Christian and Non-Christian Influences in High Fantasy Literature

For the longest time, I was a big fan of high fantasy. The Chronicles of Narnia were some of the first "grown up" books (i.e. more words than pictures) I ever read, and by the time I got to middle school, I was devouring Lord of the Rings, Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea books, and whatever Terry Brooks was writing at the moment (which I can now scarcely remember, such was Brooks's impact on me apparently). Sometime late in high school, I kind of fell out of the genre, though I still enjoy reading a good epic quest from time to time[1]. But anyway, the point is that I read a lot of that sort of thing.

One particular series that stands out in my mind is Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising sequence, which is really the main event of this post. The more I think about this series, the more it feels to me like a complete anomaly in the high fantasy genre.

For those who don't know[2], The Dark Is Rising sequence is a series of five children's books (although they probably would have been classified as YA novels if such a distinction existed at the time) written in the '60s and '70s during the post-LoTR explosion of epic fantasy literature. The main premise of the books is this: throughout history two forces—the Light and the Dark—have fought for control over Earth. The Old Ones, an ancient order of protectors allied with the Light, have to collect five magical artifacts to defeat the Dark, which is (you guessed it) rising for one final battle in which the fate of the planet hangs in the balance, and in order to do so, the Old Ones recruit several British schoolchildren (among whom is Will Stanton, a sort of Chosen One) to help them save the world. Pretty standard high fantasy stuff, right? Well, sort of.

Now, there is a whole host of reasons why The Dark Is Rising stands out as a non-standard entry in the fantasy canon, but here's the one I want to focus on in this post: unlike almost every other fantasy series I read growing up, this series values its pagan influences over its Christian ones.

Pretty much every modern fantasy epic has two major influences on its storytelling and world-building philosophies: medieval Christianity and pre-Christian European mythology[3]. From medieval Christianity, we get the setting (castles, noble knights, etc.) and the overriding storytelling morality of absolute good vs. absolute evil (including the accompanying imagery—white=good; black=bad). From European paganism, we get wizards/druids, dwarves, magic rings, and pretty much all the other mythical trappings. Of course, that's an oversimplification of the factors at play in fantasy, but I do think (please correct me if I'm wrong) it's broadly accurate.

What ends up happening in most traditional fantasy sagas is that the pagan elements (aka the magic) work in service of Christian ones. Consider (as anyone must when discussing this genre) Tolkien. Lord of the Rings has pagan influences aplenty: magic items, monsters, cloaked figures who perform ancient ceremonies—all that comes from pre-Christian Norse and Celtic mythology; Tolkien even cribbed some of the names (Gimli, for instance) directly from Norse myth. But the storytelling ends to which Tolkien puts these influences to use are decidedly Christian. Lord of the Rings, with its redemptive plot arcs, corruptible humanity, and figures of pure good and evil, is an undeniably Christian work that uses its non-Christian elements as tools. The same thing happens in most other fantasy epics I'm familiar with. The individual components may harken back Norse, Celtic, or even Greco-Roman mythology, but the central philosophy and storytelling devices are more in-line with Christian thought[4].

Cernunnos, letting it all hang out

That's not really the case with The Dark Is Rising. Sure, the series has Christian influences (the books make frequent allusions to churches, King Arthur pops up in conversation from time to time, and iconography like crosses plays an important role in the plot), but as the sequence progresses, pre-Christian Celtic narratives crop up more and more. For example, Herne the Hunter (a folk figure often connected with Celtic deity Cernunnos) makes a prominent appearance in the second book, while the third book is entirely focused on a town's annual "greenwitch" offering, which seems to be a benign version (read: no killing) of the Druid wicker man tradition. By the fourth book, it's revealed that three powers (not just the Light and Dark) rule over the world, effectively doing away with binary morality. And these aren't just passing allusions; these are major mythological touchstones for the sake of themselves, without any sort of Christian endgame. By the end of the series, it's clear that The Dark Is Rising is first and foremost interested in ancient traditions that predate Christianity's arrival in the British Isles, and it uses its fantasy structure to build a story more in-step with those traditions than any Western ideology. In a way, it's reminiscent of the original Wicker Man movie, only without all the human sacrifice and horror—how a mostly Christian (or at least Western) premise gives way to an exploration of how ancient Celtic traditions override modern sensibilities.

In a way, The Dark Is Rising takes the medieval Christian tendency to appropriate pagan traditions for theological ends (just check out the historical origins of our Christmas and Halloween celebrations) and turns it on its head, using high fantasy, a genre typically associated with Christian mores, to explore old Celtic beliefs. That's pretty fascinating stuff, even if I for one identify much more (aka completely) with Christianity than Celtic paganism.

Not the bees... oh wait.

I feel like I need to end this discussion by reiterating that I haven't paid nearly as much attention to the genre recently as I did in my middle and high school years. If I ever was an expert on epic fantasy, I certainly am not one now. Furthermore, I've never been an expert on mythology. So take all these ideas with a grain of salt. This post is more of a rambling muse than a well-researched treatise on the subject. If any of you out there know more on either subject, I'd love to hear about it!

As always, I'm super willing to discuss anything you might bring up, and moreover, I'm sure I've said something reductive, stupid, or just plain wrong in the above paragraphs. So let me know what you think. Thanks so much for reading.

Until next time.


1] In fact, I just finished Neil Gaiman's American Gods, which is pretty much a high fantasy novel set in the contemporary USA.

2] Judging from its ubiquity in libraries, I think there must have been a time when this series was at least semi-popular, but I rarely hear it discussed nowadays. Aside from a go-nowhere attempt to adapt the books into a series of movies with The Seeker (which I haven't seen but is by all accounts pretty lousy), I get the impression that not too many people pay attention to The Dark Is Rising sequence anymore. Maybe I just fly in the wrong circles, though, so apologies if I'm pretending like these books are more obscure than they are.

3] You could probably say, more accurately, that every modern fantasy epic has one influence, Lord of the Rings, and that Lord of the Rings is the one directly influenced by Christianity and paganism.

4] I'm not saying that fantasy authors always have Christian intentions or identify with the Christian religion (though that certainly seems to be the case with J. R. R. Tolkien and his fantasy co-conspirator, C. S. Lewis), but the conventions of 20th-century English-language fantasy do tend toward broadly Christian ideology, even if not in an explicitly theological way. Maybe a better way to put it is that they represent the generally Western way of thinking most closely aligned with Christianity. Even Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, as explicitly anti-Christian as it may be, still uses Western Christianity as a primary philosophical touchstone, if only to refute it.

Why Christians Should Read More Modern Fiction

Yesterday, RELEVANT Magazine published an article on its website titled, "Why Christians Should Read More Fiction." In this article, author Paul Anderson makes the fine point that Christians should, well, read more fiction. He begins by sharing the very real frustration of how narrow the Christian conversation about literature can be. According to Anderson (and I will vouch for this, too), Christian discussions about books begin by hitting the "evangelical heavyweights" of Lewis, Chesterton, Tolkien, and Piper before breaking into theological arguments about The Shack and finally affirmations of Narnia's brilliance. So true. But then Anderson says this:

"And that’s when I start wailing on the bullhorn. 'But guys, what about fiction?! What about Faulkner? Melville! Does the name Steinbeck ring any bells?!' I cry, as the crowd trickles away, whispering about the guy with crazy eyes and a copy of East of Eden in his hand."

And as much as I applaud the overall sentiment (yes, Christians most definitely should read more fiction!) the first thing I thought was, "But Paul, what about modern fiction?! What about Jonathan Franzen? Vonnegut! Does the name Tony Morrison ring any bells?!" Alright, I guess I might have waved around a bullhorn and clutched a copy of Swamplandia!, too.

My point is, look at the names Anderson drops. John Steinbeck, the most recent of the bunch, died in 1968. Herman Melville didn't even make it to the 20th century. William Faulkner lived until 1962. You know what happened between 1962 and 2013? The collapse of the USSR. The Beatles. Post modernism. A lot of the Civil Rights movement. Two whole waves of feminism. Watergate. Hip hop. 9/11. The rise of the personal computer. I could go on.

And, okay, I'm being a little glib. Anderson has a BA in English Literature, so he has no doubt read plenty of modern authors. This is no slight against his reading habits. Maybe it's a coincidence that he only names authors who haven't published new work in fifty years. Maybe if he had gone on with his bullhorning, he would have mentioned Gabriel García Márquez next. But, intentional or not, the authors Anderson names speak to another kind of narrowness in Christian literacy, which is that many Christians do not read contemporary secular literature*.

I got my undergraduate degree at a private Christian university where I majored in English and therefore had oodles of time to talk with other Christians about the books they read. What I noticed is that there are two basic literary canons that many Christians (and I should probably specify "Evangelicals," since that was the primary inclination of my alma mater) seem to adhere to. The first Anderson identifies as the "evangelical heavyweights:" Tolkien, Lewis, and other explicitly doctrinal authors. These are authors whom most Evangelicals have read or at least been familiarized with through quotes or summaries. Then there's the second canon, which is what Anderson appeals to. This consists of "classic" literature, which I know is a broad and ambiguous classification but that I mean to signify works published within the period of time that spans from Homer's writings to the first half of the 20th century. William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and yes, Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Melville tend to fall into this camp. These are authors whom Evangelicals with a deeper interest in literature tend to latch onto. Other authors from the time period who (tellingly) are often omitted from this canon: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Voltaire.

We Christians can sometimes be classicists. And there is plenty of great stuff in the classics. But by only reading classic literature, we not only miss out on great literary works, but also feed that other uncomfortable Christian tendency, that of looking back a little too often at the "good ol' days" when there is so much going on around us today.

I love what Anderson has to say about art: "One thing that unifies its many forms is the desire to distill the chaos of existence, in all its wonder and tragedy, into a single, unified image of beauty." The thing is, the "chaos of existence" is just that: chaotic. It isn't static. The turbulent, existence-defining forces we experience today are not identical to the ones that we experienced yesterday or the ones we experienced ten years ago or the ones people Victorians experienced over a century ago. I mean, I said I was being glib earlier, but I wasn't being that glib when I mentioned all the monumental things that had changed over the past fifty years. Of course the art of fiction taps into universal questions of what it means to be human (that's why we still read Herman Melville one hundred and fifty years down the line), but it's also very specific. Every piece of fiction is a unique distillation of the specific chaos of the cultural moment in which it was written. To kind of cross media for a second, a friend of mine once remarked that Seinfeld would never have worked in the 21st century, since so many of its episodes hinge on problems of miscommunication (or lack of communication) that today's internet and cell-phone conveniences could easily solve. Seinfeld's "The Bubble Boy" is universal in its depiction of human frustration in the face of chaos (those moops, man), but it is also specific to that cultural instant when Jerry couldn't just look up directions on his iPhone. Getting back to fiction, we can read a comedy of manners centered on the social mores of Victorian England and enjoy the universal ideas of class and joy and otherness, but we only see how these universals apply to the chaos of that Victorian moment. When we read classic literature, we are looking back at what the chaos used to be. Modern literature distills beauty for us out of the specific chaos we live in today, iPhones and all.

Now, just to be absolutely clear: this is not an indictment of older literature. My favorite novel of all time is Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is about to enter its fourteenth decade of existence. That's pretty "classic." Steinbeck, Faulkner, Melville, and many other older writers have given us a plethora of literary masterpieces, and you are not wasting your time by reading any of them. Reading older literature is just as important as reading recent works. We can learn from the past, finding beauty in the present world from the way the past authors found beauty in their own chaotic worlds. In fact, all literature is, in a sense, "older" literature, since it all applies to moments in the past. Even if Jonathan Franzen were to write a novel today and I read it tomorrow, it would still be a novel about the past, since I will always have to read something after it's written. But the closer something is written to the present, the more directly it can find beauty in the chaos of the present world we experience. There's something to be said for directness.

One more point I want to be clear on: I like the RELEVANT article. It has a lot of great things to say about why Christians should read fiction in general. This post is not a refutation of what Paul Anderson writes, just an addition to it, a "yes, and..."

Speaking of which, feel free to add your own "yes, and..." in the comments. Or if you think I'm completely out-of-line, contribute some buts and howevers. I'd be happy to discuss any of this post (or related issues) with anyone. Again, I owe you all my most enthusiastic gratitude for reading my ramblings. I know it can't be all that pleasant.

Until next time.

*There's a certain self-defeating irony in the fact that I'm writing this on a blog whose only other literature-themed post is about Beowulf. Okay, yeah, touché.