We All Need Fairytales

In the classic story The Little Prince, the narrator says that adults “can never understand anything by themselves” and tire out children who have to explain everything to them. But eventually, the narrator learns how to talk to such adults. “I didn’t talk to them about boa constrictors or primeval forests or the stars. I kept to things they could grasp. I talked about bridges and golf and politics and ties. And the grown-ups were very happy to have met someone so sensible.”¹

One day, I found that I was one of those adults too.

I once waved sticks in the air as magical wands and found buried keys in the backyard that I believed could open portals to other worlds. I wrote story upon story about made-up creatures and magic spells. I gobbled up fairytales.

But then I grew up, and soon I could only give my time to serious studies of theology, podcasts about the Bible, and books on Christian living. I donated all my fairytales and whimsical adventure stories to the Salvation Army in order to pursue logic and knowledge. My efforts were spent blogging about how to study Scripture and live the gospel.

Years later, postpartum depression made the windows of my heart and mind hazy—the glass through which I saw the world became clouded and misshapen. I then endured years of personal injustice, which added more dust and grime to the glass. All the smog made it harder to see even the bright light of the rising of the sun. All I could perceive was darkness—a world void of beauty and hope.

I struggled to see reality for what it was—to see that hope, justice, and goodness still followed me in the land of the living. My familiarity with these truths didn’t help; I had been writing about them online since Bible college, yet they fell flat and dull.

I needed recovery, the kind that fairyland can offer. By writing, reading, and imagining those kinds of stories again, I saw through the glass once more.

Chesterton once wrote, “I had always felt life first as a story; and if there is a story there is a storyteller.”² Stories showed me how my own story of pain fit into the greater story God was weaving, and taught me how to hope again—how to believe in the Greatest Fairytale.

Fairytales Are the Right Kind of Escapism

Fantasy is often seen as escapism—a waste of time because it doesn’t deal in “reality”. Perhaps we authors and readers of it are merely playing pretend and refusing to grow up, children who never toss away the dress-up clothes. There may be a type of fantasy novel and fairytale out there that accomplishes this, but there is another kind that offers a better kind of “escapism”.

Fantasy teaches in a way self-help books never could; it makes the familiar strange to us by putting the very issues and ideas we grapple with into a cosmos utterly unlike our own. We are faced with vice and virtue in a way that grips our imagination without feeling abrasive. The same truths that someone may have once told us plainly are felt much differently when seen through another world. C.S. Lewis says this is why he wrote The Chronicles of Narnia:

I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralyzed 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? I thought one could.³

He took the gospel story out of the churchy words we are so familiar with and made us weep anew over Christ’s sacrifice through the death of Aslan. Stories, especially fairytales, can get intimately close without arousing our suspicions and then slice into our hearts with conviction of sin as we see ourselves in the characters we hate most.

Professor Vigen Guroian writes in his book Tending the Heart of Virtue that classic stories are needed tools for building godly morals in our children. Lecturing our children on the various virtues they should cultivate can only go so far—they need stories to awaken their imaginations to cause them to care about such virtues. He writes,

Mere instruction in morality is not sufficient to nurture the virtues. It might even backfire, especially when the presentation is heavily exhortative and the pupil feels coerced. Instead, a compelling vision of the goodness of goodness itself needs to be presented in such a way that it is attractive and stirs the imagination. A good moral education addresses both the cognitive and affective dimensions of human nature. And stories are an irreplaceable medium for this kind of moral education, by which I mean the education of character.⁴

This is true for us adults too. God didn’t simply give us a book full of laws. He gave us narrative, poetry, and parables as well. God is the Creator of our imaginations and he made them require both exhortation and stories to grow in holiness. Laws may build the structure of the house, but it is stories that add texture, decoration, and furnishings. Stories put a face on the law and pull on our heartstrings. We can’t reason our way to righteousness; our wills must first be shaped by law and stories.

I first began writing fairytales for myself in order to find light in my personal Shadowland. Now, I write in hopes that others who find themselves in such hazy darkness might take hold of hope again, and be renewed by the old truths that have grown so dull.

This is why I believe all good fiction is about hope.

Fairytales Offer Hope

When I say that I believe all good fiction is about hope, I don’t mean every book must end with “Happily Ever After.” Hope is the slice of light flickering through the storm clouds, the nightlight in the dark bedroom, a daisy poking up through the concrete slabs, a sapling growing up from a rotten log. Hope often begins in small ways in desolate places. Sometimes that’s all we need, and all good fairytales should do that.

In Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, three hobbits leave their beloved home to help their friend on a journey to destroy the Ring that has wreaked so much havoc in all of Middle-earth. None of them have ever left their quiet, gentle lives in the Shire. On their journey, they are snared in unimaginable hardships. Merry, one of these hobbits, says, “If I had known what the world outside was like, I don’t think I should have had the heart to leave it.”

Yet an elf, Haldir, who had lived many more years and seen much more of Middle-earth than this hobbit, says to him, “The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”⁵

Friend, there is hope, even amid all the peril.

Tolkien taught that good fairytales provide the escape of the prisoner from the prison cell—not the flight of the ordinary man from his everyday responsibilities:

Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in a prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.⁶

This is what good stories offer: the key from the prison cell of fear, dismay, and sadness that comes with living in a broken world. It’s not a blanket over our heads to hide from the realities of living among thorns and thistles, but a hand turning our gaze to see the beam of sun coming through the prison bars. It reminds us that life, beauty, and goodness still exist and are waiting for us. These stories are a flashlight in the never-ending winter night.

We all need fairytales, even us sensible adults who have grown so accustomed to only talking about golf, ties, and politics. Non-fiction is good; I have since returned to reading books about theology and found courage there too. But fairytales lend us eyes to see our circumstances anew and restore our hope in the “happily ever after” to come in a way non-fiction may not, especially in certain seasons of life. May we be willing to seek after what goodness can be found in both kinds of literature.

Note: An earlier version of this article was originally published on Lara’s Substack, Starlit Stories.

¹ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (1943; repr., Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2019), 9.

² G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy: With Annotations & Guided Reading by Trevin Wax, ed. Trevin Wax (B&H Academic, 2022), 82.

³ C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature, ed. Owen Barfield and Walter Hooper (1966; repr., HarperCollins, 2017), 70.

⁴ Vigen Guroian, Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2023), 16.

⁵ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Rings (1954; repr., HarperCollins Publishers, 2007), 454.

⁶ J.R.R. Tolkien, Tolkien On Fairy-stories: Expanded edition, with commentary and notes, ed. Verlyn Flieger and Douglas Anderson (1947; repr., HarperCollins Publishers, 2008), 85.

Lara d’Entremont raises her three boys in a small seaside community that feels like it’s on the edge of nowhere, yet that’s often where all good stories start. Whether they walk the old train tracks by the sea or the wooded forests, you never know what adventures (real or made up) may find them that she must write down. You can explore more of her writing at laradentremont.com and her Substack, Starlit Stories.