I wonder if, in addition to the technique you describe, something else can Recover and re-mystify the world. If what you’ve described requires seeing the person, place, or thing in a renewed way, gratitude helps us see the whole context that way. Ingratitude and demystification seem to go together. The givenness of things draws our eyes to the Giver, which is ultimately re-mystifying but not for its own sake. Rather it re-mystifies for worship and for love.
What does this mean for reading and writing stories? Maybe this sense of gratitude shines through as one writes with a sense of wonder, rather than a sense of factory-worker control.
Honestly not a bad point. Tolkien also briefly mentions humility as a method against demystification and you can’t be grateful without at least a little humility.
Thank you. I think you have finally made me understand why people are so attracted to worldbuilding as an art in itself. The world has gone grey for them, and they look to Oz transform it back into technicolor.
The thing is, I don't experience the world like this. It doesn't go grey for me. I have, if anything, the opposite problem. The world is too loud and too bright. I need to turn it down, not turn it up. And I think this was something I felt about LOTR from the beginning, even when I was a bigger fan than I am now, that everything was too big and too loud, as if real mountains weren't high enough and real rivers weren't fast enough. Qua worlds, I much preferred the miniature scale of Narnia. And this may explain why I have no taste for most modern fantasy. It is trying to turn up the volume on the world while I want to turn it down.
Perhaps this explains my affection for Robert Louis Stevenson, who famously said, “The world is so full of a number of things, / I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” No creeping disenchantment there.
This also makes me wonder if the angst over disenchantment that is so prevalent in Catholic literary circles today, and which is taken to be a fundamentally religious issue, is in fact simply a matter of personality, a matter of the mind for which the world quickly grows grey and quiet as opposed to a mind (like mine) for which it is always too loud and too bright.
This also highlights another thing that has always annoyed me about both Lewis and Tolkien. They are both living in the mid-century middle class bubble that saw life as the idyll of the Oxford don who had the summers free to go on walking tours across the English countryside. Tolkien, in the Shire, and Lewis in Narnia, present worlds in which everyone lives lives of respectable middle class comfort with lots of good food and tea and wine and tobacco. No such places ever existed. The poor (as Dickens well knew) lived no such lives, either in his England or in theirs. They are sentimental for a time when life was organized for the class from which Oxford dons were drawn, and for the life of gentlemen of leisure. Unlike Waugh, who also came from and wrote about that class, they are uncritical of them and see nothing of the work of others that sustains that lifestyle and makes it possible.
As the grandson of a coal miner on one side and of a teamster on the other (literally, my paternal grandfather delivered coal and moved furniture with a horse and cart) I'm honestly not long on sympathy for an Oxford don spending his long break on walking tours and feeling that the mountains are not as high as he would like nor the sky as blue.
Curiously, though, I think this may also have given me an insight into the Contemplative Realism movement, which on the surface seems the exact opposite of the fantasy world. But there too we find the same sense of impaired vision, or a desire to see more intensely. The literary prescription may be the exactly opposite, but the underlying aesthetic complaint seems to be just the same.
Like the original post, I found yours insightful and I'm better for reading it. I would read an account of your grandparents' experiences. I certainly don't approach the Oxford set's lifestyle and luxuries either. Still, I take from the Oxford set the same thing I take from, say, listening to a Mozart piece sponsored by a sumptuously adorned royal or reading a Hemingway passage drafted while he dodged familial responsibilities: a form of insight or art far from my circumstances. I'm glad Lewis and Tolkien captured notions and ideas that were available for that moment in time. Same for Dickens. The thing I appreciate is your bringing this insight to my mind. Thanks.
The great thing about these posts is that they inform not just my reading but my writing. Really appreciate this deeper look into what the originators of the genre hoped to do with it.
This is a great post! Thank you so much for sharing it!
Also, I think I understand why Tolkien disliked Chesterton's view. (Correct me if I'm wrong, I don't know much about the life of either man.) Personally, reading Chesterton's description of a horse creeped me out and made me kind of want to avoid horses. It's the more scientific approach, trying to describe something in a way that makes you view it differently. Whereas what I think Tolkien is getting at is using words to rejuvenate wonder. Chesterton's description makes me feel a little repulsed, but Tolkien's work has always given me a sense of wonder. Not just "oh, it's so beautiful" wonder, but also "wow, that sounds terrifying" wonder and wonder at how the words he strung together made me see it so clearly.
That might be confusing and maybe I'm completely off track, but I wanted to throw it out there.
Not a bad theory. I don’t think that was Chesterton’s general strategy, but this horse does sound pretty scary and weird. I think Tolkien provided more context by building an entire world.
That is why I love fantasy, opening our eyes to see the wonder in the mundane! Some fantasy books I have loved: Where Darkness Dwells by Andrea Renea, The Secrets of Ormdale Series by Christina Baehr, The Ball and the Cross by Chesterton, Sky of Seven Colors by Rachelle Nelson, Hard Contact: Star Wars Republic Commando (this one is great because it really wrestles with the clone’s humanity and highlights their brotherhood). A great book that’s not fantasy, but brings mystery back to the mundane and deals with place, belonging, nature vs city, etc is Howard’s End.
I’m glad you mention all of those but especially The Ball and the Cross. Such a good and underrated book!! Now you’ve got me wanting to read a Star Wars book too. It’s been a while.
My favorite work for the recovery of magic in the ordinary world is actually a Harry Potter fanfiction. In it, Hermione Granger overhears a particular miscarriage of justice committed against Prof. Snape. The same passion that drove her to protest on behalf of the house elves drives her belief that all people ought to have someone who stands in the corner, simply by virtue of their humanity. She resolves to redress the wrong by directing all her interactions with Snape under the premise the he deserves to "be protected", and over the course of the story she ends up taking an extensive journey of personal growth fueled by this belief - from tutoring Neville so that he won't keep stressing Snape (which turns to a multi-year tutoring gig that expands to the size of a small class), the awareness for the more nuanced aspect of care (such as learning that he rarely eats because he's so stressed from being a double agent and she engages the house elves to provide neutral, bland meals that he can stomach), and eventually engaging various types of protective spells, Hermione grows into this incredible force of nature - mature and wise and protective, but the entire arc, set in a magical world, revolves around the question of what it means to protect others. It's beautiful and completely refocused my own perspective on what it means to care for and protect the people in my care - especially in the mundane aspects of that work.
Anyways, that was a lot of rambling, but when I read your article the story immediately resurface as one of the best I've ever read for bringing back the magic and beauty in the ordinary and the mundane.
This fantasy novel "The Binding" by Bridget Collins brought back the awe of making hardcover books by hand. Through this power of capturing someone's memories inside it, the whole thing takes on a whole new meaning that was very profound. (I reviewed it on my Substack https://jwellenhallnovelist.substack.com/p/the-binding-by-bridget-collins-review)
I have recently experienced demystification too, as I was rereading the Eragon series - which I had loved as a child, it had brought me so much joy as well as creativity, love for fantasy and story ideas. Now I don't feel that anymore. I still strive to somehow love fantasy as much again.
Yeah that’s a tough one. I find that certain books I loved as a child didn’t hold up as well to adult reading. So I just kept looking around. I gave up Redwall for Ursula K Le Guin. And Star Wars books for The Once and Future King. You might just be maturing. Some books will stick with you even still.
Thanks for this great analysis of Tolkien’s idea of recovery. I especially liked the expansion of Chesterson’s Mooreeffoc technique. Also, I appreciated the extrapolation of how simple virtue can benefit from recovery - Tolkien talks about how wood and wine and bread can become luminous again, but really it’s the value of kindness and compassion and loyalty etc that need refreshing.
I would argue this is the exact thing that makes a true scientist, the ability to move up and down the hierarchy of scales flexibly, to realize that simplifying something to a model is useful, but doesn't simplify the thing, and in fact just creates more questions about it. Some people study the same creature for their entire careers. I can't personally do that; I'm more interested in the connections between things than in the things themselves.
And yes, Buddhists would say that Demystification and Recovery are states of mind that have nothing to do with reality except where they change our behavior towards reality, which can then alter it in a reifying feedback loop.
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman softened my hatred for the grunge of the city. With black dead dirt, it paints colourful souls over things I pass by every day.
I think it's also a masterful reminder that bad luck can change the entire world of anybody in a matter of hours.
Ships made of concrete? Absolutely a thing. This one sailed from New Zealand to the UK (I was along for the ride for some of the Australian stretch).
Can't post pictures in comments so I'll share in a Note.
Archimedes would have understood.
This is fascinating. Thank you.
I wonder if, in addition to the technique you describe, something else can Recover and re-mystify the world. If what you’ve described requires seeing the person, place, or thing in a renewed way, gratitude helps us see the whole context that way. Ingratitude and demystification seem to go together. The givenness of things draws our eyes to the Giver, which is ultimately re-mystifying but not for its own sake. Rather it re-mystifies for worship and for love.
What does this mean for reading and writing stories? Maybe this sense of gratitude shines through as one writes with a sense of wonder, rather than a sense of factory-worker control.
Honestly not a bad point. Tolkien also briefly mentions humility as a method against demystification and you can’t be grateful without at least a little humility.
That Dawn Treader quote gets me every time.
It’s crazy good right?
Indeed. The quote stops you and makes you consider myriad other possibilities (if you let it).
Thank you. I think you have finally made me understand why people are so attracted to worldbuilding as an art in itself. The world has gone grey for them, and they look to Oz transform it back into technicolor.
The thing is, I don't experience the world like this. It doesn't go grey for me. I have, if anything, the opposite problem. The world is too loud and too bright. I need to turn it down, not turn it up. And I think this was something I felt about LOTR from the beginning, even when I was a bigger fan than I am now, that everything was too big and too loud, as if real mountains weren't high enough and real rivers weren't fast enough. Qua worlds, I much preferred the miniature scale of Narnia. And this may explain why I have no taste for most modern fantasy. It is trying to turn up the volume on the world while I want to turn it down.
Perhaps this explains my affection for Robert Louis Stevenson, who famously said, “The world is so full of a number of things, / I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” No creeping disenchantment there.
This also makes me wonder if the angst over disenchantment that is so prevalent in Catholic literary circles today, and which is taken to be a fundamentally religious issue, is in fact simply a matter of personality, a matter of the mind for which the world quickly grows grey and quiet as opposed to a mind (like mine) for which it is always too loud and too bright.
This also highlights another thing that has always annoyed me about both Lewis and Tolkien. They are both living in the mid-century middle class bubble that saw life as the idyll of the Oxford don who had the summers free to go on walking tours across the English countryside. Tolkien, in the Shire, and Lewis in Narnia, present worlds in which everyone lives lives of respectable middle class comfort with lots of good food and tea and wine and tobacco. No such places ever existed. The poor (as Dickens well knew) lived no such lives, either in his England or in theirs. They are sentimental for a time when life was organized for the class from which Oxford dons were drawn, and for the life of gentlemen of leisure. Unlike Waugh, who also came from and wrote about that class, they are uncritical of them and see nothing of the work of others that sustains that lifestyle and makes it possible.
As the grandson of a coal miner on one side and of a teamster on the other (literally, my paternal grandfather delivered coal and moved furniture with a horse and cart) I'm honestly not long on sympathy for an Oxford don spending his long break on walking tours and feeling that the mountains are not as high as he would like nor the sky as blue.
Curiously, though, I think this may also have given me an insight into the Contemplative Realism movement, which on the surface seems the exact opposite of the fantasy world. But there too we find the same sense of impaired vision, or a desire to see more intensely. The literary prescription may be the exactly opposite, but the underlying aesthetic complaint seems to be just the same.
G.M., I just want to say that you have consistently interesting and insightful comments. Always a pleasure to read.
Like the original post, I found yours insightful and I'm better for reading it. I would read an account of your grandparents' experiences. I certainly don't approach the Oxford set's lifestyle and luxuries either. Still, I take from the Oxford set the same thing I take from, say, listening to a Mozart piece sponsored by a sumptuously adorned royal or reading a Hemingway passage drafted while he dodged familial responsibilities: a form of insight or art far from my circumstances. I'm glad Lewis and Tolkien captured notions and ideas that were available for that moment in time. Same for Dickens. The thing I appreciate is your bringing this insight to my mind. Thanks.
The great thing about these posts is that they inform not just my reading but my writing. Really appreciate this deeper look into what the originators of the genre hoped to do with it.
This is a great post! Thank you so much for sharing it!
Also, I think I understand why Tolkien disliked Chesterton's view. (Correct me if I'm wrong, I don't know much about the life of either man.) Personally, reading Chesterton's description of a horse creeped me out and made me kind of want to avoid horses. It's the more scientific approach, trying to describe something in a way that makes you view it differently. Whereas what I think Tolkien is getting at is using words to rejuvenate wonder. Chesterton's description makes me feel a little repulsed, but Tolkien's work has always given me a sense of wonder. Not just "oh, it's so beautiful" wonder, but also "wow, that sounds terrifying" wonder and wonder at how the words he strung together made me see it so clearly.
That might be confusing and maybe I'm completely off track, but I wanted to throw it out there.
Not a bad theory. I don’t think that was Chesterton’s general strategy, but this horse does sound pretty scary and weird. I think Tolkien provided more context by building an entire world.
That is why I love fantasy, opening our eyes to see the wonder in the mundane! Some fantasy books I have loved: Where Darkness Dwells by Andrea Renea, The Secrets of Ormdale Series by Christina Baehr, The Ball and the Cross by Chesterton, Sky of Seven Colors by Rachelle Nelson, Hard Contact: Star Wars Republic Commando (this one is great because it really wrestles with the clone’s humanity and highlights their brotherhood). A great book that’s not fantasy, but brings mystery back to the mundane and deals with place, belonging, nature vs city, etc is Howard’s End.
I’m glad you mention all of those but especially The Ball and the Cross. Such a good and underrated book!! Now you’ve got me wanting to read a Star Wars book too. It’s been a while.
The Dawn Treader quite comes to mind often.
This is a good series of articles.
Thanks! @Eric Falden’s idea. :)
My favorite work for the recovery of magic in the ordinary world is actually a Harry Potter fanfiction. In it, Hermione Granger overhears a particular miscarriage of justice committed against Prof. Snape. The same passion that drove her to protest on behalf of the house elves drives her belief that all people ought to have someone who stands in the corner, simply by virtue of their humanity. She resolves to redress the wrong by directing all her interactions with Snape under the premise the he deserves to "be protected", and over the course of the story she ends up taking an extensive journey of personal growth fueled by this belief - from tutoring Neville so that he won't keep stressing Snape (which turns to a multi-year tutoring gig that expands to the size of a small class), the awareness for the more nuanced aspect of care (such as learning that he rarely eats because he's so stressed from being a double agent and she engages the house elves to provide neutral, bland meals that he can stomach), and eventually engaging various types of protective spells, Hermione grows into this incredible force of nature - mature and wise and protective, but the entire arc, set in a magical world, revolves around the question of what it means to protect others. It's beautiful and completely refocused my own perspective on what it means to care for and protect the people in my care - especially in the mundane aspects of that work.
Anyways, that was a lot of rambling, but when I read your article the story immediately resurface as one of the best I've ever read for bringing back the magic and beauty in the ordinary and the mundane.
That’s pretty incredible, and I think that’s a great illustration of some of what I’m talking about here. Really good example. Thanks!
This fantasy novel "The Binding" by Bridget Collins brought back the awe of making hardcover books by hand. Through this power of capturing someone's memories inside it, the whole thing takes on a whole new meaning that was very profound. (I reviewed it on my Substack https://jwellenhallnovelist.substack.com/p/the-binding-by-bridget-collins-review)
I have recently experienced demystification too, as I was rereading the Eragon series - which I had loved as a child, it had brought me so much joy as well as creativity, love for fantasy and story ideas. Now I don't feel that anymore. I still strive to somehow love fantasy as much again.
Yeah that’s a tough one. I find that certain books I loved as a child didn’t hold up as well to adult reading. So I just kept looking around. I gave up Redwall for Ursula K Le Guin. And Star Wars books for The Once and Future King. You might just be maturing. Some books will stick with you even still.
Recovery, as you've presented it here, recalls a favorite poem of mine: "The Beautiful Changes", by Richard Wilbur.
One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides
The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies
On water; it glides
So from the walker, it turns
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you
Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.
The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.
Your hands hold roses always in a way that says
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.
Powerfully beautiful
Thanks for this great analysis of Tolkien’s idea of recovery. I especially liked the expansion of Chesterson’s Mooreeffoc technique. Also, I appreciated the extrapolation of how simple virtue can benefit from recovery - Tolkien talks about how wood and wine and bread can become luminous again, but really it’s the value of kindness and compassion and loyalty etc that need refreshing.
I would argue this is the exact thing that makes a true scientist, the ability to move up and down the hierarchy of scales flexibly, to realize that simplifying something to a model is useful, but doesn't simplify the thing, and in fact just creates more questions about it. Some people study the same creature for their entire careers. I can't personally do that; I'm more interested in the connections between things than in the things themselves.
For more on the true freakishness of horses:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/688000/the-horse-by-timothy-c-winegard/
And yes, Buddhists would say that Demystification and Recovery are states of mind that have nothing to do with reality except where they change our behavior towards reality, which can then alter it in a reifying feedback loop.
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman softened my hatred for the grunge of the city. With black dead dirt, it paints colourful souls over things I pass by every day.
I think it's also a masterful reminder that bad luck can change the entire world of anybody in a matter of hours.
A good one for sure and a good example of recovery.
Then the bass drops. That’s how you know Théoden is in the house.