The Telos of Fantasy
Myth and the Redeemed Imagination
This essay was originally drafted to analyze and compare the views of Fantasy held by Tolkien, Lewis, and Chesterton. However, as I began to write it, it became something much more meditative. This short essay articulates the end to which I think Fantasy strives. It does so from a Christian framework with Christian presuppositions.
Story is, I think, the first occupation of Man. Man, made in the Image of God, partook (insofar as he was able) of God’s creative nature and presided over the bestowal of identity within creation. Our grandfather named the beasts. He did not give the lion its fangs nor its claws, but he did give it its name. He recognized its identity.
Any identity within time is something revelatory; it is something unfolding through its inherent nature and characteristics. The story wherein these things would be revealed was not completed within Eden, but begun. Their fulfillment became something anticipated. The lion was not only something known but something which would be more fully known, and its name was the first word of the story in which that would be told. We speak names over creation as a picture of the Eternal Word who creatively sustains all things through His own expression. Our verbalizations of creation, our story-telling, is the first exercise of our image-bearing role.
In transgression, Man violated his identity, exiling himself from unity with creation and diminishing his dominion over it. Even so, we never forgot our original role. We continued to hear Nature’s silent song through which she sings the glories of her Creator. And so, we continued to name. We named the roaring strikes of thunder and the turbulent swells in the open waters. We named the rich soil with its plentiful harvests, as well as the scorch of the west winds. We never stopped telling our stories: our explanations of the reality around us and our participations in the songs which Nature sings.
We sang of Heracles, a son of a god who tamed the wilderness for the thriving of humanity; Pandora, through whose curiosity the evils of the world emerged; Orpheus, who descended into Hades to retrieve his lost bride; Odin, who sacrificed himself on a tree for the pursuit of wisdom. These songs are interpretations of the world in which man lives. They’re Nature’s voice translated. They’re participations with Divinity’s revelation, imperfect though they may be.
We, broken, feel a wound. And though we cannot yet know what it is to be whole, we can trace the crevices of the privation within ourselves. We explore its emptiness and learn something of its shape. Though the shape we find is only a crude estimation, it nonetheless resembles the image of Truth from whose presence we have been estranged. Myth is a shape cast by shadow.
Yet, the form of our privation has now been made known to us on a cross in Judea, and we can see the place to which all the expectations of myth pointed. There were still monsters after Heracles. Odin remained powerless to stop Ragnarok. Orpheus failed in his quest to save his bride. Myth traced the wound, but it could not heal it. Yet, Christ does. As C.S. Lewis wrote in a letter to Arthur Greeves on October 18th, 1931:
...[the] story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.1
Christianity is myth fulfilled. It does not abolish mythic imagination, but validates it. Myth has not been abrogated, but baptized by Scripture’s clarifying word. The things to which it points are no longer guessed at, but known. And so, we continue in that ancient pursuit of Adam and our ancient ancestors by inventing new songs and participating with the voice of Nature, as we join in singing the glories of God.
This baptized pursuit finds its form in Fantasy. Fantasy is the form of story that feels the ache within the heart, looks at the world, and asks: What if it were ordered rightly? What if the lamb could lie with the lion? What if the dead could live again?
It embodies what is invisible, gives voice to what is silent, and language to what is inarticulate. It sensitizes us to the underpinning logic of the world so we might converse with dragons. It is rehearsal for already-won beatitude, where our lost blessings are reclaimed. It pulls back the veil from our still-dimmed eyes and reveals the creative Truth governing all things.
This is Fantasy’s telos, the goal to which its form was made. When it rejects its goal, it in essence rejects itself. It becomes something deprived.
Fantasy, rightly done, is sub-incarnation — eternal truth clothed in an imaginative image. It exists so we might look at it and leave with faces shining.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read! The above is my philosophy of writing, the end to which I’m striving. If you’d like to support me in my or endeavors or see how my career unfolds, please consider subscribing to my Substack.
About the Author
Kyle Metz is an aspiring fantasy novelist. He is building his own publishing house and will be releasing an illustrated edition of At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald this summer. If you’d like to follow what he’s doing, you can follow him on X at @_kylemetz or subscribe to his Substack A Story Told.
Hooper, W. (1966). Preface. Lewis, C.S., On Stories and Other Essays on Literature (XVII). HarperCollins.