ADVICE TO MY DAUGHTER 5: UNICORNS AND MERMAIDS

Long before you started reading fantasy novels, you had developed a deep and abiding love for unicorns, fairies, and mermaids, and an equally deep fear of (and fascination with) dragons, gorgons, and witches. You didn’t know it at the time, but your experiences in the perilous realms and your encounters with the creatures that dwell therein were building up in you a rich understanding of spiritual struggles and realities, of the nature of good and evil, and of your own significance, and yet smallness, in the face of the super-natural.

While many of your friends were readings books about teen girls who became head of the cheerleading squad or got a date with the most popular boy in school or won a singing competition and become a pop star for the day, you were courageously journeying into lands where you had to face your most primal fears, learn to decode clues and riddles, and find within yourself stores of courage, wisdom, and self-control that you did not know you had. Sometimes, at the end of the story, you found, to your great surprise, that you were the long lost princess of a hidden kingdom or an enchantress with special powers, but those discoveries tended to reduce rather than swell your vanity and sense of entitlement.

C. S. Lewis also thought it a better thing for young people to read fantasy stories that whisked them away to magical lands than school stories that played on their envious desire to get one over on the rich, talented, stuck-up kids. Whereas the latter kind of story puffs up the reader with delusions of grandeur, the former instills awe, wonder, and humility. No matter how heroic we might be, faerie exposes our weaknesses and our flaws; it reminds us, simultaneously, of our strengths and our limitations, our angelic nature and our animal instincts.

Another way to say that is that fairy tales bring us face-to-face with a truth about ourselves that we all know but try to suppress: that we were made in God image but have fallen into sin, disobedience, and rebellion. To visit the land of faerie is to be reminded that we are all special, unique, and of great value, but that we are also helpless and in desperate need of grace. To survive our trip to faerie we must be clever and brave and loyal, but those things alone do not save us. We also need a fairy godmother or a magic amulet or an animal guide to enable us to reach the end of our quest. And those things generally come to us as a free gift which we can reject but which we cannot earn.

As G. K. Chesterton, a writer who exerted a profound influence on Tolkien and Lewis’s ideas about fairy tales, liked to remind his readers: faerie is a kind of paradise where you can have all the beauty and glory you want, but you can’t say the wrong word or pluck the wrong flower or step on the wrong stone. Fairyland is as strong and as brittle as glass. It offers, at times, a far truer picture of our earthly condition than all the “realistic” novels ever written.

Life, my daughter, is more often like a fairy tale than it is like a gritty, violence-, sex- and curse-filled movie. Yes, the terrible things depicted in the movie are part of our world, but we only recognize them as terrible because we were all created to be heroes and princesses.