OOTS #1146 - The Discussion Thread

[Ornithologist]

Going internet history is that C.S. Lewis put the Lampost in Narnia mainly because Tolkein satated "There can be no Lamposts in Fantasy."

J.R.R. Tolkien said that no good fantasy would have ELECTRIC lamps in it. You can read this in his essay On Fairy-Stories, available in PDF form here:

The electric street-lamp may indeed be ignored, simply because it is so insignificant and transient. Fairy-stories, at any rate, have many more permanent and fundamental things to talk about. Lightning, for example. The escapist is not so subservient to the whims of evanescent fashion as these opponents. He does not make things (which it may be quite rational to regard as bad) his masters or his gods by worshipping them as inevitable, even “inexorable.” And his opponents, so easily contemptuous, have no guarantee that he will stop there: he might rouse men to pull down the street-lamps. Escapism has another and even wickeder face: Reaction.

Link to nominal source