Tolkein – katyandtheword

Why #Steampunk? Why Now? #analysis of #fantasy #narrative…

If you have been long time follower of my blog, you might be aware that I have a theory that with the advent of recent Speculative Fiction including (but not limited to) Harry Potter and Urban Fantasy the old idea that technology will ultimately wipe out all magic (as proposed by such classics as The Lord of the Rings, Narnia, and Wizard of Oz) has since been changed to the idea that magic and technology are parallel and coexisting worlds instead (something that I think THEOLOGY needs to catch up on…see full theory here )

So Steampunk, is our re-writing of the collective narrative, showing that even if technology had been bigger and more present in the Victorian Era, no way in the world would it have done away with magic…or religion for that matter…

There also tends to be good narratives inserting women heroines, non-hetereo-normative romances as well as developing ethnically empowering narratives. Writing the novels in such a way that they broaden our understanding of history

Steampunk, now, because it is fairy tales and technology…and people in history…we can see it better now….
Steampunk is the next step on Speculative Fiction’s natural development as it narrates itself through the contemporary world as it is today

By giving us a …

By giving us a window into the folk wisdom of an earlier age and revealing the wishes, hopes, fears, disappoinmtents, and frustrations of that time, these stories help us to understand just what is at stake in our own cultural stories. The tales we tell each other and our children not only reflect our own lived experience and our psychic realities, they also shape our lives, enabling us to construct our desires, to cope with our anxieties, and to separate fantasy from reality.” Maria Tartar Cambridge, 1997

We tell stories to find truth. Tolkien called this the eternal truth in his Mythpoeia essay/poem.

Myths, Lewis told Tolkien, were “lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver.”

“No,” Tolkien replied. “They are not lies.” Far from being lies they were the best way — sometimes the only way — of conveying truths that would otherwise remain inexpressible. We have come from God, Tolkien argued, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God.

Katy’s thoughts Stories help us to understand the human condition in light of the eternal truth, God….our charge is to tell the Gospel wherever and whenever possible, and since Christ’s story is our story, and our story is Christ’s story….the t

wo help us to find where God is…

What we are doing now, our job, is to speak our knowledge/prophecy/stories of God in love. Because that is our window to truth!

And ultimately Fairy Tales are stories about love! 1st Corinthians 8-12 “⁸Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. ⁹For we know in part and we prophesy in part, ¹⁰but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. ¹¹

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” In essence the next verse is the Mythopoeia thesis “¹²For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”

¹³And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

J. R. R. …

J. R. R. Tolkien on escapism in “The Lord of the Rings” (x)

“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?…If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!”

-J.R.R. Tolkien

J. R. R. Tolkein