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 exper...