C.S. Lewis and Fairy Tales

As a family, we're re-reading our way through the Narnia stories, and I am struck by how many wonderful new discoveries I am making - not just details I hadn't noticed before, but deeper realizations and assents, sometimes at profound levels. I think maybe I had stopped reading fairytales all too soon.

Some Christians (and non-Christians, for that matter) are embarrassed by fairy tales or feel they should be put away for more realistic tales by the time a child reaches the age of school. But, I like Lewis' response to the challenge that fantasy is mere escapism - causing children to retreat into a world of wish-fulfillment.

"The other longing, for fairy land, is very different. In a sense a child does not long for fairy land as a boy longs to be the her of the first eleven. Does anyone suppose that he really and prosaically longs for all the dangers and discomforts of a fairy tale?...It would be much truer to say that fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods; the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted..."

Lewis also makes this additional worthy point: "And I think it possible that by confining your child to blameless stories of child life in which nothing at all alarming ever happens, you would fail to banish the terrors, and would succeed in banishing all that can ennoble them or make them endurable. For in fairy tales, side by side with the terrible figures, we find the immemorial comforters and protectors, the radiant ones; and the terrible figures are not merely terrible, but sublime. It would be nice if no little boy in bed, hearing, or thinking he hears, a sound, were ever at all frightened. But if he is going to be frightened, I think it better that he should think of giants and dragons than merely of burglars. And I think St. George, or any bright champion in armour , is a better comfort than the idea of the police."


C.S. Lewis: On Stories
Tolkien: On Fairy Stories