Old Yarns

Through we laugh at old songs and old yarns, nevertheless, they are the yarn with which we weave our picture of the world.

Hope Mirrlees, Lud-In-The-Mist (London: Gollancz, 2008; 1926), p. 47.

Truth and Myth

When we translate we get abstraction—or rather, dozens of abstractions. What flows into you from the myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), and, therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level. Myth is the mountain whence all the different streams arise which become truths down here in the valley; in hac valle abstractionis. Or, if you prefer, myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of through with that vast continent we really belong to. It is not, like truth, abstract; nor is it, like direct experience, bound to the particular.

C.S. Lewis, 'Myth Became Fact', in Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, ed. by Lesley Walmsley (London: HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 138-42 (p. 141).

Forgotten Songs

I have lived to see strange days. Long we have tended our beasts and our fields, built our houses, wrought our tools, or ridden away to help in the wars of Minas Tirith. And that we called the life of Men, the way of the world. We cared little for what lay beyond the borders of our land. Songs we have that tell of these things, but we are forgetting them, teaching them only to children, as a careless custom. And now the songs have come down among us out of strange places, and walk visible under the Sun.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers (London: HarperCollins, 2007; 1954), p. 717.