Comments on: C.S. Lewis on The Fairytale

By: grace pettis

grace pettis — Tue, 04 May 2010 09:15:59 +0000

Lewis is so great. On the creative process: “This ferment leads to nothing unless it is accompanied with the longing for a Form.”

And then, “This nags him all day long and gets in the way of his work and his sleep and his meals. It’s like being in love.”

What a striking metaphor. Love being this uncontrollable emotional impulse that seeks to become physically manifested and bound by rules. I just got this great image of a boy sitting next to a girl in a movie theater, and just aching to hold her hand. Lewis is brilliant- that is so what creation is.

It must be what God felt at the beginning of time, when all that love was “accompanied with the longing for a Form.”

I just loved this essay.

Here’s another good one: “The Ethics of Elfland” by G.K. Chesterton. Also, Chesterton’s “Orthodoxy” touches on all this.

Good stuff. Thanks.

By: Kitty Osdoba

Kitty Osdoba — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 05:09:02 +0000

Praise God for all He is doing. Thanks!

By: Dean Batali

Dean Batali — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 21:31:22 +0000

More along these lines was written about by Tolkien in his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” which was published in “The Tolkien Reader.” The epilogue of that essay contains some of Tolkien’s most evangelistic statements about the Gospels (that “the birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe [a word Tolkien coined] of Man’s history.” It was in this essay that Tolkien wrote that the true beauty of the Gospel story is that it is TRUE:

“Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men — and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused.”

This is an extension of what Tolkien had argued to Lewis back in 1931, when Tolkien convinced Lewis that Christianity was “the true myth.”