet's Society with a poignant repose, but when it comes to Monday morning, he never considers such iconoclastic behavior. Actors, I've found, do so easily. To them, it is second nature, this Schillerian play drive. But then maybe that was why they were regarded as little more than vagrants and jailed in Shakespeare's day. The Common Man of the Twenty-First Century would never lower himself in such a way though. For we, after all, live in the real world, not some fantasy land.

Some Fantasy Land

Having incidentally mentioned faėrie-circles in the above, I feel compelled to come back and elaborate. The first few pages of Manalive subtly allude to the green folk about a dozen times. Peter of Narnia must escape from a sentient wolf into a tree. In The Hobbit, Bilbo is seen both climbing a tree (though grudgingly out of navigational necessity) and chasing the old will o' the wisp, the elusive glow of faėries in their twilight gatherings (which also got him lost). When the whole company of Gandalf, dwarves, and Bilbo climb trees, it is for the practical purpose that that is what one does when pursued by Wargs and Goblins. Surely, modern man would do no less if encumbered by such preternatural predators. Still we are not to the enthusiast's case for tree-climbing, only to survivalist's lessons. I fear we may get there by the long route.

Let us turn to one of the most infamous scenes in Christian literature and so-called "children's literature" at that (sadly, Christians normally shy far from such scandal). It is at the end of Prince Caspian, when Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, revelry, and women, leads the children in a good-natured romp. For many, including myself, mythoholic that I am, this comes rather close to the line. But, if we know Lewis, we know he obviously had nobler purposes than we might first be imagined.

Firstly, one must first understand the idea that Christianity is not the only truth. Were that so, as Lewis says, we are making the claim that all other religions are completely false, which is patently absurd. Most religions share similar moral codes (though religions are, of course, far more than that) precisely because truth is so ambient and powerful it is reflected in the twisted fragments among the darkest of man-made philosophies. That having been said, paganism and other religions, like unwilling mirrors, often center around shades of truth Christianity has neglected. Christianity is not the only truth, but it is the only complete truth.

Secondly, we forget in our man-made legalism that wine, revelry, and women were all created by God. As the trees of the Lord drink their fill, so does He provides vineyards for "wine which makes man's heart glad" and gardens for food (Psa 104:14-16; Eccl 9:7; Deut 14:26; 1 Cor 10:31). As Luther said, "Do you suppose that abuses are eliminated by destroying the object which is abused? Men can go wrong with wine and women. Shall we then prohibit and abolish women? The sun, the moon, and the stars have been worshipped. Shall we then pluck them out of the sky?" Shedding our Old Covenant theology, culturally American mindset, and feminized view of virtue, we can begin to understand how exactly it was that King David could boast of becoming even more undignified than this in his worship of God.

That which drove David, I posit, is the same thing which we long for, the divine madness that delights the dancer. We wish to be caught up in a story just as the hopeless romantic desires to be swept up in the arms of Gene Kelly or, if one is especially toppered, Fred Astaire. It is also this desire — what Lewis called sehnsucht — that embarrasses us moderns in the conventions of polite society. I know of a girl who dances by herself and pretends to waltz so with God. This is not done in the church, at least not the ones funded by the Southern Baptist Convention, but the privacy of her room. But if she could, I am sure she would want to do so regardless of time or space.

Though I have been discursive about it, partly not to overly tread on the feet of Lewis and Tolkien, or even Eldridge and Bruner, though invariably one does, I believe that the world of Faėrie is the human answer for that transcendence. In our use of imagination, we are reminded, with all the great visionaries of the past, that life is more than this hum-drum existence, the here-and-now of the American work week. Before that inevitable doubt arises that all this banter is mere escapism, crush it dead. For so are the dogs of realism merciless with you.

Chesterton believed "the simplified and symbolic version of life . . . as a quest with a prize (especially a princess), is nevertheless, a true version of life; that is an enlightening symbol and a legitimate simplification. St. George must kill the Dragon, or the Dragon will kill the princess; that seems to me a truer picture of the aim of life and the lot of man than any realistic novel." Just ask yourself . . . what is it that appeals so much to me in the idea of growing up in sun-bright fields under the shadow of some mountain castle and that you will be whisked away some day by a daring prince? Why is it we are enamored from an early age with the stories of Robin Hood and King Arthur? Why do we dress up in gowns for graduations, line up in procession for the pageantry of weddings or parades, soak in the otherworldly awe of a cathedral, or stare at the stars as if they could tell us something we're on the verge of hearing? Indeed, in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, you actually can talk to a star. In a brilliant rejoinder to Eustace's crude scientific statement than stars are only balls of burning gas, Ramandu replies mythically, "Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of."

The true escapism is explained by Lewis in On Stories: "The dangerous fantasy is always superficially realistic. The real victim of wishful reverie does not batten on the Odyssey, The Tempest, or The Worm Ouroboros; he . . . prefers stories about millionaires, irresistible beauties, posh hotels, palm beaches, and bedroom scenes — things that really might happen, that ought to happen that would have happened if the reader had had a fair chance. For as I say, there are two kinds of longing. The one is an askesis, a spiritual exercise, and the other is a disease."

Nor is there any reason for the chronicles of faėrie to be childish. Child-like, sure, but not childish. In the same work, On Stories, Lewis dismisses the whole genre of children's literature, saying there is no reason for children to read books in their youth that they would not enjoy in their old age. Faėrie tales, we must remember, were first made by and for adults, when man yet had a primitive and integrated mind. Now, to be fair, there are also such things as dark elves, and in world literature the fair folk are not always so domesticated as Victorian tracery makes them out to be. Anyone who has read some of the unadulterated tales of the Brothers Grimm knows what I mean. But then, we should not expect to pigeon-hole any corpus or genre with the complexity of folk literature into the black-and-white lessons of, say, fables or pastoral exemplum.

Foreshadowing Eternity

It is not enough though to spin literary criticism out of human desires. To do so would sever in twain the classic function of art, "To teach and to please." Or, to let a modern poet like Robert Frost intone, "It begins in delight and ends in wisdom." Fantasy literature in general, and faėrie tales in particular, also serves the purpose of enlarging our souls, giving us a better childhood than before, help make sense of pagan insight, catch a glimpse of the kindredness and crazy rules in Eden, and understand our role now in a fallen world. I will serve them in turn.

Yes, to quote Lewis yet again, "We want to be more than ourselves. Each of us by nature sees the whole world from one point of view with a perspective and a selectiveness peculiar to himself. To acquiesce in this particularity . . . would be lunacy . . . We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own . . . We demand windows. Literature as Logos is a series of windows, even of doors . . . The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. [I]n reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do." This is the divine madness Keats calls "negative capability," where we are emptied in a kenosis, as Eastern philosophy teaches, but not to cease thinking or feeling, but rather to think and feel on a grander scale. For Lewis is careful to note that "Obviously this process can be described either as an enlargement or as a temporary annihilation of the self. But that is an old paradox; ‘he that loseth his life shall save it.'"

Abnormality or insanity is only amusing from the outside, from the realm of sanity. We look upon children with a sympathetic, yet intellectual, eye though they have no appreciation for their more blessed state. This is precisely what faėrie tales help us to do, both to relive the childhood of innocence and to do so with the wise eye of hindsight. Chesterton summarizes this view of combining traveling afar and the feeling of coming home in Orthodoxy: "The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal. But in the modern psychological novel, the hero is abnormal; the centre is not central. Hence the fiercest adventures fail to affect him adequately, and the book is monotonous. You can make a story out of a hero among dragons; but not out of a dragon among dragons. The fairy tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad world. The sober realistic novel discusses that an essential lunatic will do in a dull world. . . . The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always one foot in earth and the other in fairyland." He goes on to argue in the next chapter, "The Ethics of Elfland," that this world really is mad, i.e., ruled by nothing but reason and no emotion, making it a fine ground to really live out the stories of old by those who can in true sanity temper their intellect with the imagination.

We must learn to regard faėrie stories and the myths of the gods, if we have not already, as nostalgia for eternity. They are signposts that point to ideals we must yearn to quest after. And Christianity is the signpost painter telling you: "Here is the path; here is the way to follow those ideals." In other words, the Cross of Christ is what the Norse were looking for when they came up with the story of the World Tree and hung Odin on its gallows, or the Greeks with Prometheus on the Caucasus rock, etc. When Ecclesiastes says God has placed eternity in the hearts of men, that may very well include mythic stories that speak of gods descending in death to restore the Creation in order to point to the historic God incarnate, Jesus Christ. And in imitating our Saviour, who stepped up on a tree to reach heaven, somehow in seeing a tree as a tree, we find ourselves equidistantly closer to heaven and closer to earth.

Yes, stories from Faėrie are also full of deeper worlds, and counter-intuitive truths. But we are steeped in cynicism and classification and must pause and deliberate over every hard saying. If only somehow we could simply listen and receive as our elders did in oral society, wrapped in the words of the fireside raconteur. The power of the spoken word in folk stories is unquestionably some of the most potent magic available to man. Consider the peace that pervaded Eden. Not only between man and God, but man and creation. It's is easy to cant an eyebrow and wonder at lions eating celery instead of lamb, but so it was and so it will be again. Or just inquire into Ovid or Apuleius, where someone is always being turned into an animal or plant, hinting at the inner desire to commune with nature and regain the powers of Adam, despite the uncertain elemental guides and tricksters. Maidens learn humility towards strangers and to keep promises, even if the suitor in question is a bewitched frog. A line of poesy summons the wind, severed heads make good oracles, and bad people die in gruesome ways. Christians may question why humanity hinged on an apple in a garden with a serpent, and are hard-pressed to see the magic of the incidental, to say: why not an apple (yes, I know the Hebrew refers to generic fruit, but in a story the abstractions must find clothes of some sort).

Remember a typical faėrie tale structure that goes so: a young man comes of age outwitting or discovering some invisible goings-on (remember Joseph or Daniel with their dream-interpretation) and thus braving death to live. His maturity is usually completed by riches or marriage. Only one man of many passes the test though and it almost always takes the help of a little faėrie magic or a convenient deus ex machina dream. At the end of "The Twelve Dancing Princesses," for instance, the suitor chooses the eldest daughter instead the youngest he first followed, concluding, "I am no longer young."

Indeed, almost every faėrie tale is about coming of age and living far from our true home. The very stars and trees long to see us return and then all at once we're being rescued from the mundane and we are allowed to view the true majesty and glory hidden like with a veil behind this world. When we've awakened, we're to find that we were foundlings, princes and princesses all along and those witches and step-sisters that harped against us face a reckoning from the King. And all this is only achieved with a terrible cost: the King's own Son had to die or shed his old skin in some way to be transformed into your spouse. That's what the Second Coming of Christ is all about. It's the old Jewish custom where the bridegroom promises himself to His beloved. She must watch and wait with candle burning until the unexpected hour he comes to rescue and ravish her. That is what "happily ever after" means, that man and woman, God and humanity, join in mystical union in a real castle in the clouds and can never be separated again. It is a journey of the good (the elect) to the truth (relationship with God) through the beauty (His landscape of the soul).

In faėrie tales we learn spiritual truths in a palatable, child-like form that too often we cannot grasp as adults in an artificial culture. There is a veil of familiarity we must get past. Even King Lear with his three daughters has faėrie tale qualities. If you put Scriptural stories in a different context, you'd feel the wonder and drama you did as a child. Phillip teleporting, Elijah calling down fire, working the heavens seven times for rain, and outrunning a chariot, Joshua walking Jericho seven times, Moses and the burning bush and striking water out of rock, Samson being deceived three times and overthrowing buildings, Nebuchadnezzar changing to a werebeast. Satan spoke through a serpent and God through an ass. Who is to say that the blind man half-healed in Mark chapter 8 did not peek into Faėrie when he saw trees walking like men? The comparisons of pagan mythology abound, but the human drama (not to mention historical veracity) pales to the biblical accounts. Just compare the pathos of Samson to Hercules, the fiery spirit of Elijah to Atalanta, or the humility of Nebuchadnezzar to Lycaon.

The Bible, along with nearly all ancient literature and historians (and archaeology bringing up the rear), tells us that giants walked the mountainsides, dinosaurs roamed the earth, and fire-breathing sea monsters dominated the deep. Today we have the tracks of dinosaurs with men, the reports of behemoth in the swamps of the Congo, lochs of Scotland, lakes of Canada, etc. to show they walk amongst us, though scarce as the dryad and elusive as the unicorn. Meanwhile, we continue, like the Pharisees in the lessons of the blind man, to refuse to see the tragedy of it all. The historic St. George and the Dragon is a horrific tale, not for George, but for the Dragon. It is only one of thousands from antiquity chronicling the extinction of that noble creature, chief of God's works (Job 40:19). The ancients spurned the Maker by hunting them beyond reason; we spurn both Maker and man by refusing to even admit their existence!

For naturalism has killed our imagination for the possible, and even the historic. Somehow, told on the evening news about the discovery of whale sharks, giant manta-rays, blue whales, and, yes, even the few surviving giant squids, we don't make the connection that all these creatures were known long ago, simply called by other, more "fantastic" names, but what we dismiss in story, we list to on television. We owe the ancients a great apology, and yet, in some respects, our over-riding skepticism is understandable. Since the population explosion of the industrial era, the billions of people born in the last few hundred years were unable to witness a single dinosaur sighting, while in the old days, before concrete replaced forests, and middle-class suburbs and segmented office cubicles replaced the town commons and hut-fires, it was not so. One could not escape from living in a magical world.

Answering the Intimations

Following this advice as far as it takes us, we can live the tales and pass through them, knowing life to be an endless adventure, a cosmic battleground, and even a faėrie story descriptive of how life truly is. Secondly, for men, it means following the natural urge to do battle for a worthy cause and to die a valiant, sacrificial death. Chesterton writes in The Everlasting Man, "When a man makes the gesture of salutation and of sacrifice, when he pours out the libation or lifts up the sword, he knows he is doing a worthy and virile thing. He knows he is doing one of the things for which a man was made."

Faėrie is, in a way, a call to arms, or at least to action to how the world should be viewed and lived. Not wanting to cite pop culture, one must say The Matrix did well depicting the gate or window to this Otherworld as the tunnel in Alice in Wonderland. The Lord of the Rings is full of such gateways, specifically here, concerning trees. When Pippin and Merry looked out over Fangorn forest, the forest looked back at them. One such the tree (or tree-herd rather) named Treebeard complemented them in praising the forest, to which they turned around with an aweful stare. Treebeard is imbued with all the archetypal things we love about trees, especially the rumbling earthy voice. As Treebeard explains, the old Elves went around trying to talk to everything that could learn how to speak. Those trees that could became Ents (incidentally one of the few names I believe the good professor should have left in its original Jotun flavor). They had personality. And in the face of the threat of Isengard, their Entmoot gathering culminated in "The Last March of the Ents."

Tolkien purposely created the Ents as a rejoinder to Shakespeare's "Macbeth shall never vanquish'd be until / Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill / shall come against him." Now, he held Shakespeare in no high regard, so it is no wonder that he sought to one-up the Bard (who, by the way, was not intending a fantasy epic in a line).

Neither of them really did it for me though as well as the Welsh annals. In the Second Battle of Magh Turedh, the Tuatha De Danann gods of Ireland fought against the Fomoraig giants with stock and stone and soil, enchanting the earth "so that they shall become a host under arms against them, and shall rout them in flight with horror and trembling." A little later the theme is borrowed in the Book of Taliesin, in the story called "Cad Goddeu," or "The Battle of the Trees." The trees are employed by two wizards as arboreal armies against each other: Gwydion and his brother, the agriculture god Amaethon, fought against Bran and Arawn of the underworld in what was essentially a name-guessing contest. In a double-riddle, the trees form the textual background since they constitute the Ogham alphabet. By guessing the tree, or name, of the god Bran, he was defeated. This poem also inspired the background and lyrics for John William's popular Star Wars track "Duel of the Fates."

Why the big hullabaloo about trees in the first place? Do we just what to assert own masculinity and dominance over nature? Or assert a sort of neo-pagan-esque communion as in Eden, where names corresponded to one's essence in the language of Adam? Ever since I saw Green Giant commercials as a boy, selling corn, that huge oak upon the plain implanted itself in my mind. The Keebler Elf or Tree Top Apple Juice logos were so feeble by comparison, but still tried. If I could have my way, all I wanted from it was to gaze upon it in the summer fields, and explore the branches that seemed to tilt the roof of the sky. It isn't really about the dominance of the insipid mountaineer or the need to talk with inanimate objects, but just to feel closer to beauty, wishing perhaps some of it might rub off on us like stardust in the eventide.

Originally, I stopped there, content with the answer of beauty. But what of the true and the good, the story God and the elect? Two things force me to see the tree in the practical light of salvation. The first and incident one is a poem called "Flood and Windfall" comparing the Ark and the Cross, an old comparison to be sure. The other is a recent e-mail from a missionary friend and her team describing how they walked around in devastated Indonesia smelling "the smell of death still present in the mud-stained rooms." Outside of the dilapidated buildings of what used to be a medical clinic, they saw a large tree and prayed that God would make the place a tree of life. Just then, their "guide" said that ten people had been saved by that tree, having climbing up into its high branches above the tsunami's devastation. Christ is like that. He carried the curse and now is more than capable of carrying us.

These vestiges of medievalism tell us this industrial world we're living in is a phantastic prison, like the solipsist one Lewis described. We must escape into the real light of faėrie day. I am not here to carp against the evils of capitalist-materialism; there is little honor is such petty victories. Rather, we must consider the option that has been closed to us since childhood, namely the union between imagination and reality, fantasy and history, is not only attainable, it is sanative, and, suffice to say, needed now more than ever. Even the materialist Wallace Stevens could say that poetry is an "interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals." To neglect bearing company to the oaken scarecrows, composing sonnets or odes in meter (even poor ones), and enjoying a good (and chaste!) roll in the grass every so often, is perhaps one of the best warnings signs of a schismed soul.

We must reclaim a sense of the magic/miracles in God's creation and honor His bountiful gift of life us, climbing trees, matching our bodies against the current of a river, marveling at mountain peaks, and realize that romping is not just for children. We ought to live like warrior-poets (hey, when the cliché fits . . .), sacrificing ourselves for our neighbours in true Christianity instead of watered down Hollywood chivalry. Oral stories recited around campfires and all that. Perhaps it is just better you just take to heart the words of Doctor Cornelius and Prince Caspian regarding the recovery of the magical world. Even Narnia contended with our rationalist madmen and lunatic revisionists, but they do not have to have the last say.

"But never forget in all these years have we forgotten our own people and all the other happy creatures of Narnia, and the long-lost days of freedom."

"I'm — I'm sorry, Doctor," said Caspian. "It wasn't my fault you know."

"I'm not saying these things in blame of you, Dear Prince," answered the Doctor. "You may well ask why I say them at all. But I have reasons. Firstly, because my old heart has carried secret memories so long that it aches with them and would burst if I did not whisper them to you. But secondly, for this: that when you become king, you may help us, for I know that you also, Telmarine though you are, love the Old Things."

"I do, I do," said Caspian. "But how can I help?"

"You can be kind to the poor remnants of the Dwarf people, like myself. You can gather learned magicians and try to find a way of awakening the trees once more. You can search through all the nooks and wild places of the land to see if any Fauns or Talking Beasts or Dwarfs are perhaps still alive in hiding."

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