John Ronald Reuel Tolkien died five years before I ready anything that he had written. He was a lover of words. He was Twice Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford in England. His specialty was Old and Middle English. He was a custodian of words few spoke in modern times. I suspect that I would have found him to be a stuffy and somewhat boring professor had I encountered him in my college years. But that is not the way I first learned of him. I met him through stories that he might have considered to be a hobby or an amateur side of his writing. He earned his living as a professor and his stories enjoyed only moderate success in his lifetime, although they had become wildly popular by the time of his death.

I read The Hobbit and shortly afterward The Lord of the Rings trilogy during the time between my father’s cancer diagnosis and his death. I was a brand new pastor serving in southwest North Dakota and making the trip back to my hometown in Montana as often as possible to visit my father. Somewhere along that road we learned that we were to become parents for the first time. It was a busy, exciting, and full time of my life. Tolkien’s stories provided a bit of escape from thinking about the big issues of death and birth and the passing of generations. Those themes figure large in Tolkien’s stories, but they are all sent in a world that is pure fantasy.

The world of Tolkien’s stories is an imagined pre-historic land occupied by Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, Orcs and Hobbits. It also contains snippets of his made-up languages.

Sometime after I read the Tolkien books, I decided that I should follow-up with a reading of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. The books, more directed at juvenile readers a than Tolkien’s tales, also come from the time of World War II and its aftermath and have vaguely Christian themes. Some faithful Christians have applied similar methods of reading meaning to the texts of Lewis’s stories that they apply to biblical texts. I can see the stories as illustrations of biblical principles and the characters as metaphors, but I must confess that I was less entertained by Lewis’ books than by other things that I have read.

That would be considered heresy among some of my colleagues who rever the books and find them to be on-going sources of meaning.

The truth is that I never got into the world of fantasy much. The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings books fit into a particular time in my life where such a huge portion of my imagination was occupied with just keeping up with the hectic past of my life and adapting to so many major life changes all in one short period of time. I graduated from school, left my academic work behind, started my first job in my new career, adjusted to my father’s death as the oldest son of the family, became a parent myself - there were a lot of things that occurred in a very short amount of time. A little fantasy helped to balance my thinking and remove me a few steps from the intensity of everyday life.

For the most part, though I enjoy novels, I am not attracted to fantasy writing. I don’t remember fairy tales being very important in my childhood. I know that TV shows like Game of Thrones and True Blood, Grimm and Once Upon a Time have become hits, but I have yet to watch a single episode of any of those shows. It just doesn’t seem all that attractive to me.

When I am looking for a bit of fantasy, I prefer to travel back in time a few years and north in direction. I read about early settlers in Alaska, about the tribal peoples of the far north, about kayaks and caribou and cold weather survival in a harsh climate.

Scholars tell us that fantasy stories are important in human development because they give our minds contexts in which to encounter and develop major human dynamics that are essential to human living. By encountering fear in a story, we can practice our fear response before we find ourselves in a situation of real life-threatening fear. Other major life themes like hope and endurance and love and sacrifice can be explored in the context of a fantasy story in ways that are less immediately life threatening than real world experiences. It is a safe way to wrestle with big concepts that later will become essential life skills.

I’m not totally convinced by these arguments. I think that real life can be an even better teacher than fantasy. Perhaps I was learning hope from the stories I was reading, but at the time I would have told you that my father’s cancer and death were more hope inspiring than anything I read in the books. I still have that opinion.

Still, I wonder whether there is any real difference between reading stories set in fantasy worlds and fiction set in geography that might be recognizable if I were to travel to that place, but often are in settings that I will never actually visit. I’m thinking that I will never really paddle the full length of the Yukon or spend much time in a kayak out of side of the shore in Hudson’s Bay.

There is a role for our imaginations in developing the mental framework that enables us to live with grace and dignity in this life. We have been given the gift of our minds to think beyond the scope of actual experience. Jesus was aware of this capacity in his teaching. The issues presented in parables are beyond the scope of personal experience. The Good Samaritan is a story about how we could treat our neighbors more than it is a report of an actual historic event. Teaching in parable is using the story to stretch the imagination.

So I’ll leave the fantasy stories and worlds to others for now. There are plenty of ways to stretch my imagination in the midst of the life I live.

After all I have a garage filled with acquired items that need to find their purpose. That’ll take a fair amount of imagination.

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