The recent upsurge of interest in J.R.R.Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, occasioned by the release of Peter Jackson's three films, has given me the opportunity to bore a number of people with my personal preference for another 'fantasy' novel cycle, Ursula le Guin's Earthsea stories. Like Tolkien, le Guin is deeply interested in myth, language and history, and in her Earthsea series she weaves these interests together into a richly textured story in which the central character, Ged, struggles to acknowledge, confront and finally overcome the forces of darkness that he once unleashed in a destructive moment of youthful arrogance.

What Lord of the Rings and the Earthsea series have in common is an overarching concern with archetypes, those fundamental and often opposing ideas that help us to form our world-view from our earliest years: good and evil, light and dark, life and death. Such archetypes lie deep in our psychological make-up and so it is not surprising that they also appear in literature of all types, from the ancient fairy-tale to the modern fantasy. Despite the best attempts of Enlightenment thinkers from the early eighteenth century onwards to bracket out all that is not (by their own estimation) rational, the kind of world-view to which Tolkien and le Guin give such eloquent expression is quite obviously one that speaks powerfully to human experience.

Religion was a particular target of some Enlightenment thinkers, especially in France. To be fair their target was often the Church rather than religious faith itself; nevertheless during the last three hundred years Christianity in much of western Europe has gradually retreated into the private sphere, cowed by the remorselessness of Enlightenment-engendered secularisation. Yet embedded within the Christian story are archetypal truths too important to be kept private: in the resurrection of Jesus Christ light has illuminated the darkness, good has overcome evil, and life has proved stronger than death. This Gospel, this Good News, is ours to proclaim; and it is not fantasy.