Welcome to Fairy Tale Central

Welcome intrepid travelers, weary from the weight of the passing world. Enter here, where there be dragons, and find refreshment for your souls. For those who have wandered astray and find yourself in these winsome woods, know that mystery, magic, and adventure await you. And worry not, for there are clear streams of pure water to refresh you, and a table laid out in the courtyard of the King. For these are his woods, and it is he who calls you to come and drink of life's water free...

This blog is an open forum and I invite one and all to comment and share. Pull off your shoes and dip your feet in the cool stream that meanders through this meadow just outside the wood. For we still have a very long way to go, and sometimes the night is filled with horrific sounds and cries. But we know we are not alone, and that we are under the protection of the King. And we are loved. Oh yes we are.

If you are wondering what the buzz is all about in Fairy Tale land, read the posted articles. As G.K Chesterton wrote in 1908 (and you will hear a lot of him on this blog): Every man has forgotten who he is....We are under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are....and we forget we have forgotten."

In this magical, real world in which we find ourselves journeying, we have moments when we realize we have lost our way. The stars we thought guided us home only led us into a great, dark pit from which we cannot extricate ourselves. As the apostle Paul cried out: "O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?" We can no more rescue ourselves from the futility of this life than we can lift ourselves by our bootstraps to get out of the pit. But there is hope, and it is couched in the power of myth and tale.

C.S Lewis defined myths as "lies breathed through silver." J.R.R. Tolkien, while working on his Middle Earth trilogy, believed in the "inherent truth of mythology."

"Just as speech is invention about objects and ideas," he told Lewis, "so myth is invention about truth. We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man ascribe to the start of perfection that he knew before the Fall."

Lewis added: "the story of Christ is simply a true myth; a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened."

On my website and in this blog you will read about the power of myth and fantasy, of fairy tales and why they are desperately needed now, in our cruel and callous time. We writers of fantasy are a vast army, and the sound of our boots trampling on the road to the great city is barely heard for the cacophony of the revelers and disrupters. But if you put an ear to the ground, you will hear a steady beat, a pulse, like a merging of hearts gaining momentum. And when we enter through the open gates, there will be no stopping us. For already inside the battlement walls are throngs of hungry, thirsting people. People who have been waiting a very long time for water that will never leave them parched ever again. For what they have tasted out there only hinted of what could be, and what they have read out there only sparked a need for something they cannot identify, and it has set loose a raging fire in their souls that refuses to be quenched.

C.S Lewis put it this way: "Fairy land arouses in [the reader] a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted words; the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted."