Like many before him, Tolkien uses light to symbolize good (and God?) and dark to symbolize evil. In Christian terms, this metaphor came to the fore in the Middle Ages when the dark mysteriosum of the Romanesque church gave way to the brightness of the Gothic windows. The builders of St. Denis, considered to be the first Gothic church, explicitly used this metaphor. In fact, for them (and perhaps for Tolkien) it was less a metaphor than a literal truth. Similarly, Milton used the same imagery. Tolkien, however, dwells on the dark. His message, like that of the Beowulf poet, is that sooner or later, the light inevitably is swallowed by the dark. Death is inevitable; further, though, human existence is immersed in darkness because of the Fall. As Tolkien says of Beowulf in "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," "He is a man, and that for him and for many is sufficient tragedy." For Tolkien, darkness is internal to the human condition, not merely a besieger from without.

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Fantasy

Tolkien's starting point is Coleridge's discussion on Imagination (ch. 13 of Biographia Literaria, Shawcroft, ed., Oxford 1907). Coleridge spoke of the Primary Imagination as "a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am." Secondary Imagination, for Coleridge, differs quantitatively but not qualitatively. It is "co-existing with the conscious will." Fancy, for Coleridge, is very different. It is merely a "mode of memory."

Tolkien disagreed. For him, fancy (which, as Tolkien pointed out, is a shortened form of fantasy) is not qualitatively different from Imagination. For Tolkien, fantasy "combines with its older and higher use as an equivalent of Imagination the derived notions of 'unreality' (that is, of unlikeness to the Primary World), of freedom from the domination of observed 'fact,' in short, of the fantastic."

Recovery

By recovery, Tolkien meant the rediscovery of the mundane. Temporary immersion into the fantastic allows us to see the everyday world afresh -- to remember what we had known but forgotten. (Compare to our discussion of the limin.) For Tolkien, though, the act of recovery is important. The creation of a Secondary World is an act of sub-creation (Tolkien's term); by imitating God's act of Primary creation we can recover God.

Escape

Tolkien's notion is akin to the concept of escapist literature. Tolkien sees it as a positive to divert oneself from everyday reality when that reality is constantly changing in the face of modern technology. It is good to escape to the unchanging verities of human existence. Tolkien says

there are ancient limitations from which fairy-stories offer a sort of escape, and old ambitions and desires (touching the very roots of fantasy) to which they offer a kind of satisfaction and consolation . . . such as the desire to vist, free as a fish, the deep sea . . . [or] the desire to converse with other living things. On this desire, as ancient as the Fall, is largely founded the talking of beasts and creatures, and especially the magical understanding of their proper speech."

For Tolkien, escape is less a matter of getting away than of returning to what was and is lost -- the glorious time before the Fall. He says "a vivid sense of that separation is ancient" and we have "a sense that it was a severance; a strange fate and a guilt lie on us."

Consolation

Intimately linked to escape is consolation. The fairy-story gives its audience the consolation of the happy ending. Tolkien termed this the eucatastrophe (katastrophe is the "turning down" "overturning" in Greek tragedy), the "joyful overturning" in which evil is overcome. But, says Tolkien, the eucatastrophe can work only if there is the possibility of dyscatastrophe, of failure.

For Tolkien, the ultimate escape is death, and the ultimate consolation is eternal life -- life after death. Tolkien called this final Consolation the Great Escape. He termed this phenomenon evangelicum, from the (Late)Latin "good news" (a term that entered Old English as godspell and gives us the modern gospel). Tolkien says that the Christian Gospels contain "a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind, which embraces all the essence of fairy stories." Tolkien says

this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation have been raised to the fulfillment of creation. The birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarmation.

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