Deliverance by Myth
Because of my stubborn, Peter Pan, never-grow-up complex, I transitioned out of childhood later, and more reluctantly, than most. At thirteen, a vague shame overshadowed me when I pulled out my Barbies and sent them upon adventurous quests in the world I created for them, a world mapped on a sheet of computer paper, each country carefully delineated in pencil.
Yet for all my embarrassment, which I stubbornly denied, I couldn’t bear to part with childhood. Then I discovered The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien’s three-book fantasy. My first brush with the trilogy came when my parents watched Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring on their anniversary. By all accounts, my mother spent most of the movie gripping the edge of the couch in enthralled suspense while my father snored, his head tilted back against the cushions. My mother told me I would like the movie, but she insisted I read the books first. Then ensued a book fest during which my mother and I borrowed two copies of The Hobbit from the library so we wouldn’t have to fight over it. I remember both of us sprawled on my bed reading our separate copies.
By the time The Return of the King—the last of the films—came out later that year (December 2003), I was an avid fan. I was not alone in my obsession. On the opening day of The Return of the King, the movie brought in $34.1 million in the U.S. and $23.5 million internationally. These figures broke the first-day record for a December release, according to The New York Times. I’m happy to say I was part of that figure.
But as a fourteen-year-old, I gave little thought to box office tallies. For me, The Lord of the Rings had struck a deep and fundamental longing. Through its mythic world of magic and elves and hobbits, I saw something more, something that teased the edges of my brain, whispering of truths beyond the physical and the now. C. S. Lewis experienced something similar in his adolescence when he encountered Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods, a Wagner opera based on Norse mythology. In his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis describes the joy this work evoked in him as “the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing.”
Throughout history, people have been stirred by the mysterious workings of myth. Among the relics of the world’s first written language, archeologists found the first known epic, The Epic of Gilgamesh. About 4000 years ago, the Sumerians of Mesopotamia recorded the supernatural adventures of King Gilgamesh of Uruk, how he defied the gods, killed monsters, and sought (unsuccessfully) immortality. Ever since that epic was written, generations from one side of the world to the other have written their myths. Cultures worldwide tell stories of supernatural interactions, of gods and heroes and monsters. Scandinavia has Beowulf. Greece has The Odyssey. India has the Ramayana. The Arabic regions have One Thousand and One Nights.
Gilgamesh, history’s first written epic, poses a question that has emerged in culture after culture over the millennia: What are we are searching for? As Gilgamesh wanders through desolate regions searching for immortality, he meets a woman named Siduri, who says to him, “Why do you come here wandering over the pastures in search of the wind?”
Most of us have not wandered the wilds of Mesopotamia or searched the ends of the earth for immortality, yet we are all wanderers. We are all searching for something, and many across the edges and expanses of time have turned to myth, have gone wandering through the words of fantasy. Why? What comfort, what courage, what enlightenment do we seek in the supernatural fictions of mythology?
The Lord of the Rings was not my first encounter with myth and fantasy. I grew up with C. S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia and with the original Star Wars trilogy. A year or two before I encountered Tolkien, I read Madeleine L’Engle’s science fiction novel A Wrinkle in Time. All of these enthralled me with their excitement and adventure. In fact, it was probably childhood myths like these that inspired me to invent my own world, the world I made for my Barbies and drew in detail on computer paper. But The Lord of the Rings greeted me with something more than my past encounters with fantasy. It delivered that twinge Lewis spoke of, that longing so exquisite it almost hurt.
Perhaps timing made the difference. Tolkien visited me during a vulnerable time, a time I might almost name an identity crisis. I felt the pressure to put away my childhood, yet I was not ready. I was afraid of taking my own journey into the gray mist and the rocky terrain of adulthood. That’s when myth took my hand. For all of us who feel lost, myth is a guide, a friend who shows us who we are and who we might become.
Western culture returned to myth, as I did, in response to an identity crisis. In the mid-twentieth century, the West grappled with its past and its future. The World Wars had shattered lives, redesigned national borders, and rattled the confidence of the last few hundred years. Gone was the faith in progress that had spurred the industrial revolution and the spread of democracy. By the mid-sixties, the tumult included the Cold War, the Vietnam War, civil rights, women’s rights, and youth rebellion. Four prominent figures, icons of hope for many, had been assassinated: John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy.
Enter myth.
Though The Lord of the Rings was actually first published in 1954-1955, it was not until 1966 that its fame bourgeoned when a pirated edition was printed in the U.S. Soon, Tolkien’s fantasy had a cult following among college students, who liked the earthy, genuine hobbits and the pro-environment undertones of the trilogy. Jane Chance’s The Lord of the Rings: The Mythology of Power describes a graffiti battle that began between the disgruntlement of modernist philosophy and the hope of modern myth. On walls, Nietzsche’s maxim “God is dead” was combated with “Frodo lives.” In his essay “He Gave Us Back Myth and with It, Truth,” Chris Armstrong commented that The Lord of the Rings “opened the world of myth and mystery to a generation disenchanted with the soulless corporate culture around them.”
Tolkien’s trilogy did not stand alone. In 1962, Madeleine L’Engle’s science fiction novel A Wrinkle in Time was published. This book, which, according to writer Gabriel McKee, equates conformity and uniformity with evil, won the Newberry Award in 1963. Then, in 1966, Star Trek premiered on television. A generation struggling for meaning and order took refuge in myth—in L’Engle’s message that love conquers control, in Star Trek’s message of an optimistic future led by reason and science, and in The Lord of the Rings’ message of good triumphing over evil. This is what myth does: it sends us confident warriors, reluctant heroes, and heartbroken wanderers. In them, we see ourselves more clearly. We see our weakness and our potential.
William Shatner, who played Star Trek’s dashing Captain Kirk apparently believed in humanity’s longing for myth. “I think,” he was quoted in Time saying, “there is a need for the culture to have a myth, like the Greeks had. We don’t have any. So I think people look to Star Trek to set up a leader and a hearty band of followers.” A shared myth becomes a rallying cry for a culture. This is who we are, it says. And this is who we want to be.
Beyond providing a cultural identity, myth provides something else, some joy in wandering the pastures of imagination. Whether or not we are searching for wind, as Siduri claimed, we seem to enjoy the wandering.
I first encountered The Epic of Gilgamesh as a freshman in college in my Western Civilization history class. Though the story dramatizes great tragedy, through it I sensed a culture yearning for something. Framed against the cloudy sky of Mesopotamian polytheism, the epic presents a hero longing for escape from death. In his lecture, “On Fairy Stories,” Tolkien called the wish to evade death “the oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape.”
Similarly, Mircea Eliade, a twentieth century Romanian philosopher, called myth “the nostalgia for eternity.” When we look across continents and cultures, this is exactly what we find, this longing for something spiritual and lasting. In Gilgamesh, a thirst for everlasting life reverberates on every page. When Gilgamesh answers Siduri, explaining why he is wandering, he tells her that his friend has died. He says, “Why should I not wander over the pastures in search of the wind? My friend…the end of mortality has overtaken him…Because of my brother I am afraid of death.”
Whether we seek the Great Escape or ordinary, everyday escape, the un-reality of myth offers some safety, like a glass window behind which we can look at the world. Tolkien saw this element of escape as positive. In “On Fairy Stories,” he insisted that “escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic.” Who would blame a prisoner for wanting to escape? he argued. And if the prisoner could not escape, the next best thing he could do would be to imagine life beyond the prison walls.
This world, in one sense, is our prison because it tends to wall out everything but the tangible and the visible. Realistic fiction can only describe life within the prison walls, addressing the physical and the possible. It plays by the rules of the world we live in. Realistic fiction is certainly important, even necessary. It may be that in order to maintain sanity, prisoners must write about prison. They must speak their insights about the bars and the bunks and the terrible food. But what if prisoners forgot that life existed beyond the prison? What if they stopped believing there was something more, beyond their sight? In the ‘60s, myth revealed itself to a culture that had largely rejected the unseen. It may be that, with the starkness of the Enlightenment over, Westerners found that life held a level of experience beyond the empirical.
Throughout mythology, we find a grappling with the supernatural or the spiritual. Beowulf fights monsters. Rama and his wife Sita, from India’s Ramayana, face demons in physical form and wrestle with the task of sorting through their deceptions. Odysseus and other heroes of Greek mythology struggle with the gods.
Myth does what realistic fiction cannot do: it personifies the spiritual. Hades becomes not just death, and not just a place, but a person as well. The curtain splits between our world and another, and demons show their faces. In modern myth, too, spiritual forces take shape. In C. S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, evil is often embodied in a character, such as the White Witch and the Green Lady, the series’ two female villains. In A Wrinkle in Time, evil coalesces in the form of The Dark Thing, a blackness slowly enveloping the universe. The Lord of the Rings solidifies evil in the form of a ring. Goodness, in old myth and new, often materializes in the heroes of the story—not necessarily perfect in goodness, but striving toward righteousness.
“Myth is necessary,” said writer Clyde S. Kilby, “because reality is so much larger than rationality.” Realistic depictions of the world are necessary and often accurate, but rarely complete. Mythology fills in our view of the world. “Something really ‘higher’ is occasionally glimpsed in mythology,” Tolkien once said, “divinity, the right power…the due worship; in fact ‘religion.’”
C. S. Lewis, as a boy, saw something of this religion in Norse mythology. He saw something there that led him back and back again to myth, and later to Christian writers (some of them mythmakers), and ultimately to God. “Sometimes I can almost think,” Lewis said in Surprised by Joy, “that I was sent back to the false gods there to acquire some capacity for worship against the day when the true God should recall me to Himself.”
Lewis spoke of false gods. It is true that many myths provide errant interpretation of the unseen. All myths, in fact, are at best incomplete accounts of the spiritual. But most myths are sprinkled with hints of truth, glimpses of the true God. The biblical book of Ecclesiastes says of God, “He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” No fantasy, no myth will ever be complete because our understanding of God will always have limits. As long as we live on the plane of this physical world, our understanding of the spiritual realm will be hampered. Even in eternity, I doubt it will be possible to fully recount the nature of God, His splendor, and all His doings. We cannot fathom it.
C. S. Lewis discovered that the joy he sought, the joy he thought he found in myth, was not, in itself, the Thing he desired. Joy, he said, was like a road sign pointing him toward Christ. The sensations joy brought him “were merely the mental track left by the passage of Joy—not the wave but the wave’s imprint on the sand…for all images and sensations, if idolatrously mistaken for Joy itself, soon honestly confess themselves inadequate. All said, in the last resort, ‘It is not I. I am only a reminder. Look! Look! What do I remind you of?’”
Myth is not God. Myth cannot fully explain God. Rather, myth calls us to peer beyond our physical surroundings and seek God. As Clyde S. Kilsby wrote, “Myth is the name of a way of seeing, a way of knowing in depth, a way of experiencing.” That is why we keep writing and filming myth today. Like a pair of glasses, it helps us see.
I first read The Hobbit nine years ago as a child struggling on toward adulthood. I rode myth, like a wave, over the tumult of adolescence. Now The Hobbit will be released as a major motion picture in December 2012. Already, fans can watch a trailer, video blogs of interviews, location scouting, and filming. On the surface, it is merely a story of dragons and dwarves and hobbits. Magic. Fantasy. Myth. But in the depths of an engaging story there is more than this. Out of the corners of our eyes, we see something true. What is it but a glimpse of the unseen, a shadow and a foretaste of the eternal? Here is a parting of the curtain behind which sits the universe of the un-palpable. We catch glimpses of the spiritual. We catch glimpses of God.
First published in 2012 in The Ivy Leaves Journal of Literature and Art, vol. 86, p. 122-127.