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Embracing Popular Culture's Fascination with Mythology

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Embracing Popular Culture's Fascination with Mythology Volume 41 Number 3 Article 4 March 2013 Embracing Popular Culture’s Fascination with Mythology Jeremy Larson Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/pro_rege Part of the Christianity Commons, and the Modern Literature Commons Recommended Citation Larson, Jeremy (2013) "Embracing Popular Culture’s Fascination with Mythology," Pro Rege: Vol. 41: No. 3, 23 - 30. Available at: https://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/pro_rege/vol41/iss3/4 This Feature Article is brought to you for free and open access by the University Publications at Digital Collections @ Dordt. It has been accepted for inclusion in Pro Rege by an authorized administrator of Digital Collections @ Dordt. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Editor’s Note: Jeremy Larson presented this paper in a session for the Popular Culture Conference at Dordt College, November 3, 2012. Embracing Popular Culture’s Fascination with Mythology demanded to know if little Nell was alive.2 Stories have the power to excite us, and it is axiomatic that people love stories. But I want to consider a specific kind of story: myth.3 The ubiquity of mythology in our culture is undeniable, as our days of the week and some of our months will readily attest. Even our everyday allusions are infused with references to pagan gods and demigods. For example, it is common to hear a football commentator use “Achilles heel” to de- scribe a losing team’s inability to convert on the fourth down. In addition, children’s literature has enjoyed somewhat of a mythological renaissance. Trending by Jeremy Larson characters such as Harry Potter and Percy Jackson are actually newcomers—Lucy Pevensie and Ubiquity Bilbo have been around for more than fifty years. When the last Harry Potter book was released to Ironically, even atheists have their own fantasy se- a frenzied fan base in 2007, one literary historian ries by Philip Pullman, who designed the His Dark searched the past for a comparable work that at- Materials trilogy as an attempt to counterbalance tracted such zealous devotees, and what she uncov- the overt theism in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia chronicles. ered was Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop.1 Perhaps Christians should take it as a compliment Dickens’s novels were released as serials in England, that an atheist felt the need to copy Lewis. Usually, a publication process typical for that time, so au- Christians are the ones to create pop culture knock- diences had to wait for weekly or monthly install- offs,4 and the Christian ghetto is teeming with such ments. As the last shipment reached American silliness. We’re often the ones copying others, but shores in 1841, impatient fans beset the ships and recently I saw a bumper sticker that read, “Ankh if you love Isis!” Look, people are finally copyingus ! Jeremy Larson is a graduate student at Baylor University, working on a Ph.D. in English, with a concentration in Apology Religion and Literature. Despite the widespread use of mythology by 23 Pro Rege—March 2013 Pro Rege—March 2013 23 Christians in the past—even the recent past— Sub-creation many Christians today have an aversion to my- Before C.S. Lewis’s conversion to Christianity, thology and view it through narrowed eyes. But he viewed myths as being worthless lies, despite many Christians have seen mythology as some- their being “breathed through silver.” To per- thing to be commandeered. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The suade him otherwise, Tolkien wrote a poem titled Hobbit, dwarves hire Bilbo as a “thief,” but he is “Mythopoeia,” in which he mentions the defaced not really stealing so much as he is reclaiming stolen image of God in man. Tolkien writes about the treasure. The gold and jewels were not Smaug’s to original mandate for man to exercise dominion begin with. Centuries earlier, Augustine spoke of over creation. Man is a “Sub-creator, the refracted such re-usurping as “spoiling the Egyptians.” Just light/through whom is splintered from a single as the Israelites exited Egypt laden with Egyptian White/to many hues… . /We make still by the law treasure, Christians have every right to take truth- in which we’re made.”10 ful elements from pagan culture. Truth that has In other words, since we bear God’s image, been mined from God’s creation “must be removed though imperfectly, we create because God cre- by Christians” and “put back into the service of ates. We imitate and glorify the ultimate Creator Christ.” Furthermore, as we engage in sub-creation. Tolkien puts it more Any statements…which happen to be true and clearly in “On Fairy-Stories” when he writes about consistent with our faith should not cause alarm, creating fantasy: “[W]e make in our measure and but be claimed for our own use, as it were from in our derivative mode, because we are made: and owners who have no right to them.… [A]ll not only made, but made in the image and likeness 11 branches of pagan learning contain not only false of a Maker.” Of course, Lewis eventually came to and superstitious fantasies and burdensome stud- agree with Tolkien, and they both used mythology ies…, but also studies for liberated minds which to create their own myths. are more appropriate to the service of the truth.5 Recovery Augustine believed that “A person who is a Lewis and Tolkien believed that their creative good and a true Christian should realize that truth storytelling helped familiar ideas appear in a new belongs to his Lord, wherever it is found, gather- light. As many of us brought up in the Christian ing and acknowledging it even in pagan literature.”6 tradition can attest, there is a regrettable familiarity Put another way, all truth is God’s truth. As Peter and desensitizing that comes from constant contact Leithart notes in his book on classical literature, the with Christianity. As much as we might deny it, the wealth of the wicked is stored up for the righteous gospel’s power over us wanes at times, through our (Prov. 13:22).7 constant exposure to it. Unfortunately, amazing Therefore, in a day when it is fashionable both grace is not so amazing the millionth time we hear to elevate STEM fields8 over the liberal arts and it, not because we have fallen away as apostates but to disdain mythology as worthless paganism, simply because it is the hapless condition of human Christians must be intentional about preserving beings: We need constant refreshing and remind- the rich heritage we have in mythology. A particu- ing that we are the recipients of a truly amazing larly useful touchstone for Christian mythology inheritance.12 Meeting weekly as a body of believ- is Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-Stories,” which ap- ers is one way to remind ourselves of the riches we peared in 1947 in a collection published by Oxford have in Christ, but repetition does not always do University Press. This essay puts forth Tolkien’s the trick. vision for what fairy-stories9 are and what benefits According to Tolkien, we need to see things, they can bring to readers. Before moving on to a not merely in addition (i.e., week after week) but contemporary “myth-smith,” I want to focus on from a new position. Tolkien firmly believed that four major concepts that Tolkien explains towards the creation and reading of fairy-stories could the end of his essay: sub-creation, recovery, escape, awaken us to the wonder of reality. Tolkien de- and eucatastrophe. scribes this new sense of wonder as a “regaining of 24 Pro Rege—March 2013 a clear view…. We need…to clean our windows; so cess, we have a need for a constant removing of the that the things seen clearly may be freed from the veil—not so much the veil of unbelief as the veil of drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from posses- familiarity. Russian Formalists might have called siveness.” Tolkien continues: this process “defamiliarization”—that is, helping This triteness is really the penalty of “appropria- familiar ideas or objects appear in a new light. tion”: the things that are trite, or (in a bad sense) To aid in this veil-removal, Tolkien suggests familiar, are the things that we have appropriated, that we “meet the centaur and the dragon, and then legally or mentally. We say we know them. They perhaps suddenly behold, like the ancient shep- have become like the things which once attracted herds, sheep, and dogs, and horses—and wolves. 16 us by their glitter, or their colour, or their shape, This recovery fairy-stories help us to make.” C.S. and we laid hands on them, and then locked them Lewis also recognized the essential nature of “de- in our hoard, acquired them, and [in] acquiring familiarization.” In one of his essays, he writes the ceased to look at them.13 following, describing our veils of familiarity as “watchful dragons”: Recovery is a concept Tolkien borrowed from I thought I saw how stories of this kind [fairy G.K. Chesterton (who himself had picked up the tales] could steal past a certain inhibition which idea from Charles Dickens). One dim and cloudy had paralysed much of my own religion in child- hood. Why did I find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the suf- Tolkien firmly believed that ferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was the creation and reading of that one was told one ought to.
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