Last week I was a guest on Joshua Gillingham’s blog, which you can view here. Joshua’s the author of The Gatewatch, a saga that follows Torin Ten-Trees on his quest to defeat the Troll King and save the Gatewatch. Torin’s story is heavily inspired by the Norse sagas, and he’s even followed the example of the old skalds by including poetry within his book. After you read Joshua’s debut, you’ll be happy to know that more is on the way; The Gatewatch is just the first of the entries in Torin’s Saga.
In the spirit of the holidays, I’ve recently read through Terry Pratchett’s The Hogfather, which is one of his most beloved novels. It’s a sequel to Mort, but can be read independently as well. In The Hogfather, a mysterious group hires an overzealous assassin to kill the Hogfather, Discworld’s equivalent of Santa Claus. With the Hogfather gone, Death steps in as the man in red. Meanwhile, Death’s granddaughter Susan sets out on a mission to discover what exactly her grandad is up to, and what has happened to the Hogfather. The book is delightful, as are all of Pratchett’s great works. Though for me The Hogfather doesn’t rank as high as Mort or the Tiffany Aching novels, it still brings up many interesting thoughts amid the humor. Central to the novel is the concept of belief and its role in human thought.
In Discworld, human belief can create and sustain supernatural beings. It’s human belief in the Hogfather that gives him strength and form, and when the Hogfather disappears, there is a overabundance of belief that begins creating all manner of other creatures. Suddenly popping into existence is a creature that steals socks, a fairy that makes men go bald, and a god of hangovers. The idea that belief can create deities isn’t unique to Pratchett, it’s also an element central to the Warhammer universe. In that grim world, its the vices of men and elves that create the dark gods of chaos and give them strength. In the same way, the blind belief of the orcs that their machines will work (despite the laws of physics) make it so. I think both Discworld and Warhammer have it right in one respect; belief is powerful.
Pratchett seems to think that humans invent the fantastic because we need something to believe in beyond the material world. I think that’s essentially true, but I’ll add a caveat. I don’t think we invent the fantastic, I think we interpret it. What if our the turning of our species toward supernatural answers isn’t some inherent flaw or defensive mechanism, but an intuition of something beyond that which we can scientifically verify? We are material beings, but there is something intangible that animates us and gives us life beyond eating and sleeping, that thing we recognize as a soul. I think that just as our material bodies can sense the material world, so our intangible spirits can sense what is intangible. As a Christian, this is where I’m tempted to dive into theology, but I’ll refrain from that discussion for now. Instead, I’d like to delve into something else entirely. Where theology discusses the questions like “Is there a God and if so, what would be the attributes of such a being?”, I’d like discuss questions more along the lines of “Are there such things as fairies and magic?”
Looking back on the short progression of this blog post, I’m a little surprised that I’ve reached this point so quickly. I feel that I should have plied my readers with sweeter words before this, or perhaps avoided this conversation all together. But here we are. As a child I knew in my bones that magic was real, as did many children. I find it interesting that there is not a hard line when children stop believing in magical things, and most of them only ever say “magic isn’t real” with a sort of a question mark on the end. They think they know what they’re supposed to believe but they aren’t quite sure. I suspect most children stop believing in magic, not because they have found hard evidence against its existence, but because it is what’s expected of them at a certain age. I admit that I have never been convinced that magic is unreal, only that belief in it is a severe faux pas. So while we are all smiling and pretending very hard to be adults, let me whisper beneath my cavalier facade that I have secretly never grown up. I have simply become an older, wiser child. I am happy to say that cynicism is a disease to which I seem to be immune. The backs of wardrobes still hold a terrible allure for me, as do clefts in trees, circles of mushrooms, ancient passage tombs, and other areas that seem to be likely portals to another world. The fact that I have never pushed past fur coats to find pine branches has not been the least deterrent.
There is something about the old fairy tales. They don’t endure because they tell us a pretty lie, they endure because there is something essentially true about them. I don’t understand why, but fairy tales and mythology will always be central to the human experience. Science has long ago given us the answer to why the sun rises, but Eos has lost none of her beauty. We don’t turn to stories for explanations of how things work, or even to create meaning in a meaningless universe. We turn to stories for explanations of the meaning that we already feel, meaning that saturates the universe and binds it together.
One of the reasons that I love poetry is for its impressive ability to communicate. A great poet can convey in a handful of lines what would take a novelist thousands of pages. It also deals with that part of ourselves that is purely intuitive. Someone who lives in the tropics may understand the crystalline structure of snow, how it is formed, and its insulating properties, but they cannot know the hush of falling snow unless through experience, or through poetry. Poetry can convey what is intangible but no less true than the scientific facts. Fairy tales are just like another form of poetry. They communicate something intangible about the world that we live in, something that goes beyond concerns of historicity. If I were asked to cast a spell, I admit that I cold not. I’m also very suspicious of those who claim to possess those abilities. In my mind, neopaganism and occult beliefs are cosplaying traditions that they don’t bother to study. I believe in the magic of a kiss and an oath. I believe there’s magic in nature, imagination, belief, and stories. Like Pratchett, I think there are some narrative conventions that are stronger than the laws of physics. I think we’ve always known that the world is a magical place, and I think it’s high time we admit it. Let’s step out of the closet and into the wardrobe…