Inventions of Truth: Concluding Thoughts
Faerie, Fantasy, and Sci-Fi, Oh My—Part 5
In closing out this series, I include a brief reflection on this series and seeing our reality with trees via the aid of literary works. The trees and forests of faery, fantasy, and sci-fi provide intriguing insights into conceptions of human-tree/forest relations in our world. That literary trees are creations by occupants of this world tightens the relationship, for the germ of every story idea is here. The power of each genre is that each allows a different focus of reality to be imaged, to lay out what is obscured in the familiar frames of human culture. Human societies need the forests and, though human agency may seem more active in our world, the power of the trees is actually dominant in their indispensable role to facilitating a healthy environment for both humans and nonhumans—a now empirically based fact that was known imaginatively in pre-industrial tales of fairy, folklore, and legend (see Porteous 2002:21-33).
As noted, each genre has particular goals, tools, and means by which to accomplish its purpose, and the varying usage of trees throughout, when brought together, present a mirror and window. As a mirror, we may see ourselves and our relations with trees and forests more clearly, but as through a window we may catch a glimpse of the multifarious reality that is beyond our comprehension—a world that would leave any poet in a frenzy to capture in mere speech. But where words of trees and forests may fail, stories of faery, fantasy, and sci-fi might just succeed in giving the truth of trees and forests a form.
Tolkien understood myth to be “invention about truth” (Carpenter 1977:147), and, as noted previously, fantasy’s power is to form “images…of things not in the primary world. A possible conclusion may be that fantasy and myth image truth we otherwise cannot (easily, at least) see. This is precisely the value of exploring artistic (here, literary) contributions to shaping human perception of reality. It is an old tension, captured perfectly by Shakespeare:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.
Even though the resulting habitations and names may be partial or even distorted, Tolkien believed that the fragment of light revealed is worthy to pursue (Carpenter 1977:147). The imaging of reality, of our world, of societies, of what it is to be mean, is explore and perhaps grasped in the pages of story.
The question raised in the review of fairy tales is whether or not forests and trees are necessary for humanity to image itself. As a type of mirror, we see our societies in the forest, the families and individual selves in the trees, the interdependence, the necessity of each other, in a way that transcends symbol and metaphor. They are that. But they are not just that. The consciousness of forests, to borrow again from Tolkien, hints at something of the forests’ independence of humanity (and, perhaps, of Nature’s independence). As humans, we cannot fully control, define, or even predict the behaviour of forests (not to mention Nature). No more can we comprehensively classify the vast diversity of the age-old question, what is human?
The revelation of the forest, incomplete as it may appear to our rationally-ordered proclivities, is still a revelation. As Le Guin established, the desire to fully know is not only futile, it is premised on the lie that everything can be known (controlled), a lie that ultimately leads to its own destruction. Full, whole, thorough knowledge is beyond human. The striving to know is human. The reality the forest reflects in its shadows and sunbeams is ways of knowing that transcend words. For, instead of words, we are given an image.
Bibliography
Carpenter, H. 1977. J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography. London: George Allen & Unwin.
Porteous, A. 2002. The Forest in Folklore and Mythology. Garden City, NY: Dover Publications.
Shakespeare, W. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene I, Lines 13-18.
Recommended reading, both of which are short, highly accessible books by excellent thinkers and writers:
Guite, Malcom. 2021. Lifting the Veil: The Imagination and the Kingdom of God. Square Halo Books.
Wolfe, Judith. 2024. The Theological Imagination: Perception and Interpretation in Life, Art, and Faith. Cambridge University Press