From Homer to Harry Potter: A Handbook on Myth and Fantasy

From

HOMER

TO

HARRY

POTTER

From

HOMER

TO

HARRY

POTTER

A HANDBOOK on MYTH and FANTASY

MATTHEW T. DICKERSON & DAVID O’HARA

© 2006 by Matthew T. Dickerson and David O’Hara

Published by Brazos Press

a division of Baker Publishing Group

P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.brazospress.com

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dickerson, Matthew T., 1963-

From Homer to Harry Potter : a handbook on myth and fantasy / Matthew Dickerson and

David O’Hara.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 1-58743-133-5 (pbk.)

1. Fantasy literature—History and criticism. I. O’Hara, David, 1969– II. Title.

PN56.F34D53 2006

809.915—dc22

2005031195

To our children (in order of birth): Thomas Dickerson, Anastasia O’Hara, Mark Dickerson, Michael O’Hara, Peter Dickerson, and Matthew O’Hara, in hopes that they will never make the mistake of thinking that fairy tales are only for the young.

And to our fantastic wives who continue to enchant us.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Sources

Citations from C. S. Lewis

Citations from J. R. R. Tolkien

Citations from Other Authors: Story

Citations from Other Authors: Essay and Criticism

Authors’ Note

Part 1 The Literature of Faërie and the Roots of Modern Fantasy

1. Introduction: From Cosmogony to Fairy Tale

What Is Myth?

Myth and Truth

2. Stories at the Boundaries

Three Faces of Myth and Faërie

Defining Myth and Fantasy?

Spells and The Spell: Enchantment and Fantasy

Chasing Down Allegories?

Mapping Our Territory (and Its Perils)

3. Biblical Myth and Story

Three Ways the Bible Functions as Myth

The Bible as a Whole: Muthos of Worlds and Wars

God and Satan

Images of Heaven and Hell

Genesis and the Flood

Job, the Great Biblical Myth

The Gospels: True Historic Myth

The Bible as the Grand Myth

4. Homeric Myth (and the Epic Fantasy)

Homer’s Iliad

Homer’s Odyssey

Myth and History in the Ancient World

Myth and National Identity

Ancient Myth, Religion, and Morality

Ancient Myth and the Rise of Science and Philosophy

Ancient Myth and Early Christianity

5. Beowulf to Arthur: Medieval Legend and Romance

The Cauldron of Story and Beowulf in Tolkien

The Prose Edda and Scandinavian Myth

The Bones of Beowulf

Arthurian Legend

6. Nineteenth-Century Fairy Tale and Fantasy: The Brothers

Grimm and George MacDonald

Fairy Tales and the Nineteenth Century

The Fairy Tale Collections of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

Violence, Virtue, and Grace

The Fairy Tales of George MacDonald (and Their Influence on Tolkien and Lewis)

The Significance of MacDonald

Mystery, Holiness, and The Golden Key

Part 2 Some Modern Works of Fantasy

7. Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea Trilogy and Balance as the Highest

Good

The Power of Myth and Legend, and the Stories within the Stories

Names, Words, and Language

Power and Balance

Good and Evil

Life, Death, and Meaning

8. The Darkness of Philip Pullman’s Material

Problems with Prose and Plot

The Subtle Knife and the Power of Death

Coming of Age?

A Sermon in Thin Disguise

Confusion of Science Fiction and Fantasy

Truth in Story

9. Grace across the Whole of Faërie: Walter Wangerin Jr. and The

Book of the Dun Cow

The Book of the Dun Cow as Fairy Tale

The Book of the Dun Cow as Fantasy and Myth

Three Genres, Four Evils

Eucatastrophe and Grace

10. Harry Potter: Saint or Serpent?

Witches and Magic in Christian Literature

The Purpose of Magic

The Source of Magic

Uses of Magic in Harry Potter

J. K. Rowling and Objective Morality

11. Once upon a Time . . . The End

Some Summary Questions

Why We Read from Faërie: A Few Final Thoughts

Appendices and Indices

For Further Reading

I. Recommended Translations

II. Selected Modern Retellings

III. A Very Short List of Recommended Commentary on J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There’s something funny about this kind of book, where we get to tell the stories of other stories. Obviously, we could not have written this one if we had not been heirs to a long tradition of those who have created, preserved, and re-told great tales. More important, we owe a debt to those who not only thought the stories were important but who also taught us to think about them. In both categories, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien have been our unparalleled masters. We also owe personal gratitude to Thomas Howard, Peter Kreeft, Tom Shippey, Robert Siegel, and Walter Wangerin Jr.

We are also thankful to the many students and colleagues at Middle-bury College in Vermont, The Pennsylvania State University, and Augus-tana College of South Dakota, who have read and discussed the stories with us and helped to sharpen our thinking.

Finally, we would be remiss if we failed to acknowledge our debts to our teachers over the years, who introduced us to the stories, inspired our continued reading, and aided our understanding: the late Professor Robert T. Farrell (1939–2003) taught Matthew Dickerson Old English, helped him translate Beowulf, and gave him his first opportunity to teach a course on Tolkien at Cornell University. Eve Adler, who died in 2004, taught at Middlebury College for a quarter century beginning in 1977. Dave witnessed her excellence as a teacher in 1990–1991 when she taught him to read Greek and to sing Homer. None could call Greek a dead language while she taught it. Now that Dave teaches college Greek he has seen with new eyes how well she loved her craft and her students alike. She was a model of scholarship and pedagogy for the faculty at Middlebury College, including Matthew Dickerson who started teaching there in 1989. Greg Vigne taught Dave the importance of loving God with one’s mind. Greg’s love of the best stories continues to inspire his students. Matthew Davis at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, gave Dave an example of what St. Augustine would consider the piety of asking the right questions. Douglas R. Anderson patiently guided Dave through his dissertation at The Pennsylvania State University, and continues to show his students the best of Achilles and the best of Odysseus, while embodying none of their faults. These teachers may not have said or thought the same things we have written in this book, and so we cannot blame them for our mistakes, but we can thank them for spurring our thought.

We are grateful to Rodney Clapp and Rebecca Cooper and the entire team of editors and artists at Brazos Press for their help and hard work, and the opportunity to collaborate with them and with each other on this book.

Matthew Dickerson and Dave O’Hara

October 16, 2005

ABBREVIATIONS

FOR FREQUENTLY CITED SOURCES

For frequently cited sources, we use the abbreviations given below. Since there are so many editions (with different page numberings) of The Lord of the Rings, we follow T. A. Shippey’s convention and give only the book number (in uppercase Roman numerals) and chapter number (in lowercase Roman numerals); e.g., the reference IV/iii would be to the third chapter of the fourth book (the chapter titled The Black Gate Is Closed, found in The Two Towers). Note that The Fellowship of the Ring contains books I and II, and The Two Towers contains books III and IV, and Return of the King contains V and VI. Similarly, for references to the seven books in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, we cite the abbreviation for the book name along with a chapter number (in lowercase Roman numerals) as in Nephew/xiv for the fourteenth chapter of The Magician’s Nephew.

Citations from C. S. Lewis

Citations from J. R. R. Tolkien

Citations from Other Authors: Story

Citations from Other Authors: Essay and Criticism

AUTHORS’ NOTE

This book spans the literature of fantasy over many centuries. The table of contents shows chapters on ancient biblical narrative, Greek myth, medieval legend and romance, and fairy tales from the nineteenth century and earlier. Given a limitless amount of time (both ours and our readers), it would be easy to expand the scope of the book even further to include such examples of fantasy, fairy tale, and myth as Norse mythology, Native American myths, African fairy tales, etc. Indeed, the more we worked on this book, the more we wanted to include (or saw that we ought to include).

When we originally conceived of this project, however, our purpose was only to provide a guide to modern fantasy literature. In particular, our initial goals were: (1) to suggest a few general principles for how to think about and understand the genre of fantasy; and (2) to illustrate those principles by exploring some specific characteristic examples (i.e., selected works of a few well-known fantasy authors of the last few decades). This was motivated in part by a comment from author Tom Shippey, who at the start of his book J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century writes: The dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic. Despite the truth of Shippey’s words, not enough critical attention has yet been given to fantasy as a literary genre.1 We set out to write a book that would explore this dominant literary mode as a mode.

However, modern fantasy literature, especially the deeper and better kind, is steeped and rooted in ancient myth, medieval heroic legend, and fairy tale. To put it differently, modern fantasy—by which we mean the fantasy literature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, or more specifically fantasy in the post–J. R. R.Tolkien era—is in many ways not so modern! If we follow the thinking of J. R. R. Tolkien—and we do—myth, fairy tale, romance,2 and fantasy can and ought to be understood as different aspects of the same category: what Tolkien calls Faërie. Thus, any exploration of modern fantasy should by rights begin with a study of its predecessors. For this reason, not long after the book was conceived, its scope grew considerably to encompass this broader category of Faërie3 —to provide a background and set of principles that would give the reader not only a guide to modern fantasy, but also an introduction to understanding myth and heroic legend, medieval romance, and fairy story, especially in light of their importance and influence on their modern literary relative. Indeed, accomplishing the former goal would not be possible without some success at the latter.

Of course, the study of myth is an ambitious goal, even if we focus only on a subset of Western myth. Much has been written on the subject: reference guides, adaptations, psychoanalytic explorations of symbolism in myth, etc.4 For the serious student, the brevity of our chapters will be woefully inadequate. The same goes for medieval romance and fairy tale. There is a variety of literature on these subjects. We seek to provide only an introduction and some background that will enable readers to understand the importance and influence of an important part of our literary culture.

Another point should also be made. Though there has been some very helpful commentary and criticism of myth and fairy story, much of what has been written is either reference guides that help the reader find some myth they once read, or books that intend to dismiss myth as outdated, unimportant, dangerous, or merely symbolic. We’d like to offer an alternative point of view, though not a novel one:5 myth and fantasy are rich and important elements in our literary lives and moral imaginations, and offer profound insights into truth.

Of course as soon as we mention exploring characteristic examples of modern fantasy, every reader will wonder which books and authors we have in mind as characteristic. One of the things we realized from the start was that whatever authors we choose to include would also (by virtue of space limitations) result in other authors being omitted. And probably every reader of this book will feel that some vitally important author has been unfairly left out. We make no claim that the authors we’ve included are either the best or even the most important modern authors of fantasy literature. Our decisions have partly to do with taste and familiarity; we are unapologetic about the fact that we know and like some authors better than others. But the most important consideration was to find a broad range of characteristic works that will best illustrate the principles we present. Indeed, our goal is to help our readers to become more discerning and understanding readers, to help them to learn to understand fantasy literature, and not to tell them what to think about specific works. To that end, it is far better that we omit important authors so that our readers can apply the principles on their own.

There are two exceptions to this approach. Those glancing through our table of contents will notice no chapters on J. R. R. Tolkien or C. S. Lewis, arguably the two most important authors of fantasy in the twentieth century, and who will likely remain the most influential fantasy authors through the twenty-first. The reason for this omission is twofold. First, unlike with the genre of fantasy in general and most of the authors we explore in particular, there is already an abundance (some would say even a glut) of critical work on these two authors. Some of this work is very fine scholarship, much of it is accessible to a general audience, and some of it even achieves both of these qualities. (Readers seeking to explore more thoroughly the writings of Tolkien and Lewis are encouraged to see the recommended reading list at the back of this book.) Second, and more centrally, the ideas of Tolkien and Lewis permeate our writing. One of the things we have done in this book is taken critical ideas about myth and fairy stories scattered throughout the writings of these two luminaries, ordered and structured them in a single place, and then applied the ideas to a new body of literature that did not exist when they wrote, and that has come into existence largely as a result of their pioneering work. Put another way, we didn’t need a separate chapter on Lewis and Tolkien because the entire book bears their fingerprints.

1 . There is no shortage of books on some important fantasy authors (especially J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis), but there are very few book-length works that take modern fantasy seriously as a literary genre and address the issues of the roots and sources of the genre and how to understand and think about works of that genre as a whole (and not just one or two important authors).

2 . By romance we—and Tolkien—are using the term in a historical sense, referring broadly to medieval romance (especially what is known as Arthurian romance) and to the nineteenth-century romantic movement in literature, and not to the modern romance or romantic novel.

3 . The word Faërie comes from Fay-Ry, meaning: the realm of the Fay. The word Fay itself is an older word for fairy and refers to a broad range of magical or supernatural creatures of myth and folklore, including elves, dwarves, goblins, and the like. Thus, for example, the famed Morgan le Fay from Arthurian legend is literally Morgan the Fairy. Today there are several derivatives and variants of the word Fay. Throughout this book, we use the modern word fairy to refer to all Fay creatures, and fairy story to refer to the narrow genre of traditional fairy tales such as the nineteenth-century collections of the Brothers Grimm and Andrew Lang. We use the more archaic Faërie (sometimes written Faery) to refer both to the realm of the Fay and to the entire broad body of literature dealing with that realm (myth and fantasy as well as traditional fairy tale).

4 . At the end of the book, a suggested reading list is given for the reader interested in further study.

5 . In fact, the point of view we offer is very old indeed.

PART 1

THE LITERATURE

OF FAëRIE

AND THE ROOTS

OF MODERN FANTASY

1

INTRODUCTION: FROM COSMOGONY TO FAIRY TALE

The dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic.

Tom Shippey

In the foreword to his book J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, Tom Shippey makes a startling and important observation about the importance of fantastic literature to modern culture. Though Shippey rightly includes science fiction and horror along with fantasy as the Literature of the Fantastic, his own book focuses specifically on fantasy literature, which claims at least an equal share with science fiction as the dominant literary mode of the twentieth century. As one of the leading philologists of our time, and one who has served on the English faculty at Oxford, as the chair of English Language and Medieval Literature at Leeds, and currently as an English professor at St. Louis University, Shippey has strong credentials to make such a judgment. Whatever personal taste one may or may not have for fantasy literature, it is difficult to gainsay Shippey’s assertion. The literary genre of fantasy has blossomed in the twentieth century and continues to flourish into the twenty-first.

But what do we make of this genre? How should one read and understand a modern work of fantasy? Can works of fantasy really have anything important to say to us? Should we take it as a serious literary form, or just dismiss it as a passing (and perhaps embarrassing) trend?

In some ways, the answer to the first two of those questions is straightforward. The best way to understand a work of fantasy is simply to read it as story, and enjoy it as story. If we have anything to say in this book, it is this: don’t seek to reduce Story, especially that of Faërie, to mere moral platitudes or philosophical propositions. Fantasy doesn’t work propositionally; if it works at all, it works as story. Having said that, there is much that can be said about fantasy as story, and about understanding it in this context. For if there is an error in the one extreme of trying to reduce myth or fairy tale to a single, easily digestible platitude, moral, or allegorical meaning, there is danger in the other extreme of missing its meaning and significance altogether—of equating myth with falsehood, fantasy with escapism, and fairy tale with the nursery. Before saying anything about understanding either myth or fantasy, however, we should first address the task of clarifying both of these terms. Clarifying our understanding of what the literature of Faërie is will go a long way toward understanding what it does.

What Is Myth?

We might start by trying to define myth and fairy story. This is a more challenging endeavor than it may first appear. In his important essay On Fairy-Stories, J. R. R. Tolkien sets out to explain what a fairy story is. While he says many things that fairy stories are not—he excludes, for example, beast-fables, travelers’ tales, and anything explained away as mere dream—he provides no succinct definition of fairy story other than that "Most good ‘fairy-stories’ are about the adventures of men in the Perilous Realm [Faërie] or upon its shadowy marches" (Essay, 38). Even were this not qualified with most and good, this definition is not helpful until one understands something about "Faërie: the Perilous Realm itself, and the air that blows from that country (38). However, Tolkien immediately goes on to say, I will not attempt to define that, nor to describe it directly. It cannot be done. Faërie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible" (38). Thus, we are left at something of a loss in our search for a definition of fairy story.

In some ways, the lack of a definition for fairy tale is appropriate. The nineteenth-century romantic movement that brought about the resurgence of fairy tale (demonstrated by the broad success of nineteenth-century collectors and authors, including Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Andrew Lang, Hans Christian Andersen, and George MacDonald) was in many ways a response to (or reaction against) the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was the age of the encyclopedia, like those of d’Alembert, Diderot, and, later, Hegel. It was an age that wanted to write definitions and provide encyclopedic information—that is, to capture the whole truth of a thing rationally and scientifically. The fairy tale, by contrast, defied definition. It succeeded, in part, on the notion that there are things that must be known through the imagination and not merely through deductive arguments or empirical science. The great twentieth-century poet T. S. Eliot recognized this when he wrote his introduction to Charles Williams’s1 fantastic novel All Hallows Eve: What it is, essentially, that [Wiliams] had to say, comes near to defying definition. It was not simply a philosophy, a theology, or a set of ideas: it was primarily something imaginative (Eliot, xiii).

Likewise, many scholars have attempted to define myth, and while some have made keen insights into the value of myth to society and the understanding of various specific mythologies, it is difficult to find a single satisfactory and universally accepted definition. One popular modern dictionary defines myth as follows:2

myth n

1. a traditional story about heroes or supernatural beings, often explaining the origins of natural phenomena or aspects of human behavior

2. myths considered as a group or a type of story

3. a character, story, theme, or object that embodies a particular idea or aspect of a culture

4. somebody or something whose existence is or was widely believed in, but who is fictitious

5. a story that has a hidden meaning, especially one that is meant to teach a lesson

One can see that this definition is not especially helpful. Definition 2 is self-referential and thus only provides a definition of myth if one already knows what myths are. Definition 3 might also be true of any number of stories that are not mythical. A typical modernist novel, for example, embodies a particular idea or aspect of the culture in which it was written. Definition 4 is certainly common usage; as in the phrase urban myth. When somebody says That’s just a myth, they usually mean That’s not true. However definition 4 may be the furthest from what we as the authors mean by the word. Indeed, we will argue that myths may be fundamentally true, often so at many layers; the better the myth, the more true it is. Definition 5 is as unhelpful as definition 3. Myths usually have meaning, and may well teach a lesson, but so do many other types of stories, and the meaning of a myth is not necessarily any more or less hidden than that of any type of story.

Definition 1 comes only a little closer to what we mean. However, even this definition falls short. What does it mean that a myth often explains natural phenomena or aspects of human behavior? The writers of that definition probably had in mind the narrow sort of myths, often called nature myths and taught to elementary school children, that provide an explanation (commonly assumed to be fictional) of something like where thunder comes from, or why raccoons have masks, or how tigers got stripes, or why we have lunar eclipses. The schoolchildren may find the story fun (or funny), but they don’t in general accept the story’s explanation as real history. In On Fairy-Stories, Tolkien describes nature myths and responds to the common notion that they were the original myths from which later myths and fairy tales derived.

At one time it was a dominant view that all such matter [fairy-stories] was derived from nature-myths. The Olympians were personifications of the sun, of dawn, of night, and so on, and all the stories told about them were originally myths (allegories would have been a better word) of the greater elemental changes and processes of nature. Epic, heroic legend, saga, then localized these stories in real places and humanized them by attributing them to ancestral heroes, mightier than men and yet already men. And finally these legends, dwindling down, became folk-tales, Märchen, fairy-stories—nursery-tales.

That would seem to be the truth almost upside down. The nearer the so-called nature myth, or allegory, of the large processes of nature is to its supposed archetype, the less interesting it is, and indeed the less is it of a myth capable of throwing any illumination whatever on the world. (Essay, 49–50)

Tolkien here is not only denying the notion that nature-myths provide the source matter for fairy tale, but is going even further, suggesting that so-called nature-myth isn’t even real myth. He says it ought instead to be called allegory (a term that for him is usually derogatory). If we do include it as myth, it is a myth of a much lower kind, not at all capable of illuminating the world. The implication, of course, is that real myth is capable of throwing illumination on the world—a notion to which we shall return. In any case, this definition of myth usually makes myth out to be a story that is useful only in a prescientific culture, implying that we, in our scientific age, have outgrown myths. Thus, definition 1 leads back to definition 4 and the emphasis on fictitious, except perhaps that in the case of nature-myths the explanation isn’t even widely believed

(at least not any more). And whether the myth is believed or not, the suggestion that a myth’s main value and purpose is merely to explain something—or worse, that myths may be little more than disguised sermons— diminishes their real significance and has a similar flaw to that of definition 5.

Of course we shouldn’t be surprised that an off-the-shelf dictionary would have a less than satisfactory definition of such a complex idea. In On Fairy-Stories, Tolkien made the same complaint about the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The OED didn’t even have an entry for the combination fairy story except in the supplement, where the third definition (as with the above definition of