In the beginning of his essay “On Fairy-Stories”, Tolkien speaks about the popular view of myth, and follows with his own belief. On first reading this essay, I was stupefied; never before in my life had I been exposed to such arguments explaining the importance of fairy stories. At one point in the essay, Tolkien remarks, “Faerie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants or dragons” (42). This particular quote struck a chord with me because if I had to define what a fairy story previous to reading the words of Lewis and Tolkien throughout the semester, this is exactly what I would have defined one as.
Lewis and Tolkien, in a sense, brought fairy stories alive in my eyes. I always thought of them as stories for children, but even that belief was shaken. Tokien believed that myth helped the reader get a glimpse of the primary world and Lewis claimed that it helped people comprehend the incomprehensible. As Lewis points out in “Myth Became Fact”, “What flows to you from the myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), and, therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level”. Throughout the course of this semester, my view on mythology, poetry, and all arts has changed to be more like Lewis and Tolkien’s; a change that has altered my view of the world in a positive way.
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