ABSTRACT
C.S. Lewis once wrote that “the value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich signicance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity … by dipping them in myth we see them more clearly.”1 Patricia Meyer Spacks, writing of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, declared that it “demonstrates how even a framework of fantasy can provide a context for the exploration of serious concerns, how moral energy can illuminate farfetched ction, how a tale of other worlds than ours can incorporate and be enriched by a complex ethical structure.”2 And J.R.R. Tolkien himself defended fantasy in the famous essay “On Fairy-Stories,” as “a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved), the most potent.”3 Fantasy for Tolkien is “founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun”; it allows us to then imagine them differently, to seek recovery and consolation.4 As a window into such dual truths of recognition and imagination, fantasy is a genre born out of what Tolkien calls the “Cauldron of Story,” where the great gures of myth and history are boiled for a long time together, until they emerge in the forms the new age requires of them-as Verlyn Flieger says, “A modern use of these motifs reafrms their value as a vital part of literature in an age when only scholars and children (and too few of those) read the story of King Arthur, or of Jack the Giant-Killer, or the adventures of Sigurd dragon-slayer.”5
