Forging Faërie: Sub-creation, Depth and Mythic Otherworldliness in J. R. R. Tolkien's Conception of the Fairy-Story

by

Jonathan Deschene

Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (English)

Acadia University Fall Convocation 2011

© by Jonathan Edward Deschene, 2011 This thesis by Jonathan Edward Deschene was defended successfully in an oral examination on August 30, 2011.

The examining committee for the thesis was:

Dr. Shelley MacDougal, Chair

Dr. Anna Smol, MSVU, External Reader

Dr. Andrea Schwenke Wyile, Internal Reader

Dr. Kevin Whetter, Supervisor

Dr. Herb Wyile, Graduate Coordinator, Dept. of English

This thesis is accepted in its present form by the Division of Research and Graduate Studies as satisfying the thesis requirements for the degree Master of Arts (English).

iii

I, Jonathan Deschene, grant permission to the University Librarian at Acadia University to reproduce, loan or distribute copies of my thesis in microform, paper or electronic formats on a non-profit basis. I, however, retain the copyright in my thesis.

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______Supervisor

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Table of Contents

Abstract

Acknowledgments

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1: Sub-creation, Story and Philology ...... 6

Chapter 2: Depth ...... 32

Chapter 3: Mythic Otherworldliness ...... 62

Conclusion ...... 91

Works Cited ...... 94

v

Abstract

In this thesis, I attempt to articulate key features of J. R. R. Tolkien's theory of fiction. I begin by assuming that Tolkien's conception of the fairy-story, in ―On Fairy-

Stories,‖ is central to this theory and claim that grasping ―Faërie,‖ on Tolkien's terms, is vital to understanding his fiction. I therefore set out to refute Tom Shippey's influential reduction of Faërie into philology and explore the diversity of ways in which Tolkien writes ―depth‖ – a condition of Faërie – into The Lord of the Rings. I conclude by showing how depth permits the incarnation of mythic otherworldliness within the

Primary World of ordinary experience. vi

Acknowledgments

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Acadia, and the English Department in particular, for the generous funding provided during the course of my program. I could not have pursued graduate studies without the financial aid awarded to me by the university, and I am therefore very grateful for the funding and the opportunity which it has created. I am also indebted to Summerside's Legion Branch #5 for awarding me its

Memorial Bursary.

I would also like to thank everyone who has taken the time to read and comment on the following pages. I would especially like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Kevin

Whetter, for making this writing opportunity possible and for his interest in, and support for, this project over the past year. Throughout the course of this project Dr. Whetter has allowed me to pursue my own road, while at the same time providing me with the guidance necessary to travel that road. Working with Dr. Whetter on this thesis has been a very rewarding experience. 1

Introduction

Scholarship on J. R. R. Tolkien's fiction has considerably broadened in perspective since the 1950s and '60s, when works like Tolkien and the Critics struggled to accommodate The Lord of the Rings within a narrow critical framework (see Isaacs and

Zimbardo). Because Tolkien rejected both realist and postmodernist modes of expression in favour of a medieval aesthetic, even critics who liked the work, such as Burton Raffel, were often unwilling to view it as ―literature.‖ By way of compromise, early critics sometimes tried to salvage Tolkien's work at the expense of its imaginative core. Thus

Patricia Spacks says, ―although Tolkien's achievement is far outside the central modes of twentieth-century fiction . . . it demonstrates how even a framework of fantasy can provide a context for the exploration of serious concerns, [and] how moral energy can animate far-fetched fiction‖ (99; emphasis added). Spacks approves of the moral force of the book, despite its less than desirable ―framework.‖ Notwithstanding the broadening of critical perspective, however, many scholars even today seem unwilling to acknowledge

Tolkien's ―fantasy as a form of literature,‖ and also seem to lack ―the critical language and vocabulary to write about it‖ (Anderson, ―Mainstreaming‖ 301).

And yet, in his essay ―On Fairy-Stories,‖ Tolkien provides just such a theoretical framework for what he refers to as fairy-stories, both in general, and his own work, in particular. Rachel Hart quotes Tolkien saying that he ―'had to think about'‖ the relationship between fairy-stories and adults ―'before he [delivered the] ―Andrew Lang‖ lecture at St. Andrews'‖ in 1939 – later published to a wider Tolkien audience simply as

―On Fairy-Stories.‖ In the relevant letter, he calls The Lord of the Rings ―'a practical 2 demonstration of the views that [he] expressed'‖ in the essay (Hart 3; Tolkien, Letters

310). One of the things Tolkien argues in the lecture, or at least in its printed form, is that fairy-stories are not necessarily – or not merely – for children. Tolkien does not refer to his own fiction in ―On Fairy-Stories,‖ yet the essay nevertheless expresses an approach to narrative art which underlies The Lord of the Rings, as well as other works in his creative corpus.

The problem with ―On Fairy-Stories,‖ however, is that it too exists in a kind of theoretical vacuum and Tolkien does some peculiar things in the essay. He confesses, for instance, to ―desir[ing] dragons with a profound desire,‖ and talks about Elves as if they were real (Tolkien, ―OFS‖ 135; Shippey, Road 49). As mentioned above, he also disagrees with the prevailing critical and cultural attitude towards the elements of the fairy-story – one which is still common among literary gatekeepers today – seeing a profound truth value in the phenomenology of successful fairy-stories and believing therefore that the genre belongs primarily to the literary diet of adults rather than of children. At the heart of the unusual claims and style of ―On Fairy-Stories‖ lies the concept of Faërie, on which the fairy-story genre depends (114). Verlyn Flieger, who has written extensively on Faërie and has herself edited an edition of ―On Fairy-Stories,‖ confirms that ―one of the most important words and concepts in Tolkien's lexicon . . . [is]

Faërie, the Otherworld of fairy tales and fantasy‖ (―When‖ 59). In ―On Fairy-Stories,‖ then, Tolkien offers a framework for reading a particular kind of literature which he tried to recreate in The Lord of the Rings, among other works, and the concept of Faërie lies at the heart of this framework.

Unfortunately, the tendency in Tolkien scholarship is to either summarize ―On 3

Fairy-Stories,‖ failing to contribute anything beyond what Tolkien has already said in the essay, or fold Tolkien's concept of Faërie into something else, thereby reducing it to something that it is not. Thus we see Tom Shippey fold Faërie into the profession of philology in The Road to Middle-earth, Randel Helms fold it into myth in Tolkien's World and Jane Chance reduce it to Christianity in Tolkien's Art. Verlyn Flieger is perhaps the only scholar who sets out to explore Faërie on its own terms. She fails to do justice to the subject, however, either because her work strays into other matters (A Question of Time), or simply because it is too short (―Allegory versus Bounce‖). As Faërie is central to

Tolkien's conception of the fairy-story, it is key to understanding his creative work.

Reducing Faërie into something else will inevitably lead to skewed or myopic readings of

Tolkien's fiction.

Consequently, while ―Tolkien not only wrote the seminal example of a secondary world fantasy, [and] also gave us a critical framework for understanding a Tolkienian fairy-story‖ (Northrop 815-6), that framework has yet to be adequately explained. It is my hope in this thesis to help elucidate the concept of Faërie by showing that a kind of mythic otherworldliness lies at its center, and to explore the ways in which ―depth,‖ and

Tolkien's notions of story and sub-creation give rise to this quality. I hope to show that

Faërie is found in the enchantment that the experience of mythic otherworldliness engenders and that the fairy-story is a way, however faintly, of producing this experience in literary form.

In the following chapter, I will challenge an influential approach to Tolkien's work, making the case that the profession of philology – the study of the history of words and language – does not form the basis of Tolkien's artistic core as Shippey claims in The 4

Road to Middle-earth. I will argue, contra Shippey, that Tolkien was a ―story-maker‖ as well as a philologist and that the artistic, sub-creative nature of fairy-stories is a way of producing, or at least approaching, Faërie. In doing so, I will explore some of the key features of Faërie, such as the importance of its holistic and experiential nature, and the truth value that it possessed for Tolkien. I will also address Tolkien's incorporation of sub-creative elements within ―On Fairy-Stories,‖ arguing that his creative style aspires to produce Faërie and therefore communicate it more fully. Finally, I will look at the manner in which Tolkien's novella, Smith of Wootton Major, parallels and embodies aspects of

Faërie, while also critiquing Shippey's reading of this work.

This discussion of philology and sub-creation leads into Tolkien's fascination with the ―depth‖ that can be found in ―rooted‖ works of medieval literature, which I explore in

Chapter 2. Depth is a key aspect of Tolkien's conception of the fairy-story insofar as it bridges the gap between myth and ordinary experience. In this chapter, then, I will outline how Tolkien constructs depth in The Lord of the Rings and argue that the scholarship tends to privilege temporal depth at the expense of other kinds of depth in this work. In taking Faërie on its own terms, it becomes evident that the manifestation of depth in The

Lord of the Rings is much more complex than critics have realized. Faërie operates in The

Lord of the Rings to create depths not only in time but also in space, in story and even in certain characters.

Depth provides the space within which the fundamentally other-world of myth can erupt into the world of ordinary experience. In Chapter 3, I argue that, although myth is an essential element of Faërie, the latter cannot be reduced to myth alone. My claim is that, within the context of Faërie, myth possesses three layers of otherworldliness, all of 5 which can be observed in The Lord of the Rings and which are instrumental to the way that the book functions. Myth is, first of all and just like story, separate from the

―Primary‖ or real world. Furthermore, immersion in the mythic reality of Faërie enables one to experience the otherworldly depths in one's surroundings. Finally, Faërie contains a disjunction between two mythic worlds – one, inspired by the dark, Northern mythic imagination which gives rise to the monsters of Middle-earth, and a second, opposing mythic reality embodied and represented by the Elves, which together work to produce

―eucatastrophe.‖

What I hope to show in the following chapters is that Faërie begins when the

Secondary Worlds of myth and story erupt into the Primary World, or the mundane reality of ordinary experience. And that the experience of Faërie, or enchantment, thus has its origin in this encounter with mythic otherworldliness – that the fairy-story is, for Tolkien, an attempt to capture and communicate this experience through the medium of narrative art. 6

Chapter 1: Sub-creation, Story and Philology

The conception of the fairy-story which J. R. R. Tolkien outlines in ―On Fairy-

Stories‖ provides a critical framework for understanding the theory of his fiction. Early in the essay, Tolkien makes the pivotal assertion that fairy-stories are ―stories about Fairy, that is Faërie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being‖ (―OFS‖ 113; author's emphasis). I begin, then, with the premise that understanding the core of Tolkien's creative work depends to a large degree on understanding this notion of Faërie on its own terms. This last qualification is important, for scholars typically fold or reduce Faërie into something else when explaining the concept and its importance in Tolkien's work. Even the most prominent and arguably the greatest Tolkien scholar, Tom Shippey, does exactly this when addressing ―On Fairy-Stories‖ in his ―seminal work,‖ The Road to Middle- earth (Nagy, ―Road‖ 261). Yet, as I will argue in the following pages, neither Tolkien's creative inspiration, nor his story-making avocation, can be reduced to philology, as

Shippey claims. Excessive privileging of philology further blinds Shippey to the artistic or sub-creative aspect of ―On Fairy-Stories‖ – an element Tolkien employs in the essay because Faërie operates, and is best understood, phenomenologically. Fairy-stories are valuable for Tolkien insofar as they expose one to primordial or mythic truths, and it is through seeking to capture and communicate Faërie within narrative art that this exposure occurs. The final section of this chapter extends this discussion of ―On Fairy-Stories‖ through a critique of Shippey's allegorical reading of Smith of Wootton Major.

In the Preface to the Revised and Expanded edition of The Road to Middle-earth,

Tom Shippey claims that early criticism of The Lord of the Rings failed to grasp the work because critics lacked an understanding of philology. Shippey argues that there is an 7

―inter-locking of philology and [J. R. R. Tolkien's] fiction‖ (271), and suggests throughout his book that philology is not just central to, but also constitutive of, most of

Tolkien's creative output. Shippey's profession to having attended the same grammar school as Tolkien (King Edward's School, Birmingham) and to having held the same academic position at Leeds, implies that he sees himself as uniquely suited to offer insights into the philological nature of Tolkien's fiction (xv, xvi). In The Road to Middle- earth, then, Shippey establishes himself not only as an expert in the field of philology but also as a singular commentator on what he believes lies at the heart of Tolkien's creative inspiration.

It is clear that philology does play a constitutive role in much of Tolkien's writing and that Shippey's background places him in an excellent position to comment on this aspect of Tolkien's work. However, it is also clear that, although Shippey's professional similarities to Tolkien have endowed him with a unique and penetrating perspective, this perspective is also a highly specialized one that at times results in overly narrow interpretations of Tolkien's writing. Shippey tends to treat those works by Tolkien that are less explicitly philological than other works, for instance, in a reductive or dismissive way. Thus he says that the essay ―On Fairy-Stories‖ is Tolkien's ―least successful, if most discussed, piece of argumentative prose‖ due to ―its lack of a philological core or kernel‖

(Road 49). Likewise, he interprets Smith of Wootton Major as an allegory of Tolkien's professional life which reduces the story to a series of autobiographical and philological symbols (Road 271-80), effectively undermining ―the story as a story‖ (Flieger,

―Allegory Versus Bounce‖ 188). These readings suggest a bias towards interpretations which privilege the role of philology in Tolkien's work at the expense of its non- 8 philological elements.

Yet, as the author of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien was not just a philologist. As

Richard West notes: ―one of the central facts about Tolkien is so obvious that we may overlook its significance: he was a writer. He wrote in almost every spare moment: he wrote voluminously; he revised incessantly‖ (288). Tolkien alludes to this fact himself in a letter to Christopher Bretherton in which he distinguishes philology from both story and writing. In the letter, he associates his early interest in language-inventing with his later, professional occupation: ―I am primarily a scientific philologist. My interests were and remain largely scientific.‖ He goes on to admit, however, that he ―was also interested in traditional tales (especially those concerning dragons); and writing (not reading) verse and metrical devices‖ (Letters 345). It is also worthwhile pointing out that the Inklings, a group to whom Tolkien owed a great deal in providing a regular audience that offered feedback on, and support for, much of his creative output, was not comprised of philologists but simply of a group of friends, ―most of whom were interested in literature‖ (Carpenter 200). Aside from being a philologist, then, Tolkien was also a writer – a fact that Shippey tends to overlook in his appropriation of the value of

Tolkien's fiction as fundamentally philological in nature.

Yet Tolkien was not just a writer, either. More specifically, and perhaps more importantly, he was a ―story-maker‖ (Tolkien, ―OFS‖ 132; emphasis added). Much of his fiction that predates The Lord of the Rings arose within the context of writing stories for his children. The Father Christmas Letters, for instance, began in 1920 with a letter sent to his three-year-old son John. ―Every Christmas‖ thereafter, Tolkien would ―write out an account of recent events at the North Pole in the shaky handwriting of Father Christmas‖ 9 and deliver the letters in such a way that his children believed they had in fact come from the North Pole (Carpenter 219). Roverandom is an example of another such work, as is the origin of Tom Bombadil, who ―was based on a Dutch doll that belonged to [Tolkien's son] Michael‖ (Carpenter 216). Humphrey Carpenter remarks in his biography that

Tolkien's early children's stories were wholly set apart from the mythic writing that would later become The Silmarillion, but that these two separate strands came together in the writing of The Hobbit (229-30). Tolkien himself says of The Hobbit that

it was not intended to have anything to do with [the ―matter of the Elder Days‖]. I had the habit while my children were still young of inventing and telling orally, sometimes of writing down, ―children's' stories‖ for their private amusement. . . . The Hobbit was intended to be one of them. It had no necessary connexion with the ―mythology,‖ but naturally became attracted towards this dominant construction in my mind, causing the tale to become larger and more heroic as it proceeded. (Letters 346)

Essential to Tolkien's writing of The Hobbit was his children's interest in hearing the story; as they grew older and became less interested, so too did Tolkien's desire to write the tale and the manuscript was set aside. It was not until a publisher expressed interest in it that Tolkien began to work on it again (Thomas 58). Joseph Pearce sees the role

Tolkien's children played in stimulating Tolkien to write as so important that he thinks ―it is fair to assume that if Tolkien had remained a bachelor and had not been blessed with children he would never have written either The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. Perhaps he would have written The Silmarillion, but in all probability it would never have been published‖ (40). Tolkien's relationship with his children provided, at least initially, the stimulus he needed to concoct stories: it was his love of storytelling that ultimately gave rise to The Hobbit and, later, to The Lord of the Rings. It seems evident, based on this fact alone, that Tolkien's creative drive cannot be exclusively attributed to his professional 10 background, as Shippey would have us believe.

Shippey nevertheless argues that The Lord of the Rings does have its source in philology, implying that the work was a natural, if not also an inevitable, outcome of

Tolkien's professional interests. Ironically, however, Tolkien did not initially want to write what would become his masterwork. In response to his publisher's request for ―a sequel to The Hobbit,‖ Tolkien's ―first act was an attempt to avoid [writing the new book] by thrusting at Stanley Unwin whatever manuscripts were close at hand,‖ which included material both related and unrelated to his mythology (Thomas 61). Tolkien's real desire lay in publishing manuscripts that would later become The Silmarillion. And while

Shippey argues for a philological kernel to this work as well (Road 34, 270), it is important to remember – and for many readers, all too readily apparent – that The

Silmarillion is as much mythological as philological. And the etymological root of myth, as Tolkien would know, is utterance or tale or, in other words, story (Kirk 22). Maria

Prozesky sees Tolkien's desire ―to construct a mythology he could dedicate 'to England'

(Letters 144), [as] an ambition which is not unlike the role of the oral poet or story-teller, who brought to birth and nurtured the people's langue, and thus their identity‖ (Prozesky

30). In oral-formulaic theory the story-teller often composes prior to or without the aid of a standardized writing system, and in this sense Prozesky reminds us of the ways in which Tolkien as story-maker is inventing, not studying, organized words and meaning.

Even The Silmarillion, then, which is the work nearest to philology, displays both a story- maker and story-teller impulse that has little in itself to do with the profession of philology. And The Lord of the Rings was no more than a meeting halfway between

Tolkien's publisher's request for a sequel to the popular children's novel and Tolkien's 11 own desire to publish his mythological work (Thomas 63).

We should not, then, uncritically accept Tolkien's comment, quoted by Carl

Hostetter, that The Lord of the Rings is ―largely an essay in 'linguistic aesthetic'‖ or that

the ―stories‖ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. . . . I should have preferred to write in ―Elvish.‖ But, of course, such work as The Lord of the Rings has been edited and only as much ―language‖ has been left in as I thought would be stomached by readers. (Hostetter 231; Tolkien, Letters 219-20)

Not unlike Shippey, Tolkien exaggerates the linguistic core of The Lord of the Rings here as the manuscripts and typescripts show that not only was there no Elvish edited out of

The Lord of the Rings, but more of the language was actually added during the process of revision (Hostetter 233). Because The Lord of the Rings is based on the mythological stories as much or more than on the language that was the inspiration for these stories, and because it is also a sequel to The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings is significantly removed from the linguistic inspiration that gave rise to The Silmarillion. Nowhere do we see Tolkien's story-making imperative more explicit than in the Foreword to The Lord of the Rings where he confesses that ―the prime motive‖ for writing the book ―was the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them‖ (10). It is significant that the medium through which Tolkien thought best to communicate his linguistic aesthetic was narrative art. If nothing else, story-making was a way to ground, if not also legitimize, Tolkien's language-building hobby in the same way that it justified the ―game of inventing. . . countr[ies]‖ (Letters 196; author's emphasis). Of course, Tolkien's linguistic aesthetic was essential in inspiring his stories and it often manifests itself in explicit ways within the fiction, contributing to the overall 12 effect that his works have. However, the value of the stories cannot be reduced merely to a linguistic aesthetic – to argue that they can be is to overstate the importance of philology in Tolkien's work.

In his effort to fold Tolkien's creative impulse into philology, Shippey quotes

Jacob Grimm who distinguishes philologists who ―'study words only for the sake of the things'‖ from ―'those who study things only for the sake of the words.'‖ Shippey explains

Tolkien's story-making avocation within the context of his professional background as a result of belonging to ―that former class,‖ which both Grimm and Shippey concede was the ―superior‖ (Road 54). Shippey suggests here that Tolkien's desire to write fairy-stories arose out of, and depended on, his preoccupation with philology. Yet if true, one would expect to find philologists the world over engaging in similar creative pursuits, with the result that very little scholarship would ever be accomplished in the field. Tolkien himself all but abandoned his research in philology to write The Lord of the Rings, a decision that he grappled with in ―Leaf by Niggle‖ (44), and one that many of his professional academic colleagues (such as Ida Pickles) took exception to (Anderson, ―'industrious little devil'‖ 24). Because the writing of The Lord of the Rings (among his other works) makes Tolkien unique among philologists, it is difficult not to conclude that what motivated him to write was not primarily philology itself, as Shippey suggests, but rather a story-making bent largely independent of Tolkien's academic background. Granted,

Tolkien does draw a connection between his profession and story in ―On Fairy-Stories‖

(119-20), hence the collections of fairy-tales put together by philologists like Grimm. Yet there is a categorical difference between a collector, or even a re-writer, of tales, and a story-maker of Tolkien's calibre. And although Shippey shares a remarkably similar 13 professional background to Tolkien, Shippey himself is not a writer of fairy-stories and seems therefore to be biased against Tolkien's work, or interpretations of it, that focus on story at philology's expense.

Thus we see Shippey taking issue with Tolkien's essay ―On Fairy-Stories‖ – an essay that is, according to Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson, ―Tolkien's defining study of and the centre-point in his thinking about the [fairy-story] genre, as well as being the theoretical basis for his fiction‖ (Flieger and Anderson 9). The last half of this statement is particularly important. As the title of the essay denotes, ―On Fairy-Stories‖ is a discussion (and defence) of the elements of fairy-stories, while its ―core or kernel‖ is

―sub-creation,‖ which can be loosely defined as the artistic realization of the fantastic or

―Otherworldliness‖ through the medium of story. Shippey's concern seems to hinge on the mistaken belief that the essay's subject is primarily a philological one, but that Tolkien

―held back‖ because the essay was read to, and ―later writ[ten] for, an unspecialised audience‖ (Shippey, Road 49). However, Tolkien's confession at the beginning of the essay, that he has ―not studied [fairy-stories] professionally‖ (―OFS‖ 109), is a recognition that the subject of the essay falls beyond his professional qualifications as a philologist. Of course, he goes on to refute major critical approaches to fairy-stories as well as cultural biases of his time; thus he clearly believes himself to have much to offer.

And he does demonstrate a certain degree of philological relevancy in the essay, asserting, among other things, that the search for the origin of story cannot be separated from that of language, while also discussing the mistaken approaches to fairy-stories employed by philologists like Max Müller (121). Accordingly, however, Tolkien's representation of these philologists suggests that those he shares his discipline with are 14 perhaps not the best people to handle the artistic nature of sub-creation, and there is a sense in the essay that philology ultimately has little to offer regarding the origin, function and effect of fairy-stories. There is a connection here with his famous Beowulf essay in which Tolkien laments that the poem was, in his day, all too rarely studied as poetry (―Monsters‖ 6-7). In fact, Tolkien explicitly states in ―On Fairy-Stories‖ that

―philology has been dethroned from the high place it once had in this court of inquiry‖

(121). The problem with the realm of the fairy-story is that it is a peculiar ―land, full of wonder but not of information‖ (109). Tolkien is therefore not being entirely disingenuous when he declares himself an amateur or merely a ―wandering explorer (or trespasser)‖ within the subject of the essay (109). He is signalling from the outset, rather, that the ―scientific‖ approach of the philologist (Letters 345) will simply not yield the kind of insights about fairy-stories that Tolkien thinks most worthwhile – a conclusion we may gather Shippey would not support.

As part of his claim that Tolkien was writing for an ―unspecialised audience,‖

Shippey argues that ―there is some sign that [Tolkien] trie[s] to talk down to‖ his audience in ―On Fairy-Stories‖ (Road 49). Shippey levels his charge specifically at

Tolkien's creative style which often blurs the boundary between the ―real‖ or ―Primary

World‖ and the ―Secondary World‖ of the fairy-story. Tolkien says, for instance, that ―it is often reported of fairies (truly or lyingly, I do not know) that they are workers of illusion, that they are cheaters of men by 'fantasy'‖ (―OFS‖ 116); and he abandons discussing the origins of ―the intricate web of Story,‖ saying, ―it is now beyond all skill but that of the elves to unravel it‖ (121). Shippey thinks that, by incorporating these kinds of comments within the essay, Tolkien ―repeatedly . . . plays the trick of pretending that fairies are 15 real,‖ and believes that this aspect of ―On Fairy-Stories‖ ―comes perilously close to whimsy [or] the pretence that something not true is true to create an air of comic innocence‖ (49; author's emphasis). Shippey does not go into detail as to why he thinks this aspect of ―On Fairy-Stories‖ is problematic: instead he simply dismisses it as symptomatic or representative of the unphilological nature of the essay.

Such unqualified dismissal is not surprising considering the scholarship on ―On

Fairy-Stories,‖ for this peculiar aspect of the essay has been largely ignored even by those scholars who are more sympathetic to its non-philological content. Regardless of the lack of critical attention paid to this feature of the essay, dismissing Tolkien's blurring of the real and the fantastic as merely (or dangerously) whimsical is itself problematic. For one thing, it overlooks Tolkien's perfectionism and constant revising, and while these work habits do not guarantee freedom from error, they do remind us that Tolkien was very careful in his choice of diction. The intrusion of Elves into the essay, therefore, is likely more than a trick. Furthermore, in one of the essay's endnotes Tolkien uses the word

―whimsical‖ to describe what he sees as the unfortunate reworking in the dramatized version of the opening of The Wind in the Willows, ―in which a child is seen telephoning with a daffodil‖ (157). Tolkien likewise criticizes the rewriting of older fairy-stories into collections for children, such as Andrew Lang's Fairy Books, in which

the old stories are mollified or bowdlerized instead of being reserved; the imitations are often merely silly . . . or (deadliest of all) covertly sniggering. . . . I will not accuse Andrew Lang of sniggering, but certainly he smiled to himself, and certainly too often he had an eye on the faces of other clever people over the heads of his child-audience. (136)

Tolkien clearly takes exception to whimsy, or a lack of seriousness, insofar as it undermines the essential qualities of the fairy-story. Indeed, Faërie, or the ―Magic‖ on 16 which the ―definition‖ of the fairy-story depends, ―must in [the fairy-story] be taken seriously, neither laughed at nor explained away‖ (114): ―Faërie fails the moment at which the hearer [or reader] no longer takes it seriously‖ (Long 92). If Tolkien's blurring of the real with the fantastic in ―On Fairy-Stories‖ is in fact whimsy, as Shippey claims, this aspect of the essay is, at best, out of character – at worst, bizarrely incongruous, for it takes as its subject the very features of fairy-stories that Tolkien argues should be treated with gravity and, if we are to believe Shippey, uses them to create an atmosphere of comic innocence.

More in keeping with the tone and content of the essay, then, is a rejection of

Shippey's claim that what he calls ―play[ing] the trick of pretending that fairies are real‖

(Road 49) is either play or trickery. The alternative is not to suggest that Tolkien would have us believe Elves really exist in the Primary World. Rather, this aspect of the essay invokes an ―old‖ mindset which takes fantastic things like Elves and dragons seriously, and which would not relegate the fairy-story genre to the ―'nursery'‖ (Tolkien, ―OFS‖

130). Tolkien uses this ―whimsical‖ aspect of the essay to draw his audience into a perspective by which one can appreciate the potency of the fairy-story. Rather than simply expostulate on this peculiar worldview, he attempts, through ―pretending that fairies are real,‖ to give his audience a taste of it – to invoke the spirit in which fairy- story should be read. One can even, perhaps, trace the origin of the fairy-story back to this worldview. This sub-creative quality of ―On Fairy-Stories‖ thus appeals to a worldview that is imbedded and embodied for Tolkien in his conception of fairy-stories, and thus acts as a bridge into the ―endlessness of the World of Story‖ (161). Particularly,

Tolkien had in mind, and valorizes, myth and medieval stories like Beowulf, the Völsung 17

Saga and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – old stories which he folds into the fairy- story genre (114, 124, 126, 127, 135). Tolkien praises these stories for ―belong[ing] to that literary kind which has deep roots in the past,‖ and which ―is made of tales often told before and elsewhere‖ (―Sir Gawain‖ 72). Being linked to the ―World of Story,‖ these stories have a particular truth potential absent in narrative art which does not fall within

Tolkien's conception of the fairy-story.

In ―On Fairy-Stories,‖ then, Tolkien's role as story-maker eclipses his role as philologist. In fact, he opens the essay like a storyteller, introducing the discussion of fairy-stories as if embarking on a quest into Faërie, saying, ―I propose to speak about fairy-stories, though I am aware that this is a rash adventure. Faërie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold‖ (109). The full import of this opening does not become apparent until a few pages later when Tolkien explains that

―most good 'fairy-stories' are about the aventures of men in the Perilous Realm or upon its shadowy marches‖ (113; author's emphasis). Just like the blurring of sub-creation with the Primary World, which Shippey takes exception to in the ―pretence‖ that Elves are real, Tolkien blurs the analysis in the essay with the subject analyzed. In other words, the essay is an ―aventure‖ into the subject of Faërie, in which Tolkien refers to the fantastic as if it were real and concludes with eucatastrophe (the fairy-story turn for the better or

―happy ending‖); it thus resembles a fairy-story in key ways.

Admittedly, as Jane Chance points out, ―On Fairy-Stories‖ is an essay and ―not a fairy-story‖ (55). Chance's conclusion misses the larger point, however, that, although this sub-creative element does not make the essay a fairy-story, it nevertheless functions to produce Faërie or the ―Magic‖ of the fairy-story, even if only in a minor or subtle way. 18

In the quotations in the preceding paragraph, Tolkien implies that merely to discuss

Faërie is to invoke it – a notion expressive of the spontaneously creative power of Faërie:

―that power which, even as it conceives the story, causes it to take living form and colour before the eyes‖ (Tolkien, ―OFS‖ 116). Part of the ―Magic‖ of Faërie lies in its power to actualize something out of nothing: particularly, the eruption of the Secondary World of story or myth into the ordinary world of everyday experience. Tolkien associates this power of Faërie with sub-creation, which is ―the process by which human imagination invents secondary worlds strange to the everyday primary world in which we live and move, but nevertheless possessed of an inner consistency of their own‖ (Kocher 165).

The sub-creation of fairy-stories creates a ―spell‖ of Secondary Belief (Tolkien, ―On

Fairy-Stories‖ 128); therefore, sub-creation (when done well) produces ―enchant[ment]‖

(132). Tolkien explains that Faërie ―contains many things besides elves and fays . . . [and even] ourselves . . . when we are enchanted‖ (113; emphasis added). Enchantment is important to Tolkien because it involves the experience of Faërie, which is essential for any genuine understanding of the concept since ―Faërie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible‖ (114).

Tolkien thus blends sub-creation into his discussion because he believes that Faërie is best communicated through experience. In talking about Elves as if they are real, Tolkien aspires to enchant his audience.

The fact that the sub-creative element of ―On Fairy-Stories‖ tends to take Elves as its subject is significant. Elves are important for several reasons, not least because they are Tolkien's supreme sub-creators: ―to the elvish craft, Enchantment, Fantasy aspires, and when it is successful of all forms of human art most nearly approaches‖ (143). It 19 must be remarked here that Tolkien is sometimes inconsistent and circular with his use of terminology in ―On Fairy-Stories.‖ This inconsistency is perhaps most evident in his folding of ―fantasy‖ into ―sub-creation‖ (122) and then in his making the latter a quality of the former (139). Tolkien's use of ―fantasy‖ to mean an element within the fairy-story genre is also quite different from the more common usage of ―fantasy‖ to refer to a specific literary genre – a genre which many people consider The Lord of the Rings to epitomize. For these reasons, I have chosen to use ―sub-creation‖ in the place of

―fantasy,‖ except when quoting Tolkien or other scholars. My use of ―sub-creation‖ thus encapsulates both the story-maker's internal vision and the communication of that vision through the medium of story (122, 135, 139). This internal vision has tremendous truth potential for Tolkien and Elvishness is one of the chief visions of sub-creation he sought to communicate through his fiction. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that in an essay largely about sub-creation and its effects, Tolkien goes so far as to incorporate his vision of the ideal sub-creators through the very art of sub-creation about which he writes. It is, after all, from ―the desire for a living, realised sub-creative art‖ that the Elves ―are largely made‖ (143). There is a ―rootedness‖ or ―depth‖ to this aspect of ―On Fairy-Stories‖ which is historical in its allusiveness to a past worldview that takes Faërie seriously. Yet it is also suggestive of the eruption of the sub-creative, Secondary World into the Primary

World, which is the creative power of Faërie. Tolkien invokes his vision of Elves as a way of communicating that towards which the fairy-story should aspire. Elves are thus something more than simply metaphors representing the human sub-creator and Tolkien makes clear that one can only ever ―approach‖ the Elvish craft of Enchantment through fairy-stories. The manner in which Elves are utilized in ―On Fairy-stories‖ is a subtle, 20 sub-creative attempt to communicate a particular vision, the truth of which Tolkien felt could only be satisfactorily apprehended phenomenologically. If nothing else, the fact that the sub-creative elements in ―On Fairy-Stories‖ are carefully wrought to produce the experience of Faërie should indicate that Tolkien took them seriously.

Despite his antipathy towards the sub-creative nature of the essay, Shippey does admit the importance of both Tolkien's use of sub-creation and enchantment (though he avoids using the word Faërie) in ―On Fairy-Stories,‖ and he understands the integral relationship they share. He acknowledges that ―it is just about possible to make out the bones of an argument, or rather of a conviction‖ in ―On Fairy-Stories,‖ that the sub- creative, fantastic features of fairy-stories are ―not entirely made up‖ (Road 49). Sub- creation, Shippey points out, possesses a spiritual or ―mystic[al]‖ quality for Tolkien (50)

– a quality, as Tolkien himself notes at the essay's end, akin to ―Gospel‖ (―OFS‖ 155).

Flieger is quick to point out that ―Tolkien is not making light of the Gospels‖ in referencing ―Gospel‖ this way, but rather that he uses the religiously loaded term to reveal ―the underlying gravity and essential truth of fairy-stories‖ (Flieger and Anderson

14). And despite the Christian connotation of the word, Tolkien makes clear in his essay on Smith of Wootton Major that Faërie ―is not religious‖ (―Smith‖ 100; author's emphasis). In associating Tolkien's notion of sub-creation with the word ―Gospel,‖

Shippey claims Tolkien would like to assert in ―On Fairy-Stories‖ not only that ―the

Gospels have the 'supremely convincing tone' of Primary Art‖ or ―of truth,‖ but that the same is true ―of elves and dragons‖ (Road 51). And, of course, Tolkien did equate myth with religion, as the famous discussion with C. S. Lewis and Hugo Dyson on myth and

Christianity makes clear (for this discussion see Carpenter 196-9). In the poem 21

―Mythopoeia,‖ which Tolkien wrote to C. S. Lewis in response to their discussion on the epistemic status of myth and fairy-story, Tolkien argues that human sub-creation is the

―refracted light,‖ ―splintered from the single White‖ of the Creator's formation of the

Primary World (61-2). Myth- or story-making is therefore not only legitimate but has an inherently profound truth-potential. Flieger comments that ―the purpose of [fairy-stories] is not to make sense but to give the reader a glimpse of the perilous realm that Tolkien called [Faërie]‖ (Flieger, ―Allegory Versus Bounce‖ 187). This insight is supported by

Tolkien's portrayal of his ideal sub-creators in ―Mythopoeia‖ as ―panning the vein of spirit out of sense‖ (40). Although the experience of Faërie may only ever be produced faintly through the sub-creative nature of fairy-stories, this art form nevertheless possesses a profound truth potential for Tolkien.

Yet Shippey sees the ―mystical‖ nature of enchantment as being non-literary and therefore a thing ultimately separate from sub-creation. He bases his conclusion on the dual nature of Tolkien's definition of sub-creation – one which involves both the

―making‖ and ―glimpsing of Other-worlds‖ (Tolkien 135). Unlike Shippey, C. S. Lewis sees this ―otherworldliness‖ as an inherent quality of sub-creation, saying in ―On Story‖

(an essay clearly responding to or inspired by ―On Fairy-Stories‖), that

the plot, as we call it – is only really a net whereby to catch something else. The real theme may be, and perhaps usually is, something that has no sequence in it, something other than a process and much more like a state or quality. (17; author's emphasis)

Lewis appeals to the experience of ―giantship‖ communicated in ―Jack the Giant-killer‖ as one example of ―good Story's‖ potency in creating otherworldly experiences – in this case, ―the intolerable pressure, the sense of something older, wilder, and more earthy than humanity‖ (8). Although this otherworldly quality cannot be reduced simply to plot, it is 22 nevertheless a product of art. Shippey, however, disagrees that this elusive, otherworldly quality ultimately has an artistic source. He sees, rather, a clear distinction corresponding to a division between the rational (artistic) and non-rational (mystical), pointing out that

―making up dragons is Art; 'glimpsing' them and the worlds they come from is not‖ (Road

50). Shippey argues that the spiritual quality of Faërie manifested in fairy-stories is not intrinsic to their artistic or sub-creative nature (as Tolkien asserts in ―On Fairy-Stories‖), but rather is something that ultimately has a non-literary source. For Shippey, of course, this source is philological in nature. Despite his overemphasis on the importance of the profession of philology as the source of Tolkien's creative inspiration, Shippey does make a convincing argument that philology granted Tolkien a way of experiencing depth in time, which has an enchanting effect similar to that produced by rooted works of literature (see Chapter 2 for an exploration of the nature and significance of depth).

This reduction of the effect of sub-creation in fairy-stories to a non-literary quality which Shippey links to philology explains his inability to interpret Smith of Wootton

Major as anything other than an allegory of Tolkien's professional life. For Tolkien does not utilize philology as explicitly or as often in Smith of Wootton Major as he does even in The Lord of the Rings. To interpret the novella from a philological standpoint, then,

Shippey must reduce the story to allegory. He thus reads Smith's grandfather, ―the first

Master Cook,‖ as a philologist-figure, while Nokes, who replaces Smith's grandfather as the Master Cook and ―who has no idea of the charms of fantasy‖ (Shippey 274), ―seems very clearly to be an unsympathetic picture of the propounders of 'lit.'‖ Shippey invokes here the controversy in English departments in Tolkien's day between scholars of language (like Tolkien and Shippey) and scholars of literature, who, at their worst, 23 separated literature from language or philology and attempted to decry such linguistic matters. Shippey thus interprets Nokes as ―a degradation, a decline, from philologist to critic‖ (275), further arguing that Smith is a ―Tolkien-figure‖ (276) and that the Great

Cake the Master Cook is expected to bake for a special feast every twenty-four years is thus a ―full-length work on medieval literature‖ (276) – one that Tolkien never produced.

It is telling, of course, that Shippey interprets Smith of Wootton Major's Cook within the context of the profession of philology without acknowledging the allegorical

Cook in ―On Fairy-Stories‖ – a figure associated not with philology, however, but with

Story. In fact, Tolkien uses the allegory in ―On Fairy-Stories‖ to illustrate the difference between the ―the Pot of Soup [or] the Cauldron of Story‖ that is ―served up by its author or teller‖ from the ―bones‖ of the soup or a story's ―source material‖ (Tolkien, ―OFS‖

120, 125). For Tolkien, the ―Cauldron of Story‖ has been boiling for a very long time – as long as language has been around – and thus it cannot be reduced to words. Reductive, scientific approaches to fairy-stories, such as those employed by folklorists, anthropologists and some philologists (those who approach stories seeking information), are focused exclusively on the ―bones‖ of the ―soup‖ and therefore their proponents have a less legitimate relationship with Story than do the ―Cooks‖ or story-makers, according to Tolkien. Tolkien viewed ―Lang's practice of reading mythology,‖ for instance, as being

―incorrect and misleading because it turned the focus away from the story and centered instead on its potential role as a historical document‖ (Baltasar 26). Tolkien makes the same complaint early in his allegorical account of Beowulf criticism and the critics' tendency to ignore the poetical or storied aspects of Beowulf (―Monsters‖ 5-9). In contrast to such critics, ―Cooks‖ or story-makers are necessarily involved in a long line of 24 tradition as they draw from and contribute to the ―history of story-making‖ (Tolkien,

―OFS‖ 126); and thus their interaction with Story has greater value for Tolkien, who believes, of course, that there is more to be had from fairy-stories than superficial entertainment and shallow escapism. In this context, it is important to recall that Tolkien's love of Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight stems in part from the manner in which the authors of these works ladled the Soup out of the Pot. That is, Tolkien admired the poets of these works precisely because of their skill as storytellers and for the manner in which each poet (re-)tells his story. In an endnote on lines 33-36 from Tolkien and E.V.

Gordon's edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – lines that read,

As hit is stad and stoken In stori stif and stronge, With lel letteres loken, In londe so hatz ben longe

– the editors offer ―'embodied in truthful words'‖ as a possible interpretation of line 35

(p. 72, note to vv 35-6), an interpretation which attributes to the narrator a view of story as something both old and true in these lines. Admittedly, the one-to-one correlations between the Cooks in ―On Fairy-Stories‖ and Smith of Wootton Major break down, as the

Master Cook's most important contribution in Smith of Wootton Major takes the form of a

Great Cake rather than a Pot of Soup. Yet just as in Tolkien's conception of the fairy-story in ―On Fairy-Stories,‖ the Cake is used as a medium through which Faërie is passed on, ultimately enabling Smith to journey into the Perilous Realm. If one is going to read the

Cook as an allegory, then, at least some reference should be made to ―On Fairy-Stories‖ which also purports to be an ―aventure‖ into Faërie. At the very least, Shippey's reading of Smith of Wootton Major as an allegorical comment on Tolkien's professional life further demonstrates his excessive privileging of the profession of philology. 25

Much closer to capturing the essence of the story is Randel Helms' interpretation of Smith of Wootton Major as an allegory ―about the tremendous power of the 'spell of

Faërie'‖ (99; author's emphasis). We see this power associated with the Master Cooks of the tale. In the beginning of the novella, the first Master Cook ventures into the realm of

Faërie and returns with an apprentice named ―Alf,‖ who seems just a boy to the townsfolk but who is in fact the Elven King of Faërie (or ―Faery,‖ as Tolkien spells it in this work). ―Alf,‖ which means ―elf‖ in Old Norse and Old English, is one of the relatively few explicit uses of philology in the novella. Thus the first Master Cook of the story parallels Tolkien's ideal sub-creators in ―Mythopoeia‖ who ―look[ed] backward . . .

[and] beheld the elves‖ (42) in their sub-creative endeavours. Early in the story the

Master Cook abandons the townspeople, and is replaced by the sly and petty Nokes, who associates ―fairy‖ with the ―nursery‖ (Tolkien, ―OFS‖ 130): ―fairies and sweets were two of the very few notions he had about the tastes of children. Fairies he thought one grew out of; but of sweets he remained very fond‖ (Smith 11). In attempting to bake the ―Great

Cake‖ for the special feast held once every twenty-four years, Nokes

looked in some old books of recipes left behind by previous cooks. They puzzled him. . . . He scratched his head and remembered an old black box with several different compartments in which the last Cook had once kept spices and other things for special cakes. . . . In one compartment in the corner he discovered a small star. . . . ―That's funny!‖ he said as he held it up to the light. (Smith 12)

In his sub-creative attempt, Nokes also ―looks back‖ but does not understand what he sees. Alf is literally behind Nokes when Nokes finds the star and Alf tells him that ―'it comes from Faery.'‖ Nokes laughs and remarks that ―Faery‖ and ―funny‖ ―means much the same‖ (12, 13). Nokes is here representative of the attitude towards fairy-stories (and

Faërie in general) that Tolkien takes exception to in ―On Fairy-Stories‖ – the diminishing 26 of Faërie as something both humorous and childish – or ―whimsical.‖ Flieger explains that

Tolkien has said that [Smith of Wootton Major] began as an allegorical response to the (to him) common misconception of the word fairy, correlating the writer who would sweeten and prettify the notion for children to the cook baking an over- sweet cake on the assumption that all children liked sugar[, although] the story outgrew this concept. (―Allegory Versus Bounce‖ 189)

Although the work outgrew this conception and Tolkien largely abandoned the allegorical frame, the novella nevertheless continues to express the ideas outlined in ―On Fairy-

Stories,‖ notably that Faërie must be taken seriously if it is to have any power.

Despite Nokes's clumsy handling of the ―fay star,‖ he nevertheless enables Smith to experience the ―power of the 'spell of Faërie.'‖ The star is put in the slice of the Great

Cake that Smith eats and is then ―tucked away in some place where it could not be felt; for that was what it was intended to do. There it waited for a long time, until its day came‖ (Smith 19). The star is a passport into the land of Faërie within which, among many other marvels and mysteries, Smith wanders across

the King's Tree springing up, tower upon tower, into the sky, and its light was like the sun at noon; and it bore at once leaves and flowers and fruits uncounted, and not one was the same as any other that grew on the Tree. (Smith 28)

Given Tolkien's valorization of Faërie and the role played in it (and vice versa) by deep or rooted stories, it is difficult not to read the Tree as Tolkien's ―Tree of Tales‖ or the

―Cauldron of Story‖ itself (―OFS‖ 120, 125). In the end, however, Smith must relinquish the star, much to his regret. Thus Smith of Wootton Major can be viewed not just as the embodiment of the core ideas expressed in ―On Fairy-Stories,‖ but also as an extension of them. Indeed, Josh Long sees the novella as an epilogue or addendum to ―On Fairy-

Stories‖ (89). Helms reads Smith's journeys as Tolkien's farewell to his own ―journeys‖ 27 within the realm of Faërie through the medium of story-making (Helms 111, 112). What is key to note here is that story-making and Faërie are inextricably linked for Tolkien: story-making is the act through which Faërie is communicated. For this very reason, however, Helms, like Shippey, goes too far in reading the novella as an autobiographical allegory, for such an interpretation alters the experience of reading the story in much the same way that not treating Faërie seriously undermines the potentially enchanting effect of fairy-stories. According to Flieger, the practice of allegorizing Smith of Wootton Major is not uncommon as ―nearly every critic who has paid serious attention to Smith has tended to allegorize it or at least to extract some sort of specific meaning from it beyond the pattern of the story‖ (Time 231). Such an approach tends to parallel the exclusively scientific methodologies employed by philologists and folklorists criticized by Tolkien in

―On Fairy-Stories:‖ ―people using the stories not as they were meant to be used, but as a quarry from which to dig evidence, or information, about matters in which they are interested‖ (119). This charge is similar to the issue Tolkien addresses in his Beowulf essay: critics of the poem too often ignored the poetry and the story in favour of other issues (―Monsters‖ 6-7). For Shippey, Smith of Wootton Major appears to have value only insofar as it can be interpreted within the context of Tolkien's philological background.

Flieger argues that such a reductive approach to the story robs it of its effect in the same way that cutting open a ball robs the ball of its ―'bounce'‖ (Time 233; Tolkien, Letters

388). ―Bounce‖ is here meant to express the experience of the story as story – the experience of Secondary Belief or the ―inner consistency‖ of the reality of the story, which is a state that the truth-potential of sub-creation depends on. Of course, this enchanting potential of the fairy-story is essential for Tolkien. Tolkien states in a letter 28

―that fairy story has its own mode of reflecting 'truth,' different from allegory, or

(sustained) satire, or 'realism,' and in some ways more powerful‖ (Tolkien, Letters 233).

Essential to the fairy-story ―mode,‖ then, is maintaining the integrity of the story's

―bounce.‖

Smith of Wootton Major may be the exception to Tolkien's anti-allegorical, fairy- story rule insofar as a degree of allegory appears to actually enhance its sub-creative effect. Flieger's issue with Shippey's interpretation of the story, in particular,

resides not so much in whether there is allegory to be found in the story (for there are at least demonstrable leftovers of an original allegorical intent) as in whether a reading on that level comes closest to Tolkien's final intent and best serves the story as a work of art. (―Allegory Versus Bounce‖ 186)

Flieger identifies Tolkien's ―intent‖ in her statement that ―[Faërie] – the actual experience of enchantment by Smith – is at the center of Smith, while any leftover allegory is at the edges – the beginning and the end‖ (―Allegory Versus Bounce‖ 189). If we read the allegorical element in Smith of Wootton Major within the context of ―On Fairy-Stories‖ as symbolizing the very thing that the story does as a fairy-story (induces Secondary Belief or enchantment), then the ―bounce‖ of the story is enhanced rather than undermined. For

Tolkien, allegory generally frustrates Secondary Belief insomuch as it signals that the sub-creation of a fairy-story, vehicle of myth, represents some aspect of the Primary

World and should not therefore be taken on its own terms. Allegorizing the fantastic explains it away and consequently robs it of the effect that makes fairy-stories the supreme form of literary art for Tolkien. Although Helms comes closer to Tolkien's artistic intent in his allegorizing of the novella than Shippey, his approach also explains away the reader's experience of the story by interpreting the narrative and its various sub- creative elements as autobiographical symbols (Helms 111). In the Foreword to The Lord 29 of the Rings, Tolkien equates allegory with ―the proposed domination of the author‖ and thus prefers the ―applicability‖ of ―history, true or feigned‖ (12). And what is feigned history but story? Smith of Wootton Major can be treated as a special case, however, as the allegorical element in the novella stands for the sub-creative ―bounce.‖ This feature of the work is about the “bounce‖ or enchantment, rather than some aspect of the Primary

World disconnected from the experience of the story. The novella can be viewed, then, as a kind of inverse reflection of ―On Fairy-Stories‖ in which the essay is primarily non- fictional, intertwined with a thread of sub-creation, while Smith of Wootton Major is a full-fledged fairy-story with bits of symbolism or allegory, alluding to ideas expressed in the essay. The allegory in Smith of Wootton Major is an unusual, perhaps ingenious, feature of the story, functioning in the same manner that the sub-creative element in ―On

Fairy-Stories‖ contributes to Tolkien's discussion of Faërie in that work.

This stress on fairy-story or sub-creation as a primary means through which

Faërie can be communicated stands in stark contrast to Shippey's argument that the ―'real centre'‖ of ―On Fairy-Stories‖ is ultimately ―philological, and that Tolkien could not express it in ordinary literary terms‖ (Road 50). Shippey admits that enchantment lies at this ―real centre‖ but he refuses to acknowledge the importance of sub-creation in communicating it. He distances his claims from sub-creation in part by opting to use the word ―glamour‖ instead of ―enchantment,‖ even though by his own admission they mean the same thing (for he defines ―glamour‖ as ―'magic, enchantment, spell'‖ [Road 51]).

Tolkien uses ―enchantment‖ several times in ―On Fairy-Stories‖ while ―glamour‖ only appears once (―OFS‖ 111). Shippey explains this disparity by saying that ―glamour‖ is

―too complicated for a non-philological piece‖ (Shippey, Road 51). Of course, the 30 philological nature of the word ―glamour,‖ when used in this context, makes it an appealing choice for Shippey. ―Glamour‖ no longer means ―enchantment,‖ as it did for the medieval Norse (Road 52); thus it carries philological baggage that must be unpacked and displayed whenever the word is used in place of ―enchantment.‖ Even though enchantment and glamour mean the same thing for Shippey, he chooses to use the former as a way of linking the concept expressed by both terms to philology. Tolkien, significantly, does not make this move in ―On Fairy-Stories‖ as he clearly does not share

Shippey's belief that Faërie and enchantment can only really be understood through invoking philology. Story communicates Faërie and thus enchants, for Shippey, only insofar as it incorporates philological content. In opposition to Tolkien's claims in ―On

Fairy-Stories,‖ Shippey contests that it is the content, or perhaps some representation of the process, of philology which conveys Faërie within Tolkien's conception of the fairy- story, rather than the artistic, sub-creative nature of the genre.

Shippey does, however, raise an important point when he argues that enchantment is non-literary and therefore not an experience story can produce independently of philology. Enchantment is for Tolkien a spirituality akin in degree, if different in kind, to his Christianity. It possesses, then, a status for Tolkien that places it outside the realm, not just of story, but of philology as well. No great stretch of the imagination is involved in supposing that Tolkien would gladly have set aside his study of philology and story- making in exchange for a free pass to the Perilous Realm, as his character Smith acquires in Smith of Wootton Major (not unlike Eärendil, one of Tolkien's oldest literary [sub-] creations, who also passes into Faërie, albeit in a different fashion). In the end, Shippey fails to see that Tolkien's investment in Faërie ultimately extended beyond the mediums 31 through which enchantment could be accessed.

Philology clearly played a role in the construction of the bulk of Tolkien's creative work and Shippey does an excellent job of demonstrating how philology parallels story as a medium of enchantment for Tolkien. The problem with Shippey's approach lies in the way that he excludes other aspects of Tolkien's fiction, with the result that works which do not have the same philological core are diminished, denying the reader or audience the experience of enchantment that Tolkien's sub-creative art potentially offers. Shippey's position is problematic, then, because it arbitrarily limits the medium through which the

―mystical‖ or spiritual concepts and experience associated with Faërie can be communicated. We cannot be enchanted by ―On Fairy-Stories‖ or Smith of Wootton

Major if the sub-creative aspects of these works are dismissed as whimsy or reduced to allegory. If this supposition is correct, then Shippey's interpretations of these two works diminish their potential effect – an undesirable outcome if Faërie is best understood through experience.

One way of experiencing Faërie is through deep or rooted stories. Accordingly, my next chapter turns to an examination of Tolkien's view of depth. 32

Chapter 2: Depth

Because J. R. R. Tolkien's conception of the fairy-story is central to his theory of fiction, and because fairy-stories are about Faërie (―OFS‖ 113), grasping Faërie on its own terms is vital to understanding Tolkien's fiction. I argued in the last chapter that

Tolkien's sub-creative appeal to Elves in ―On Fairy-Stories‖ is an expression of Faërie insofar as it blurs the boundary between sub-creation and the Primary World, but also to the extent that it roots the essay to an older, mythological worldview. Tolkien calls this latter attribute ―depth.‖ Depth denotes a normally inaccessible otherworldliness existing underneath, or adjacent to, ordinary experience. Depth is therefore the state which signals the incarnation of mythic otherworldliness within the mundane world. In this chapter, I first explore depth as it manifested itself for Tolkien in philology and then, more extensively, as he constructed it in The Lord of the Rings. As I argue below, depth is not restricted to the temporal, as Tom Shippey and others have argued; rather, depth appears in The Lord of the Rings not only in time, but also in space, in narrative and even in certain characters. Furthermore, sub-creation is itself a kind of depth for Tolkien.

Although Shippey argues that enchantment was for Tolkien essentially a philological matter – thus folding Faërie into philology – he nevertheless introduces and explores a key aspect of Faërie in his discussion of ―depth‖ in The Road to Middle-earth.

Early in this book Shippey points out that Tolkien's commitment to philology entailed a particular view of language in which a word was like ―a stalactite, interesting in itself but more so as part of something growing‖ (28). Of course, many scholars have commented on the role language played in Tolkien's life and work, and the potentially transcendent quality he ascribed to words. Verlyn Flieger sees this quality as ―super-natural‖ in 33

Splintered Light, quoting C. S. Lewis's famous statement that Tolkien ―'had been inside language'‖ and Simonne d'Ardenne's claim that Tolkien had ―readily admitted‖ to having

―'brok[en]'‖ its ―'veil'‖ (Flieger, Splintered Light 9; Carpenter 180; d'Ardenne 34).

Tolkien's fascination with language encompassed both the sound of a word and the historical association it possessed, and he believed that one could perceive these historical associations in a word's phonology (Shippey, Road 114). His interest in mythic literature, then, had much to do with ―how language is adopted to convey new meaning while preserving traces of its old context‖ (Nagy, ―Saving‖ 85). It was through philology that this quality of language, this hint of the old – of myth, even – in the new, could be uncovered and investigated (Shippey, Road 28-30, 33-4; Jeffrey 64). As an example of this ―rooted‖ characteristic of language, Shippey tells us that Tolkien's office ―at Leeds

University stood just off 'Woodhouse Lane,' which crosses 'Woodhouse Moor' and

'Woodhouse Ridge,'‖ going on to say that ―these names may preserve, in mistaken modern spelling, old belief in 'the wild men of the woods' lurking in the hills above the

Aire‖ (Road 65). This otherworldly potential which could be unearthed by delving into the historical stratum of a word was one of the qualities of language that most fascinated

Tolkien.

A word for Tolkien, then, had a kind of depth or historical ―rootedness.‖ This philological disposition towards words went at least as far back as his first published work: a poem called ―Goblin Feet,‖ which appeared in Oxford Poetry 1915 (Shippey,

Road 30, 34). The poem links Tolkien's early conception of Faërie and enchantment to his philological interest in language, associating them with the notion of temporal depth or historical rootedness: 34

I am off down the road Where the fairy lanterns glowed And the little pretty flittermice are flying: A slender band of grey It runs creepily away And the hedges and the grasses are a-sighing. (30)

So goes the first half of the poem. ―Flittermice,‖ according to Shippey, is one such rooted word. Shippey also makes much of the word ―creepily,‖ arguing that the road – ―the slender band of grey‖ – can be identified as a road originally built by ancient Romans and thus that ―creepily‖ involves an ―emotion[al]‖ response to this temporal quality derived from Tolkien's knowledge of the local history (Road 31-2, 34). Shippey later associates this quality with ―glamour‖ or enchantment in his discussion of the ―mystical‖ underpinnings of ―On Fairy-Stories,‖ seeing this temporal depth as essentially philological in nature and therefore key to understanding the spiritual aspect of Tolkien's discussion of sub-creation in the essay. Yet it is worth noting that temporal depth, to the extent that it relates directly to the road in this poem, has here been divorced from language and removed from the kind of exclusively philological context which Shippey seems keen to venerate in his book.

Tolkien himself talks about temporal depth in his essay on Sir Gawain and the

Green Knight, which Shippey briefly explores at the end of his book (Shippey, Road 308-

9). In the essay, Tolkien says that ―antiquity like a many-figured black-cloth hangs ever behind the scene‖ in Sir Gawain, creating a ―flavour,‖ ―atmosphere‖ and ―virtue‖ unique to such ―rooted works‖ (72-3; author's emphasis). This ―illusion of historical truth and perspective‖ or ―depth‖ is one of the qualities that also made Beowulf attractive to

Tolkien (―Monsters‖ 7, 27). Just as in Sir Gawain, the author of Beowulf has rooted his work in older tales – and the worldviews embodied in these tales – creating a specific 35 kind of literary experience that appealed to Tolkien in much the same way as the

―creepiness‖ of the old Roman road in ―Goblin Feet‖ and the stalactite nature of words did. Depth thus describes a particular aesthetic experience Tolkien valued in medieval works that display traces of even older mythological worldviews. To experience depth, then, is to at least glimpse an otherworldliness not normally accessible within the Primary

World of one's ordinary experiences. The term ―depth,‖ like ―otherworldliness,‖ implies that one always experiences the mythic from within a comparatively mundane, and thus surface, reality, even if the prosaic nature of this reality is only a matter of perspective.

And it is noteworthy that, as in Tolkien's portrayal of the road in ―Goblin Feet,‖ depth in literary works where ―stalk the figures of elder myth‖ does not necessarily need to be a linguistic phenomenon (―Gawain‖ 73).

Of course, Tolkien's interest in temporal depth does not just appear in his Beowulf and Sir Gawain essays, for it also shows up when he discusses Faërie, in ―On Fairy-

Stories,‖ where he says that

the magic of Faërie is not an end in itself, its virtue is in its operations: among these are the satisfaction of certain primordial human desires. One of these desires is to survey the depths of space and time. . . . A story may thus deal with the satisfaction of these desires, with or without the operation of either machine or magic, and in proportion as it succeeds it will approach the quality and have the flavour of fairy-story. (116; emphasis added)

Tolkien unites temporal depth here with the concept of Faërie, suggesting that depth is integral to the ―flavour of [the] fairy-story.‖ One finds a similar assertion in ―Sir Gawain and the Green Knight‖ where Tolkien defines the fairy-story as ―a real deep-rooted tale‖

(73), claiming that Sir Gawain is one of the ―greater fairy-stories‖ because it has ―deep roots in the past‖ (72-3). Sir Gawain and Beowulf both possess this enchanting ―Elvish hone of antiquity‖ insofar as they are ―old‖ works, historically rooted in a yet deeper past, 36 therefore offering the reader an experience that in Tolkien's view functions to satisfy the basic human desire of gazing into the chasm of time. In associating these kinds of rooted works with Story in ―On Fairy-Stories,‖ Tolkien points to the essential differences between ―story‖ and ―Story‖ – an important distinction, as story, although it may act as a medium through which Faërie can be communicated (the best medium it would seem, according to Tolkien), does not appear linked to Faërie in the way that Story is. One explanation for this difference, which Tolkien makes fairly clear in ―On Fairy-Stories,‖ but which becomes more relevant in light of the Sir Gawain and Beowulf essays, is that

Story depends on this notion of depth in a way that stories which fall outside the fairy- story genre do not. In their most potent guise, fairy-stories tie into the ancient stream of the ―history‖ of Story (which appears to possess a mythic quality and is therefore more than mere history), potentially acting as a door that opens into ―Other Time‖ (―OFS‖

129). To experience Story is to step beyond the walls of the Primary World, if only briefly.

The fact that the word ―flavour‖ is used to describe the depth element in both the

―Sir Gawain‖ and ―On Fairy-Stories‖ essays is significant for two reasons. It indicates, first, that this quality was important for Tolkien, as his interest in it remained consistent over the nearly fifteen years between which the two essays were delivered. Tolkien also esteems depth in his Beowulf essay, published three years before ―On Fairy-Stories.‖

Secondly, it indicates that the depth of these works appealed to Tolkien primarily as a thing experienced. Shippey's take on the matter is somewhat ambiguous. He seems to appreciate the experiential aspect of depth in his acknowledgement of Tolkien's use of

―flavour,‖ while nevertheless emphasizing its ―illusionary‖ aspect (Road 228-9) and 37 relationship to the ―bones of the soup‖ (309). This emphasis may indicate a lack of sympathy on Shippey's part towards the phenomenological nature of Tolkien's fascination with depth. Shippey does, of course, recognize that the sense of temporal depth that these rooted works have is ―rich and poetical rather than accurate with the accuracy of modern archaeology‖ – that it is a product of ―art‖ (Tolkien, ―Monsters‖ 7, 22). Whatever

Shippey's final opinion on the matter, Tolkien's interest lies not simply with the ―bones of the soup‖ here but rather with the experiential effect that these bones have in the medieval fairy-stories he favoured most. An approach to understanding Faërie that

Tolkien stresses in ―On Fairy-Stories,‖ then, can be seen repeated in his discussion of depth: the value of the thing lies in the experience of it. Depth manifests itself aesthetically in literature, and when successfully produced, creates an experience which has profound truth potential for Tolkien. It is telling that Tolkien expends far more energy exploring temporal depth in fiction than in discussing it in non-creative prose.

Nowhere do we see Tolkien's attempt to capture and communicate this quality of

Faërie more clearly than in The Lord of the Rings. This work is especially interesting in light of a discussion on rooted literature as it possesses a kind of multilayered depth. It is rooted ―externally,‖ in the way that Tolkien defines the rootedness of works like Sir

Gawain and the Green Knight and Beowulf, by drawing on older history, myth and stories from the Primary World. And it is also rooted ―internally,‖ drawing on these same elements but doing so within the fictional, Secondary World of Middle-earth. The temporal depth in The Lord of the Rings is a constitutive feature of the work and, in one form or another, has often been the focus of scholarly attention. Nowhere is this more true, of course, than in Shippey's The Road to Middle-earth. The general medieval 38 heritage of The Lord of the Rings is self-evident and it is a key component of the story's depth: ideals of northern courage, swords, high language and so on. Much of what some critics have viewed as superficially associated with the historical period of medieval

Europe (see, for instance, Giddings 12) often involves explicit allusions to medieval texts, such as Aragorn's paraphrasing a passage from the medieval poem The Wanderer in a song about the Rohirrim (Towers 136-7; Shippey, Road 179). This example is only one among many other allusions discussed by Shippey in his book. More importantly, for my purposes, The Wanderer branch of The Lord of the Rings helps to reveal that the rootedness of Middle-earth is more pervasive than some have been willing to admit.

The aesthetics, or flavour, of depth in The Lord of the Rings also depends in part on the fact that it is presented as a story about the Primary World. Middle-earth is similar to the worlds of Beowulf and Sir Gawain in that it ―is not a Neverland or a Narnia or even a Dunsian Dreamland but the good green earth beneath our feet, when it was enchanted‖

(Rateliff 79-80). ―Middle-earth‖ itself is borrowed from the Old Norse term ―midgardr,‖ which was used in Old Norse and later medieval (Christian) culture to distinguish the world inhabited by humanity from the spiritual or preternatural worlds that were believed to surround it (Siewers 142). It is also an Anglo-Saxon word, appearing pervasively in

Anglo-Saxon poetry, including line 75 of The Wanderer. It was important to Tolkien that

The Lord of the Rings be read as a story about the Primary World. In rejecting allegorical readings of the work in the Foreword of the second edition of The Fellowship of the Ring,

Tolkien asserts his preference for history over allegory (12). Humphrey Carpenter quotes

Tolkien as saying that he ―'wanted people simply to get inside this story and take it (in a sense) as actual history'‖ (Tolkien, Letters 244; Carpenter 260). One of the effects Tolkien 39 would like to produce, if only tangentially, is a sense that the story of The Lord of the

Rings really happened. To accomplish this blurring of the boundaries between the

Secondary and the Primary Worlds is to further enchant, or create the experience of

Faërie, in the same way that Tolkien's use of Elves is meant to enchant in ―On Fairy-

Stories.‖ Tolkien encourages reading his work as history in a number of ways, not least of which is the implication at the end of the book that the mythic or fantastic aspects of

Middle-earth will gradually disappear. By the end of The Lord of the Rings ―we are in some sense in the present-day world. We are, at least, out of the world of [Faërie]‖

(Basney 15). As a ―history,‖ The Lord of the Rings not only functions as a fairy-story meant to communicate Faërie and thus enchant, but also as a fictional explanation about why the world in which we live is not, like Middle-earth, enchanted. The Lord of the

Rings can therefore ―be read as the story of how the Elves vanished from Middle-earth, fully as much as the story of the unmaking of the Ring‖ (Madsen 42). In contrasting

Tolkien's Northern mythopoeism with Nazi Germany's appropriation of Germanic medieval literature for the purpose of ―social work,‖ Christine Chism alludes to the fact that The Lord of the Rings ―is a fantasy that wills its own disenchantment into history, a mythology that . . . assents to its own mortality and agrees to fade‖ (65, 87). This shift by the end of the book from myth to history and from the magical to the mundane enables

Tolkien to link his work to the Primary World. By rooting The Lord of the Rings in our own distant past, Tolkien endows the book with a degree of ―depth and resonance‖ that it would not otherwise possess (Rateliff 67).

The Lord of the Rings is also, of course, heavily rooted internally, within the mythology and history of the fictional world of Middle-earth itself. Paul Kocher points 40 out that ―Tolkien loves to wrap a past inside a past‖ (170). Although ―the Third Age‖ in which the story takes place is ―old beyond measure,‖ the characters in the book ―tell stories out of ages yet deeper 'in the dark backward and abysm of time;' and in fact often suggest that these stories recount only the events of relatively recent times‖ (Reilly 138-

9). Not only is the reader's gaze continually drawn ―backward‖ into the ―abysm of time,‖ there are often explicit signs in The Lord of the Rings that ancient history, legend and myth have welled up out of the distant past and threaten to overflow into the present moment of the story. Aragorn confirms the possibility of this actualization of myth in the

―real‖ by responding to Éomer's question, ―Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in daylight,‖ with ―A man may do both‖ (Towers 39). The Ents going to war is another such example: it is ―a thing . . . which has not happened since the Elder Days‖ (126). And the hobbits, the central characters who represent what seems to be the most unremarkable race in Middle-earth, are themselves frequently referred to as creatures who have arisen out of legend (39, 141, 191). When he first encounters Merry and Pippin, Théoden says,

―already I have seen many [marvels] since I left my house; and now here before my eyes stand yet another of the folk of legend‖ (201). Lionel Basney approaches this folding of myth into the present as the ―conversion of myth or legend into history . . . into the real and calculable‖ (16-7). Basney sees myth and history in a dualistic way, as representing

―story‖ and ―fact,‖ respectively. Granting Basney this distinction, it is also evident, however, that Tolkien's use of myth functions to evoke the sense of temporal depth he finds so compelling in medieval literature. Tolkien also folds relatively recent Middle- earth history into the current action of the story. This folding of both myth and history into the present occurs, for instance, in the Mines of Moria where the fate of Balin, 41 would-be lord of Moria and Gimli's lost kin, is by chance investigated and his last few moments relived by the Company. As it turns out, the story of Balin's fate is thoroughly enmeshed within the mythology of Middle-earth. These mythological elements include

Durin, the first Dwarf and the iconic king who oversaw the construction of

―Dwarrowdelf,‖ and his (and Balin's) bane: the Balrog. This incarnation of mythic evil is associated not with Sauron but with Morgoth, Sauron's master, and the scourge of all free creatures living in the Elder Days long before humans walked in Middle-earth

(Fellowship 411-2, 416-20). In entering Moria, then, the Company becomes entangled in both the recent history of the Mines and the underground realm's mythic pre-history.

Consciously or not, narrative and theme mimic one another here, since the Balrog, which encapsulates the ways depth in Middle-earth can re-enter or affect the present, is awoken and rises from and then falls into the physical depths of Moria, the roots of the Mountain.

Although the ancient is an ever-present feature of the world that the hobbits traverse, nowhere is the folding of the past into the present – the surveying of the depths of time – more fully realized than in the Company's sojourn in Lothlórien. Verlyn Flieger comments extensively on the otherworldly nature of time in Lothlórien, characterizing the Elves as historical ―embalmers‖ (Tolkien's word; Time 110-5). Flieger's decidedly negative view of Lothlórien depends in part on the Elves' place within the larger context of Tolkien's ―legendarium‖ and his letters in which the fallen condition of the Eldar is explicated (see, for instance, Letters 197). Within this larger context, the Elves' attempt to halt the progress of time and keep things unchanged is viewed as a resistance towards the natural order, and is thus an expression of their fallen nature. Nowhere is this attempt more obvious than in Lothlórien where time flows more slowly than in the surrounding 42

―mortal lands‖ (Tolkien, Fellowship 505). However, within the more immediate context of the Quest of the Ring (especially considered as fairy-story rather than as a more traditional myth) and certainly from the perspective of Frodo, it is difficult not to see

Lothlórien in a profoundly positive light. The Elven realm is a haven in a world falling into ruin and crawling with monsters; it is a place ―where days bring healing not decay‖

(Towers 130). But Lórien also functions as a space where eucatastrophic fulfillment of certain primordial desires can occur. Upon entering Lórien, ―it seemed to [Frodo] that he had stepped over a bridge of time into a corner of the Elder Days, and was now walking in a world that was no more. In Rivendell there was memory of ancient things; in Lórien the ancient things still lived on in the waking world‖ (Fellowship 453). Lórien is the most fully actualized Elvish realm or space in The Lord of the Rings. No surprise then that when Frodo's blindfold is removed he feels as if ―he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name‖ (455). Here, perhaps more than at any other moment in The Lord of the Rings, the reader witnesses the operation of Faërie and the satisfaction of the primordial human desire to survey the depths of time. For in Lothlórien, Frodo encounters a normally inaccessible mythic otherworldliness.

Faërie, depth and time are complex components of the Tolkien universe.

Accordingly, it is not just the past but the future as well that is surveyed, or at least often alluded to, in The Lord of the Rings. References to a future time in which the world will return to its pre-fallen state abound in the text. We see one example in the words exchanged between Galadriel and Treebeard during their parting: Treebeard says, ―I do not think we shall meet again,‖ to which Galadriel responds, ―not in Middle-earth, nor 43 until the lands that lie under the wave are lifted up again‖ (Return 314-5). Kocher says that ―Galadriel guesses at some far distant future when . . . she and Treebeard may meet once more on the meadows of Tasarinan‖ (4; emphasis added). More significantly, the events narrated in The Lord of the Rings occur beneath the threat of cataclysmic changes doomed to befall Middle-earth no matter which Power prevails in the War of the Ring.

The oft-repeated sentiment that ―much that was fair and wonderful shall pass for ever out of Middle-earth‖ (Towers 192) expresses the fact that these changes will be so profound that they will alter the metaphysical structure of the world. After the Ring is destroyed,

Treebeard says, ―the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air,‖ and Gandalf tells him, ―the New Age begins . . . and in this age it may well prove that the kingdoms of Men shall outlast you, Fangorn my friend‖ (Return 312,

314-5). Elves vanishing into the west is both a literal outcome and the most important representation of these changes; the events in The Lord of the Rings will give rise to a new time (the ―Fourth Age‖) defined by a change in the very fabric of reality. Middle- earth will still be rooted to its past but much of the enchantment, significantly, will fade.

―By many such references,‖ according to Kocher, ―Tolkien achieves for Middle-earth long perspectives backward and forward in geological time‖ (4; emphasis added).

Of course, the emphasis on temporal depth most often concerns the past and, with the exception of a few visions and possibly the industrializing of the Shire, we do not see

Middle-earth's future folded into the present to the degree that the past is. This disparity likely has much to do with the fact that mythic otherworldliness is a necessary condition of depth and that myth lies in Middle-earth’s past rather than its future. Without doubt, however, temporal depth is a quality of The Lord of the Rings that Tolkien highly valued 44 and referred to on more than one occasion. In a letter to his son Christopher, who could not precisely say what it was about an aspect of The Lord of the Rings manuscript that he found so powerful, Tolkien replies: ―I think you are moved by Celebrimbor because it conveys a sudden sense of endless untold stories: mountains seen far away, never to be climbed, distant trees (like Niggle's) never to be approached‖ (Letters 110-1; author's emphasis). Tolkien likewise attributes much of the ―fascination‖ general readers of The

Lord of the Rings experience to ―the vistas of yet more legend and history, to which this work does not contain a full clue‖ (185). And although this emphasis on temporal depth is most evident in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien's masterwork is not alone in possessing this quality. Flieger remarks that ―it is important to [Smith of Wootton Major] and to its bounce that someone else has been‖ in Faërie before Smith: ―behind Smith hovers the enigmatic, unexplained figure of the first Cook‖ (Time 237).

What Tolkien's letter to his son also indicates, however, is that depth in The Lord of the Rings does not depend exclusively on the ―illusion‖ of historical rootedness. This

―sense of endless untold stories‖ is not just one that establishes an atmosphere of temporal depth, but also of narrative depth. Not only does The Lord of the Rings allude to the story of Celebrimbor but also to the stories of Eärendil, Beren and Lúthien, and the downfall of Númenor, among others. Admittedly, most of the in-set narratives are rooted temporally, yet they nevertheless function as windows into other stories (particularly those embedded in verse narratives) and thus do more than just create a sense of temporal depth. This narrative layering suggests that the ―real‖ or ―factual‖ events described in The

Lord of the Rings have arisen out of the mythic depths of Story, as well as time, and will fall back into it – a notion expressed in Frodo and Sam's discussion regarding the tales 45 that will be told about them (Towers 403-4). In this sense, one could view ―The Lord of the Rings itself . . . as a written version of the Song of Nine-Fingered Frodo sung by the bard at Cormallen‖ (Prozesky 23). Comparing The Lord of the Rings to Beowulf,

Alexandra Bolintineanu points out that ―the characters enact legends by performing in the fictional present deeds that will provide legendary material for future generations. Both texts dwell on the process through which significant moments of the central narrative are transmuted into legend and recur in narrative episodes‖ (265). The actualization of myth and legend into the realm of the factual, and the transmutation of the real into myth does not only entail the surveying of the depths of time, but also the surveying of the depths of

Story. Sam and Frodo's discussion of their own possible literary legacy is itself rooted in an earlier remark of Bilbo to Frodo: ―Don't adventures ever have an end? I suppose not.

Someone else always has to carry on the story‖ (Tolkien, Fellowship 304). Story, taken in its own right, is a deep, intertwined, self-generating thing in The Lord of the Rings. This sense of endless untold stories contributes to the atmosphere of depth in the work. Depth, in turn, is an important aspect of the experience of Faërie which I discussed in the previous chapter.

It is doubtful whether or not one can fully extract story from its rootedness in time as myth and legend are, by definition, stories rooted in the past, but it is clear that a discussion of depth in The Lord of the Rings need not focus exclusively on the temporal.

Shippey, in arguing that Tolkien's discussion about enchantment is, at its core, philological, privileges temporal rootedness while excluding other possible ways that

Tolkien constructs depth in his attempt to capture and communicate Faërie. We therefore see that, even in a work which clearly owes much to Tolkien's profession, Shippey's 46 reduction of Faërie to philology forces a reading of The Lord of the Rings that is oblivious to key aspects of the work. Granted, Tolkien also privileges the flavour of temporal depth at the expense of other kinds of depth in his Sir Gawain essay, as well as in his letter to Christopher, quoted above. Tolkien does not limit his perspective in this way in ―On Fairy-Stories,‖ however, where he presents a much more comprehensive discussion of fairy-stories. In discussing the peculiar nature of Faërie in this work,

Tolkien lumps surveying the depths of both time and space together as one of the desires that the ―operation‖ of Faërie satisfies (―OFS‖ 116; quoted above).

As the preceding pages suggest, the plurality and complexity of depth is particularly prominent in The Lord of the Rings. Even this desire to survey the depths of space is expressed in one of Bilbo's more famous songs early in The Lord of the Rings:

The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with eager feet, Until it joins some larger way Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say. (Fellowship 58)

Tolkien likely drew on his own personality when portraying his characters' desire to survey the depths of the field of space (even if, or perhaps because, he did not have much opportunity to satisfy this desire in his own life). He says in a letter to Christopher, ―but I have the autumn wanderlust upon me, and would fain be off with a knapsack on my back and no particular destination, other than a series of quiet inns‖ (Letters 94). This appears not unlike the ―wanderlust‖ that Flieger points out ―possesses so many of Tolkien's characters from Aelfwine to Bilbo to Edwin Lowdham‖ (Time 212). And Frodo is no exception. One of his first impulses upon recovering from his Ringwraith-inflicted wound 47 is to wander in the trees surrounding Rivendell, saying, ―most of all I should like to go walking today and explore the valley. I should like to get into those pinewoods up there‖

(Fellowship 313). Tolkien's novella, Smith of Wootton Major, is, perhaps more than anything else, about this wanderlust.

A song Bilbo sings in Rivendell provides a clue as to what drives this desire:

For still there are so many things that I have never seen: in every wood and every spring there is a different green. (363)

This is a good, figurative way of characterizing Smith's wanderings, which are at least in part fuelled by this exploratory drive. Smith is Tolkien's ideal ―wandering explorer‖ in a land ―full of wonder‖ (―OFS‖ 109). Tolkien's wanderlust seems driven by the possibility of discovering new things and experiencing wonder – ―the primal desire at the heart of

Faërie‖ (116). In fact, there is a sense in Tolkien's fiction that things and lands hidden within the depths of the field of space may ultimately provide a road or a gateway to the

Undying Land itself:

Still round the corner there may wait A new road or a secret gate, And though we pass them by today, Tomorrow we may come this way And take the hidden paths that run Towards the Moon or to the Sun. (Fellowship 112)

It is no surprise, then, that Flieger also associates this wanderlust with the realm of Faërie

(Time 217, 237). Just as surveying the depths of time and narrative in The Lord of the

Rings tends to lead back to the past and the Elder Days, when Middle-earth was much more like Smith's ―Inner‖ and ―Outer Faery,‖ so there is in Tolkien's fiction the possibility that in surveying the depths of space one may stumble across the road or 48 gateway that leads to the Undying Lands, ―West of the Moon, East of the Sun‖ (Return

375).

In order to make the satisfaction of this wanderlust possible, Tolkien creates a sense of spatial vastness in The Lord of the Rings. Consider Frodo, Merry and Strider at the summit of Weathertop, where, ―standing upon the rim of the ruined circle, they saw all round below them a wide prospect, for the most part of lands empty and featureless, except for patches of woodland away to the south, beyond which they caught here and there the glint of distant water‖ (Fellowship 251). The frequency with which the members of the Fellowship can be found on a hill, mountain ledge or some other high place surveying the lay of the land, is significant. Having moved on from Weathertop, for instance, ―away below them they could see the Road sweeping round the feet of the hills; and to their right a grey river gleamed pale in the thin sunshine. In the distance they glimpsed yet another river in a stony valley half-veiled in mist‖ (267). After leaving

Rivendell, ―the travellers reached a low ridge. . . . Away in the south Frodo could see the dim shapes of lofty mountains‖ (368). And on escaping Moria: ―before them they could see the stream leaping down to the trough of the valley, and then running on and away to the lower lands, until it was lost in a golden haze‖ (434). This is just a small sampling of the dozens of times that distance is surveyed in The Fellowship of the Ring. Similar examples can be found in both The Two Towers and The Return of the King, whether it be

Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas in Rohan, Merry and Pippin in Fangorn, or Frodo and Sam in Mordor. In fact, every new land that the characters enter is surveyed in this way. This surveying of Middle-earth's topography in The Lord of the Rings functions not simply to describe the landscape, nor is it only a way of building ―tension‖ and of ―'winding down'‖ 49 before and after climactic events (Ellison 22-3), for it also creates a sense of spatial vastness through which the Nine Walkers pass. It is thus meant to give the reader Sam's impression about the geography of Middle-earth: ―maps conveyed nothing to Sam's mind, and all distances in these strange lands seemed so vast that he was quite out of his reckoning‖ (Fellowship 373).

Tolkien creates this sense of spatial vastness perhaps most explicitly in the

Company's passage through the Mines of Moria, despite the fact that vision is greatly reduced by the walls and darkness of the underground road. In Moria, ―in the pale ray of the wizard's staff, Frodo caught glimpses of stairs and arches, and of other passages and tunnels, sloping up, or running steeply down, or opening blankly dark on either side. . . .

The Mines of Moria were vast and intricate‖ (404). Tolkien creates the sense that all around the Company, hidden in the darkness, there are both horizontal and vertical depths of space. Twice the labyrinth-like passages break out into ―cavernous hall[s]‖ (427), and

―at the end of‖ one of these relatively vast spaces ―the floor vanished and fell to an unknown depth‖ (427-8). These sudden depths do not always lead downward for there are shafts in the mountain side through which ―blue sky‖ can be seen (415). Nowhere else in The Lord of the Rings are the words ―depth‖ and ―deep‖ repeated more than in Moria.

Pippin quite literally sounds the depths of Moria by dropping a stone into a well: ―he felt his heart beat many times before there was any sound. Then far below, as if the stone had fallen into deep water in some cavernous place, there came a plunk, very distant, but magnified and repeated in the hollow shaft‖ (407; author's emphasis).

As the Company discovers in Moria, the depths of space in Faërie are perilous indeed and should not be surveyed or sounded lightly. Gandalf explains that the ―deep 50 places‖ of Moria ―are drowned in water – or in a shadow of fear‖ (412), alluding perhaps to Glóin's words at the Council of Elrond: ―too deep we delved there, and woke the nameless fear‖ (315). Foreshadowing the battle with the Balrog, Gandalf comments on the ―Watcher‖ guarding Moria's western entrance, saying, ―there are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world‖ (402). And just like the depths of the earth, represented here by Moria, Gandalf also warns that ―there are many things in the deep waters‖ and so advises against casting the Ring into the sea (348). So it is, in another narrative-thematic doubling in the text, that just as the depths can be dangerous to the Company, so too is the tragedy of the fading of the Elves and Ents and enchantment from Middle-earth magnified for readers by the ways in which Tolkien surveys depths of space and time throughout The Lord of the Rings.

Moria, however, is not the only forbidden, lost realm that the quest leads through.

The members of the Company enter prohibited spaces numerous times in The Lord of the

Rings. Apart from Moria, the hobbits journey through the Old Forest, the Barrow-downs,

Lothlórien, Fangorn Forest, The Stairs of Cirith Ungol, and Mordor, among other lost or forbidden lands. Tolkien always uses the voice of at least one character to establish that these spaces should not be surveyed. Fatty Bolger says that he is ―more afraid of the Old

Forest than of anything [he] know[s] about: the stories about it are a nightmare‖

(Fellowship 150). From Tom Bombadil the hobbits learn that the Old Forest ―was indeed ancient, a survivor of vast forgotten woods‖ (179), and his tale-telling also arouses in them a dread of the Barrow-downs (180). Boromir, Aragorn and Legolas would all much rather find some other road than pass through Moria (386-7), and it is only because these other roads are blocked or believed guarded that the Company enters the Mines. 51

Significantly, it takes a wizard of great lore to discover the password which permits entry into this underground realm (399-401). Boromir also resists entering Lothlórien (439), warning that the Elven realm is a perilous land to pass through – a sentiment echoed by both Treebeard and Éomer later in The Two Towers (36, 82). In like manner, Celeborn warns the Company about entering Fangorn (Fellowship 486), and Treebeard himself tells Merry and Pippin that his forest ―is a queer land‖ in which ―folks have come to grief‖ (Towers 82). Dread of the Stairs of Cirith Ungol and, of course, Mordor, is expressed numerous times by many different characters.

These regions represent the extreme depths of the field of space partly because they are removed from the normal world, being inaccessible, unknown and/or considerably more dangerous than other parts of Middle-earth. To refer back to Bilbo's

Rivendell song, they belong to ―the many things‖ that few or none have seen (particularly those who have remained alive to talk about them). In entering these realms, then, the heroes in The Lord of the Rings survey the uttermost depths of space. This is particularly true of Gandalf, whose pursuit of the Balrog takes him ―far, far below the deepest delving of the Dwarves [where] the world is gnawed by nameless things,‖ and then up the ―long lost‖ Endless Stair to the pinnacle of ―the hard horn of the world‖ (128-9). It is interesting that in surveying these spatial depths, the characters in the book almost always encounter the source that has either brought about the hidden or perilous nature of the place, or is inextricably linked to the qualities of the region that have set it apart (one exception may be Mordor, although Frodo and Sam do come within sight of Barad-dûr where they glimpse the Eye [Return 264-5]). The Company goes so deep into the Mines of Moria, for instance, that they feel they ―have been tramping on, on, endlessly to the mountains' 52 roots‖ (Fellowship 405), and shortly thereafter encounter the Balrog – by far the greatest source of Moria's inhospitable state. Likewise, Merry and Pippin follow a stream

―westward and up towards the slopes of the mountains, deeper and deeper into Fangorn‖

Forest, where they eventually meet Treebeard (Towers 74; emphasis added). Treebeard tells Merry and Pippin that he is also called ―Fangorn,‖ describing himself as ―the Ent‖ or the chief tree-like caretaker of Fangorn forest (78, 83; author's emphasis). These otherworldly sources are always sentient beings of some sort, whether it be the Balrog or

Treebeard, Old Man Willow, the Barrow-wight, Galadriel (who bears the ring that makes

Lothlórien possible), or Shelob. Thus, in surveying these regions, the members of the

Company interact with fey or fell incarnations of the qualities which make these spaces off limits or fundamentally ―other,‖ and it is these qualities which also makes them especially deep.

In having his heroes repeatedly pass through regions that are normally inaccessible or off limits, Tolkien places the desire to survey the depths of space in The

Lord of the Rings alongside the other kinds of desires he sees falling within the purview of fairy-stories. Discussing these desires in ―On Fairy-Stories,‖ Tolkien says that

there are ancient limitations from which fairy-stories offer a sort of escape, and old ambitions and desires (touching the very roots of fantasy) to which they offer a kind of satisfaction and consolation[,]. . . such as the desire to visit, free as a fish, the deep sea; or the longing for the noiseless, gracious, economical flight of a bird. . . . There are profounder wishes: such as the desire to converse with other living things. . . . And lastly there is the oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape: the Escape from Death. (151-3)

These desires are ―primordial,‖ in part, because they arise from prohibitions that define the human condition. The magic of Faërie operates within the fictional world of the fairy- story to enable characters to overcome these prohibitions. Significantly, each of these 53 desires also entails the desire to encounter an otherworldliness much like the kind of quality C. S. Lewis praises in ―Jack the Giant-Killer.‖ The desire for deathlessness appears to be the exception. However, in The Lord of the Rings, the Undying Lands are the deepest, most otherworldly realms in or linked to Middle-earth, and while they do not necessarily grant immortality, they may extend a mortal's lifespan considerably. Even

―the Escape from Death,‖ then, is associated with otherworldliness in Tolkien's fiction.

Just as the desires that Tolkien sees fairy-stories both satisfying and igniting are defined by prohibitions arising out of the human condition, so too are they defined by otherworldliness.

In creating deep space for his characters (and readers) to survey, then, it is not enough for Tolkien simply to generate the sense that Middle-earth is a vast expanse of space, which he accomplishes in part by repeatedly describing landscapes from high vantage points. He must also create places that are hidden, lost or forbidden (or all three) for the characters in the book to pass through. For deep space entails territory that consists of otherworldly ―layers‖ which exist below or beyond the surface of ordinary experience. The sense of spatial vastness is necessary, however, as it makes these uttermost depths in space possible and grants them an authenticity that they would not otherwise possess.

The desire to survey the depths of space is thus very similar in this regard to that of surveying the otherworldliness in the depths of time and Tolkien often merges the two in The Lord of the Rings. All of these off limit regions are, for instance, also connected to the remote past. The temporal nature of Moria and Lórien has been mentioned above. We also see this connection to the past in the Old Forest, whose very name signifies its 54 rootedness in time and where ―there lived yet, ageing no quicker than the hills, the fathers of the fathers of trees, remembering times when they were lords‖ (Fellowship 179). And the beings that form the axis or source of these normally inaccessible or especially dangerous regions of Middle-earth are always ancient vestiges of the mythic pre-history of the story's world. These deep regions in space are therefore also deep in time and, in fact, their association with myth marks them as deeper space. Forbidden realms like the

Old Forest, Moria and Lothlórien, then, are junctions in The Lord of the Rings which aim to satisfy the desire to survey the depths of space and time (if not also, and even more so, to awaken this desire, ―whetting it unbearably‖ [―OFS‖ 134]).

We see this desire to survey both the depths of space and time voiced in Bilbo's

Rivendell song where, after he sings of his desire to see that which he has never seen, he sings

I sit beside the fire and think of people long ago, and people who will see a world that I shall never know. (Fellowship 363)

This desire is further represented in two magical objects in the book. The first is the

Mirror of Galadriel – ―Elf-magic‖ (469) which gives both Frodo and Sam a glimpse of their future road. The second is the Palantír (also Elf-magic), which Alex Lewis is quick to point out falls within the ―method of divination‖ called ―Scrying,‖ and so ―has a long history in nearly all world cultures‖ (―Palantíri‖ 16). Lewis's interest lies in showing how the Palantír is rooted to the Primary World and thus that it is ―not such a trite invention within [Tolkien's] secondary world as people might first imagine‖ (―Palantíri‖ 16).

Lewis's study fails, however, to make any substantial comment on the Palantír's thematic role in The Lord of the Rings. He does not, for instance, attribute significance to Pippin 55 seeing things which appear to him ―far away and long ago‖ when he looks into the ―red depths‖ of the Palantír (Towers 245, 248). ―Palantír‖ in fact means ―that which looks far away,‖ and it is likely the most explicit manifestation of this desire to survey the depths of space and time in Tolkien's fiction, for it allows one to ―see small images of things far off and days remote‖ (253-4; author's emphasis). Gandalf confesses that he feels tempted to risk challenging Sauron's mastery of it not to gain any martial advantage but simply ―to look across the wide seas of water and of time to Tirion the Fair, and perceive the unimaginable hand and mind of Fëanor at their work, while both the White Tree and the

Golden were in flower‖ (255). The Palantír awakens an almost unbearable desire in

Gandalf, which is not unlike the effect successful fairy-stories produce (―OFS‖ 134), demonstrating that not even a Wizard is immune to the enchantment of Faërie.

Perhaps the most extensive representation of surveying the depths of space and time in The Lord of the Rings can be found in Tolkien's characterization of the Road. As mentioned above, the reader is introduced to the ―road motif‖ at the beginning of the book in Bilbo's song ―The Road Goes Ever On‖ (Flieger, Time 82). The Road is, predictably, made up of numerous, different roads. Accordingly, Bilbo and Frodo sometimes sing variations on the original ―Road Goes Ever On‖ song. Many, if not most, of these roads are very old, if not ancient – like the ―path‖ Frodo discovers at the bottom of Amen Hen: ―the dwindling ruins of a road of long ago (Tolkien, Fellowship 515); or the road south of the gates of Mordor which was ―made in a long lost time‖ (Towers 320).

The implication seems to be that ―the road that goes ever on‖ has some temporal function as well as the obvious spatial one; that is, that the Road leads through the depths of time as well as space. Flieger says, ―a typical characteristic of Tolkien's use of time is its 56 frequent correlation with space,‖ and therefore that ―'the field of Time' is more than a metaphor in his fiction. It is a working reality‖ (Time 22). Not surprisingly, one of the few places where we find a road in good repair, and one which does not in some other way itself possess a sense of historical rootedness, is in Lórien (Fellowship 458-9), where the past has folded over into the present and the ancient world can be experienced as it was when it was young. The world of the mythic past has been preserved in this Elvish realm, which means that its roads have not fallen victim to the ravages of time. Elsewhere, and especially outside of deeper spaces like Lórien, the condition of the roads suggests a world lost in time. To walk the Road is to find oneself on both a spatial and a temporal bridge which leads to other-worlds, and it is thus to walk in Faërie.

Flieger discusses the ―road motif‖ in detail in her book A Question of Time, particularly as it relates to time travel in Tolkien's unfinished work, The Lost Road. The

Lost Road is Tolkien's aborted attempt to write a time-travel story – an undertaking motivated by C. S. Lewis who suggested that he and Tolkien create stories which would appeal more to their literary sensibilities than what was being written at the time

(Carpenter 226-7). According to Flieger, ―the deliberate presentation of time as space leads directly to the title metaphor of the story [The Lost Road] and to the road references within it, wherein time is treated as space that really can be travelled‖ (Time 71). Because

Flieger is primarily concerned here with time and The Lost Road, her interpretation of the road motif tends to emphasize the Road's role of enabling one to survey the depths of time at the expense of space, reading it as a metaphor for time travel. Even in The Lost

Road, however, the Road leads back not only in time but also in space, as it enables the protagonists to visit the lost city of Númenor shortly before its destruction. 57

This exploration of the depths of space and time is a constitutive feature of The

Lord of the Rings, if not also of most of Tolkien's other fiction. If, for instance, the time- travel story, The Lost Road, takes one back to Númenor, so too do parts of the

Appendices to The Lord of the Rings, the Akallabêth in The Silmarillion, or sundry bits of

Unfinished Tales. As such, these depths are not just associated with characters like

Treebeard and Galadriel who rule perilous realms, but also with characters who belong to the Company itself, such as Gandalf and Aragorn. These two characters are frequently portrayed as possessing hidden depths often derived from their age and the extent of their travels. Granted, although Aragorn is old by hobbit and human standards, he does not compare in age to characters like Gandalf and Legolas. His ancient, mythic lineage is, however, an inextricable part of who he is and so grants his character a temporally related depth that outwardly similar characters like Faramir and the Prince of Imrahil do not share. The number and extent of Gandalf and Aragorn's past journeys is also important: both have passed through Moria and Lothlórien before embarking on the Quest of the

Ring. Having themselves surveyed space and time to various degrees, they possess depths similar in kind to beings like Treebeard, Bombadil and the Elves.

Characters in The Lord of the Rings are thus themselves frequently portrayed as possessing hidden depths. Often it is only by looking into the eyes of a character that one can perceive these depths: ―no sign of age was upon‖ the ancient Galadriel or Celeborn,

―unless it were in the depths of their eyes; for these were keen as lances in the starlight, and yet profound, the wells of deep memory‖ (Tolkien, Fellowship 460). Pippin describes

Treebeard's eyes in a similar way, as having ―an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long slow, steady thinking‖ (Towers 77). More often still, this 58 depth takes the form of cloaked power or ―majesty that [is] veiled‖ (Return 28). At the beginning of the book Gandalf threatens to reveal his power ―uncloaked‖ when Bilbo refuses to hand over the Ring, almost drawing his sword instead (Fellowship 56). Bilbo later says to Frodo that there is more to his nephew ―than appears on the surface‖ (363) and when Frodo establishes his mastery over Gollum he appears to Sam like ―a mighty lord who hid his brightness in a grey cloud‖ (Towers 279). Like Frodo and Gandalf,

Aragorn's majesty is generally hidden except in rare moments. During the battle of

Helm's Deep ―so great a power and royalty was revealed in [him], as he stood there alone above the ruined gates before the host of his enemies, that many of the wild men paused, and looked back over their shoulders to the valley, and some looked up doubtfully at the sky‖ (178-9). This depth, like the power and age of other, mythic characters, usually remains hidden behind Aragorn's surface appearance.

Alfred Siewers interprets this depth as a product of ―spiritual overlay,‖ and argues that it characterizes many different aspects of Middle-earth, including artefacts and landscape as well as people. Siewers claims that

in Tolkien's fantasy we see immortal realms interlaced with the everyday world of physical experience and natural topography. . . . The effect is a deeper dimensionality to landscape and ultimately nature. . . . A similar overlay of spiritual and physical landscapes is seen in the layering of natural and spiritual forces, and history and in descriptions of other landscapes in Tolkien as well such as Weathertop, and the Old and Fangorn Forests. (143)

Perhaps the best example of this spiritual overlay can be found in the Shadow world ruled by Sauron – the realm in which the Ringwraiths have their true form and the one the Ring enables its wearer to enter. Seeing this spiritual overlay as a kind of depth may thus appear at first to be a good way to approach the magical or Faërian core of Middle-earth.

Sam describes the ―magic‖ of Lothlórien, for instance, as being ―right down deep, where 59

[he] can't lay [his] hands on it‖ (Fellowship 468). Similarly, after Gandalf casts the Ring into Frodo's fireplace to demonstrate that it is indeed the One, its normally invisible letters ―shone piercingly bright, and yet remote, as if out of a great depth‖ (76). We might also refer to the moment in Smith of Wootton Major when Smith is given a flower by the

Queen of Faërie that ―seemed like a thing seen from a great distance,‖ even when held up close (35). Siewers insists that this depth arises from the merging of the spiritual and physical in Middle-earth (146). Characterizing depth as spiritual overlay, however, entails an appeal to Cartesian dualism which seems discordant within Tolkien's fictive world, where magic appears to emerge from the very physicality of a thing, being or place. The

―elvish robes‖ given to the Company upon leaving Lórien possess magical properties insomuch as the ―hue and beauty‖ of ―leaf and branch, water and stone‖ have been woven into them (Tolkien, Fellowship 481). The magical depths of Middle-earth are the vestiges of a mythic world lost in time. In such a world, there is no distinction between the spiritual and the physical. Siewers's use of these terms signals his ultimately reductive desire to fold Faërie within the ―Christian cosmology‖ of certain early medieval texts

(148).

Just as there is more to the Faërian core of Tolkien's creative work than philology

(pace Shippey), so too is there more than Christianity (pace Siewers, Jane Chance and

Joseph Pearce, among many others). Tolkien associates Faërie with his conception of sub-creation, which, as the name implies, is itself a kind of depth, for the term does not only, or even chiefly, imply ―lesser-creation‖ but also ―creation-within-creation.‖ In ―On

Fairy-Stories,‖ Tolkien sees the successful sub-creator as possessing ―'the power of giving to ideal creations the inner consistency of reality'‖ (―OFS‖ 138). Of course, 60

Tolkien is often lauded for achieving this quality in his own work. Early reviews of The

Lord of the Rings by C. S. Lewis and W. H. Auden praised the book for its ―high architectural quality‖ and ―structural invention of the highest order‖ (Lewis,

―Dethronement‖ 13), as well as the exceptional ―standard of concreteness‖ of its

―imaginary world‖ (Auden 86). Lewis and Auden here praise the sense of depth that

Tolkien's successful combination of world-building and art creates, and thus the way in which it operates to communicate otherworldly reality. The story-maker does not, according to Tolkien, create in the reader a ―'willing suspension of disbelief.'‖ Rather,

what really happens is that the story-maker proves 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. (―OFS‖ 132)

The authoring of Secondary Worlds establishes depth in the Primary World insofar as it enables the experience of ―secondary‖ realities. These realities are important for Tolkien as they expose one to the sort of thing that Lewis praises in ―Jack the Giant-Killer.‖ Sub- creative depth thus functions in much the same way that the temporal and spatial depths in Middle-earth do, to the extent that they expose the characters in The Lord of the Rings to the experience of mythic otherworldliness.

Regardless of how great or little an effect various kinds of depth have on the

Primary World of one's ordinary experiences, depth is always characterized by a glimpse into the otherworldly. And for Tolkien, this otherworldliness has a mythic potency.

Philology is one aspect used by Tolkien in creating depth in his Secondary Worlds. But it is, I hope I have shown, merely one root of the tree. Depth can be created in a variety of ways. Tolkien is also concerned with the experience of the depths provided by sub- creation. The interconnectedness of these various roots or branches is further explained in 61 my next chapter. 62

Chapter 3: Mythic Otherworldliness

In Chapter 1 I claimed that Faërie must be taken on its own terms if one is to understand Tolkien's theory of fairy-stories, arguing against an influential line of Tolkien criticism to suggest that Faërie, the core of Tolkien's creative work, cannot be reduced to philology. In so doing, I made the case that Tolkien believed that the artistic, sub-creative nature of the fairy-story best communicates the experience of Faërie. Fairy-stories are also marked by depth and in the last chapter I explored how Tolkien creates depth in the fictional world of The Lord of the Rings. Depth is important because it exposes one to an otherworldly reality. According to Tolkien, Faërie begins in the crossing of the boundary between this otherworldly space and the ordinary world. The fairy-story is the supreme form of literary art for Tolkien because it exposes the reader, not just to otherworldliness, but to mythic otherworldliness, however tangentially. Because the sub-creative aspect of fairy-stories is used to invoke otherworldly mythic reality, the Secondary Worlds of fairy- stories have an effect on the reader similar in kind to the enchantment that deep spaces, like Lothlórien, have for the hobbits in The Lord of the Rings. In this chapter, I explore the way in which myth and otherworldliness intertwine within Tolkien's conception of the fairy-story and attempt to show why Faërie cannot simply be reduced to myth. I also explore the Northern mythological imagination, or the specific flavour of myth, Tolkien admired, and argue that he uses Northernness to create a disjunction between two wholly mythic realities in order to produce eucatastrophe – another essential quality of Faërie.

Tolkien makes the connection between Faërie and otherworldliness most explicit when he remarks of the Sigurd story that, ―the dragon had the trade-mark Of Faërie written plain upon him. In whatever world he had his being, it was an Otherworld‖ 63

(―OFS‖ 135; author's emphasis). Not unlike the Elf, the other fantastic creature Tolkien makes use of in ―On Fairy-Stories,‖ the dragon is an incarnation of Faërie because otherworldliness is a necessary condition of its being. Tolkien goes on to say that

―Fantasy, the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds, was the heart of the desire of Faërie,‖ and confesses that as a child (and doubtlessly also as an adult) he ―desired dragons with a profound desire‖ (135). These statements suggest that the dragon's spell of otherworldliness belongs, however dreadfully, to that very state of enchantment fairy- stories are meant to convey. For the dragon is a creature of myth which establishes depth in the fairy-story world. Fairy-stories are not in themselves Faërie, although the more successfully they are written and the more powerful their art, the closer they will come to producing in the reader a sense of enchantment or the experience of Faërie. This experience involves the perception of having traversed normally uncrossable boundaries between worlds – a state Tolkien would claim is induced by a masterfully sub-created dragon.

Patrick Brückner explores Tolkien's distinction between allegorical and real dragons in ―Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics‖ (Tolkien, ―Monsters‖ 16-7), arguing that the literal dragon Tolkien privileges in his famous essay possesses ―'historical' depth.‖ When dragons ―enter‖ our world, they do so ―only as anachronisms,‖ for they belong to another time (Brückner 105). Due to its rootedness, the dragon brings with it a

―radically different reality . . . for modern readers‖ – a reality which could only have normalcy for ―an audience immersed in epic-historical storytelling and a different order of knowledge‖ (129). For Tolkien, the dragon has its genesis within a mythic reality and is therefore a different ―order‖ of being (―OFS‖ 135). Brückner interprets the dragon's 64 otherworldly aura as depth (130), going on to say that ―the 'real' dragon guards the boundary between our perception of the world and the mythical or epic-historical reality and opens up a passage into that world, beyond historical research or anthropology – for when the dragon comes, the rules of modern experience are no longer valid‖ (130-1). It is this mythic otherworldliness that Tolkien sought to capture in his fiction and it is this quality that largely separates his work from the pulp, ―sword-and-sorcery‖ fantasy of his imitators who fail to see that depth brings the fantastic to life. Characters such as

Gandalf, Aragorn and Galadriel, and even Frodo, are deep insofar as they have been exposed to this mythic otherworldliness, and, of course, to the extent that they possess inherent mythic natures prior to surveying the depths of space and time.

Rootedness thus endows Tolkien's dragon with an otherworldly quality not simply because the dragon is linked to the past but also because it has been conceived within a mythic worldview which is necessarily otherworldly. Tolkien describes the ―pre- eminently desirable‖ world ―of Sigurd of the Völsungs and the prince of all dragons‖ in

―On Fairy-Stories‖ as the ―nameless‖ Northern lands (135; emphasis added). This

―nameless North‖ suggests that the Northern mythological literature that so fascinated

Tolkien was evocative of a particular world. At the same time, ―nameless‖ implies uncharted wilderness – a vast expanse of unsurveyed space, thus also linking depth in space to Tolkien's ideal conception of dragons. The lands which give rise to the dragon must be ―nameless‖ ones, precluding any sort of scientific knowing or containment of them precisely because the dragon's world is one which cannot be ―measured, weighed, and rationally examined‖ (Brückner 105). The dragon is thus not simply rooted in time; it is also rooted to a conception of otherworldly reality bound to myth – one which lies at 65 the heart of Tolkien's conception of the fairy-story.

The Old Forest, Tom Bombadil's house and the Barrow-downs are all examples of

―otherworldly‖ places in The Lord of the Rings, for they, like Tolkien's nameless northern lands, all represent ―deep‖ space and time. They are therefore set apart from the normal world of the Shire and Bree. Some readers view this section of the book unfavourably as

―the Tom Bombadil digression,‖ as it seemingly has little to do with the story of the Ring

(Ellison 21; see, for instance, Gasque 155). Tolkien himself admits that Bombadil is not important to the narrative but nevertheless functions as a conceptual counterpoint to the struggle for dominance in Middle-earth (Letters 178-9). For Martin Simonson, the fact that this section was not cut during the process of revision confirms that ―the discovery and revelation of the world had become just as important [for Tolkien] as the advancement of the plot‖ (16). Similar to the lands from which the dragon has its genesis,

―Tom's cabin is situated 'up, down, under hill' – that is, in no particular place but in all places at the same time, a kind of primordial reality‖ (Simonson 14; Tolkien, Fellowship

168). The indication here is that, like Faërie, which ―cannot be caught in a net of words,‖ this deep space cannot be quantified. As Simonson puts it: ―when the hobbits enter the

Old Forest and arrive at Tom Bombadil's house and the Barrow-downs they break through to the world of myth, and when we return to the familiar world of Bree, we know that it only exists on a simultaneous level‖ (Simonson 16; emphasis added). Like Bilbo in

The Hobbit, Frodo and his companions act as a bourgeois bridge between the ordinary reader and the high heroism or myth of the Elves, Rings and Rangers (Shippey, Road 71).

The Old Forest thus transports the hobbits from their everyday world to Tom's and

Aragorn's and Gandalf's mythical world. Depth thus results from the integration of 66 otherworldliness into the non-magical, Primary World, and this otherworldliness is essentially mythic in nature.

Although there may be no ―consensus [in Tolkien scholarship] as to the definition of 'mythology'‖ (Drout 229), myth is nevertheless widely accepted as a key ingredient within Tolkien's creative corpus. Marek Oziewicz voices the critical consensus when he claims that Tolkien sees ―myth as a vehicle for truth and human beings as seeking this truth through, primarily, the activity of mythopoeia‖ (134). Tolkien esteems myth in numerous places – nowhere more noteworthy, however, than in his essay ―Beowulf: The

Monsters and the Critics,‖ and in his letter to Milton Waldman. In the former, Tolkien defends the aesthetic qualities of Beowulf, arguing that they are fundamentally mythic in nature (15). In the latter, he explains both The Silmarillion and his desire to create a mythology for England to a potential publisher. He says in the letter: ―I believe that legends and myths are largely made of 'truth,' and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode‖ (Letters 147). Not only does Tolkien see myth as a medium through which ―certain transcendent truths [can] be expressed in intelligible form‖ (Pearce xiii), but he views the mythic medium itself, independent of any specific content, as inherently ―truthful.‖ Myth thus entails a kind of primordial mode of inquiry for Tolkien, who believes that to harness it successfully through art is to wield the profound.

This mythic impulse can be seen in the way that Tolkien revives the potency of

Elfland and its inhabitants in ―On Fairy-Stories.‖ Tolkien accomplishes this revitalization most simply by changing ―fairy‖ to ―Faërie‖ – a spelling which was archaic when

Edmund Spencer used it in the late sixteenth century, according to The Oxford English 67

Dictionary. He thus roots the concept in a worldview which existed prior to the

―'rationalisation' . . . which transformed the glamour of Elfland into mere finesse‖ (―OFS‖

111). Tolkien blames William Shakespeare and Michael Drayton, in particular, for diluting the concept of Faërie and the beings who have their existence in that realm

(Burke 26), but also admits that their treatment of Faërie was largely symptomatic of the epistemological changes which took place during the Renaissance. He says that the diminutive representation of fairies ―seems to become fashionable soon after the great voyages had begun to make the world seem too narrow to hold both men and elves; when the magic land of Hy Breasail in the West had become the mere Brazils, the land of red- dye-wood‖ (―OFS‖ 111). As the worldview of European culture gradually shifted from a mythic to a more rationalistic one, ―Faërie‖ lost its potency and became mere ―fairy.‖

The centrality of myth in Tolkien's work cannot be denied. It does not follow, however, that one should reduce Faërie solely to myth, as Randel Helms does in Tolkien's

World or Ann Petty in One Ring to Bind Them All: Tolkien's Mythology. Modern western culture has divorced itself from perceiving the world in mythic terms – an orientation towards myth implicated in Tolkien's emphasis on the otherworldly nature of Faërie. For this reason, the manner in which myth functions and is made manifest within works of

Faërie is different from the way myth was expressed long ago. Margaret Hiley states that,

―in [M. H.] Abrams's definition, mythic tales 'were once believed to be true by a particular cultural group' ([Abrams] 170). Here we run up against the main discrepancy between Tolkien's mythology and the ancient ones: ancient myth was once believed to be true, and the aura of that truth and universal applicability still clings to it‖ (844). Despite

Tolkien's attempts to root his work in the Primary World, his fiction ultimately lacks the 68 pre-modern ―authenticity‖ possessed by ancient myths, if for no other reason than that he wrote in the twentieth century. This may be one of the reasons why The Silmarillion, which strives to produce what Tolkien calls ―higher‖ mythology (―OFS‖ 122), has not shared the success of The Lord of the Rings (Flieger, Splintered xvii). Flieger cites

Shippey's belief that, in writing The Silmarillion, Tolkien simply ―'demanded too much for most audiences'‖ (Flieger xix; Shippey, Author 261). New, high mythology tends not to arouse interest in a culture which rejects the notion that myth exists ―out there,‖ in the depths of space, or ―back then,‖ in the depths of time; and, in fact, space and time are not perceived to have depths – at least not in Tolkien's sense of the word. Therefore, attempts to write high mythology within modern western culture will perhaps inevitably fall flat for most unspecialised readers. As Flieger concedes, the corpus of work that adds up to

Tolkien's mythology for England, ―has not (and probably will never) fill the place that genuine, real-world mythologies occupy in the hearts and minds of their respective cultures‖ (Interrupted 3-4; emphasis added). Flieger illuminates here the inherent paradox in trying to write ―a mythology for England‖ in the twentieth century: such things must have their source in the remote past and have arisen, or at least appeared to have arisen, organically within a culture, over time. For this reason, Tolkien's after-the- fact attempt to write a myth for England, in what later became The Silmarillion, was perhaps inevitably doomed to failure as a work of traditional myth. It is, however, this very disjunction between the lost world of myth and modern times, thrown into relief by

Tolkien's mythopoesis, and The Silmarillion's function as a bridge between these two worlds, that mark the text as a work of Faërie.

Despite the fact that, like The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings is something of an 69 aside in Tolkien's myth-making endeavours, critics like Charles Moorman nevertheless claim that the book is best understood when read as ―Nordic myth‖ (201). R. J. Reilly appears to agree with this sentiment, stating that The Lord of the Rings ―would seem closest to 'myth,'‖ but goes on to clarify, however, that ―we generally think of myth as some sort of adumbration of what was once either fact, or felt to be fact, or desired to be fact‖ (132). Yet, clearly, Tolkien's approach to myth in The Lord of the Rings is very different from his handling of myth in The Silmarillion. The Silmarillion is told, for instance, from the perspective of the Elves – beings who are themselves bound within myth (see, for instance, Alex Lewis who discusses the Elvish bias in The Silmarillion). In this sense, the Elves parallel ancient humans immersed in a mythic past. Conversely, in

The Lord of the Rings, although the land is full of fantastic creatures, myth is characterized repeatedly as erupting into the non-mythical, Primary World of the story.

Characters who are familiar with other fantastic creatures, such as the hobbits (who are themselves fantastic beings and who initially live only in legend for the Rohirrim), are amazed to find that what they thought existed only in the secondary world of myth and legend is in fact real. Sam's experience with the Oliphaunt is perhaps the most memorable example of this sudden encounter with myth (Towers 336). Nowhere is there a greater sense of the separation of the ―normal‖ inhabitants of Middle-earth (and the reader) from myth, than in the narrator's description of Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel and Celeborn's fellowship after the fall of Barad-dûr. The narrator tells us, ―if any wanderer had chanced to pass, little would he have seen or heard, and it would have seemed to him only that he saw grey figures, carved in stone, memorials of forgotten things now lost in unpeopled lands‖ (Return 319). These mythic characters are represented here as profoundly remote. 70

It is thus not myth in its common usage that defines the sub-creation of The Lord of the

Rings so much as it is the way in which Tolkien views myth through his lens of Faërie.

Faërie is ―the realm or state in which fairies have their being‖ (―OFS‖ 113); it is not, significantly, the realm or state in which humans have their being. First and foremost,

Faërie is otherworldly. In discussing the ―fey star‖ which grants Smith entry into the

Perilous Realm, Flieger remarks that ―the very word star carries connotations of unearthly, inhuman, unattainable, all of which carry over from the star itself to the Faery world it represents‖ (―When‖ 63; author's emphasis). As a mythic being, then, the dragon has a potency akin to the Elvishness Tolkien invokes in ―On Fairy-Stories.‖ Like the

Elves, the dragon's otherworldliness depends on its rootedness or depth – a quality which separates it from the ordinary, Primary World. For humans immersed in a largely anti- mythic culture, myth is inherently otherworldly and this otherworldliness is partly what constitutes Faërie. It is for this reason that ―fairy-stories were plainly not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability. If they awakened desire, satisfying it while often whetting it unbearably, they succeeded‖ (―OFS‖ 134; author's emphasis). It is no surprise, then, that, after articulating his conception of the fairy-story in ―On Fairy-

Stories,‖ the irrevocable loss of otherworldly mythic reality became a recurrent theme in

Tolkien's creative work. We see this theme played out in The Lord of the Rings, Smith of

Wootton Major, and ―The Sea-bell‖ and ―The Last Ship‖ in The Adventures of Tom

Bombadil. In determining Tolkien's view on what fairy-stories ―have become for us, and what values the long alchemic processes of time have produced in them,‖ the fundamentally otherworldliness of their mythic ingredients seems to be key for him

(―OFS‖ 120). 71

Faërie and myth are therefore not identical. Not only is the element of explanation or aetiology generally found in myth absent in Faërie, but Faërie also involves a particular relationship to myth which one does not find in ancient or ―high‖ mythology.

Tolkien himself distinguishes myth from Faërie when he writes that King Arthur was put into the Pot of Story ―together with many other older figures and devices, of mythology and Faërie‖ (―OFS‖ 126; emphasis added). It is this aspect of myth that he wants to focus on and which underlies his conception of fairy-stories in ―On Fairy-Stories.‖ This particular interest in myth appears furthermore to have driven Tolkien's fascination with rooted medieval works. The very notion of rootedness depends on a disjunction between a work like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and an even more distant mythic past.

What separates The Lord of the Rings from Sir Gawain is that the latter work is not

―about those old things‖ (―Sir Gawain‖ 73; author's emphasis). Nor, we might gather, is it about the disjunction between old and new things. The author of Sir Gawain ―inherited

'faerie', rather than turned deliberately to it,‖ in the way that Tolkien does in his fiction

(73). Ancient myths are likewise not about myth; rather they simply are myth. Herein lies the difference between both ancient myths and works rooted in these myths which inspired Tolkien, and Tolkien's own work: Tolkien's work is, at least in part, about old things, and the experience produced by the disjunction or otherworldliness when these things erupt into the mundane reality of the Primary World.

This notion of otherworldliness is therefore an essential aspect of Tolkien's conception of fairy-stories. Tolkien uses ―fantasy,‖ or sub-creation, to describe what is for him a central element of the fairy-story precisely because of its association with the

―fantastic‖ or ―freedom from the domination of observed 'fact'‖ (―OFS‖ 139). Sub- 72 creation enacts or gives rise to Faërie insofar as it transcends the walls of the Primary

World. Because the Primary World is the reality that we usually inhabit, sub-creation and

Faërie tend therefore to be linked. A ―power‖ of Faërie is the ability to produce ―visions of 'fantasy'‖ (122). And Tolkien says in his essay on Smith of Wootton Major that Faërie represents ―'a breaking out (at least in mind) from the iron ring of the familiar, still more from the adamantine ring of belief that it is known, possessed, controlled, and so

(ultimately) all that is worth being considered – a constant awareness of the world beyond these rings'‖ (―Smith,‖ 101). Faërie is found in the enchantment that the experience of mythic otherworldliness engenders and the fairy-story is a way, however faintly, of producing this experience in literary form.

Tolkien's focus on the ―different order of knowledge‖ that a mythic perception involves endows things with an otherworldly depth which defies reductive, objective modes of inquiry. The mythic reality made available through depth in The Lord of the

Rings allows one to sink into a thing – into its otherworldly nature. Depth creates the possibility of worlds within our world. David Abram, whom Patrick Curry highly lauds

(―Iron‖ 108), expresses a similar notion based on an experience he had in nature while immersed in the animism of indigenous, oral cultures. The experience granted him a

―recovery‖ of perception in which his ―senses first learned of the countless worlds within worlds that spin in the depths of this world that we commonly inhabit, and from [it he] learned that [his] body could, with practice, enter sensorially into these dimensions‖

(Abram 19; emphasis added). Tolkien's mythic perspective likewise opens up the possibility of experiencing ―other-worlds‖ within the Primary World. This ―deepening‖ grants the world a vibrancy or a life that it would not otherwise possess – a quality which 73 can be seen in the mythic Old and Fangorn forests of Middle-earth. Of the Old Forest,

Merry says, ―everything in it is very much more alive, more aware of what is going on, so to speak, than things are in the Shire‖ (Tolkien, Fellowship 153). And speaking of the otherness in the depths of Treebeard's eyes, Pippin says, ―it felt as if something that grew in the ground – asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between root-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years‖

(Towers 77). Faërie involves moving beyond the ring of the familiar and experiencing the otherworldliness inherent in one's surroundings. For Tolkien, forests best represent the otherworldliness of wild nature, which, by virtue of its wildness, is fundamentally separate from humanity. Childhood stories about Native Americans were better for

Tolkien than Treasure Island or Alice in Wonderland because they had ―strange languages, and glimpses of an archaic mode of life, and, above all, forests‖ (―OFS‖ 134; emphasis added). Characterizing a sentient being as embodying the otherworldly essence of green and growing things is an aspect of sub-creation which appeals to the primordial human desire to ―hold communion with other living things‖ (116). To encounter this kind of reality, for Tolkien, even faintly, within the Secondary World of a fairy-story, is to step outside the Primary World of one's ordinary experiences.

Best of all, Tolkien seems to imply in his work, is to become immersed in the otherworldliness of a thing, which is permitted, or facilitated by, the depth myth engenders when it appears at the borders of ordinary experience. This ability and desire to delve into the essence of an Other is one of the characteristics that distinguishes the

Elves, Tolkien's ideal mythic beings, from the majority of the inhabitants of Middle-earth. 74

Elves are ―better at getting inside other things‖ than humans or Ents (84). Treebeard tells

Merry and Pippin that the Elves were responsible for ―waking trees up and teaching them to speak and learning their tree-talk,‖ adding, ―they always wished to talk to everything, the old Elves did‖ (84). Faërie is inextricably linked to ―elf-magic‖ which Tolkien distinguishes from instrumental magic, or the ―devices and operations of the Enemy‖

(Letters 146; Fellowship 469). For this reason alone, Elves are more than just ―Men made wonderful‖ (Stanton 99), or ―Man before the Fall which deprived him of his powers of achievement‖ (Carpenter 130). To make these reductive claims is to undermine the very thing that makes Elves ―wonderful.‖ Such assertions overlook the fundamental nature of

Elves, diminishing their mythic aura and robbing them of the enchantment they embody.

To return to Tolkien's admission that Elves are embalmers of time: it is not so much that

Elves embalm time as myth itself, the very quality to which their being is bound (Tolkien,

Letters 197). Thus they can choose to abandon the mortal world, as it changes, for the mythic lands which will maintain what they are, or they can stay in Middle-earth and

―diminish‖ as myth itself gradually fades (Fellowship 474). Myth is perhaps the most basic component of Elvish ontology. To argue, with Michael Stanton or Humphrey

Carpenter, that Elves are an aspect of humanity is thus to fulfill the very diminution of

Faërie which Tolkien argues against in both ―On Fairy-Stories‖ and his Middle-earth fiction.

As Tolkien's ideal mythic beings, Elves enact the most important aspect of Faërie:

that is, a love and respect for all things, ―Inanimate‖ and ―animate,‖ an unpossessive love of them as ―other‖. This ―love‖ will produce both ruth and delight. Things seen in its light will be respected, and they will also appear delightful, beautiful, wonderful even glorious. . . . This compound – of awareness of a limitless world outside our domestic parish; a love (in ruth and admiration) of the things in it; and a desire for wonder, marvels, both perceived and conceived. 75

(―Smith‖ 101)

Like Bombadil, if to a lesser extent, Elves take ―delight in things for themselves‖ (Letters

178-9). Significantly, one of the characteristics that marks Frodo as an Elf-friend is his expression of this love. Hence, in part, his wanderings through the woods around the

Shire before the Quest begins. More obviously, in Lothlórien, where the mythic is most palpable, he feels the life of a tree beneath his hands, experiencing it keenly as other. He takes ―delight of the living tree itself‖ (Fellowship 456), ―enjoy[ing] a self that exists for its own sake . . . beyond representation‖ (Dufau 109). The mythic worldview allows one to perceive the world in a radically different manner – a manner, as Abram argues, which permits a new and profound relationship with one's surroundings. Myth does not guarantee such a relationship; however, mythic reality experienced within the context of

Faërie does enable it.

As Faërie involves the blurring of boundaries between the Primary and Secondary

Worlds, this quality of myth can be communicated, if not also actualized, in the Primary

World through stories. We see this eruption of mythic otherworldliness, for instance, in

Bombadil's ―tale‖ that ―laid bare the hearts of trees and their [otherworldly] thoughts, which were often dark and strange‖ (Fellowship 179). Stories have a unique power when operating within the context of Faërie. Employing the medieval sense of the word,

Tolkien says that a ―spell means both a story told, and a formula of power over living men‖ (―OFS‖ 128). Tolkien seems to suggest here that stories themselves can manifest the properties which define the otherworldly nature of deep spaces, such as Lothlórien or the mythic region surrounding Bombadil's house. Tolkien shared with C. S. Lewis the notion that there was a ―need for a creative, mythic platform‖ (Brown 132) that involved 76

―conveying spiritual truths through a story format‖ – a format which would ―for the first time make them appear 'in their real potency'‖ (Brown 132; Lewis, Stories 47). For

Tolkien, fairy-stories can act as mediums for the ―Image‖ or the mythic truth that is necessarily otherworldly when perceived from within the mundane, Primary World

(―OFS‖ 139). The ―Sub-creative Art[,] in itself,‖ is possessed of a mythic potency and thus becomes linked with Story. This latter ―Story‖ is for Tolkien an irreducible cultural- historical matrix which contains and passes down truths linked to the human condition.

The kinds of stories that draw from Story are thus essential to the health of human beings, according to Tolkien (139). The Lord of the Rings appeals to this truth potential inherent in story, for ―in each place of rest and restoration along the journey, Tolkien makes clear that part of the essential nourishment that the hobbits receive is story – in word and in song, and even in picture‖ (Johnson 34). Faërie begins when the potency of mythic otherworldliness, communicated through the Secondary World of a story, alters the

Primary World. This state is induced even if it is only one's perception of the Primary

World that is affected; hence Tolkien's creative style in ―On Fairy-Stories,‖ which aspires to enchant through blurring the boundaries between ordinary reality and the Secondary

World of Elves. When Tolkien says, for instance, that, ―according to abundant records the elves have often presented [Faërian Drama] to men‖ (―OFS‖ 142), he appeals directly to the ―Cauldron of Story‖ within which Elves can be found and which is a part of the cultural inheritance of the West. By referring to Elves as if they were real, Tolkien not only evokes Story but signals that it has the power to alter our perception of reality in a profound manner.

We can see, then, how ―sub-creation,‖ which ―plays strange tricks with the 77 world,‖ internally, within the Secondary World of a story, is a less potent form of Faërie for Tolkien (Tolkien, ―OFS‖ 143). Interestingly, Tolkien takes pains to defend sub- creation against charges of delusion by pointing out that the construction of successful fairy-stories depends on having a good grasp of reason, and on knowing the difference between the real and the fantastic, or the Primary and Secondary Worlds (―OFS‖ 144).

Enchantment, or the experience of Faërie, depends on an awareness of this difference.

Tolkien is adamant that there is something intrinsically desirable about sub-creative elements in a story that have been, are, and always will be, fantastic. He says that it is from the Elves that ―we may learn what is the central desire and aspiration of human

Fantasy [or sub-creation] – even if the elves are, all the more in so far as they are, only a product of Fantasy itself‖ (―OFS‖ 143). This statement points to the inherent truth value of sub-creation for Tolkien. The sub-creation that usually constitutes fairy-stories gives one a Recovery of perception and offers Escape from the banality of ordinary experience within an anti-mythic culture. According to Tolkien, all stories possess a mythic potential; however, fairy-stories are the most desirable kind because they seek, more than any other, to actualize this potential through their use of sub-creation. In his analogy of the prison,

Tolkien equates the function of fairy-stories with the granting of the prisoner a glimpse of

―home‖ and ―the world-outside‖ the gaol (148), for fairy-stories allow us to see ―'things as we are (or were) meant to see them'‖ (146). The enchantment which sub-creation produces ―'is as necessary for the health and complete functioning of the Human as is sunlight for physical life'‖ (Flieger, Time 247), for it endows the world with a vitality which Tolkien sees as being more in touch with ―'the life of nature and of human nature as well,'‖ than worldviews typically found in anti-mythic cultures (Tolkien, ―OFS‖ 150; 78

Dawson 62). When Éomer hears of the existence of hobbits in Middle-earth, he attempts to reestablish the dichotomy between, what are for him, the Secondary and Primary

World(s), or ―legends‖ and ―the green earth in the daylight.‖ Aragorn, who is himself linked to myth and therefore embodies a subversion of this distinction, responds: ―the green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day‖ (Towers 39). Aragorn's remark is representative of the metaphysically subversive intent of Tolkien's fiction, for Tolkien would have The Lord of the Rings create an effect in its readers similar to Éomer's experience when he learns of the existence of legendary beings. However, in order for this subversion to occur, a boundary must first be clearly established.

The mythic potential of sub-creation in fairy-stories is most clearly represented by

―Faërian drama,‖ which is Tolkien's vision of the sub-creative power of the Elves to weave an enchantment that blurs the boundary between the Primary and Secondary

Worlds. This power is one of the features that makes Elves Tolkien's ideal mythic beings, as it enables them to wield the stuff of myth – a power next to which human sub-creation is but a mere shadow. Frodo experiences this sub-creative power in the halls of Rivendell:

at first the beauty of the melodies and of the interwoven words in elven-tongues, even though he understood them little, held him in a spell, as soon as he began to attend to them. Almost it seemed that the words took shape, and visions of far lands and bright things that he had never yet imagined opened out before him; and the firelit hall became like a golden mist above seas of foam that sighed upon the margins of the world. (306)

The moment Frodo begins to attend to the Elvish art, he is pulled into an otherworldly experience. This power is the chief mark of the Elves as gatekeepers of Faërie, within

Tolkien's Secondary Worlds.

Christopher Garbowski points out that, ―if Faërian Drama now seems prescient of 79 an almost plausible artistic interactive virtual reality, for Tolkien it seems to be the fledgling conception of an ideal artform or total art‖ (30). One should not, however, confuse the mythic elements which give rise to enchantment with technology in the way that Péter Makai does when he conflates Faërian Drama with the virtual reality produced by ―machine-elves‖ (45). Makai argues that the gaming medium better employs Tolkien's concept of sub-creation than narrative art in-and-of-itself, saying that ―an average game is already ahead of an average novel of Fantasy since the simulated game as a form, from its very beginning, has incorporated the player into its Secondary World and is thus enchanting it in an act of Faërian Drama‖ (51). Makai fails, however, to take into consideration that one of the most, if not the most, essential components of an immersive fantasy game is a great story. Thus, in the highly acclaimed Final Fantasy series of role- playing games, the 2D Final Fantasy IV (1991) offers a more enchanting experience than

Final Fantasy XIII (2010), despite the latter's stunningly life-like graphics, precisely because IV has a much better story.

Makai furthermore fails to take into account the mythic nature of Story, and thus the mythic potential of stories, that underlies Tolkien's notion of Faërie. Faërian drama enchants not merely by creating a world which one can enter, but in accessing and communicating myth. Tolkien says of narrative art that ―if it speaks of bread or wine or stone or tree, it appeals to the whole of these things, to their ideas [and] . . . every hearer of the words will have his own picture, and it will be made out of all the hills and rivers and dales he has ever seen, but specially out of The Hill, The River, The Valley which were for him the first embodiment of the word‖ (―OFS‖ 159; author's emphasis). There is a kind of mythic potency linked to narrative art, for Tolkien. Oziewicz compares 80

Tolkien's views on these matters with Giovanni Battista Vico's work in which Vico claims that ―the ancients 'spoke by means of poetic symbols' which were 'imaginative general categories,' or archetypes [that] constitut[e] the essence of myths‖ (129). This archetypal way of looking at narrative art is thus essentially a mythic one. We see this same kind of representation in the mythic realm of Lothlórien wherein ―a light was upon it for which

[Frodo's] language had no name. All that he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed at once clear cut, as if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of his eyes, and ancient as if they had endured forever‖ (Fellowship 455). Makai acknowledges that the otherworldliness of Faërie is essential to Tolkien's notion of sub-creation (36), but he fails to see, however, that this otherworldliness is fundamentally mythic in nature.

This error throws into contrast a looming problem with Curry's work on enchantment. Like Makai, Curry fails to take into account the link between myth and

Faërie. He thus views enchantment as being equally potent in distinctly non-otherworldly aspects of life, such as nature, love, ritual, art, sports, food and learning (―Enchantment‖

101). It is telling that Curry avoids using the word Faërie, for, like Makai, he takes enchantment out of the mythic context Tolkien creates for it in turning ―fairy‖ into

―Faërie.‖ Yet without Faërie – without the mythic underlay – Curry divests enchantment of the very thing that gives it its power.

Myth and stories are, for Tolkien, complex and interrelated paths to enchantment.

One of the ways that Tolkien both announces and makes use of myth in his fiction is by appealing to and interacting with certain aspects of Northern mythology. Brückner's assertion that the dragon ―opens the door to a world located in ours, yet not identical with it – the world of the epic-historical past‖ (131), is suggestive that it is not simply mythic 81 otherworldliness that Tolkien is keen to venerate in his work. Rather, Tolkien makes explicit his interest in a particular kind of mythic otherworldliness which is embodied in the ―Northerness‖ or ―Northern spirit‖ of medieval-European, heroic-mythic literature

(Carpenter 194; Lazo 194). The theme of Northern courage in particular ―– courage to grapple not only with human foes, but with the monsters of the outer darkness – runs through The Lord of the Rings as it does through Beowulf‖ (Moorman 212). ―So potent‖ is this Northern mythological imagination, for Tolkien, that he claims ―that while the older southern imagination [of classical mythology] has faded for ever into literary ornament, the northern has power, as it were, to revive its spirit even in our own times‖

(―Monsters‖ 26). And, to an extent, Tolkien attempts to revive this Northern spirit in The

Lord of the Rings. Like the rooted works that Tolkien draws his inspiration from, The

Lord of the Rings ―continue[s] to embody aspects of a [Northern] mythology and a world view long dead‖ (Shippey, ―Tolkien‖ 154). This particular flavour of mythic otherworldliness is made manifest in Tolkien's use of Elves and dragons and other fantastic creatures.

Richard Fehrenbacher, however, cautions against inflating the similarities between

The Lord of the Rings and Northern mythological literature, seeing irreconcilable differences, for instance, between Beowulf and The Two Towers. For Fehrenbacher, these differences hinge on the centrality of enchantment in fairy-stories, which brings with it, according to Tolkien's definition, recovery of vision, escape, and eucatastrophe or the consolation of the happy ending (see ―OFS‖ 145-54). Fehrenbacher reminds us that otherworldliness is key to enchantment, saying that ―since the Secondary Worlds of

Fantasy are 'made out of the Primary World' one of Enchantment’s effects is to 82 defamiliarize the quotidian, to make it strange, and by doing so to allow us to recognize the wonderful in what unfortunately has become to us mundane‖ (Fehrenbacher 104;

Tolkien ―OFS‖ 146). But he claims that the problem with the aid Beowulf brings to

Heorot, to take one example of Northern myth, is that it is not otherworldly enough to save the ultimately doomed people. He argues that, in contrast, Tolkien enchants Book

Three of The Two Towers by having the saviours be not simply humans (Beowulf and his men), but a legendary lost king, a Dwarf, an Elf and, later, a Wizard (Fehrenbacher 105).

And one of enchantment's essential functions lies in its ability to produce eucatastrophe,

―the most important function of the fairy-story,‖ which Fehrenbacher believes to be absent in Northern myth (104). He points out that eucatastrophe occurs numerous times within The Two Towers, the most noteworthy example being Gandalf's arrival at Helm's

Deep and the appearance of the Huorns, which together turn the tide of the battle, subduing or annihilating Saruman's horde (Towers 181). The possibility of eucatastrophe necessitates, for Fehrenbacher, a banishment of ―the monsters of Beowulf – those heroic- elegiac symbols of inescapable Chaos and Unreason‖ (105). Fehrenbacher goes on to say that ―this allows [Tolkien] to rewrite what he saw as the heroic but ultimately doomed pre-Christian worldview of Beowulf in order to allow for the eucatastrophe, the happy ending denied the Danes but central to Tolkien’s project in The Lord of the Rings‖ (105; author's emphasis).

The problem with Fehrenbacher's claim is that, in such a world, one cannot have heroes without monsters, and eucatastrophe depends on the possibility of ―sorrow and failure‖ and ―universal final defeat‖ (―OFS‖ 153). Eucatastrophe occurs when ―the mightiest man on earth‖ strides into nightmare and routs a terror no one else can face 83

(Heaney 197). In this sense, heroes like Beowulf are as much beings of Faërie as are

Dwarves, Elves or Wizards. Nowhere is the otherworldly status of heroes more evident than in the beginning of The Hobbit, when Gandalf tells Bilbo that in the comfortably disenchanted ―neighbourhood‖ of the Shire ―heroes are scarce, or simply not to be found,‖ and so Thorin and company must settle for a reluctant burglar in their quest to plunder Smaug's hoard (21). Here and throughout his legendarium Tolkien uses the monsters of the Northern mythological imagination to create eucatastrophe insofar as they establish the need for heroes. Middle-earth in fact appears framed by monsters, such as those ―that lurk in the shadows a day’s march from Bree or that gnaw the world‖ beneath the depths of Moria (Shippey, Road 110-1). They provide a context which

Shippey sees functioning most powerfully as ―'myth'‖ (110-1). In contrasting the

Northern with the Southern, or classical, mythologies, Tolkien praises the former precisely for the central role of its monsters, and because it gives ―them victory but no honour, [finding] a potent but terrible solution in the naked will and courage‖ of the heroes who face such darkness (―Monsters‖ 25-6). In the face of mythic evil there is a need for Northern courage, and the will and sinew that vanquishes the fell beast produces eucatastrophe, however fleeting. But Fehrenbacher is right to point out the centrality of eucatastrophe in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien is interested not just in the nightmare and sorrow, but also, and especially, in the joyous turn for the better which depends, however, on this context of darkness.

In fact, we see this theme represented numerous times in the interplay between literal darkness and light in The Lord of the Rings. When the hobbits first arrive at Tom

Bombadil's house, for instance, his dwelling is characterized as an island of light amidst a 84 sea of darkness, not unlike Beowulf's Heorot was intended to be. After Bombadil abandons the hobbits in the Old Forest, ―almost at once the sun seemed to sink into the trees behind them [and] . . . great shadows fell across them. . . . Out of the very ground at their feet a shadowy steam arose and mingled with the swiftly falling dusk‖ (Fellowship

167). However, as the hobbits step from the murk of the forest they find themselves bathed in ―the light of the stars‖ and on the hill before them ―they [see] the twinkling lights of the house‖ of Tom and Goldberry, where ―suddenly a wide yellow beam flowed out brightly from a door that was opened‖ (168). Yet beyond the light ―the dark shapes of the Barrow-downs stalked away into the eastern night‖ (168). The light of Tom's house acts much like the light of Gandalf's staff in Moria, which provides sanctuary from an all- encompassing, malignant darkness. An unquenchable point of radiance in a world of shadow is one way Tolkien invokes and references Northern myth, but as I have just argued, the contrast of starlight against the dark is, more importantly, intrinsically eucatastrophic. The star that Sam sees in Mordor is one of the most memorable associations of eucatastrophe with a light shining in a dark place (Return 238). The Phial of Galadriel, which also happens to be filled with starlight, and which Frodo uses to fend off Shelob and the profound darkness of her lair, is another (Towers 410, 413-4).

As a recurrent image of myth, enchantment and eucatastrophe, stars are associated with the mythic beginnings of Middle-earth and of Elves. Bombadil weaves a kind of

Faërian drama for the hobbits in his tales of long ago: ―and it seemed as if, under the spell of [Tom's] words . . . darkness had come from East and West, and all the sky was filled with the light of white stars. . . . The stars shone through the window and the silence of the heavens seemed to be‖ all around (Fellowship 180). The star consistently represents 85 the fabric of Tolkien's otherworldly reality. In the mythic pre-history of Tolkien's legendarium, ―Middle-earth lay in a twilight beneath the stars that Varda had wrought in the ages forgotten of her labours in Eä‖ (Silmarillion 32). Some of Tolkien's earliest writings on Middle-earth, in fact, involve the character Eärendil and Tolkien's efforts to elucidate the connections between the Anglo-Saxon word which underlies the name, and

Tolkien's sense that the word was a debased name belonging ―to an astronomical-myth‖

(Letters 385). Carpenter sees ―Eärendil‖ as being ―the beginning of Tolkien's own mythology‖ (92, 101-2), and in The Silmarillion Tolkien turns the name into a character who becomes linked with myth and eucatastrophe and starlight. Manwë's herald, Eönwë, makes these features evident when he calls out to Eärendil:

Hail Eärendil, of mariners most renowned, the looked for that cometh at unawares, the longed for that cometh beyond hope! Hail Eärendil, bearer of light before the Sun and Moon! Splendour of the Children of Earth, star in the darkness, jewel in the sunset, radiant in the morning! (298)

Eärendil is the mortal who, having witnessed hope leave Middle-earth and against all odds, seeks the aide of the Valar to rid Middle-earth of Morgoth. Thereafter, the Valar grant him immortality and he sails the ―pathless voids‖ beyond ―the confines of the world‖ with the Silmaril fixed to his brow, and appears as a star of hope to the free peoples of Middle-earth (Silmarillion 300-1). Galadriel's Phial is filled with the very light from this Silmaril. The Eärendil star therefore embodies that which is both ancient and which exists over an unbridgeable gulf of space. Not only, then, do stars represent remoteness (as Flieger points out above), the cosmic and eucatastrophe, but also depth both in space and time. Stars are therefore evocative of the mythic source of Middle- earth.

As Elves possess a unique relationship with myth, it comes as no surprise that 86 they are repeatedly associated with stars in Tolkien's fiction. We learn in The Silmarillion that ―by the starlit mere of Cuiviénen, Water of Awakening, [the Elves] rose from the sleep of Ilúvatar; and while they dwelt yet silent by Cuiviénen their eyes beheld first of all things the stars of heaven. Therefore they have ever loved the starlight‖ (Silmarillion

45). ―El‖ in fact means ―star‖ and, being the first of the Valar to discover the Elves,

Oromë ―named them in their own tongue Eldar, the people of the stars‖ (46). In The Lord of the Rings, almost every encounter with Elves outside of the Fellowship accordingly involves some reference to stars. ―A light like the light of stars‖ shines in Elrond's eyes, while the eyes of Celeborn and Galadriel are ―keen as lances in the starlight‖ (Fellowship

297, 460). The Company arrives at the Elven city of Caras Galadhon ―as the night deepened [and] more lights sprang forth [before them], until all the hill seemed afire with stars‖ (458). And stars are reflected in the ―hard and dark‖ water of the Mirror of

Galadriel (470). As Elves are yoked to imagery of stars and starlight they often appear in the proximity of darkness. The reader first encounters Elves in The Lord of the Rings when they emerge from the night just in time to discourage the Ringwraith from advancing on its hobbit prey: ―but at that moment there came a sound like mingled song and laughter. Clear voices rose and fell in the starlit air. The black shadow . . . climbed on to the shadowy horse and seemed to vanish across the lane into the darkness on the other side‖ (113). As the Elves pass by, ―the hobbits could see the starlight glimmering on their hair and in their eyes. They bore no lights, yet as they walked a shimmer, like the light of the moon above the hills before it rises, seemed to fall about their feet‖ (115). Yet it is also from these Elves that Frodo learns ―of gathering darkness,‖ and through contact with them that Sam becomes aware that he and Frodo ―are going to take a very long road, into 87 darkness‖ (124).

Elves thus represent, and in some cases literally are, fragments of light ensnared within a greater world of darkness. They were born into lands ―haunted by monsters and shapes of dread,‖ and they are bound to the sorrow and doom of Middle-earth

(Silmarillion 43). Shippey reminds us of Galadriel's view of history as ―the long defeat‖ and of Elrond's similar admission: ―I have seen three ages in the West of the world, and many defeats, and many fruitless victories‖ (Shippey, ―Creation‖ 312; Tolkien,

Fellowship 318, 436). Here, again, we see the prevalence of Northerness and monsters in

Middle-earth. But we also see the way Northern myth allows eucatastrophe, since Elvish

―songs most often function as contrasts to surrounding gloom and give the dejected, spiritually darkened listeners a new insight, a fresh glimpse of themselves and their roles in the great Quest‖ (Kelly 184). Elvishness has an antidotal effect on ―the kind of depression expressed by Sam on Weathertop: 'I would dearly like to hear more about

Elves; the dark seems to press so close'‖ (Kelly 184; Tolkien Fellowship 257). Elves are enmeshed in the darkness of Middle-earth, and yet they embody a fundamentally different world of light, joy, beauty and life, and thus their existence in the world of night is inherently eucatastrophic for characters like Sam, huddled in the shadows.

More subtly, then, the Elves represent the manifestation of one world within another, very different world. Their existence within Tolkien's Secondary World therefore parallels the disjunction between mythic otherworldliness and Primary World reality that defines Tolkien's notion of depth. This disjunction between Elvishness and the world of

Shadow also appears in the way that Tolkien portrays his ―Fairylands.‖ Lothlórien is, for instance, contrasted with the surrounding countryside which appears to Frodo as ―flat and 88 empty, formless and vague, [and] . . . dark and drear‖ (Fellowship 456). All around the deep space of Lothlórien ―wolves were howling . . . [but] on Lórien [itself] no shadow lay‖ (453). Even in Smith of Wootton Major, the Lothlórien-like ―Inner Faery‖ is bordered by an ―Outer Faery‖ within which exist both ―Greater‖ and ―Lesser Perils‖ (24,

30-1). In this Outer Faery, Smith approaches the ―outer darkness‖ of mythic evil when he stands ―beside the Sea of Windless Storm where the blue waves like snow-clad hills roll silently out of Unlight to the long strand, bearing the white ships that return from battles on the Dark Marches of which men know nothing‖ (26). According to Flieger, ―Tolkien's purpose in writing [Smith of Wootton Major] . . . was less to create a conventional narrative than to capture, like a butterfly in a net, the atmosphere, the essential nature of the Perilous Realm more traditionally known as Fairyland‖ (―When‖ 58). This ―essential nature‖ depends in part on the juxtaposition of Elven lands with a limitless darkness – not a disenchanted or nonmythical world, but one that enables a very Northern incarnation of death, despair and darkness in bodily form. The perilous nature of Faërie is a product of this quality more so than any potentially addictive effects Curry sees belonging to enchantment (―Enchantment‖ 105). Significantly, the existence of the Ring, gateway to the Shadow world of the Ringwraiths and the object within which Sauron has invested his power, is instrumental to the existence of Lothlórien. For when the One is unmade and the champion of mythic evil overthrown, the Elves are no longer able to maintain their mythic essence and eventually fade into the West. Tolkien's Faërie is not simply fairy- realms like Lothlórien, then, nor is it only an overlapping of the Primary and Secondary

World. Faërie also depends on this disjunction between fragments of mythic light and life in a greater world of mythic dark and death. Within the Perilous Realm, ―both joy and 89 sorrow [are] as sharp as swords‖ (Tolkien, ―OFS‖ 109; emphasis added).

Although there is certainly a moral component to this particular juxtaposition of mythic worlds, it is the phenomenology of this juxtaposition itself which engenders enchantment. The experience parallels discovering snow deep in the forest on a withering summer day, or, conversely, finding a flower in bloom on a storm-blasted meadow during the bleakest month of winter. Such encounters are the same in kind, if not in degree, to

Frodo's far-off glimpse of Galadriel, who ―shone like a window of glass upon a far hill in the westering sun, or as a remote lake seen from a mountain: a crystal fallen in the lap of the land‖ (Fellowship 490; emphasis added). Both eucatastrophe and ―arresting strangeness‖ characterize the experience of such manifestations (―OFS‖ 139). Such a discovery is therefore to obtain a glimpse of Faërie, for it suggests a kind of alchemical incarnation of something akin to the ―life principle‖ in an otherwise hostile world. Faërie is therefore more than just the realization of mythic otherworldliness in the real world: within the mythic world itself there must be a eucatastrophic manifestation of one, particular, mythic reality within another.

This ―otherworldly‖ magic lies at the root of Tolkien's concept of the ―sub- creative art which plays strange tricks with the world and all that is in it, combining nouns and redistributing adjectives‖ (―OFS‖ 143). Tolkien emphasizes the sub-creative, almost magical, nature of adjectives in two separate sections in ―On Fairy-Stories,‖ declaring that ―no spell or incantation in Faërie is more potent‖ than the ―invention of the adjective.‖ ―Such incantations‖ may in fact be viewed as another way of perceiving adjectives – as

a part of speech in a mythical grammar. The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things 90

light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water. . . . When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter's power – upon one plane; . . . in such ―fantasy,‖ as it is called, new form is made; Faërie begins. (122)

Enchantment, the experience of Faërie, is the experience of perceiving this transmutation in the world, whether it arises from Elvish art (Frodo in Bombadil's house and Rivendell), or Elvish magic (Lothlórien), or simply from the ―recovery‖ of a mythic perspective through the art of fairy-stories. 91

Conclusion

Verlyn Flieger remarks that Faërie was for J. R. R. Tolkien ―a word and an idea that embraced many meanings. It was at once a literary construct, an imaginal exercise, a make believe world, a place to go to, and an altered state of being – a series of ideas easier to picture than explain, very like his spelling of the word‖ (Flieger, ―When‖ 60; author's emphasis). Faërie is a difficult concept not least because of the flexible manner in which Tolkien applied it. Yet, despite the various ways in which Tolkien utilized the word, he remained consistent in his conception of Faërie as both the disjunction between the Primary World and other, mythic realms, and the bridging of the boundary between these worlds. Therefore, whether discussing the concept of Faërie as a technique of literary fantasy, or alluding to it in metaphysical terms, Tolkien always characterizes

Faërie as a separation from the Primary World. It is for this reason that he finds the depth of rooted medieval works fascinating. For depth, in this context, indicates a separation from everyday life: to experience the mythic depths of space and time and Story is to step beyond the purview of normal experience. As depth appeared for Tolkien primarily in the form of stories, it is not surprising that he privileges narrative art in ―On Fairy-Stories,‖ viewing it as the best medium through which to communicate Faërie. And, of course, communicating Faërie is exactly what he attempts to do in his fiction. Faërie is most meaningful for Tolkien as a thing experienced and thus he favours story because it expresses Faërie in a holistic, experiential fashion. According to Tolkien, then, fairy- stories are successful insofar as they enchant and produce the experience of Faërie. Thus the varied uses of the concept of Faërie all point to what Shippey has observed in The

Road to Middle-earth: that Tolkien sought to express something mystical or spiritual in 92

―On Fairy-Stories,‖ something which he felt could be reached, at least tangentially, through literary endeavours (Road 49-54).

These claims are not intended to exhaust critical comment on the concept of

Faërie or the ways in which Faërie manifests itself in Tolkien's fiction. I have only, for instance, touched briefly on morality, which is also an important aspect of Faërie. Tolkien makes reference to this element of Faërie in ―On Fairy-Stories,‖ among other places, when he says that the ―good and evil tale of Arthur's court is a 'fairy-story' rather than

[the more fantastic] tale of Oberon‖ (112; emphasis added). Nevertheless, we see that even the moral aspects of Faërie, as Tolkien has constructed them in his fiction, are bound to the notions explored in these pages. To construct a world wherein moral choices have such high stakes because good and evil belong to the world's ―immanent magic . . . that propels the tale to its completion‖ (Petty 37), for instance, is to bind these moral elements to story, depth and mythic otherworldliness. Additionally, Tolkien's emphasis in ―On

Fairy-Stories‖ most often falls on these three elements of Faërie. So too, as I hope to have shown, these aspects play constitutive roles in such works by Tolkien as The Lord of the

Rings and Smith of Wootton Major.

The trouble that critics have had with Faërie, and often Tolkien's work in general, points to the fact that Faërie does not fit well within an academic framework which privileges certain methodologies: namely those that come nearest to a scientific approach to literature, or one that is both reductive and objective. Because Tolkien's approach to fantasy in ―On Fairy-Stories‖ depends on holism, and because it uses language and concepts that have no pre-established place within the standard critical dialect, scholars tend either to dismiss his theory and application of sub-creation or reduce them to notions 93 such as myth, philology and Christianity as a way of both legitimizing and making sense of his fiction. Yet readings of Tolkien's work which either dismiss Faërie or fold it into something else, undermine the experience Tolkien tries to communicate in his fiction.

And, for Tolkien, to miss out on this experience is to miss out on the greatest boon that fairy-stories can afford: a glimpse beyond the walls of the Primary World into the mythic otherworldliness of space and time and Story, and ―the good green earth beneath our feet, when it was enchanted‖ (Rateliff 79-80). 94

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