The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveler who would report them. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost. (1)
J.R.R. Tolkien’s seminal essay On Fairy-Stories is one of those classics that everyone knows is a classic. And a classic is, as Mark Twain said, “something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”
Everybody recognizes the genius and importance of Tolkien’s essay, but not very many people seem to have made it all the way through. Well, I have. The last time I read the essay I was in my early twenties, skimmed it, disregarded most of it, misunderstood some, and quickly moved on to more pleasant forest glens in the Tolkien canon. Coming back to it this week, I circled it warily for a few days, made a few assays, and finally gritted my teeth and tackled the beast. And it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. In fact, I found myself immersed and moved by the humor, the power and the mature wisdom that Professor Tolkien so easily dispenses.
I want to take On Fairy Stories in stages. It’s a long and sophisticated essay (it reads pretty well in about an hour if you stick at it, but the ideas in it are knotty and will take quite a bit longer to digest), written in a colloquial style and very much Tolkien’s own voice. It reads better aloud. A fair part of the essay is off-putting, partly because of its original context and partly because Tolkien was working toward a vocabulary that had not yet been invented, so the road is rough.
The original context is important for an unwary reader. On Fairy-Stories was first delivered as a lecture in honor of Andrew Lang at the University of Scotland in 1938, and a good part of it focuses specifically on Lang’s work as a folklorist and collector of fairy tales. He loosely organized his tales, edited them for children and published them in twelve different volumes, distinguished by the color of their covers, between 1889 and 1910.
It is not a light thing to venture into a dragon’s den and beard the dragon’s offspring, but that’s exactly what Tolkien was doing. He walked a tightrope, delivering the talk where he did, because although Lang was primarily a scholar of folklore, his greater fame lay in his color-coded Fairy Books which were, explicitly, children’s fare. So when Tolkien took on the foundation of Lang’s great enterprise, he had to be careful not to alienate his audience—the people sitting in the chairs in that room at the University of Saint Andrews in 1938—and yet, undercut that foundation he did, and thoroughly.
It’s worth noting, by the way, that in 1938, as Tolkien wrote in the Introduction,
The Lord of the Rings was beginning to unroll itself and to unfold prospects of labour and exploration in yet unknown country as daunting to me as to the hobbits. At about that time we had reached Bree, and I had then no more notion than they had of what had become of Gandalf or who Strider was; and I had begun to despair of surviving to find out. (p. 2)
His own Great Labor lay before him, as he at this point had not seriously considered publishing The Silmarillion, and I sense that Tolkien undertook this essay at the University of Scotland to clarify his ambitions in his own mind as much as to celebrate and salvage what he could of Lang’s reputation, although not without substantial revisions to that reputation. Primarily on Lang’s behalf he dismantled the entire notion that fairy stories, as he called them, are for children, at least not primarily for children. Reclaiming fairy tales as a respectable area of study, indeed, as a subject worth adult consideration, has done a lot to keep Lang himself off the ash-heap of history.
Tolkien’s was no small undertaking. Although, by 1938, Modernism was very much a thing in literary salons, Victorian sensibilities held sway among traditionalists, who on one hand infantilized children and yet somehow managed also to consider them miniature adults whose minds could be weakened and irreparably warped by too much dreaminess.
No, fairy tales were for the nursery, and by the time a boy got out of dresses and into short pants he was expected to have discarded them, although girls could hang out in Faerie a little longer before they, too, were forcibly extracted. The readers of Lang’s multicolored Fairy Books were children, and the only adults who could get away with messing around in fairy tales were the governesses or parents who read them to The Little Ones and the bearded scholars who collected them, brushed them up and exorcized all aspects of danger. Thus elves were diminished and diminutized, and Puck and the Green Knight both became little woodland sprites, the kind you can still see in garden statuary of a certain style—and Tolkien will have none of it.
Among those who still have enough wisdom not to think fairy-stories pernicious, the common opinion seems to be that there is a natural connection between the minds of children and fairy stories, of the same order as the connection between children’s bodies and milk. I think this is an error; at best an error of false sentiment, and one that is therefore most often made by those who, for whatever private reason (such as childlessness), tend to think of children is a special kind of creature, almost a different race, rather than as normal, if immature, members of a particular family, and of the human family at large. (pp. 33-34)
Considering children “normal, if immature” human beings substantially changes the relationship between the writer of children’s stories and the reader of them—it levels the field. I note this only because a lot of fantasy today is passed off as Young Adult or Middle-Grade. Other authors of children’s and YA novels have a lot to say about our (still prevalent) adult tendency to condescend when we consider younger readers. Le Guin has some especially pithy observations. I’m only touching on it here to make about a third of Tolkien’s essay more accessible, because we all know that fantasy is not a children’s literary form, even if mainstream traditionalists haven’t figured that out yet.
The reason we can’t just cut away these parts of the essay (arguing with Lang about fairy tales and children) and consign them to the footnotes is that Tolkien introduces essential terms and concepts that he will use to build upon; indeed, they form the central tenets of his approach to craft and art.
Tolkien quotes the introduction of Lang’s first volume, The Blue Fairy Book, as his jumping off point: ”They [fairy tales] represent the young age of men true to his early loves, and have his unblunted edge of belief, a fresh appetite for marvels.” (36) Where Lang conflates belief and appetite for marvels, Tolkien distinguishes. Belief is knowing what’s true and appetite for marvels speaks to the desire to be entertained, and they are very different things, both to adults and to children. The question of belief, and the weakness inherent in the suspension of disbelief, of which Lang also speaks, is where things get interesting:
Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker’s art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called “willing suspension of disbelief.” But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story maker prove a successful “sub-creator.” He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it what he relates is true: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed. (pp. 35-36) [bolding mine]
Coleridge likened the poet’s imagination to godlike creation. Tolkien takes this a step farther, and also in another sense, a step back. To create a mental image is one thing, he argues, and is rightly called Imagination. But for another mind to perceive “the image, the grasp of its implications,” is different; it is a cooperative enterprise between writer and reader, which Tolkien calls “Art, the operative link between Imagination and the final result, Sub-creation.” (pp. 46-47) He continues:
For my present purpose I require a word which shall embrace both the Sub-creative Art in itself and a quality of strangeness and wonder in the Expression, derived from the Image: a quality essential to fairy-story. I propose, therefore….to use Fantasy for this purpose: in a sense, that is, which combines with its older and higher use as an equivalent of Imagination the derived notions of “unreality” (that is, of unlikeness to the Primary World), of freedom from the domination of observed “fact,” in short of the fantastic. (p. 47)
Fantasy.
Thus was born the literary genre, standing beyond the diminished mythos lovingly collected and collated by German and English philologists and scrubbed clean for the nursery—Tolkien stakes out a solemn middle space for his art as a creative enterprise, a mind-to-mind collaboration between the writer who speaks from the page and the reader for whom the words form images and the images take life (Tolkien disapproved of dramatic representations of fantasy, and there’s no doubt what he would have made of Peter Jackson’s films, or movies in general).
That’s the step forward. Now for the step back.
Part of Tolkien’s terminology reflects his religious understanding of the world and his role within that world; as a Catholic, Tolkien sees the writer as a secondary Creator—not taking over God’s place, neither imitating nor subverting nor assuming the role of God—but as a divine Creation doing the work for which s/he was Created: to body forth more things under heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.
This is a good place to break for now. We’ve dispensed with the trappings of kiddie lit and ethnography. Next week we’ll deal with the history of Faerie in Western culture, part of what Tolkien calls the “soup.” After that, the essential purpose of Fantasy, as Tolkien sees it.
We’ve defined the act of writing fantasy as sub-creation, the making of a coherent secondary world that, while we’re in it, is real. Anyone who has read The Lord of the Rings knows how well Tolkien pulled off this particular magic. Ursula Le Guin writes of her first trip to Middle Earth: “I read the three volumes in three days. Three weeks later I was still, at times, inhabiting Middle Earth: walking, like the Elves, in dreams waking, seeing both worlds as once, the perishing and the imperishable.” (2)
The writer as creator, the Primary World being the world of Reality, the Secondary World as the world the writer has made—and it must be as real, while you’re in it, as the Primary World your body currently inhabits. That’s the art, the magic, which Tolkien calls an elven magic, and one that is enacted mind-to-mind, to make a shared imagination.
Next week: On Fairy-Stories: Tolkien and Soup
Week after that: On Fairy Stories: The Uses of Fantasy
Notes
1. J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” from Tree and Leaf. Reprinted in The Tolkien Reader, NY: Ballantine, 1966, p. 3. Nota Bene: All subsequent quotations are from this edition. Although the work is copyrighted, there are a bazillion pirated editions on the internet, but I’m not linking to any of them.
2. Ursula LeGuin, “The Staring Eye,” Vector 66/67, 1974. Reprinted in The Language of the Night. Ed. Susan Wood. NY: Putnam, 1979, p. 172.
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