Stealing Past the Watchful Dragons: The Imaginative Apologetics of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis
By Melissa Cain Travis
It has been more than twenty years since my first reading of The Lord of the Rings. I’d never even heard of the book until the first film of Peter Jackson’s trilogy made its grand debut in December of 2001, and I purchased a copy of the book immediately after seeing it. Since then, I’ve read the book numerous times, and watching the extended versions of the films has become a central tradition of the holiday season in the Travis household. My discovery of Tolkien was a watershed event in my life; it resuscitated my love of great literature and played a key role in my journey towards a much more robust life of the mind. That journey included a far broader acquaintance with the work of Tolkien’s fellow Inkling, C.S. Lewis, who I’d previously known only through Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters. I devoured the Narnia chronicles, even though I didn’t yet understand their theological and philosophical depth.
It wasn’t until about a decade ago that I began to truly appreciate the importance of imaginative literature in the context of Christian apologetics. Like many Christians, I thought of apologetics as a discipline concerned with philosophy, history, and science. I was unaware of the subdiscipline known as imaginative apologetics, which seeks to open minds to the deeper truths of Christian theism by appealing to the imagination. A fantastical story, such as a fairy tale, has the potential to pierce the soul of a person who may not be affected by straightforward theological conversations or by arguments and evidence. Lewis expressed this idea in his essay, “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said”:
I wrote fairy tales because the fairy tale seemed the ideal Form for the stuff I had to say. . . I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons?[1]
Based upon his personal conversion experience, Lewis knew that when we encounter imaginative stories, we let our guard down in the pleasurable experience of the tale. On the plane of fantasy, we let go and resonate with higher truths about evil (witches and balrogs), virtue (Lucy and Samwise), and sacrificial love (Aslan and Gandalf). We ponder the reality of the dragons we too must fight and the heavy burdens we are sometimes called to bear with purity—yet not without grace from on high.
The necessity of divine grace is a powerful theme in the fantasy stories of Lewis and Tolkien. Perhaps the best known from Tolkien is the scene near the end of The Lord of the Rings, when Gollum becomes essential to the destruction of the One Ring after Frodo succumbs to its power. Most people are also familiar with Aslan’s atonement for Edmund’s sin in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. But another example, one that I find incredibly poignant, is what may be referred to as the “un-dragoning of Eustace Scrubb,” the climactic moment of the major theological theme of Lewis’ Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Although the book, which is part of the Narnia chronicles, is about far more than this particular character, the opening line is a clue about his centrality: “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”[2] Eustace is spiteful, selfish, and arrogant, but it’s not until he’s transformed into a literal dragon and the ugliness of his soul is made visibly manifest that he realizes he’s a monster even in the metaphorical sense. His dragonish heart, now with the outward appearance to match, begins to long for the good—for virtue and the forgiveness of his kindred.
In the depths of his misery, wondering what will become of him when he is left behind on the island in this hopeless state, Aslan appears and invites Eustace to follow him. They journey deep into the mountains and stop at a water well, where Aslan explains that Eustace must “undress” from the dragon skin. At first, Eustace seems to make progress, scratching off the scales and peeling the skin off like a suit, but then he looks down to see that he remains every bit a dragon. Twice more he desperately rends his own hide and tears it off, but this turns out to be an exercise in futility. At that point, Aslan explains that Eustace must allow him to do it. Eustace recounts:
The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right to my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off…And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me—I didn’t like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on—and threw me into the water.[3]
Thus, Aslan delivers Eustace from his bondage and washes him in baptismal waters. It was only by the grace and power of the Great Lion that Eustace could be made clean, made more fully human than he’d ever been, even before his dragon-ing.
Lewis demonstrates how a fairy tale can awaken our longing for the good and show us truths through imaginative story. As Paul Gould writes: “Our imagination moves us in a way that nothing else does…We are captured by that which captivates our imagination, and once hooked, we’re hooked…Often it is the ‘aesthetic currency of the imagination—story, poetry, music, symbols, and images’ that God uses to awaken our desire.”[4] Goodness, truth, and beauty, conveyed through imaginative stories like the masterworks of Lewis and Tolkien, steal past the watchful dragons. To paraphrase Lewis, this imaginative approach draws common things “into the bright shadow,”[5] it helps to re-enchant the world and peel the dragon scales from hardened hearts.
—Melissa Cain Travis holds a PhD in Humanities (Philosophy) from Faulkner University's Great Books program and an MA in Science and Religion from Biola University. She is a Fellow at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, where she teaches adult education courses related to the intersection of science, faith, and philosophy. To learn more about her publications and academic interests, visit melissacaintravis.com.
[1] C.S. Lewis, “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said,” in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (New York: HarperOne, 2017), 57.
[2] C.S. Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 3.
[3] Ibid., 109.
[4] Paul Gould, Cultural Apologetics: Renewing the Christian Voice, Conscience, and Imagination in a Disenchanted World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2019), 74.
[5] C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (New York: HarperOne, 2017), 222.