Category: Fantasy Criticism

It all depends on what you mean by “un-Christian.”

About 99% of the fiction–stories and novels, movies, TV shows, comic strips, video games, etc.–generated since the start of the 20th century presents us with a world in which God does not exist. At least He is never mentioned, except on those many occasions when a fictional character takes His name in vain.

Certainly in The Hobbit (I haven’t seen the movie, but I’ve read the book many times) there is no mention of God or Jesus or any kind of church, and the characters never pray or do anything else of a distinctly religious nature. We know from the author’s own life that he was a Christian, a staunch  Catholic who was instrumental in converting his friend, C.S. Lewis, from unbelief to Christianity. So where is the Christianity in The Hobbit?

We know from J.R.R. Tolkien‘s other writings, letters and such, that he intended a spirit of Christianity to permeate his created fantasy world, and to that end, purposely removed all overt references to religious belief and practice. Seems a pretty odd procedure, to me (as readers and I have discussed elsewhere on this blog–see, for instance, Tolkien’s Camoflage). I doubt a reader who wasn’t a Christian, and hadn’t studied Tolkien, would ever guess that a spirit of Christianity is supposed to permeate The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings.

So we can say the author intended The Hobbit to be “Christian” in a very subtle way. In all fairness to Tolkien, now that I know what to look for, I can see it. Whether it can survive the movie industry’s treatment of the story, I can’t say.

 

If your teens, or you yourself, are currently reading James Dashner’s The Maze Runner and its sequels instead of my books–hey, c’mon, what’s the matter with you?

I just finished The Maze Runner, and I’ll steer well clear of the sequels, thank you. Your family should, too.

Dashner is one of those authors who writes down to young readers, perhaps in the belief that anything much more than a text message will totally defeat their understanding. There’s something about writing “ya” for “you,” over and over and over again, that really annoys me.

Published in 2009, Maze Runner may most economically be described as a poor man’s Hunger Games. Dashner creates a dreary, hopeless, dystopian world and spends 62 chapters torturing his characters. I wonder if he likes to pull the wings off flies.

If you’re a teenager reading this, don’t get upset by what I say next: hear me out. You may find yourself agreeing with me.

Some young people have a melodramatic, morbidly self-pitying streak (which most of them naturally grow out of) that needs no extra feeding. Not that novels for young readers ought to be sappy, syrupy, everybody-feels-good-all-the-time–I am sure mine aren’t. But the unrelieved, toiling dreariness of books like Maze Runner and Hunger Games are of that simple-minded school that confuses ugliness with realism. Eventually teens who are willing to listen to this claptrap gain enough experience in life to realize that beauty, goodness, love, and truth are real, too. But for the time being, I fail to see the point of a writer purposely creating more ugliness than already exists.

 

I’ve just read a review of The Hobbit–not the book, but Peter Jackson’s new prequel to his Lord of the Rings movies. The reviewer objected that the movie is too long; but I think he took a wrong turn there.

I don’t think many of the movie’s fans will find it too long. I very much doubt anyone will say to himself, “Well, that’s enough of Elves and Hobbits and Dwarves. Back to Harry Reid! Back to the Fiscal Cliff! Back to watching my taxes and all my bills go up while my wages stay the same!”

After all, why would anybody want to see a fantasy movie in the first place? To escape! To escape into Middle-Earth, or Narnia, or the world of The Princess Bride–where problems actually get solved (one way or another) and the villains don’t win. No rigged voting machines to keep the Dark Lord from being destroyed once the Ring goes into the fire! And best of all, the heroes stay heroes–they don’t turn against you the moment they come to power.

Besides which, a good fantasy has true, albeit subtle, things to say about our own world and our own problems. We may not easily get rid of the White Witches that trouble our world; but once we’ve been to Narnia, we may have learned to see those witches for what they are.

I am convinced there is a book missing from C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series–a book that should have been written, but wasn’t. And I sort of believe that Lewis knew what that book was and would have gotten around to writing it someday, if only he’d lived longer.

My wife and my editor say I should get permission from Lewis’ estate and write the book myself. Well, I dunno… The Narnia books are, I should say, inimitable. There are writers who are as good as C.S. Lewis was, but I’ve never seen anyone who could do certain things as well as Lewis did them.  No one, for instance, but no one, was better than C.S. Lewis at giving you a whole character in just a few sentences, when anyone else would have needed a whole page. And who else would ever think of, and dare to do it, putting Father Christmas into the middle of a Narnia story?

Meanwhile, let me check my instincts against yours, dear readers. What do you think the unwritten Narnia book would be about?

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth fantasies, only two of which were published during his lifetime (The Hobbit and the trilogy, The Lord of the Rings) were the product of long decades of focused imagination. He worked on them for most of his long life.

In the process of shaping his imaginary world, he created languages. The most fully-realized of these was Quenya, more popularly known as “Elvish.”  Remember, Tolkien was a scholar who had a gift for difficult foreign languages. While still in his teens, he taught himself to speak Welsh and Finnish. (Go ahead, try it yourself!) So, as created languages go, Tolkien’s Elvish is pretty much top-of-the-line.

A friend recently sent me this recording–made some years before Lord of the Rings was published–of Tolkien reciting his poem, “Namarie,” in Elvish. Listen:

http://io9.com/5941544/listen-to-jrr-tolkien-read-his-poem-namarie-in-elvish

One commenter sees in this nothing but “an elderly gentleman reciting gibberish.” Personally, I find it fascinating and compelling–offering the very faintest hope that maybe, just a little-bit maybe, Middle Earth might be real, after all. More than that, I find it soothing.

No one understood better than Tolkien the use of fantasy as escape. And there’s plenty we want to escape from! I mean, you could lose your mind trying to make sense of American foreign policy these days. To watch our nation governed by wicked fools is something we might well want to break away from, now and then.

As a Christian, Tolkien was instrumental in converting C.S. Lewis out of atheism. So I am sure he never intended “escape” to be a substitute for prayer, for Bible-reading, for communing with the living God who can, and often does, take us under the shelter of His wings. There is no substitute for that.

But we fantasy writers who consciously try to serve God, who try in our own small way and in our own peculiar field to advance the Kingdom of Christ… well, we appreciate a little Elvish now and then.

Would you like to read something that’s clean and wholesome and playful enough for children, but also witty, subtle, and clever enough for any adult who doesn’t take himself too seriously?

I had to go back to my childhood for these treasures–the various adventures of Freddy the Pig, by Walter R. Brooks (d. 1958). Brooks created Mr. Ed, the talking horse, but the Freddy books were his magnum opus. I loved them when I was in grammar school. I love them even more now.

Freddy is a talking pig who is a poet, a detective, banker, newspaper editor, polar explorer, magician, and several other things. He lives on the Bean farm near the Adirondacks with many other talking animals. The farmer, Mr. Bean, has never been quite comfortable with this.

If you’ve ever wondered how a spider might deliver a lecture, how a cow might cope with a swing, or how a pig might fare at flipping flapjacks, these books are for you. You might wish to start with the first of the series, Freddy Goes to Florida, and read them in order. Or simply grab the first one you can get and just dive in.

Among my favorites are Freddy Goes Camping, Freddy Plays Football, and Freddy and the Ignormus. There are dozens of these, and to this day I haven’t read them all–which gives me something exquisitely pleasant to look forward to.  All are illustrated by the great Kurt Wiese.

If you’re a sophomoric sap committed to a vision of radical despair, maybe the Freddy books can’t do much for you. You won’t be interested in Mr. Webb the spider’s movie career, or Uncle Solomon the screech owl’s penetrating criticisms of Freddy’s poetry. But if your breath can still fog a mirror, I suspect these books will do you good.

I’m not sure I can get away with classifying these as fantasy. Then again, I don’t know what else you’d call them… other than a gift from God.

Laura Andrews, a frequent visitor to this site, has on her own blog an essay, “Realistic Fantasy?” (see http://lauraeandrews.blogspot.com/ ), posted Feb. 5, which raises an interesting question–

How “realistic,” or how “fantastic,” ought a fantasy to be?

Personal taste will provide the answer for the reader; but for the writer, the question is not so easy. Hey, you can only get so “realistic” before your fantasy isn’t a fantasy anymore. Or you can be so “fantastic” that you wind up being the only one who knows what you’re talking about.

Fantasy can be written to show what the writer thinks ought to be: hence knights in shining armor, kings who rule righteously over people who love and respect them, and so on. Or you can be “realistic” (sometimes for humorous effect), and write about cowardly knights who aren’t worth much, corrupt kings, swinish peasants, etc.

At this point I open the forum for discussion.

I bear it in mind, when I write, that heroes don’t always look like heroes; wisdom may look like foolishness; and the light of goodness may shine most brightly in the dark. So to that extent, my own fantasy stories are “realistic”–because sometimes a dark background is the best way to show off the light.

One of the articles on this blog previewed the cover art for my book, The Thunder King. On my site stats page are listed “Search Engine Terms” that tell me how some readers wind up visiting my blog.

I was surprised today to find the term, “Gutter King Cover.” This means some poor guy was trying to buy a cover for his gutter and the computer sent him to my book instead. I would like to think he appreciated the serendipity of it all, and bought my book; but that won’t keep dead leaves from clogging up his gutter. It’ll just give him something nice to read while he’s waiting for someone to come and clean out his gutter.

I hope the man who needed a gutter cover wasn’t so put out that he didn’t buy the book. You know, folks, it’s getting harder and harder to write fantasy, these days. Fantasy was never meant for people who are already delusional. But I turn on the radio, and there’s some 30-year-old college student telling Congress–that’s the United States Congress–that her sex life is so bodacious, she can’t keep up with the cost of contraceptives, and she wants the government to force the university to pay for her birth control pills. How the dickens am I going to write a fantasy for her? She’s already in one!

My stories are written for sane people. I hope that’s not a shrinking demographic.

Some Christian readers don’t like C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia because certain characters in the stories use magic. For these readers, “magic” is the same as “witchcraft,” a practice strongly condemned in the Bible: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 22:18).

I don’t think we need to spend any time defending C.S. Lewis against a charge of promoting the use of witchcraft. Even so, he might have been well-advised to be more careful.

Dr. Cornelius, a dwarf, has “some small magic” which includes a sleeping spell. The magician Coriakin has a book of spells which apparently anyone can open and use (kind of like leaving a loaded gun lying around the house). Uncle Andrew makes a great deal of trouble for himself by fooling around with magic that he doesn’t understand. And there are a werewolf and a hag who intend to use magic to call up the White Witch from the dead, but are killed before they can do it.

Continue Reading “Was C.S. Lewis Wrong to Allow Magic in Narnia?” →