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.

Me and You and Everyone We Know

Halfway through Me and You and Everyone We Know, I thought I had it pegged down. I was wrong, and I'll explain why. But let me give some context first.

Sometime during the past two years, too gradually for me to pin on a specific date, I got bored with "indie" movies. Now, people can quibble a lot about the word indie, whether such-and-such movie really qualifies as indie or not when so-and-so actor worked on it and whatever studio distributed it, but I'm not here to get into credibility debates, which are pretty dull anyway. Moreover, the term indie has described so many different things over the years that it's basically meaningless as anything but a genre distinction. In 2013, indie isn't a studio, or lack thereof; it's a style. So when I say that I got bored with indie movies, what I really mean is that I got tired of romantic comedies whose primary emotions are ennui and sincerity, where the men are stammering and disaffected, and the women are outgoing and have eclectic hobbies, and the children are precocious, and the dialogue lets the audience know it's sophisticated because it references literature and uses the word "fuck," and everything about the cinematography and soundtrack is just a little too precious.

Of course, in addition to being a horrible trainwreck of a run-on, most of that last sentence reeks of an oversimplified view that dismisses a diverse collection of films made by hardworking, talented people. Not that such trends don't exist in certain brands of cinema (I'm pretty sure they do, and I am tired of them), but it's unfair and disrespectful to dismiss huge swatches of (mostly) American film output based just on aesthetic criteria. Plenty of good things have actually come out of this genre, and to tell you the truth, a lot of movies that I like quite a bit share many of those "indie" qualities I listed above.

Nonetheless, such was my mindset going into writer/director/actress Miranda July's 2005 film.

Here's the movie's synopsis on Netflix, which appears beneath its pastel-saturated poster: "Eccentric Christine seeks emotional connections in the modern world while newly single shoe salesman Richard copes with his recent separation and his teenage son experiences a sexual awakening." Quirky woman, disaffected man, precocious teen: indie flick, right?

Well, as it turns out, sort of. The first half of the movie or so didn't do a whole lot to change the impression I had gleaned from the cover and Netflix blurb. In its early goings, Me and You and Everyone We Know seems to aspire to a romantic comedy take on the Magnolia-style film that became popular around the turn of the new millennium, where casual acquaintance and synchronicity interconnect the lives of a large cast of characters. It would be cumbersome to describe the considerable number of characters and subplots in the movie (a cumbersomeness that Me and You avoids through clear and efficient storytelling, which itself should have clued me in that something special was going on), but the focus initially remains on quirky Christine (Miranda July) and sad-sack Richard (John Hawkes), which is what gives the movie such strong indie rom-com vibes early on. The two first meet in what I assumed to be a take on the typical "meet-cute," with a perhaps overly clever conversation on how the street signs mirror the relationship they might have together. Before long, the script gives the two a few more of these Holly Golightly-esque chats, and the movie is well on its way to indie-pop territory.

But then something happens in the final forty-five minutes of the movie that blew me away: Me and You and Everyone We Know ceases to aspire to indiedom and instead achieves the sublime. The film pulls away from the supposedly central romance and lets the rest of the characters' stories unfold in deeply human ways that push toward the surreal and the emotionally naked. For example, the beginning of the movie shows Richard's teenaged son, Peter, goofing around on an internet chat room; there he meets an anonymous user, to whom he describes, at the suggestion of his six-year-old brother, Robby, a practice Robby calls "pooping back and forth forever" (which is exactly what it sounds like). Robby then begins to log on to the chat room by himself and continue talking to the anonymous user (who has taken quite a liking to the idea of "pooping back and forth forever"). The movie gets a lot of comic mileage out of the situation, but the payoff of this subplot, when Robby meets the chat room companion (a thirty-ish woman who curates an art museum), is absolutely transcendent and indicative of the beauty this movie dishes out in its second half. When the two meet, there is no screaming or revulsion between the two, but instead a tender understanding and a completely non-ironic embrace. This ending somehow manages to frame the two as wistful lost souls finding peace (read: real human beings) without reneging on the movie's promise to deliver on the ick-factor and comedy of a six-year-old meeting a thirty-year-old with a fecal fetish for a blind date. These are two characters finding unexpected profundity out of a situation whose initial premise would have exploited their situation solely for comedy.

What's striking is that while nearly every character gains this profundity by the end of the film, often in equally bizarre ways that contrast the initial realist/indie aesthetic of the beginning, these resolutions never feel jarring or ridiculous. This won't make sense to anyone who hasn't already seen it, but that it doesn't seem out of place for a movie that begins with a marriage falling apart to end with the image of a child literally causing the sun to rise speaks to the astoundingly natural way that director Miranda July manages to transform the lives of her characters. This is the stuff of avant-garde cinema, grown like a weed out of conventional meet-cute scenes.

Upon finishing the movie, then, my question became: why start with the indie trappings at all? This is a movie that dresses itself up in indie pop sensibilities but by the end refuses to be pop in any sense of the word. Why even bother with all the meet-cute stuff at the beginning? The answer, I think, partially lies with a sympathy for the audience. You don't want to throw viewers into a world that ignores conventional rules of science and human interaction; no matter how beautiful the images you create, your audience will always be alienated without some kind of lifeline. The conventional human drama provides that lifeline. I'm thinking of Charlie Kaufman's great Synecdoche, New York, a movie I saw recently that reaches the same kind of avant-garde profundity at the end as Me and You. Synecdoche doesn't give off the indie rom-com vibes, but it still takes time to establish realistic character motivations and conflicts before diving into the stages-within-stages and actors playing actors.

But the more I think about the indie false start in Me and You and Everyone We Know, the more I think there's more to that story mode than just hooking the audience. And here's what I've realized: that was never the story mode it was trying to adopt. Only my expectations of the movie's plot set it up as such. I read the plot synopsis and heard the opening notes from the soundtrack, and I assumed I knew what I was seeing. Looking back at those first scenes, however, I realize that the surreal bent exists throughout the movie, albeit in a subtler form. If I'm not looking for a meet-cute, Christina and Richard's conversation about their prospective relationship is less cutesy and more just plain weird. Really, it's pretty strange that these two people just launch into the sort of conversation that contemplates their own mortality, just out of the blue, but it's right in keeping with the movie's ultimate bent on sublimity. Here are two characters passing the time by passing through time, stepping out of their own realistic situation into a metaphysical head space. I didn't notice this because I was looking for clunky artificiality of genre tropes instead of something with its own personality altogether. I put the conventions there by looking for them.

In short, it's unfair to a movie to judge it by its genre, especially since a lot of movies actual resist classification by genre.

And, well, that's all I've got. Sorry, it's another long post. Please don't hate me. Thank you so much for slogging your way to the end, and I'd love for you to share what you think in the comments. Readers are wonderful. Oh, and I promise I'll do a short one next time.

Until then.