Are We Old Enough to Read Fairy Tales?

When did you stop reading fairy tales? Were you eight…ten…twelve? Maybe you’ve read a fairy tale to a child as an adult and actually been caught up in the story–wanting to push back bedtime and find out what happens next. Could it be that fairy tales are not something to outgrow?

During a recent radio interview, folklorist Maria Tarta said fairy tales are making a comeback for adults. She points to television shows like Grimm, Game of Thrones, and True Blood and notes how they weave fairy tale themes into their stories. She says, “It’s great that today [fairy tales have] made a comeback. We’re recognizing that these stories are not just the domain of childhood.”

Maybe the idea of fairy tales for adults isn’t all that new.  In dedicating The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to Lucy Barfield, C. S. Lewis said, “I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

It seems to me that, unfortunately, Christians—at least many contemporary American Christians—tend to shy away from these kinds of stories. Near the beginning of her interview I was struck to hear Tatar say, “I remember sitting through sermons as utter torture, and maybe that’s why I was attracted to fairy tales.”

It could be, though, that fairy tales are making a comeback, not only in popular culture, but in the church as well. We might be getting old enough, as Lewis hoped, to start reading fairy tales again.

[caption id="attachment_1378" align="alignright" width="300"] Bookmarks II
photo by L. Whittaker on Flickr and licensed by http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/legalcode[/caption]

One of my favorite books on preaching is Frederick Buechner’s Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. Buechner encourages preachers to tap into what Tatar calls the “storytelling instinct” that, she says, is evidenced by the fact that “from the get-go we need to communicate to tell things that makes sense of what happened.” Or, to use Joan Didion’s memorable statement, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

Rachel Marie Stone, a writer for Christianity Today, observes that fantasy literature might be a means to create openness to the message of the gospel. She quotes anthropologist Tanya Luhrman as saying, “I myself think that a capacity for imagination improves someone’s capacity to experience God intimately, and I think there’s evidence for this.” Then, writing about well-known atheist Richard Dawkins’ recent criticism of fairy tales, she asks, “Does Dawkins reject fairy tales because he rejects God, or is it the other way around?”

C. S. Lewis was one who told fairy tales himself, and was, in fact, led to Christ through the concept of fairy tale and myth. In his biography of J. R. R. Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter relates a discussion between Tolkien and Lewis about the Christian story as “true myth.” In the discussion Tolkien said, “Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic ‘progress’ leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.” Lewis responded to this by saying, “You mean that the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth that works on us in the same way as the others, but a myth that really happened? In that case, I begin to understand.”

After coming to faith, Lewis continued to understand and communicate—especially through the Chronicles of Narnia and the Space Trilogy—the Christian faith in terms of story, myth, and even fairy-tale. He wrote a famous essay titled “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said,” in which he explains that, as a child, he had a hard time feeling “what one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ.” In light of that, he asked himself, “Supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency?”

In Francis Spufford’s recent book Unapologetic, after surveying the traditional defenses (or apologies) of God’s existence in the midst of our world full of evil, he concludes that none of them are ultimately convincing. He goes on to say, however, “We don’t have an argument that solves the problem of the cruel world, but we have a story.” For those who might be nervous about conceiving of the gospel as story because it might call its historicity into question, Spufford is quick to say, “A story is not the same thing as a lie.”

This calls to mind another great quote from Tolkien on the Gospels and fairy tales. He writes, “Of course I do not mean that the Gospels tell what is only a fairy-story; but I do mean very strongly that they do tell a fairy-story: the greatest. Man the story-teller would have to be redeemed in a manner consonant with his nature: by a moving story.”

Wesley Hill, a New Testament professor at Trinity School for Ministry, observes that much contemporary New Testament scholarship, and specifically that of N.T. Wright, seeks to read the Bible in terms of a grand story “whose major buzzwords [are] ‘story,’ ‘narrative,’ and the associated terms of literary analysis.”

Hill shares that after an in-depth study of Wright soon after re-reading The Lord of the Rings, he was beginning to read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for the first time. “Having loved the dramatic sweep of Tolkien’s narrative, and having caught a glimpse of a derivative (but no less delightful) arc in Rowling’s tales,” he writes, “I was primed to embrace a biblical theology like Wright’s.”

Earlier this year Hill picked up Harry Potter again, but this time, rather than N. T. Wright’s paradigm ringing in his ears, it was the words of mid-20th century German scholar Ernst Käsemann. “According to Käsemann,” Hill writes, “the problem with a scheme like Wright’s, in which a promise-making God meets a covenant-keeping people, is that it can downplay, or even sideline altogether, the moments of sharp discontinuity, the moments of slippage and rupture, in which divine fidelity encounters only human failure and disobedience.”

Interestingly enough, though, Käsemann’s criticisms didn’t cause Hill to reject the “Fairy Stories” of Tolkien and Rowling as somehow incongruent with the overarching narrative of scripture. Rather, “with Käsemann’s voice in my ear, I am noticing more narratological chaos, bewilderment, and defeat in Rowling’s books than I saw before.”

Fairy tales, then, have the capacity to prepare one to receive the overarching continuity of the biblical story, and yet also caution against adopting a view of slow, steady progress toward the “renewal of all things.”

Good fairy tales have what Tolkien called “eucatastrophe,” which he defined as “the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears.” So when we hear the stone table crack, see Gollum falling into fire of Mt. Doom with the ring, or Harry jumping from Hagrid’s arms, we’re somehow prepared to hear—or hear again—the story of the first Easter, the true myth from which we draw true life.

Rachel Marie Stone concludes her piece with the declaration, echoing the famous words from Joshua 24:15, “As for me and my house, I pray we’ll enjoy a God who comes to us in story, who invites us to fall awake into a dream that is more real than waking.” Amen.