How Fantasy Literature Lost its Soul
From Narnia to Nihilism
As a child, I roamed the candlelit corridors of Hogwarts, rode through the snowy woods of Narnia, and stood in the shadow of Mount Doom. I was a bookish kid with an outsized inner life and a quiet ache for something I couldn’t name; in these enchanted worlds, I found a sense of belonging.
As I grew up, I didn’t leave fantasy behind. But when I read some of the most lauded contemporary offerings, like Phillips Pullman’s His Dark Materials or Lev Grossman’s The Magicians trilogy, I was conflicted. I loved the books. They were gripping and brilliantly written… but when I turned the last page, I was left with a strange, hollow feeling. Beneath their cleverness, there lingered an an atmosphere that seemed to mock the sense of wonder that had once made fantasy feel like home.
Many of the most celebrated contemporary fantasy books – the ones often winning industry awards – felt different from the stories I loved as a child. These newer stories only felt like fantasy on the surface. The quests remained, but identity replaced destiny and irony stood where sincerity once ruled. Hidden beneath the dazzling prose, the worldview being offered to the reader was not one of transcendence, but of nihilism.
Disenchanted
A few years ago I read a book that offered an insight into the critical mindset shaping much of today’s fantasy, one that sees the genre not as a vessel for wonder, but as raw material to be rewritten in the image of modern ideology. In Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century, Maria Sachiko Cecire examines how fantasy literature, particularly by authors like JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, has shaped cultural perceptions of magic, medievalism, and childhood. Cecire’s main argument is that Tolkien and Lewis’s use of medieval-inspired settings in their fantasy books The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia was rooted in their supposed racism and sexism to serve as a symbol of cultural purity and traditional power structures. I believe this argument profoundly misreads both the intent and the impact of the fantasy genre’s foundational works.
What makes her thesis especially egregious is that neither Tolkien nor Lewis left us guessing about their reasons for esteeming the medieval worldview; Lewis in particular wrote extensively about it. Lewis was, first and foremost, a scholar of the medieval era. He read medieval texts in their original language and was more oriented to this worldview than the one in which he lived.
What was the medieval worldview that Lewis cherished? The medieval era was, contrary to popular misconceptions, one of “bookish sophistication,” in which the science of the day was combined with theology and philosophy to create a conception of the universe that was more comprehensive than anything before. To live within this worldview was to dwell in a cosmos alive with meaning. Every star, tree, and season spoke in symbols; the world was not inert matter but a divine poem waiting to be read. People believed that creation was designed to shape the soul, like a vast mnemonic device, cultivating virtue and embedding each person in a living web of meaning.
But over the centuries, the West underwent a long period of historical unraveling. The rise of mechanistic science, Enlightenment rationalism, and the slow erosion of religious belief dismantled that cosmic story. The scientific revolution brought about a worldview that, for the first time in history, likened the world to a machine. Lewis was not anti-science but he believed that a purely materialist perspective had drained society of meaning and led to an epidemic of nihilistic despair. From a world where everything meant something, we entered a world where nothing meant anything, and we were left adrift in a disenchanted cosmos, told that even our hunger for meaning was meaningless.
Once society lost its iconographic vision, fantasy literature became unmoored from its spiritual purpose. What had once been a genre rooted in transcendence and moral order gave way to stories obsessed with material power and political identity. There are, of course, notable exceptions to this pattern, but consistently many of the most celebrated contemporary works adhere to this materialist framework.
In The Magicians, Lev Grossman gives us a world where magic exists, but the story functions as a meta-takedown of our youthful love of transcendent fantasy stories, rubbing our faces in the idea that such longing was always a lie. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials explicitly rejects Christian metaphysics, casts God as a fraud, and exalts personal autonomy as the highest good. Similarly, in The Priory of the Orange Tree, Samantha Shannon fills her world with magic but configures the narrative toward modern ideologies, grounding moral purpose in progressive politics rather than cosmic order. In The Bright Sword, out just last year, Lev Grossman writes a gripping take on Arthurian legend where his characters wrestle poignantly with spiritual disillusionment, ultimately drifting toward the modern default of meaning being something constructed by the self. By the end, this culminates in a jarring endorsement of mass immigration, suggesting that the future of Camelot is one of open borders. This feels like a concession to contemporary dogma rather than a genuine outgrowth of the Arthurian mythos. Clearly, in these fantasy worlds, even when enchantment remains, it is no longer a doorway to the sacred but another tool in a flattened world, stripped of mystery and soul.
Escape, Recovery, and Consolation
Lewis believed this nihilistic worldview needed to be remedied urgently and one of the ways he wanted to do that was through fiction. And so he and Tolkien created fictional worlds in which readers would be so immersed in the atmosphere of the medieval age that they could breathe its very air, reawakening their longing for transcendence. This medieval world is charged with meaning, beauty, and moral order, it is a place where the stars sing and every tree has its place in the divine pattern. As Tolkien wrote, fantasy at its best offers escape, recovery, and consolation, not so we can flee reality, but so we can recover the vision to see it rightly again.
In her book, Cecire never sufficiently engages with the medieval worldview and how it radically differs from our current conception of the world. She never takes seriously Tolkien and Lewis’s purpose of recovering a sacramental vision of the cosmos. Instead, she reinterprets it as a coded form of cultural regression. She seems unable or unwilling to acknowledge that Tolkien and Lewis’s medievalism was not an expression of rampant bigotry but a spiritual rebellion against modern disenchantment. To interpret their work primarily through the lens of race, gender, and power, is to flatten its mythic dimensions into incidental sociological artifacts.
These reductive critiques lead to increasingly troubling commentary. At one point, Cecire implies that it was suspicious that Tolkien “mostly concerned himself" with white English people. This is a startling thing to say. It reflects not only a lack of compassion for the context in which Tolkien lived but a failure to grasp just how different the world was only a few generations ago, before mass immigration and globalization reshaped Western societies. During the vast majority of Tolkien’s lifetime, England was around 99% white – a demographic reality that shaped the cultural backdrop of everyone at that time, not just Tolkien. To impose modern expectations onto the past to imply the worst about a beloved literary figure is hubris masquerading as critique.
Stories that Awaken
To finish her book, Cecire praises contemporary fantasy novels that subvert the “problematic” tropes of the genre by moving away from religious yearning towards individual choice and personal empowerment. This is what we find in series like His Dark Materials and The Magicians, where the old transcendent order is mocked in a move presented as subversive and edgy - but is really nothing more than a total capitulation to the modern machine.
Fantasy literature, once a trenchant critique of modernity, has been repackaged into shallow affirmations of identity, politics, and self-obsession. There is nothing transcendent here, only the solipsism of the modern age. Fantasy literature has become a mirror turned inward, trapping the reader in the claustrophobic confines of the self. We are told this is freedom, but it is actually the final disenchantment, the closing of the imaginative horizon until all that remains is the small, grim gospel of the self.
The problem, to be clear, isn’t one misguided book; Cecire’s argument reflects today’s wider cultural attitude that treats fantasy as a field for ideological power-plays. We no longer ask what a story reveals about the cosmos - we ask if it has the right kind of diversity. We no longer wonder what it tells us about the soul - we check if it affirms the correct political beliefs.
Today we criticize authors like Tolkien and Lewis for refusing to tell us the modern lie: that we are self-made, that identity is everything, and that there is nothing beyond the self worth striving for. But this was the very worldview they were resisting. They dared to offer us a vision of humanity rooted in sacred dignity, that tells us we are made in the image of God and called to live with moral purpose. Their stories do not flatter, they awaken. They invite us to participate in something eternal. And that is why, while contemporary fantasy that glorifies the self will fade with the moment it serves, the deep magic of Tolkien and Lewis will remain, steadfast and glowing, like a lone lamppost in a snowy wood, quietly pointing the way home.
Further Reading:
Narnia Against the Machine: Deep Magic for the Modern Age
CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien: A Friendship that Created Worlds Pt. 1
CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien: A Friendship that Created Worlds Pt. 2