Faërie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and birds, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted. (1)
Finally, after all the throat-clearing and context-setting, we can get to the heart of J.R.R. Tolkien’s vision of what fantasy is, how it works, what it can accomplish. We’ve talked a good bit already about how the world Tolkien was addressing was markedly different from ours and how we got Here from There. Tolkien’s thoughts about fantasy substantially determined the way the genre would develop over time; even today, his work towers over the form. Mention “Fantasy,” and your audience nods, murmuring, “The Lord of the Rings.” We now have other giants in the field, but they all stand—willingly or not—on Tolkien’s shoulders.
In his 1938 address “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien defined four characteristics and/or purposes of fairy-stories, not as children’s reading but as an artistic form legitimate in its own right.
First: Fantasy
As we discussed in the first part on Tolkien’s essay, the essential nature of fantasy is the creation of a secondary world, separate from the primary world of our daily lives, a world that evokes in the reader not a suspension of disbelief, but (temporary) positive belief in the invented reality. While you’re in Middle Earth, it’s real, or as Ian McKellen said during the filming of The Fellowship of the Rings, “The Shire never existed, except in our hearts.” Creating this alternate world is a collaborative effort, a labor shared between writer and reader, the effect of which collaboration is enchantment.
So far, so good. In discussing fantasy as an art form, Tolkien goes further. Because the Secondary World contains things that can’t exist in the “real world,” when the enchantment is successful and the world becomes real to the reader, the artistic achievement is greater because the world is stranger. “That the images are of things not in the primary world … is a virtue, not a vice. Fantasy (in this sense) is, I think, not a lower but a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent” (p. 47). A higher form of art because it’s more difficult; to create a world separate from the one we live in, one characterized by what he calls an “arresting strangeness,” and is yet convincingly real.
Because fantasy is harder to achieve, Tolkien argues, consequently it’s easier to botch. “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, 47). Last week we discussed how the juxtaposition of primary qualities makes for “arresting strangeness”—a green sun, silver leaves, blue moon—a world unlike our own, a world in which anything is possible but a world that must be inherently coherent and must observe its own internal consistency. In short, it must be real to its creator and that creator must respect its reality, if a reader is ever going to be able to enter that reality.
To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft. Few attempt such difficult tasks. But when they are attempted and in any degree accomplished then we have a rare achievement of Art: indeed narrative art, story-making in its primary and most potent mode. (pp. 47-48)
Story-making in its primary…mode: this is the point of the entire exercise, to tell great stories. Given the difficulty in making both a compelling story and a complete world, when it works, Tolkien calls the effect “enchantment.” Together the reader and the writer enter a sub-creation, a world powered by shared imagination. The reader enters a dream, but it’s not the reader’s dream; the dream is the writer’s, although without the reader’s contribution the world would remain a dead one.
“Enchantment” is powered by the desire to create, not the desire to control. “Uncorrupted…it seeks shared enrichment, partners in making and delight” (p. 53). To Tolkien, world-building as we have come to call it, is not an act of domination but one of discovery; the world-builder takes pleasure in the making of the world because it is a shared space that offers the potential for enchantment, not an act of power but one of collaboration and delight.
Second: Recovery
Nothing in the world is new:, so says the law governing the conservation of mass. Reality grinds us down; familiarity breeds the expectation that everything we see we’ve seen before. We know what to expect from day to day, because nothing is new.
Tolkien agrees—to a point. Yes, nothing is truly new; trees will leaf out in the spring as they have since before recorded history. But every spring is different. As Tolkien observes, “Each leaf, of oak and ash and thorn, is a unique embodiment of the pattern, and for some this very year may be the embodiment, the first ever seen and recognized, though oaks have put forth leaves for countless generations of men” (p. 56). Within the cycle of eternal repetition in all of its forms there is room, not only for genuine renewal, but also for genuine discovery.
Few of us, if any, would disagree. In a meta sense, nothing is new (unless it’s human ability to mess things up, to sully the world—to make it warmer, dirtier, more cluttered and litter-strewn). Likewise, nothing in human nature is new…except we can surprise ourselves and each other. We are all individuals, unique. Even though we are all the same, the embodiment of the individual is the individual; we love and hate the same, experience rage and learn empathy the same, dream similarly no matter what culture we come from, we are all at once of a pattern and yet all different.
Fantasy celebrates and enhances that difference, and challenges us to recover our ability to see the world anew. Tolkien asserts that it’s the role of fantasy to help us refresh our sense of the wonder inherent in all human experience by taking us out of our familiar frames and challenging our perspectives.
Have you ever had the experience of gaining your heart’s desire? This works especially if your desire is a possession—a thing of beauty, a jewel or a kimono or a car, something that takes your attention and consumes you with the will to possess. You gain your desire, and suddenly, somehow, you no longer value it. You don’t look at it anymore, at least not in the same way. You no longer prize it.
Experience also does this to us. Our daily lives are filled with the “things that we have appropriated, legally or mentally. We say we know them. They have become like the things which once attracted us by their glitter, or their colour, or their shape, and we laid hands on them, and then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them” (p. 58). Once we gain it, we don’t really want it; what we want is the desire, the attraction, the fascination. The acquisitiveness in human nature, our drive to collect—stuff, people, experiences—it wears us down.
Fantasy serves as a cure for this tired reality. The things of fantasy are still the things of reality, but they’re made strange, made different; they’re elevated above the mundane by their setting in a different world. Nothing that drives The Lord of the Rings, for example, is unfamiliar to us: we understand Sauron’s will to conquer and control, Frodo’s will to preserve, Sam’s steadfast friendship, Aragorn’s embrace of responsibility, the growing affinity between Gimli and Legolas, even the elves’ sorrow as they recognize, like Bilbo, there will come to Middle Earth a spring that they will not see. Every reader reads from the same perspective; we come to the text with the same toolkit.
And who among us has not been changed for the journey? We return to our daily lives, but we see the world with a slightly different lens. Our jaded natures have been washed clean, we have been vaccinated against loss. Our hearts have been broken and returned to us. We have wept, knowing that “not all tears are an evil,” and we’re better for it.
This, I think, is what Tolkien means by Recovery.
Third: Escape
Yes, escape. Tolkien actually pastes the critics of “escapism” hard in “On Fairy-Stories.” He hits his contemporary literary critics squarely, too.
I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which ‘Escape’ is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all… In…Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds. (p. 60)
Literary critics, he suggests, miss the point in dismissing escapism. Without the escape of imagination, reality would be a profoundly grim exercise, or as Tolkien wrote, “Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison walls?” (p. 60). Tolkien sees the world of realistic fiction as a world in miniature, a snow-globe of reality, a “play under a glass roof by the side of a municipal swimming-bath” (p, 63). By dreaming beyond our four walls, he suggests, we return to the “real world” with a richer perspective; the mundane can be transfigured into something wondrous. We are refreshed and made new.
Besides, the subjects of fantasy are the same as the subjects of realistic fiction: life, love, war, death, and at base always, what does it mean to be human? “…fairy-stories deal largely, or (the better ones) mainly, with simple or fundamental things, untouched by Fantasy, but these simplicities are made all the more luminous by their setting” (p. 59). By not being concerned with the real world, fantasy allows us to consider “simple or fundamental things” without the distractions of the real world, which means that, when we return to reality, it’s a reality with additional shades of meaning, one in which the importance of that simple thing becomes new. This is escapism in the best sense of the word, and successful fantasy accomplishes it. Who among us doesn’t tear up at Frodo’s speech to Samwise (so unforgivably botched in the movie)?
It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them. But you are my heir: all that I had and might have had I leave to you. (2)
As Sam—Sam made wise by loss—returns to Bag End, to his real life, so we return to our real lives. We too are Frodo’s heirs; we’ve gone every step to Mount Doom and back, and the inheritance he leaves us is a rich one—and I doubt seriously that anyone who has made that journey would disagree.
Fourth: Consolation
All stories, it is said, end in death. Death is the great constant that defines us as human beings—it’s not merely the opposable thumbs or the ability to vocalize. More important is our ability to imagine immortality, eternity, even though we don’t partake of it. We don’t get all of it, of course—it’s too immense a concept for the human mind to grasp…but we can catch the edges of it. We die, and even though the mind blanks at the immensity of death, we dream of a state beyond death, not in a religious sense per se, but in a very human acceptance, even welcoming, of that finality. (I have some small experience in this—you’ll just have to take my word for it that, to the prepared mind, death can be a friend.)
What has death got to do with fantasy? Death is the End of the Story. In fantasy, endings are replete with resonance, with meaning. Even while admitting the limitations of time and the inevitability of the end, well-crafted fantasy can achieve a state that Tolkien calls eucatastrophe.
This is not exactly a happy ending. For one thing, according to Tolkien, the story never stops. An end is an artificial marker, whether it is “they lived happily ever after,” or “Well, I’m back.” It’s a wink shared between storyteller and audience, because we know that now Sam has a family to raise, Ged has not yet seen the patterns of the forest in the autumn, Bod is leaving the cemetery but gaining the world, Kelsea Glynn is still an apprentice queen, Valen is going to embrace the future, and Cinderella has to make her marriage work. No, the ending isn’t the end. The story moves on, even though we’re finished for now. We are consoled, not by the ending, but despite the ending.
The consolation of fantasy is marked by a sudden turn, a surprising lifting of the heart, “a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur” but one that gives us “a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief” (p. 58).
This aspect of fantasy is to me the hardest part to intellectualize, to verbalize. Unless approached with great care, it invites trivialization. And in fact, a large part of the failure in many fantasies is in the writer’s disregard of a eucatastrophic ending, one that acknowledges sorrow and loss and yet manages to transcend grief and give us a glimpse where
beyond all towers strong and high,
beyond all mountains steep,
above all shadows rides the Sun
and stars for ever dwell:
I will not say the Day is done
nor bid the Stars farewell. (2, p. 185)
This is not a formulaic “happy ending” or “they lived satisfactorily ever after” kind of thing. The closing of a world on the right note is mysterious alchemy, demanding something different for each created world. When it doesn’t work...well, we feel the loss and the lack. We feel somehow cheated. But when it works, oh it’s sublime. When it works we feel it, we know it, and we come away with a sense that we’ve seen something new, been somewhere greater than we could imagine.
Finally: The Nature of Fantasy
Fantasy, according to Tolkien, is a natural human activity, one that lifts us above the mundanity of our lives and returns us refreshed, refocused, our sight washed clean of the dust of daily living. It can be badly done, he agrees. “It can be carried to excess….It can be put to evil uses.” Being a part of human nature, it can be turned to bad ends, just as, he argues, can anything else:
Men have conceived not only of elves, but they have imagined gods, and worshipped them, even worshipped those most deformed by their authors’ own evil. But they have made false gods out of other materials: their notions, their banners, their monies; even their sciences and the social and economic theories have demanded human sacrifice. (p. 55)
We might justifiably say we still do sacrifice to false idols (supply-side economics, wmd’s, and Make America Great Again, anyone?) The difference between “realistic myth” and real myth is often the clothing in which it’s draped. According to Tolkien, the reading of fantasy (and the writing of it, too) doesn’t blunt reality but enhances it. I suspect that, whatever quibbles and reservations about his definitions we may harbor, however the genre might have expanded and stretched and slipped since Tolkien first laid down his markers in 1938, we have to agree that Fantasy is a house built on Tolkien’s foundations, and those foundations are substantial, both creatively and intellectually.
To those who consider Fantasy as Not Real Literature, who think it’s childish, immature, and fundamentally unserious, “On Fairy-Stories” will be a failed attempt at legitimacy. However, they’re not part of the conversation; they won’t be reading this essay or participating in this discussion. And ultimately, they don’t count. They are not the readers who have established the genre as a powerhouse in contemporary reading. As anyone who loves fantasy knows, the journey There and Back Again remakes us and returns us as people who think more deeply about life’s great mysteries and contradictions than most others; in facing what it means to be human in a world where humanity is not a given—well, there’s just nothing else like it.
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.
2. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King, NY: Houghton-Mifflin, 1988.
Previous Installments:
Getting Started
On Fairy-Stories, Part the First
On Fairy-Stories, Part the Second
