The Third Road: Faerie in Hypermodernity April 21, 2010

In the 18th-century ballad "Thomas the Rhymer", when the hero abducted by the queen of Elfland, they pass two roads - the narrow way to Heaven and the broad way to Hell - before taking the winding road to her own land. I shall explore the ambiguous, fascinating, worrying role of enchantment in contemporary culture, as it cuts across more familiar (but superficial) divisions such as sacred vs. secular. For this purpose I shall use, as a microcosm, the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman. This will lead to some reflections on the survival of enchantment in a notoriously disenchanted world. Patrick Curry is the author of Defending Middle-Earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity (2004), Ecological Ethics: An Introduction (2006) and several books on the history of astrology.

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