Great stories run through Western literature from the start. One of its great and recurring topics is conflict, whether with other humans or internal spiritual conflict or both. Whether in the wars written of and in the Bible, or, to pick up the Greek and Roman strain, in such books as The Iliad and The Aeneid, such stories have brought us to face the nature of our own humanity and how to uplift it or fail to do so. A closer and more direct current feeding into our American heritage is the English narrative tradition, along with the nearby stream of Norse sagas, which intertwined with Anglo-Saxon culture over centuries of conflict, intermarriage, and shared storytelling. The powerful continuity of these various streams was brought to the fore in the post-World War II publishing of a fantasy trilogy written by an Oxford don whose specialty was Middle and Old English literature and the adjacent Norse narrative tradition. The Lord of the Rings captured an enthusiastic and quickly growing audience in the mid-Sixties and opened the door to successors, such as the Harry Potter series and Game of Thrones. Tolkien’s deep scholarship set him apart from other fantasy authors. He wrote seriously about the literary tradition in which he took an active part, and in his lecture/essay “On Fairy Stories,” he set out his critique of various storytellers in the past. What makes such stories good, wrote Tolkien, is something we recognize from our religious tradition. At its best, fantasy’s role is so serious because it has us rising to be who we humans are made to be by God. God did not make us only to be a recipient of His gifts, but to emulate God’s ways. It is our fundamental role granted by God by making us in His image, and so able, in a finite but powerfully real way to be ourselves a creator. In Tolkien’s words, “Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made. And not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.” A profoundly religious man, Tolkien does not presume that anything human will necessarily be good except in at the end of the great arc of salvific history. Humans can and often do misuse this right and infect their creative imaginings with their own unexamined failings. But, quoting the excellent Latin proverb abusus non tollit usum— the existence of abuse does not preclude the possibility and need for proper use — Tolkien refuses to conceive fantasy as being limited to imaginings that obscure or oppose truth. At its best, Tolkien believed, fantasy provides humanity redemptive engagement with the creation of which we are a part. One particular aspect of this is what he calls “recovery” — we lose the vision of the world as compelling and mysterious as we appropriate the world and transform it into things we imagine we fully own. This road leads to triteness and cliché, whose emptiness, in turn, leads on to filling the void with anything that can re-create that sense of thrill or magic that enables a child to find wonder in the most ordinary of things. What distinguishes between good and bad fantasy? Tolkien gives a positive hint: Fantasy is made out of the Primary World, but a good craftsman loves his material, and has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone, and wood which only the art of making can give. “The Primary World” is the given reality, the world of God’s creation. Within that world, we are given the “human right” to create a secondary world through which the Godliness of who we are and the world we inhabit can be recovered, even after we may have emptied it of wonder by reducing it as to be merely an adjunct of our unordered wants. As Tolkien knew well and as he addressed in his art, the modern West had lost its sense of fantasy and identified it as something necessarily opposed to truth. In acting on this impulse, it wrought immense destruction, something Tolkien witnessed first-hand as a participant in the horrors of the First World War at its ugliest at the Battle of the Somme. Worse was the perversion of mythology and fantasy to fill the gap left by the expulsion of God with the nearest we may ever have come to hell on earth — Nazism. When “Nazism” has become a cliché, and everyone with whom we have a political disagreement is a Nazi, we must engage in a Tolkienesque recovery of the power it had for those sensitive to the mythic void at the heart of civilization. A man of such creative genius as T. S. Eliot befouled his writing with snide caricatures of Jews and the profound Ezra Pound was so besotted with Mussolini’s Fascism that he crossed the line into treason and embraced the Axis cause in radio broadcasts even after Pearl Harbor. A result of that recovery enables to see better what is going on with other people of proven talent and even sensitivity today. The problem is not that Carlson and others of his ilk embrace fantasy in order to lead their listeners towards what in their mind is a better world. It is that they have failed in emulating the Primary World within the Secondary World of their fantasies. They have thrown away the care of the craftsman who reveals wonders through his careful work with the reality of the given world of Creation. Instead, they feel their vision can only be sustained by an imagination unfettered from any accountability to anything outside itself. Thus, the utter disregard of evidence and facts that is rampant in their discourse. In a recent exercise in slipshod fabulism, Carlson tried to further his fantasy of Winston Churchill as the prime criminal behind World War II and adduced as evidence the “fact” that Churchill had imprisoned the elected leader of the Parliamentary Opposition, Sir Oswald Mosely, without a trial under terrible conditions for the entirety of World War II. By this, he hoped to break through cliches that have hindered us from truly understanding that war and all wars. What makes this fantasy of Carlson malignant and perverse, an abuse of this God-given power, is his disrespect for the truth of the Primary World in which we only have a subsidiary authority. By the time World War II had begun, Mosley was not even in Parliament, not alone head of the Opposition. His party was called the British Union of Fascists, sometimes with “and National Socialists” added on, and it never succeeded in all its years to elect even one member to Parliament. Mosley emulated Hitler in every way. When he married at the end of 1937, long after the Nuremberg Laws went into effect and Germany and its intention to achieve military predominance was headline news, Mosley went to Berlin and married in Hitler’s home, with the Fuehrer himself serving as witness. The real British Opposition party, by contrast, supported Churchill and closed ranks across party lines to establish a National Government which against all odds, successfully led the fight to defeat and destroy the Nazis. Mosley was indeed imprisoned in 1940, as a likely Nazi agent seeking to subvert Britain from within as Quisling had done in Norway. British law provides, as does the American Constitution, for the suspension of habeas corpus during times of emergency. And with France fallen and the British Army run off the Continent leaving thousands of prisoners and most of its materiel behind, it was as great an emergency as the country had faced in a thousand years. It was hardly a KGB operation. Mosley was afforded a hearing at which he spoke at length over the course of four days. At the end, the hearing’s record reports him to have said, “I would like to thank you for your very great patience, courtesy, and fairness, which I shall always remember.” When the tides of war had turned, and Mosley’s health had declined, Churchill deemed the emergency abated, and he was released to a kind of house arrest, a leniency that was roundly unpopular with the British public. Let’s embrace Tolkien’s kind of fantasy, with its vision that unites us with each other and with our God. That is an outline of the Primary World in this case, the real world and its history. It is that real world, the Primary World, that the best of fantasy honors and the worst ignores or misrepresents. A similar contempt for the Primary World, for evidence and for facts, infects the rest of Carlson’s fantasies as well as the less talented purveyors of noxious mythology on the Make-America -Hate-Again Right. Tolkien, a deeply committed Catholic all his life, had a sound moral intuition. To use religion and human creativity for hate was fundamental betrayal of God and the gift He gives humans. A story from the same time that Mosley was getting married in Hitler’s house breaks through the ancient and childish cliches of the haters who fancy themselves the redeemers of today’s Right. In 1938, a German publishing house sought the right to publish a translation of Tolkien’s first commercial success, The Hobbit. Its powerful Secondary World of fantasy, with its clear overtones of the Norse, English, and German storytelling traditions, seemed just right for the myth-drunk world of the Nazis. But the project went afoul when the publisher asked Tolkien to document that he had no Jewish lineage. Tolkien took offense. Among the two replies he drafted for his British publisher to send back to the Germans, he called the Nazi race theory “pernicious and unscientific” and since he could not claim Jewish ancestry, he had only regret that he was not descended from those he called “that gifted people.” Rather than go along with that racism, he wrote to his British publisher, he would rather “let a German translation go hang.” And that is what he did — no German Hobbit until after the war. For Tolkien, the true goal of fantasy, of the imagination, is to make real for us that to which all aspire. Tolkien coins a word for what this glimpse sees — eucatastrophe — which he defines as powerfully positive as a catastrophe is negative. In his own words, this is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief. Tolkien gets to the heart of the shared biblical message of God’s transcendent love spurring us to use the gifts He gave us to help create the vision of this deliverance here in this world, the redemption of this world from evil. Tolkien was no Talmudist and may never have heard of the rabbinic teaching that G-d created the human to be a co-creator. Obviously, we cannot create the heavens and earth from scratch. But with our words and actions, we can bring a glimpse of the eucatastrophe. The example the rabbis give is of someone reciting the prayer sanctifying the Sabbath, the day in which God brought His world through time to a day of completion and sanctity. By the act of a blessing invoking that recurring sanctity, in which the peace and bliss of the final redemption can be tasted each week, we rise to be co-creators — in the language of the Zohar, we are making one within One. We have been given the freedom to reject that evil will forever define what God has wrought. In doing so, our own choice makes redemption present already. Working within the divine mandate,  we can see with the rabbis in Bereshit Rabba that even our innate urge to sin is what God calls “very good” — He opens the way for us to transcend ourselves in our sanctified and sanctifying act. Deeply entwined with the truth of God’s creation and constant upholding of created Primary Reality of the world, our Secondary Reality realizes that goal that Tolkien sets for it: “the joy of deliverance… joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” Let’s embrace Tolkien’s kind of fantasy, with its vision that unites us with each other and with our God. Let the peddlers of perverse fantasy go back to the woodshed. Living in freedom, we are not compelled to buy their cheap and harmful wares. Give them time to better their craft and realign their vision with something more worthy of their great talents and our time. READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Sacred Limits and Free Institutions Choose Life, Not Blame When Democracies Grow Up Too Late