Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.
--The Stolen Child, William Butler Yeats
Britain has a rich tradition of elves and we can say a lot about the mythology of Elfland (we will, in time.) Elves because, as Tolkien observes, the word “fairy” is of French origin and a relatively late addition to the language. The tradition, which encompasses all manner of being from the Sidhe to the Pook, is one from which Yeats draws in “The Stolen Child,” one among many of his Gaelic-themed poems. I picked this poem for its irrevocability. As the child leaves the familiar world, the warm world of the cottage and the farm for the wild of the fairy world, we know that he will never go back; to the invited, the door opens one way only.
Among the many aspects ripe for discussion in this poem is one I want to pick out: that Faërie is a different place; it doesn’t belong in the hierarchy of creation as has been understood in Christian culture.
As the medieval world knew it, above all was heofon, heaven. Below all was helle. Between those two poles was middangeard, earth (middle-earth, because it was poised between heaven and hell). That was the cosmos.
Faërie stood outside of God’s creation; it predates the Christian world. By entering Faërie, one leaves God’s sight, puts oneself beyond the reach of God—beyond all reward or punishment. Not only does Yeats employ this well, but so does Susanna Clarke in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel, wherein the Raven King is said to have built a tower on the edge of his third kingdom, the one overlooking hell. This is one reason even the idea of Faërie was both seductive and perilous. It remains so because, although we no longer view the world according to the medieval paradigm of creation, the structures of thought that instituted the paradigm remain with us.
J. R. R. Tolkien did not invent Faërie; nor did he invent fantasy. He named it. He took existing elements, pulled them out of the pot, and made them into something new. He did this in his long essay, “On Fairy-Stories.” 1
Is it Soup Yet?
This is the second of our three (or four) part consideration of J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1938 essay, “On Fairy-Stories.” This week, we’re talking about Tolkien’s thoughts on the formation of stories, especially in relation to fantasy, which he likens to making soup.
Like most of the points in “On Fairy-Stories,” the beginning of this thread is tangled in another skein. Last week I wrote about the way Tolkien divorced the then-ubiquitous connection between children and fairy tales, and established the tales as valuable in their own right.
Continuing that process, Tolkien attacked the other then-legitimate reason for messing around with fairy stories—that was the collection and study of tales by anthropologists and folklorists. The collections were compiled ostensibly to spiff them up and spoon feed them to the kiddies. This purpose, Tolkien implies, provides cover for the academic study of fairy tales which, before 1938 and the delivery of Tolkien’s talk, was primarily (not exclusively but primarily) undertaken to trace story elements to their source material.
Nothing happens in a vacuum, and academia is no exception. Anthropology’s passion to get back to sources, trying to distill the origins of European mythology, went hand in glove with the 19th and early 20th century program of English and German philology—to get back to a “pure” European language and culture (in all its racist implications, implications made manifest in the 1930’s in Germany). Both quests for “the original” fitted nicely with what I would call the exuberant age of archaeology, when diggers both professional and amateur hacked into archaeological sites in search of treasures, ignoring context, relationship, dating and just about everything that modern archaeology values.
This general academic project to establish a “golden age” of European culture—a project that was spearheaded by German philologists and anthropologists and met its Götterdämmerung in its subsumption in the Nazi movement—is illustrated perhaps no more clearly than in the scholarship of Beowulf. Before Tolkien delivered his famous "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" lecture and subsequent essay in 1936, the study of Beowulf had been limited to discussing its origins, its historicity, its “corruption” by Christian influences. Most of the academic study of Beowulf was specifically geared toward finding a pure, however fragmentary, core of authentic Nordic pre-Christian history. But Tolkien looked at the poem as a work in its own right, not a repository of earlier myth/history, but a story, one with inherent structure, coherent wholeness, and artistic integrity. Singlehandedly he changed the trajectory of Anglo-Saxon studies.
“On Fairy-Stories” stakes out similarly revolutionary ground; although it didn’t have the immediate effect that “The Monsters and the Critics” did, “On Fairy-Stories” set the conditions that allowed Fantasy to be taken seriously as a form it its own right. Would Dunsany and MacDonald et al continue to write without Tolkien’s manifesto? Absolutely. Would we be talking about them today as anything more than eccentricities, outliers from their own time? Probably not.
But enough context-setting. Tolkien repurposes a metaphor written by George Webbe Dasent in the introduction of his Popular Tales from the Norse, “We must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled.” (p. xviii)
Tolkien writes:
By “the soup” I mean the story as it is served up by its author or teller, and by “the bones” its sources or material—even when (by rare luck) those can be with certainty discovered. But I do not, of course, forbid criticism of the soup as soup. (p.20)
Contemporary anthropologists posited a hierarchy of myth, starting with natural forces (like thunder) personified into gods (like Thor). From their “divine” (a.k.a. “natural”) sources, over time legends pinned the gods to specific places and events, gathered to them personalities, diminished them—so from Thunder to Thor to Weyland Smith. According to the traditional devolution of mythology,
Epic, heroic legend, saga, then localized these stories in real places and humanized them by attributing them to ancestral heroes, mightier than men and yet already men. And finally these legends, dwindling down, became folk-tales, Märchen, fairy-stories—nursery-tales. (p. 23)
Tolkien rejects this theory, and the associated implication that fairy-tales are merely a degenerate stage in a mighty process. He sees no value distinction between high (god-centered) mythology and lower mythological processes. Instead, he sees, in the case of Thor, for instance, a circumstance whereby thunder and lightning, a red beard, an irascible temper, a local guy, perhaps a blacksmith, and a name: Thórr, all went into the pot that is the Cauldron of Story, simmered a while, and out came a god with an oversized personality and a quick temper (pp. 24-25).
Speaking of the history of stories and especially of fairy-stories we may say that the Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story, has always been boiling and to it have continually been added new bits, dainty and undainty. (pp. 26-27)
This means of course that some of the story elements are ancient and some not so ancient. This is obvious, but it’s revolutionary when Tolkien suggests that it’s the Story that is paramount, not the tracing of story elements to an all-authoritative ur-version, but the story as told, that is valuable, that is precious, that is new.
It seems fairly plain that Arthur, once historical (but perhaps as such not of great importance), was also put into the Pot. There he was boiled for a long time, together with many other older figures and devices, of mythology and Faerie, and even some other stray bones of history (such as Alfred’s defence against the Danes), until he emerged as a King of Faërie. (pp. 28-29)
No one element in the Arthur-story, whether written by Malory or Mark Twain (okay, maybe not Twain—for reasons outlined below) or the anonymous composer of the 13th century Mort Artu, is more important than the other. It’s the effect of the story as a whole that weaves a spell upon the reader or listener. Such a simple idea—such profound implications.
To this point, what Tolkien writes is true of all writers, all the cooks who approach the great Cauldron of Story and select out the bits and pieces they want to use to make something new. Bringing the subject back to fairy stories and the making of fantasy, he writes “I feel that it is more interesting, and also in its way more difficult, to consider what they are, what they have become for us, and what values the long alchemic processes of time have produced in them” (p. 19).
When it comes to fantasy, he implies, the elements are primal, older, more deeply embedded in the matrix of the mind. In isolating those elements, those qualities, perhaps we should start with what Tolkien considers not fantasy (pp. 11-17):
1. Travel-stories to fantastic lands. Example: Gulliver’s Travels. Why? He says there’s nothing remarkable about, for example, the Lilliputians, other than that they’re small.
2. Dreams. By framing the story with “it was only a dream,” the writer undoes the reality of the enchantment. Example: Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories. Similarly, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
3. Beast-fables. Not all beast-fables, but the ones that reflect directly on human society, or present human characters that wear beast-hides. Example: The Wind in the Willows or The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.
Tolkien’s definition cuts out a wide swath of potential candidates. Now, perhaps, we can turn to what elements he sees as essential to fantasy. We’ll start now, and finish up next week.
The definition of fantasy depends, Tolkien asserts, on the essence of Faërie, that country where elves have their being and from which they derive their power, “the Perilous Realm itself, and the air that blows in that country.”
Faërie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible. (p, 10)
A few essentials we can chalk up: few stories are set in Faërie itself. Tolkien describes its magic as too intense and heady for mortals. Most stories are set on Faërie’s borders, or involve human’s adventuring into Faërie. Its purpose, to satisfy “certain primordial human desires,” such as “survey[ing] the depths of space and time,” and “hold[ing] communion with other living things,” things not human, p. 13. Also, the primal desire at the heart of fantasy is “the realization, independent of the conceiving mind, of imagined wonder,” (p. 14). That imagined wonder is central to human nature and the making of stories, and it was born out of the ability to imagine what cannot be seen in the world:
When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter’s power—upon one plane; and the desire to wield that power in the world external to our minds awakes...We may put a deadly green upon a man’s face and produce a horror; we may make the rare and terrible blue moon to shine; or we may cause woods to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and put hot fire into the belly of the cold worm. But in such “fantasy,” as it is called, new form is made; Faërie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator. p. 22
The effect of fantasy is to make us stand outside of ourselves, outside of our world, outside of time itself. Although constructed of boiled bits in the Cauldron of Story, Fantasy calls its creator to make something original, to make us see the world differently. Tolkien himself says that it’s hard to do.
...it is found in practice that ‘the inner consistency of reality’ is more difficult to produce, the more unlike are the images and the rearrangements of the Primary World. It is easier to produce this kind of ‘reality’ with more ‘sober’ material. Fantasy thus, too often, remains undeveloped; it is and has been used frivolously, or only half-seriously, or merely for decoration: it remains merely ‘fanciful.’ p. 48
Next week, we turn to the uses of fantasy as Tolkien defines them. Then, finally—finally— we’ll be able to consider fully what he sees in fantasy, how he understood the genre and how his theories informed his own writing.
Meanwhile, the conversation here has been amazing. Y’all have been taking me to school. I only hope to be able to keep up with you. It’s an honor to converse with such wise and erudite thinkers. I just love this site.
Next week: “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, pp. 2-84. All subsequent references are from this edition.
Back Installments:
Getting Started
On Fairy-Stories, Part the First