C.S. Lewis wrote a review of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings when it was first published; in the review he comments on “the value of myth.”
“The value of myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity’… If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. This book (Tolkein’s) applies the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish, and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly.”
C.S. Lewis. Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces. London: Harper Collins, 2000
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