Good evening, reader.
It is December 25, 2023; it is late, but it is still Christmas, and I have a few thoughts.
Last I blogged it was to share my journey through Scotland. Life has continued to move, and five months have passed since my time in Scotland, but yet I am there every day. In my home and my classroom I am surrounded by photos of Scotland. I might possibly check the weather in various Scottish cities on the regular because, you know, I need to know how much colder it is there than here in Louisiana, and I need to know if it's snowing.
I recently had a conversation with a former student and friend that centered, as so many of our conversations do, around books. I was telling her Reagan has recently begun reading the Harry Potter series, and she said most young people her age preferred either Harry Potter or the Percy Jackson series. I've never read any of the Percy Jackson books. This is a fantasy series by Rick Riordan, but prior to my recent conversation I knew nothing else about the Percy Jackson books. Apparently the central characters in this series are a group of special young people whose uniqueness stems from the circumstances of their conception; they are half-human, half-god. They each have a human parent and a god parent, meaning lowercase (g)od; for example, Percy Jackson is the son of a human woman and Poseidon. As my friend shared this information with me I was doing a lot of mental work, and I am about to tell you why.
I don't know if the Percy Jackson books offer any details about the conception of these half-human, half-god beings. How is this possible? My guess is you are to enjoy the story, the fantasy world Riordan builds for the reader, without stressing over details in much the same way Twilight readers are not to ask specific questions about the half-human, half-vampire child that is born in the final book in that series. Fantasy novels demand the reader suspend rational thought, and this is one of the reasons why this genre continues to draw wide audiences. If you're reading to escape reality, you may as well fall through time and take up with a handsome Scottish Highlander, right?
It is not my intent to drone on about the fantasy genre. It's actually not one to which I immediately gravitate. Fantasy is hard to write, I think, in part because the writer has to build a world from scratch. It's not a romance novel where the opening line can be:
Alice had lived in New York City her entire life, but nothing of note had ever happened to her until the day she turned twenty-six and, running late for her own birthday dinner, she agreed to share a cab with Daniel, a gentleman in a three-piece suit who behaved rudely but was so tall she forgave him.
This one line sets the scene for an entire novel; it builds the world in which the story will take place with just a few keystrokes. Even an idiot knows what's happening: We're about to read more about a young lady named Alice who lives in New York City; Alice likely has a few close female friends with whom she discusses her lackluster dating life until one day, perhaps during the birthday dinner mentioned in the opening line, she tells her bosom buddies about Daniel, the tall, handsome stranger who paid her cab fare and about whom she cannot stop thinking. A clever reader knows Daniel will resurface soon in some potentially predictable twist we totally expect but yet still cannot wait to read about in detail.
Anyway, the point is world building is hard work for a fantasy author, and this is why fantasy is either excellent or not worth reading, in my opinion; so much depends on the world the author builds. Do I understand it? Can I picture it? Is it a place I want to stay for an entire book (or book series?).
What I need to say, the thoughts that sent me to my keyboard (the aforementioned tall Daniel didn't send me to my keyboard) pertain to two of the best fantasy authors, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Yes, Lewis, while he is known for his Christian apologetics, also wrote many works classified as fantasy. In fact, his beloved Narnia series is fantasy. How do I know? Well the children walk through a wardrobe and discover a new, magical world. Harry Potter is fantasy. Percy Jackson is fantasy. There are elements of fantasy in the Twilight novels as well as in another of my favorites, the Outlander series. Why can all of these be classified as fantasy? Because you must set aside what you know about reality in order to read and enjoy them. Things happen that simply cannot actually happen.
Tolkien and Lewis were friends and colleagues with much in common. They both taught literature at the collegiate level, and they both had an interest in writing fantasy. Tolkien of course is best known for his Lord of the Rings series. What they did not have in common for some time was a belief in a good, powerful, saving God. Lewis walked away from his experiences during the first world war and could not believe in the Christian God to whom he'd been exposed as a youth. This obviously bothered Tolkien, a devout Christian. I believe that while the Lord of the Rings novels are excellent and contribute much to the canon of British literature, Tolkien's greatest legacy is his persistence with his friend, Lewis, whom he did convert to Christianity. But Lewis was a wise man, an academic, one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, in my opinion, and it took his equal, a man who could meet him mind for mind, to win Lewis to Christ, and the way Tolkien did it is noteworthy, and this brings me back to the fantasy genre.
Tolkien explained to Lewis, fantasy writer to fantasy writer, that the reason they were driven to write fantastical stories featuring other-worldly creatures, stories with villains and heroes and trials and triumphs, and the reason people read and are mesmerized by these stories, is because there are threads of the truth in these stories, threads of the story of which we are all a part, of which Tolkien was and is a part, of which Lewis was and is a part. Think about it. Two of the aforementioned series, Twilight and the Outlander series, both take liberties with the concept of time and with mortality. Twilight's infamous male protagonist is a vampire named Edward who is, like all vampires, undead. What does this mean? It means he was born in the early 1900s but frozen as a vampire at the age of seventeen. Outlander's protagonist is a nurse who falls through time; she steps through a standing stone shortly after WWII and finds herself in the year 1743.
Stay with me. Harry Potter is about the interplay between the known world populated by Muggles and the world of magic and wizards Harry learns about at Hogwarts over the course of his seven-year education there. Percy Jackson is about young people who are half-human, half-god, and it was learning this recently that sent me down the path that led to these thoughts. What do these fantasy series have to do with Lewis's conversion? They, as does most fantasy, contain echoes of truth, truths humans instinctively know even if they don't consciously always realize it or want to admit it:
Jesus was both God and man. He had a human mother and a Heavenly father. Sound familiar?
God is outside time. He is not subject to time, and He defeated the enemy, Death, once and for all. He was both mortal and immortal, and guess who else is both mortal and immortal? I am. You are. Tolkien is. Lewis is. They are dead, but they are not gone forever. I love that thought. I hope to meet Lewis in Heaven one day; I hope to thank Tolkien for converting him.
Humans live in a world of the seen and the known and the unseen and the unknown. Sound familiar? Lewis speaks to this in his book I will again teach in the spring, The Screwtape Letters. It is a treatise on temptation, on the forces at work on us daily, constantly, even though we cannot see them and may not fully understand them. It is Lewis begging humans to realize what the Bible tells us: we live in two worlds, a world of temporal, tangible things, and an eternal world alluded to in II Corinthians: "So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal." That is II Corinthians 4:8.
What is unseen is eternal. You could open a fantasy novel with that line.
I may ask my students to read this when we cover Lewis's The Screwtape Letters. Many of them don't love what they're asked to read for school, but they have read Harry Potter or Percy Jackson or some other series they may not even realize is classified as fantasy, and I want them to know several things: I want them to know it's fine, more than fine, to read fantasy. There are, I believe, and Tolkien believed, significant reasons why we write and read this genre. I want them to know it's important to pursue their friends, that one conversion can echo loudly; consider the conversions of Paul and of C.S. Lewis and the tome of letters and literature they penned after their respective conversions. I want them to know that while they are not going to step through a standing stone and find Jamie Frasier, and while they are not going to receive a letter to Hogwarts, and while they are not going to meet and date a gorgeous vampire, they are part of an equally epic story that began with world building, climaxed when the hero, a human man and also God, was crucified and then defied death, and will conclude when the hero, who is not subject to Death or Time, returns to triumph over both; the story will end then, and it will also begin then. Time will cease, and eternity will begin.
Tolkien made the argument that humans are drawn to fantasy because it, while fiction, loudly echoes eternal truths about the story of which we are all a part. He was right, and he is still right, and it is at this time of year we celebrate one of the most poignant moments in the story, the moment God became flesh and took the form of a man; the Creator became the creation in order to save His creation. It seems too good to be true because it is too good to be true, but it is true. We write stories and read stories that echo divine truths because these truths are written on our hearts even before we understand enough to read and decipher them; it is using fantasy to communicate reality. That is a summary of what Tolkien explained to Lewis, and with that explanation Lewis's worlds, his academic world, his life as a writer, and his spiritual world where he'd fought and fought against the idea of God, collided and made sense.
I pray you've had a Merry Christmas. I don't blog as often as I once did, but I do still love this space where I can write freely when the need arises. I will not abandon it completely, that is not my plan, and at some point next year I will return with a life update regarding the children's increasing height, books I've read that are worth discussing, and my desire to return to Scotland.
AZ
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