To fully understand C.S. Lewis’ love for the imaginary—indeed, to understand the man himself—something must be said about the distinctively English world Faery. The world of Faery, which has its roots in Celtic culture, is not so easily categorized. It is not at all the land of delicate fairies that Walt Disney would have us imagine. Nor is it simply imaginary, a story altogether detached and unrelated to the world before us. Faery is, first, a place. It is lush and green like gentle British landscapes and ancient English forests, but forests untamed, willful, and enchanted—”a world, that sometimes overlaps with Britain but is fundamentally Other than it.”(1) Biographer Alan Jacobs hints at the importance of Faery on the imagination of Lewis, and in particular, this “old idea that Faery overlaps our world—that one can, unwillingly and unwittingly, pass from one into the other.”(2) Faery is both beautiful and dangerous, its boundaries unclear. The encounter with Faery and its tales, the “horns of Elfland faintly blowing,” was one that haunted Lewis throughout much of his life.(3)

For Lewis, “the horns of Elfland” were heard and followed and dear, like arrows of Joy shot at him from childhood—through the death of his mother at the fragile age of nine, through the horrid years at boarding school, through the doubt and dismissal of faith and God, through the metaphysical pessimism and the deep layers of secular ice, through a dejected and reluctant conversion, to Narnia, and to the Joy itself.

Of course, this is not to say that the imaginative world in which Lewis lived was one fueled in any sense by Christianity or faith; nor were the imaginary worlds he loved anything one might necessarily call Christian. But it was an imagination nonetheless that shaped the way he viewed the world—until he saw fit to abandon it all. Among other reasons for the distancing of his imagination, a new intellectual movement in psychology was becoming increasingly influential. As Lewis writes, “What we were most concerned about was ‘Fantasy’ or ‘wishful thinking.’… [W]hat, I asked myself, were all my delectable mountains and western gardens but sheer Fantasies?… With the confidence of a boy I decided I had done with all that… And I was never going to be taken in again.”(4) For a long line of atheists like Lewis at this time, the Christian imagination’s possession of beauty and hope could be explained only as wish fulfillment, which lied at the very heart of the Christian religion—even if it was, as some contended, a beautiful, imaginative delusion.

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