Tolkien and Lewis on Fantasy and Magic

This is something that I put together years ago for an online magazine that I used to write for called "Ink and Fairyfust." And I just recently rediscovered it while I was cleaning out a lot of old docs in my Google Docs. Since it is NaNoWriMo now I figured it was a good time to share it.

Photo by Yeshi Kangrang on Unsplash

“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?...If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!” ― J.R.R. Tolkien

“At all ages, if [fantasy and myth] is used well by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. But at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of 'commenting on life,' can add to it.” ― C.S. Lewis

In his in-depth analysis of the literary use of magic in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, Steven D. Greydanus said “the magic of Tolkien and Lewis in its particulars bears little or no outward resemblance to actual occult practices in the real world, instead consisting of obviously imaginary and fantastic phenomena that offer no appreciable risk of direct imitative behavior.”

Later on in the analysis, Greydanus says, “Lewis, in particular, took pains, as I will show, to avoid even the appearance of condoning any sort of magical study or practice in the real world. His fictional worlds have been consciously and deliberately shaped in such a way as to make quite clear that the pursuit of magic, while it might be imagined to be a safe and lawful occupation for someone like Coriakin in the fairy-land world of Narnia, is, in fact, dangerous and wrong for human beings in and of our world — something attempted by nasty personages like Digory’s Uncle Andrew. Tolkien, too, created his imaginary world in such a way that the imaginative leap from the magic of Middle-earth to real-world occult practices would be difficult if not impossible for readers to make. The whole shape of his worldview as a Catholic Christian and of his imaginative life was antithetical to the “deceits of the enemy”; and the very quality of the magic of his world, as well as of the imaginary situations in which it might be lawfully pursued and exercised, was very much removed from, and opposed to, the forbidden practices of real-world occultists and practitioners of magic, and even from objectionable fantasy magic.”

As you can see from what I have taken from Steven Greydanus’ analysis of the literary use of magic in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, both authors took great pains to not use any sort of occult magic in their writings. In the quotes by Tolkien and Lewis that I have included you can see, in their own words, what they thought about fantasy and magic. And in the 7 points, from Steven Greydanus’ analysis of the literary use of magic in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, you can see more of how Tolkien and Lewis thought of fantasy and magic

“The incalculable winds of fantasy and music and poetry, the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or the sight of a horizon, are always blowing evil’s whole structure away.” ― C.S. Lewis

“The Gospels contain a fairy-story or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels- peculiarly artistic, beautiful and moving: ‘mythical’ in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation have been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy.” - J.R.R Tolkien

1. Tolkien and Lewis confine the pursuit of magic as a safe and lawful occupation to wholly imaginary realms, with place-names like Middle-earth and Narnia — worlds that cannot be located either in time or in space with reference to our own world, and which stand outside Judeo-Christian salvation history and divine revelation.
2. Reinforcing the above point, in Tolkien’s and Lewis’s fictional worlds where magic is practiced, the existence of magic is an openly known reality of which the inhabitants of those worlds are as aware as we are of rocket science — even if most of them might have as little chance of actually encountering magic as most of us would of riding in the space shuttle.
3. Tolkien and Lewis confine the pursuit of magic as a safe and lawful occupation to characters who are numbered among the supporting cast, not the protagonists with whom the reader is primarily to identify.
4. Reinforcing the above point, Tolkien and Lewis include cautionary threads in which exposure to magical forces proves to be a corrupting influence on their protagonists: Frodo is almost consumed by the great Ring; Lucy and Digory succumb to temptation and use magic in ways they shouldn’t.
5. Tolkien and Lewis confine the pursuit of magic as a safe and lawful occupation to characters who are not, in fact, human beings (for although Gandalf and Coriakin are human in appearance, we are in fact told that they are, respectively, a semi-incarnate angelic being and an earthbound star.)
6. Reinforcing the above point, Tolkien and Lewis emphasize the pursuit of magic as the safe and lawful occupation of characters who, in appearance, stature, behavior, and role, embody a certain wizard archetype — white-haired old men with beards and robes and staffs, mysterious, remote, unapproachable, who serve to guide and mentor the heroes.

Finally, Tolkien and Lewis devote no narrative space to the process by which their magical specialists acquire their magical prowess. Although study may be assumed as part of the back story, the wizard appears as a finished product with powers in place and the reader is not in the least encouraged to think about or dwell on the process of acquiring prowess in magic.