Myth and Reality

Dear Lucy,

You’ve got it exactly right. A strict allegory is like a puzzle with a solution: a great romance is like a flower whose smell reminds you of something you can’t quite place. I think the something is “the whole quality of life as we actually experience it.” You can have a realistic story in which all the things and people are exactly like those we meet in real life, but the quality, the feel or texture or smell, of it is not. In a great romance it is just the opposite. I’ve never met Orcs or Ents or Elves—but the feel of it, the sense of a huge past, of lowering danger, of heroic tasks achieved by the most apparently unheroic people, of distance, vastness, strangeness, homeliness (all blended together) is so exactly what living feels like to me. Particularly the heart-breaking quality in the most beautiful places, like Lothlorien. And it is so like the real history of the world: ….The Darkness comes again and again and is never wholly triumphant nor wholly defeated.

–

“Letter to Lucy Mathews, 11 Sept. 1958,” in Letters to Children, eds. Lyle Dorsett and Marjorie Mead (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 81-2.