There is only a small sliver of the spectrum of light that we can see. If we could extend the ability of our eyes just a little further into infrared, we would see one another walking around as glowing wells of heat like gods. Extend it further up the spectrum and we could see bones. And so our lived experience that we call reality is actually only a sliver of reality. Life is much stranger than we often reckon. 

How are we to reckon with that strangeness? I think how we always have: with Faerie. I am not suggesting that nymphs really do hide in the woods, or that we could find dwarves if we knew where to look. I am saying that the elements of Faerie are symbols of spiritual significance. (I am using Faerie as a catch-all for myth, faerie tale, and fantasy fiction. I mean the fantastic in general, from Homer to Star Wars. It is a broader definition than Tolkien used for the term, but the genre has blossomed since his work.) Realistic fiction is concerned with the sliver of observable, conscious reality. Faerie uncovers broader rays in the spectrum. It reveals. It is apocalypse.

Our postmodern Western culture’s values are upside down, so our stories refract less and less light. In some, villainous protagonists are portrayed as sympathetic heroes, and audiences root for them. Many make their monsters misunderstood instead of evil. Is it not this, that our passions are at war within us?

Apocalypse in the literal sense does not refer to the end of the world. It simply means “revelation.” If all the world’s a stage, apocalyptic literature is that which pulls back the curtains. The servant of the prophet Elisha looked out from the walls of Dothan, besieged by a great Syrian army, and quaked with fear. Elisha prayed that the Lord would open the eyes of his servant. “So the Lord opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha” (2 Kings 6:16-20, ESV). His eyes opened up to the broader spectrum of light, he saw the fiery celestial army of God, and he knew that there was no cause to fear. This is the essence of apocalypse. And this, I argue, is the purpose of Faerie stories. (It is fitting that this story ends not with a battle of vengeance but a feast of mercy. Just as the celestial army is revealed, God reveals a little more of His design: the new covenant way of mercy. This is how the kingdom comes to earth as it is in heaven.)

Faerie deals with the strangeness of life on the fringes of observable reality and beyond: the mysteries of the cosmos, the depths of the soul, the numinous and spiritual. They make visible what is hidden. C.S. Lewis, in his review of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, said,

“But why,” (some ask), “why, if you have a serious comment to make on the real life of men, must you do it by talking about a phantasmagoric never-never land of your own?” Because, I take it, one of the main things the author wants to say is that the real life of men is of that mythical and heroic quality. One can see the principle at work in his characterization. Much that in a realistic work would be done by ‘character delineation’ is here done simply by making the character an elf, a dwarf, or a hobbit. The imagined beings have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls. And Man as a whole, Man pitted against the universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale? (On Stories, Lewis).

Faerie stories, then, are stories that incarnate broader realities. They embody spiritual truths. Therefore Faerie is allegorical, whether intentionally or not. Now even in allegory, not every element maps perfectly onto reality one-to-one. According to Lewis, the best allegory transcends simple correlation. Lewis said in the afterword to The Pilgrim’s Regress that people may “suppose that allegory is a disguise, a way of saying obscurely what could have been said more clearly. But in fact all good allegory exists not to hide but to reveal; to make the inner world more palpable by giving it an (imagined) concrete environment… But it remains true that wherever the symbols are best, the key is least adequate. For when allegory is at its best, it approaches myth, which must be grasped with the imagination, not the intellect.” This is the level that all fantasy fiction works on. At the risk of saying nothing by saying everything, it is metaphor. Metaphor is present in all language, but in Faerie, as in poetry, it is working at its highest register. “The Lord God is a sun” (Ps. 84:11) communicates more than merely brightness or warmth or the source of life. Rather, each of those and more are summed up within a spectrum of meaning worthy of deep meditation. For we don’t merely know the sun by this or that attribute, but live our whole lives’ stories under his rays. So, as in poetry, with Faerie one can communicate more with less.

It is a common misunderstanding that Faerie stories are untrue—that they are no more than fanciful, childish conceits. But the same mistake is made of metaphor. How many times have we heard the dismissal, “It’s just a metaphor”? But in fact it is the opposite. Metaphors are used to uncover the depth of things, not to betray shallowness. A map uses a thin line to depict a road which in reality has texture, warmth, hardness, and cars running over the top of it. And Faerie has no less potential to signify deep spiritual truths. These are stories about what we believe, the intentions of our hearts, our tests and decisions, the battles of the soul. The best of them tell the truth. Others tell lies. Some of the worst have no clue that they are spiritual at all.

Unfortunately many of today’s fantasy stories fail because of this. Our postmodern Western culture’s values are upside down, so our stories refract less and less light. In some, villainous protagonists are portrayed as sympathetic heroes, and audiences root for them. Many make their monsters misunderstood instead of evil. Is it not this, that our passions are at war within us? We make excuses for our monstrous tendencies. But dragons and ogres and monsters are archetypes of evil. When we make them out to be good, they become mismatched symbols, stripped of meaning and hollow forms signifying nothing. Orcs represent the shadow we must reject within ourselves and within society. Orcs are the embodiment of a life or society given over to lies, corruption, and harm. Shrek succeeds with its inverted archetypes on the grounds that it is self-aware comedy. But How to Train Your Dragon, for all its merits, has no place in Faerie. The only tame dragon is a dead one. It is dangerous to parley with dragons: we ought to have learned that from Eve, from Jesus in the wilderness, from Revelation, Beowulf, and The Hobbit. In the end you must either flee or fight.

The hero must be virtuous. Anti-heroes played straight to the end have no place in Faerie. To be sure, he can fail and fail again, be a fool, choose the wrong path, and have to be righted. But his values and aim must be true from the start. The princess ought to be rescued, not because of misogyny but because she represents the love worth sacrificing everything for. And she ought to have great agency in the story, because the bride of Christ is not inert in the world. He saved her so she can play her part in saving all Creation.

Am I just a staunch traditionalist? Am I against innovation? I am not arguing against innovation, which is necessary for the genre to be fruitful and multiply. I am saying that the innovation that is often in use today is cheap. Instead of inverting archetypes, innovation ought to take place within plot, character, world, literary design, atmosphere, and expression. A house is made a home by furnishing the rooms, not by razing the foundation. There is always more room to invent, but as long as we are mixing truth with lie we dilute the power of story.

Someone will say, “It’s only a story. It doesn’t harm anyone.” But in fact stories carry the power of death and life (Prov. 18:21). In every age, stories have been weaponized to justify violence. Make no mistake: if you listen with an uncritical ear, some bedtime tales will slay you in your slumber. Consciences are being seared. Human souls and minds are becoming numb to the shock of violence, sex, greed, and dehumanization. Our culture is saturated in Story, so this is a frontline issue. If Faerie has the power to incarnate spiritual truths, then let us strive to tell the truth. These stories have the power to reveal, so let us peer deeply and thoughtfully into those realms as we write.

The apostle Paul at the end of his letter to the Ephesians does two remarkable things. One is by accident and the other is at the forefront of his intention. First, he unwittingly constructs the template for all Faerie stories to come. Like every genius in every age, he uses the elements of the past to fashion something new and ends up far ahead of his time. Each article of the armor of God has precedent in the Old Testament but was used there toward different ends. What Paul does here is nearly Medieval. The spiritual armor bordering on allegory, the struggle against cosmic forces, the sanctity of the flesh and blood of man which is not to be trespassed, and the ultimate yielding to prayer and the Spirit—that numinous help beyond our capabilities which precedes Tolkien’s eucatastrophe by a couple millennia: these are the very scaffolding of Faerie. And he takes it a step further, for while he is constructing it, in the same breath he wraps that imaginary structure around our corporeal bodies. This he does intentionally, for being trained in the Hebrew scriptures he is well aware that reality cannot be truly seen without imagination. He fits us in the imaginary armor and wakens us to our part in the overarching story that is being written in real time towards the end. Our physical bodies are wrapped in spiritual armor. And so the whole physical realm is revealed to be wrapped within the spiritual, as earth is wrapped within the spheres of the heavens, and as two dimensional planes are wrapped up within three dimensional space. For Paul, real life is a faerie tale, so to speak.

Faerie uncovers the spiritual realm. It is like a reverse-parable, for it provides us with eyes to see and ears to hear. Looking through the lens of Faerie, we are invited to see more than mere appearance and perceive the world as it truly is. It reveals what lies within and what surrounds. We wrestle not against flesh and blood but against unseen forces, wielding unseen arms under unseen aid. Faerie makes the unseen seen. We see through these frames and filters, and catch glimpses of pure light refracted in shifting colors. Faerie has the power to open our eyes so that we can find our place in the great Faerie Tale, in hope of the Day when we will behold the whole spectrum of glorious Light. For now we see through a glass dimly, but then we shall see face to face.

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