It's ok to live in a fantasyland

That's the joy of being a writer (and reader).

I ducked into a small used bookshop in the town of Penryn at the southernmost end of Cornwall and there discovered a faded tome, the travelogues of a writer who visited this place one hundred years before I did.

He was staying just where I am, looking out at the same cliffs I do and tucked away in the same drizzle, but a deep mist separates his world from mine. When it clears he sees an old man down on the beach calling out to the sea. 

He wonders abstractly if the man be Merlin, this being the place from which such stories originated, but the man’s granddaughter is nearby and corrects him. There’s an old Cornwall legend that those who drown at sea can speak to the living if called by name, so her grandfather calls to his dead son each year, waiting for answers from beneath the waves. 

The legends haunt this place. Without them, these are just cliffs and moors. With them, they are the past come to life. 

“If you do not not believe in Arthur, stay away from Tintagel,” our author warns. “For here you will find only a bleak, desolate cliff crowned by the crumbling fragments of an ancient rampart. You will get no thrill out of the magic island which disappears into the sea twice a year, and you will see nothing of the ghosts that haunt the home of the fair Igraine.”

He’s right, it is only with our imaginations intact that we see something more. 

“Fortunately I have managed to keep my faith in Arthur and the very ordinary little wooden door down in the valley admitted me to a wondrous realm of romance,” he says. “Wander around this grey space, carpeted here and there with stunted grass, and try to repeople it with the wonder heroes of the past. You also will come under the spell of Merlin, and leave Tintagel, as I did, with a dream in your heart.”

Visiting a place without its myth is to find nothing but old buildings and ruin, but I’ve been trying to recapture the myth—to get to the magical places from the ordinary ones.

To reach Narnia, one must only walk through the wardrobe. To reach Neverland we must follow the second star to the right straight on till morning. In real life, we can only get to those places through stories, transported to another world through books and held captive there until the book is done—the fantasy superimposed over reality in a way that only authors can do. 

I think I better understand the world through fantasy than reality. Last winter, when I was reading Emily Wilde, a friend and I skied through the woods and spent the whole of it imagining we were in the wilds of fairyland. As the snow fell heavily on our giant sweaters I told her it helped to think of my brother as a changeling. I don’t like how we talk about him in clinical terms: special needs, brain damage, mental retardation. The mythical version makes more sense to me: He’s a fairy swapped into our lives at birth, connected to a wild world I can’t possibly peer into. 

I wonder if the clinicalization of everything has removed something of the magic we once held—the myth that was naturally layered over life because it was so immensely unknown. In his book, Cowles recalls legends that thunder was the boots of giants, earthquakes caused by their brawling. After a young man is lost walking on the cliff tops, a sailor’s legend tells that he ran away with a mermaid and now lives happily in her underwater kingdom. There are wizards in that cave, witches on that hill. Fairies have been seen eating their suppers while they are away. Even the medicines, before medicines were known, were more like potions, just plants and lore with histories concocted by herbalists. At an old apothecary in London my husband and I laughed at old bottles claiming to cure just about everything.

It’s not hard to wonder why so many of these stories came from England—King Arthur, Narnia, Neverland, The Lord of the Rings, Winnie the Pooh, Peter Rabbit, Harry Potter, Taylor Swift’s fictional albums Folklore and Evermore—it’s the weather. The rain and the fog obscure what can be seen, and that leaves space for imagination. An ordinary forest becomes the Hundred Acre Wood, a garden overrun with rabbits becomes Peter Rabbit, a magical platform between train stations becomes our entry to the wizarding world. In King Arthur, a local king becomes the chosen of wizards.

In the absence of real historical facts about Arthur we embellished them to make them more magical. To impress upon the world that this was a man of great importance we add Excalibur; that he was chosen, the enchantress. My religion once thrived on that kind of myth—the Old Testament prophets who walked in fire and foretold of a man who would die and be resurrected once more—but when I held those stories to the light they could no longer survive. During my graduate studies, I researched away the myths that were added to the man in the centuries that came after him, until I was left with nothing but the man.

It would be a great loss to do the same to Arthur. 

I don’t always want to see the world so clearly. If I had a son who fell off a clifftop, I would love the story that he ran away with a mermaid. If my cupboards were bare of food, I would love to believe the fairies ate it. Myth gives us a way of coping with the real world in a way that the real world just can’t. Sometimes I feel like I have too many facts at my disposal and I can no longer see the Magic of the unknown. There are no more gaps in my mind to fill with folklore. 

If I have few gaps left, my brother has lots of them. For as long as I can remember, he has called me the Lady of the Lake. Most of what he says is nonsensical so I never gave it much thought, he also calls my brother-in-law “Big Baby,” which is an association he made after watching Toy Story Three that keeps us laughing to this day. What is it about that dead-eyed doll that reminded him of my brother-in-law? And what is it about the Lady of the Lake that makes him think of me?

But cozied up in Cornwall, reading the Arthurian legend and watching the film version in bed, I paid attention to the enchantress who forged Excalibur and caught it in her hand when it was thrown back. My brother has access to the mystery that to me is too unveiled, and perhaps there’s something mysterious he finds about me that he fills with folklore—with the Lady of the Lake. I make a secret wish in my heart that I could see myself that way too. 

I think many people do. The mermaids sailors think they see, the monster in the Loch Ness, the unicorn in the wood, the blurry beast that wanders Appalachia. How much of the myth did they think was real? And how much was just a story told around the fire at night, a balm against the dark night and a harsh reality? It’s more fun to live in the magical world than to put a submarine underwater and realize it’s just a whale or the waves, a trick of the light. 

As my husband’s grandpa always says: “Never ruin a good story with the facts.”

Cowles does ruin the story. When he visits Dozmary, the lake of the Arthurian legend, he’s disappointed to not find it a whirling abyss where an enchantress might forge silver, but a shallow lake with good fish and children playing on the banks. I’ve been similarly disenchanted with some of our travels. The world has been mythologized by photographs framing out the crowds and filtering in the light—the romance added in the editing. I’ll often get home and look at my husband’s photos of our travels, more colorful than I remembered, and say: When did we go there?

But that modern mythmaking is necessary, the dreary day superimposed by technicolor. With our art we can step across the abyss from the real world to the magical one. It is only with our imaginations intact that we can see something more spectacular. 

“I suppose if one could come upon Dozmary by the light of the moon and hear the night breezes sighing through the reeds, it would seem a weird haunted place,” Cowles considers. “As I was turning away, a white gull dated down into the water and, stirring the ripples with a gleam of silver, made me think of that fair lady, the great enchantress, who lived deep beneath the waves of Dozmary Pool.”

In the dark, a crackling branch might conjure up any fancy, but by the light of day it’s hardly scary. 

Memory too serves as an opaque lens we can impress our imaginations upon. My whole childhood feels like a fantasy as I remember it, and perhaps that’s because I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. I lived in the mist and I can still remember seeing fairies in the woods and the old lady that hunched over my bed and watched me sleep. My sister and I have similar memories from that time, but mine are somehow rosier than hers. Why does our memory shade the lens in that way? We backfill our memory with what we know about the present. We fill in the gaps with what we’ve learned since. 

I can still remember the veil of childhood falling from my eyes. We moved to Colorado when I was in the sixth grade and I remember blinking into the sun as if a spell had been lifted. 

It’s good that it has. We learn more, become more educated. When I was researching my gothic novel I learned that in the 17th century men presumed to be dead were nailed into coffins and set in the church before they were buried. When they awoke from their comas and banged on the insides of the coffin trying to get out, the nuns were frightened. Tales of vampires came from a lack of medical knowledge, and those poor men were buried alive in fear of it. 

Conspiracy theories thrive when we are missing the facts. It is in this same land where people assumed their princess had fallen out with the royal family and was living in hiding or that she was on a secret mission and using a body double, before it was discovered she had stomach cancer and had simply been undergoing surgery in private. It was just around the corner in Heligan that a local gardener was turned down from restoring a heritage garden because locals had conjured up lore that his rare breed animal farm would overrun the sewer system with crocodiles, and that his business would serve as a front for nefarious operations.

It is our imaginations that conjure up such atrocities, and there can be no doubt that has been a detriment to society. 

But there are also downsides to knowing too much, and sometimes I crave a world not knowing them.  

So I fill my life with stories and myth, I read old books that keep the mystery alive, I write my own. I feel the spell of my childhood descend once again as we walk along the clifftops and wander through the moors. In the mist, it does not take much to imagine mermaids in the waves, those sounds the sirens singing. So many shipwrecks have been lost to storms on these coasts, and when they never returned we filled their loss with sailor’s legend recounted at the pubs, and we read about them in hundred-year-old books that were searching for the same: For the magic that can be found in the real world, if we only we care to see it that way. 

I recently asked my brother why he calls me Lady of the Lake but he didn’t have an answer. 

Sometimes I wish I didn’t either.

The joy of being a writer is that I can come up with my own. This page my own entry into the folklore.

Thank you for reading.

And happy All Hallows Eve!

Elle Griffin