children have since proved extremely popular. Narnia is full of the romance, parable
and folklore Lewis had harvested. Such genres are found in every literature, but
advanced opinion used to neglect them as fairy stories suitable for children, think-
ing of realist novels as serious and ‘adult’. In practice, however, childhood reading is
the only access to imaginative literature which many people get. To children, adult
experience is not real, and, to some children, stories are very real indeed. Most writ-
ers seem to have become interested in writing through the books they first read in
their childhood, which influences their ideas of literature to a greater extent than is
usually realized. This certainly seems to have been the case with C. S. Lewis and with
J. K. Rowling (see page 432).
Advanced opinion is now divided over the merits of fairy stories. Structuralist
theory seized upon the professional scholarship of folk-tales, or rather on its
reduction of the world’s stock of stories to a few basic types; post-structuralism
enabled the allegorization of surface meaning to uncover allegedly permanent
elements of the human psyche. Whatever the value of the more extreme applica-
tions of these radical theories, one effect of the explosion in general critical
thinking in the late 20th century, now subsided, has been to weaken any
commonsense assumption that literature is a transparent window through which a
slice of life is simply observed. The idea that naturalist, or realist, fictions do reli-
ably reproduce the material, or the real, structure of the life of the world is no
longer self-evident. It is now common to speak of writers as ‘constructing’ a real-
ity, though this approach too needs to be justified. A history of literature cannot go
further into this, but it follows from what has just been sketched that a realist novel
is not, simply by virtue of its realism, a truer representation of life than a fairy
story. Some theorists, especially feminist theorists, are keen on the value of fairy
stor ies,which, like myths, have the advantage and disadvantage that they are open
to endless reinterpretation.
Lewis’s Narnia books are briskly written for other people’s children. They are
formulaic and archaic in their school setting, but the fantasy world that is found
through the wardrobe is original and systematic. Its Christian allegory owes much
both to Spenser’s Fairie Queeneand to George Macdonald. MacDonald (1824–1905)
was the author ofPhantastes (1858),At the Back of the North Wind(1868) and other
fantasy nove ls for Victorian children. MacDonald encouraged Dodgson to publish
Alice in Wonderland, and he was an acknowledged formative influence on the fantasy
writing of G. K. Chesterton, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.
J. R. R. Tolkien
The above factors may help to explain why in the 1950s a worldwide popularity
came to the Oxford philologist J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) for his epic trilogy The
Lord of the Rings. There were no better scholars of Old English than Tolkien, who
wrote the single most influential essay on Beowulf,though he published little other
scholarly work.The Lord of the Rings, a heroic romance of grand mythological scope,
drawing on Beowulfand northern legend, symbolic rather than (as Narnia is) para-
ble-like. (Parables are small allegorical stories with meanings which are definable,
whereas the symbolic mode is more suggestive and less definable.) Tolkien’s cycle
grew out of his early romance The Hobbit, written for his children. He inscribed his
wife’ s gravestone in Elvish, an invented language used in The Lord of the Rings. There
is a considerable imaginative depth to The Lord of the Rings,helped by its success in
establishing a northern landscape and some credible characters, whose loyalties are
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