Lewis continued his discussion of The Lord of the Rings as myth in “The Dethronement of Power,” his review of The Two Towers and The Return of the King that appeared in the October 1955 issue of Time and Tide.

‘But why’, (some ask), ‘why, if you must have a serious comment to make on the real life of men, must you do it by talking about a phantasmagoric never-never land of your own?’ Because, I take it, one of the main things the author wants to say is that the real life of men is of that mythical and heroic quality. One can see the principle at work in his characterisation. Much that in a realistic work would be done by ‘character delineation’ is here done simply by making the character an elf, a dwarf, or a hobbit. The imagined beings have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls. And Man as a whole, Man pitted against the universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale?

. . . The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’ The child enjoys his cold meat (otherwise dull to him) by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savory for having been dipped in a story; you might say that only then it is the real meat. If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting break, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality, we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves . The book applies the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish, and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly. I do not think he could have done it any other way.

Oh to see the world as it really is!  But that would mean being willing to recast it by reminding ourselves of the bigger story in which we find ourselves, the bigger story we often reduce to our own size.

(photo taken June 2014 at The Green Dragon in Hobbiton)