Locked Doors and Imagination

They open a door on Other Time, and if we pass through, though only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself, maybe.
- J.R.R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories"

I've been reading Tolkien's excellent essay "On Fairy-Stories", which covers the depth of story, meaning, purpose, and hope. I have read this essay a few times before, but this time, my eye was keener and my heart took time to dwell in these ponderable ideas that provoke me to celebrate and embrace the written words of imagination and good story-telling.

Fairy stories take us into a new realm, a secondary world created by a thoughtful sub-creator with an imaginative mind. When we open a book into a good story, we exit the primary world and enter one where we are open to strange and different things. Here, elves are living in the woods. The woods may feel familiar, but there is magic amongst the trees. Elements of nature become more real to us as if seeing for the first time, and there is a hidden mystery that we explore along the laws and rules of the realm.

The Locked Door stand as an eternal Temptation.

We come to a place that blocks us, and we can go no further. How much do we desire, then, to get through? Our curiosity should imagine what is on the other side. Why would we not imagine that? I wonder about those who would have no curiosity. How dull it must be to them all the time to come across something imaginative.

Tolkien believed to be a true fairy-story, there should be a happy ending, which likely takes place after the sudden good catastrophe (he coins a new word here, eucatastrophe) when everything seems most dark. It comes out of nowhere, with no sense that it could ever happen again. This is where the hope in the story shapes our own imaginations to look for that hope in other stories, including our own. 

Bringing it all the way home, Tolkien explains that the story has entered History. The eucatastrophe of man's history is the birth of Christ, he writes. Then, the eucatastophe of the incarnation is the resurrection. Fairy-stories are not just those little tales you learned as a child. The Gospel is a telling and entering into history of the true fairy-story.