Finding Meaning in Middle-Earth: Why I’m Learning to appreciate Fantasy

This week I visited Hobbiton (the set of the Hobbit in NZ) with my daughter. The green hills, the round doors, the lanterns glowing in the dusk—it was enchanting. She was thrilled. I was curious. Fantasy has never really been my favourite genre. I’m more of a non-fiction kind of reader. I like my stories grounded. But I’m beginning to see what others have long known: fantasy, done well, is not an escape from reality but a deeper engagement with it.

C.S. Lewis once wrote, “Reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.” That sentence has stuck with me. Life isn’t just about knowing what’s true—it’s about interpreting it, intuiting it, letting it move us. We don’t just live by facts; we live within stories that are rich with meaning and orientated towards convictions.

Lewis also wrote, “The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’” That’s it, isn’t it? We grow blind to the wonder of things. Life becomes routine. Love becomes cliché. Hope becomes sentimental. But in a well-told story—a hobbit’s courage, a ring’s burden, a king’s return—we feel again the weight and compulsion of these realities.

More than that, fantasy helps me realise that the greater story—the one the Bible tells—is also about an eternal battle. Good and evil. Light and darkness. These aren’t abstract concepts. They are present and active forces. “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood,” Paul says in Ephesians 6:12, “but against the powers… of this dark world.” The best fantasy doesn’t distract me from that—it wakes me up to it.

Christian faith is not just truths to adopt. It’s a battle to enter. A kingdom to seek. A hope to live for. Fantasy, in its way, reminds me of that, whereas the 9 to 5 of life can distract us from that.