The function of fairy tales (Faery) or fantasy according to Lewis

[Rivendell_librarian]

In a sense a child does not long for fairy land as a boy longs to be the hero of the first eleven. Does anyone suppose that he really and prosaically longs for all the dangers and discomforts of a fairy tale?—really wants dragons in contemporary England? It is not so. It would be much truer to say that fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted. This is a special kind of longing. from Lewis's Of This and Other Worlds

I came across this quote while reading Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of Truth: Tales of Pullman, Tolkien, MacDonald and Hoffmann and thought it worth sharing - a nobler motive than making money.

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

Thanks, RL, I'd not seen that. Tolkien shared much of that view, though I suspect, on the evidence in "On Fairy Stories" that he would distance himself from the special connection with the "child", which he considered an accident of history.

There are, of course, many motives for writing, as in any creative art; Dickens certainly didn't want his children ever to have to work in a blacking factory, as he did, but he saw himself as a social reformer; when Joseph Conrad was once asked why he wrote his stories, he answered simply "So I can stop thinking about them".

 

[Rivendell_librarian]

Conrad and Dickens - what giants of literature!

I was listening to A Good Read on BBC Radio 4 recently and Carlo Rivelli said that he didn't understand or like modern literature and preferred literature from a previous era. His choice was Dostoyesky's White Nights as opposed to Nick Hornby's choice To Throw Away Unopened. I must admit I'm with Rivelli.

Lewis had a talent for conjuring up images in his writing and investing them with deeper meaning, as had Tolkien of course.