Here's a fascinating article on why British children's stories (which tend toward fantasy) are more popular than American children's stories (which tend toward preachiness and realism). I think the reason British stories (which tend towards fantasy) are more popular than American stories (which tend towards preachiness and realism) is that deep down inside, people know that the universe isn't a soulless machine, but a place of mystery and glory and wonder.

This article by N.D. Wilson is a few years old, but it's a great rationale for why Christians should appreciate fantasy stories.

There is real adventure to be had in God’s fantastic world, real evil to fight, real moral complexities to navigate, real sorrows to bear, real redemption to celebrate. Tolkien created Middle-earth not as an escape from the real world, but as a retreat to see our reality all the clearer and come back more wide awake to our world. . . .

Tolkien’s stories summon us . . .  not to settle for our little comforts and play spaces and semblances of control, but to dream for more, to lose ourselves in some great global pursuit, to vanquish the foe, to win the peoples.

Evil in the world is real and powerful, as Tolkien so starkly portrays. And so throughout The Hobbit, says Devin Brown, Tolkien is teaching us a lesson about . . . an invisible Hand at work in the entirety of the story.

But even more poignant than some Great Providence at every harrowing turn is the climactic moment of rescue and resolution. Which now, at long last, we come to in this third and final installment of The Hobbit. It is what Tolkien called “the Consolation of the Happy Ending” in his powerful essay “On Fairy Stories.”

Here we finally taste “the joy of the happy ending.” But don’t think that means it comes with simplicity, and that you can see it coming. Tolkien coined a term for this happy ending that “all complete fairy-stories must have.” He called it “Eucatastrophe,” which means “the good catastrophe.” It is

the sudden joyous “turn” . . . a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of . . . sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance: it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium [the gospel], giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world.

. . . The great insight of Tolkien’s “On Fairy Stories” is that the Christian story “is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe.” The “Joy” we experience at the sudden climactic turn from evil to good, from death to life, from utter darkness to brilliant light, is a “gleam or echo of evangelium [the gospel] in the real world.” Says Tolkien,

The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the “inner consistency of reality.” There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. . . .

 It is preeminently (infinitely, if our capacity were not finite) high and joyous. But this story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men — and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused.

. . . For Christians, here [in The Hobbit] we find just a gleam, just a faint echo of the Joy that is, and is coming, and will shine and sound for all eternity, and satisfy our souls in that True Story for which we were made.

David Mathis, "Bilbo's Last Goodbye"

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is a powerful illustration of why fantasy matters in the first place. Yes, the Narnia books are works of Christian apology, works that celebrate joy and love—but what I was conscious of as a little boy, if not in any analytical way, was the deep grief encoded in the books. Particularly in the initial wardrobe passage. There’s a sense of anger and grief and despair that causes Lewis to want to discard the entire war, set it aside in the favor of something better. You can feel him telling you—I know it’s awful, truly terrible, but that’s not all there is. There’s another option. Lucy, as she enters the wardrobe, takes the other option. I remember feeling this way as a child, too. I remember thinking, “Yes, of course there is. Of course this isn’t all there is. There must be something else.”

How powerful it was to have Lewis come along and say, Yes, I feel that way, too. 

But I bristle whenever fantasy is characterized as escapism. It’s not a very accurate way to describe it; in fact, I think fantasy is a powerful tool for coming to an understanding of oneself. The magic trick here, the sleight of hand, is that when you pass through the portal, you re-encounter in the fantasy world the problems you thought you left behind in the real world. Edmund doesn’t solve any of his grievances or personality disorders by going through the wardrobe. If anything, they're exacerbated and brought to a crisis by his experiences in Narnia. When you go to Narnia, your worries come with you. Narnia just becomes the place where you work them out and try to resolve them.  

The whole modernist-realist tradition is about the self observing the world around you—sensing how other it is, how alien it is, how different it is to what’s going on inside you. In fantasy, that gets turned inside out. The landscape you inhabit is a mirror of what’s inside you. The stuff inside can get out, and walk around, and take the form of places and people and things and magic. And once it’s outside, then you can get at it. You can wrestle it, make friends with it, kill it, seduce it. Fantasy takes all those things from deep inside and puts them where you can see them, and then deal with them. 

 Lev Grossman, "Confronting Reality by Reading Fantasy"

"In literary worlds where goodness is made desirable and where moral order and meaning derive from a morally absolute supernature, the Christian can momentarily relax his vigilance and free his attention for the humble but refreshing pleasures of nature, friendship, and adventure. Perhaps more significantly, an unbeliever can feel he is a stranger in a gracious place, and wish he were at home."

Miriam Hendrix, "Flight to Fantasy," in The Christian Imagination, Ed. Leland Ryken

"Christians ... ought not to be threatened by fantasy and the imagination. ... The Old Testament art commanded by God was not always 'photographic.' There were blue pomegranates on the robes of the priest when he went into the Holy of Holies. In nature there are no blue pomegranates. . . . The Christian is the really free man--he is free to have imagination. This too is our heritage. The Christian is the one whose imagination should fly beyond the stars."


Francis Schaeffer, Art and the Bible

"[God's instructions for the tabernacle included] cherubim of gold . . . representations of nature, flowers, blossoms, things of natural beauty. And these are to be in the tabernacle at the command of God in the midst of the place of worship....

Later in Exodus we find this description of the priests' garments: "And upon the skirts of it thou shalt make pomegranates of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet ..." (Ex. 28:33). Thus, when the priest went into the Holy of Holies, he was to take with him on his garments a representation of nature, carrying that representation into the presence of God. Surely this is the very antithesis of a command against works of art.

But there is something further to note here: In nature, pomegranates are red, but these pomegranates were to be blue, purple, and scarlet. Purple and scarlet could be natural changes in the growth of a pomegranate. But blue isn't. The implication is that there is freedom to make something which gets its impetus from nature but can be different from it and it too can be brought into the presence of God. In other words, art does not need to be 'photographic' in the poor sense."

--Francis Schaeffer, Art and the Bible

Christians . . . ought not to be threatened by fantasy and imagination. Great painting is not "photographic": think of the Old Testament art commanded by God. There were blue pomegranates on the robes of the priest who went into the Holy of Holies. In nature there are no blue pomegranates. Christian artists do not need to be threatened by fantasy and imagination, for they have a basis for knowing the difference between them and the real world "out there." The Christian is the really free person--he is free to have imagination. This too is our heritage. The Christian is the one whose imagination should fly beyond the stars.

Francis Schaeffer, "Perspectives on Art"

[Tolkien's] doctrine of sub-creation [the idea that man's ability to create worlds in fantasy literature is one of the ways that man demonstrates the image of the Creator of this world] was created to explain certain features of fantasy literature, [but] it is applicable to many other genres as well. Even in the most "realistic" fiction, the writer creates a world, peoples it with characters whose actions give its history significance, and determines the rules of its nature.l And usually . . . the secondary world [created by the author] echoes the primary creation [the real world, which God created] in more ways than one. The hero, at great personal sacrifice, defeats the villain and rescues the damsel in distress, and they ride off into the sunset to live happily ever after: this basic plot we keep coming back to is salvation history writ small, as it were. As Edwards says, literature is "drawn" towards a biblical reading of life. Tolkien explains why: "We make still by the law in which we're made."

Donald T. Williams, "Christian Poetics, Past and Present"