The Case for Re-Enchantment
What Tolkien and the Inklings knew about seeing the world again.
I read The Fellowship of the Ring and The Oxford Inklings back to back over a couple of December weeks, and the second one ruined me for the first — in the best possible way. You finish the novel still half inside Middle-earth, and then you turn to the history and learn that the men who built it were sitting in a pub on Tuesday mornings, arguing over pipe smoke about whether any of it was true.
Cleaning the glass
Tolkien had a word for what a good story does to you: Recovery. He laid it out in his essay On Fairy-Stories, and I haven’t been able to shake it since. His claim is that we don’t really see the things we own. We file them. A tree becomes lumber, a star becomes a fact, a face across the breakfast table becomes furniture. Familiarity isn’t knowledge — it’s a film that grows over the eyes.
Fantasy scrubs the glass. Make a dragon, Tolkien said, and you will suddenly be able to see a horse again. The invented thing sends you back to the real one astonished. That’s the trick hiding inside every myth worth keeping: it is not a way out of the world. It’s a way back in.
A footpath at midnight
The gears of this are worth looking at, because the most important conversation in modern fantasy happened on a walk.
September 1931, Addison’s Walk in Oxford. Lewis — not yet a believer — tells Tolkien that myths are beautiful but false. “Lies,” he says, “though breathed through silver.” Tolkien stops him. No: a myth is the opposite of a lie. It is the only vessel some truths will fit into at all. We were made by a Maker, so we make in turn — sub-creation, he called it — and the stories we tell are splintered fragments of a light we didn’t invent. A few nights later, Lewis believed.
Sit with the size of that. The entire modern project of explaining the wonder out of everything got its argument, on a dark footpath, and lost — and what fell out the other side was Narnia and the conviction, shared across that whole circle of friends, that the deepest things reach us as story or they don’t reach us at all.
The other half of the masthead
I should admit something here. I spend my days taking things apart. I love mechanism — the moment a thing that looked like magic comes apart into gears you can follow is one of my favorite feelings in the world. Half of what I write lives there.
But there’s a failure mode on that road. Demystify long enough and you can lose the muscle for being surprised by anything at all — a flattened world where everything is “just” something else. The Inklings are the standing argument against that flattening. Some things you understand best by not dissolving them. You let the myth stay myth, and it hands you back the world with the colors turned up.
Tolkien even had a name for the best moment a story can give you: eucatastrophe — the sudden, joyous turn, the eagles arriving, the good catastrophe that doesn’t deny the sorrow but pierces straight through it. That catch in your throat when the turn comes? He thought it was a rumor. A report, leaking in from somewhere real.
What I keep landing on
I write my own stories partly to argue with the philosophers I read, and I keep ending up where Tolkien did: that wonder isn’t the thing you graduate out of once you’re smart enough. It’s the thing the smartest among us spent their whole lives defending.
So this is the standing invitation of everything filed under Culture here. Not to explain the magic away. To clean the glass, and look again.
Pour the next reader a cup. The Tuesday meeting is still on.
— Mark