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The Fantastic Sublime: Tolkien's 'On Fairy-Stories'

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The Fantastic Sublime: Tolkien's 'On Fairy-Stories' Volume 22 Number 1 Article 2 10-15-1997 The Fantastic Sublime: Tolkien’s ‘On Fairy-Stories’ and the Romantic Sublime David Sandner Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore Part of the Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons Recommended Citation Sandner, David (1997) "The Fantastic Sublime: Tolkien’s ‘On Fairy-Stories’ and the Romantic Sublime," Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: Vol. 22 : No. 1 , Article 2. Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol22/iss1/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Mythopoeic Society at SWOSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature by an authorized editor of SWOSU Digital Commons. An ADA compliant document is available upon request. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To join the Mythopoeic Society go to: http://www.mythsoc.org/join.htm Mythcon 51: A VIRTUAL “HALFLING” MYTHCON July 31 - August 1, 2021 (Saturday and Sunday) http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-51.htm Mythcon 52: The Mythic, the Fantastic, and the Alien Albuquerque, New Mexico; July 29 - August 1, 2022 http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-52.htm Abstract Discusses Romantic views of the sublime as they relate to Tolkien’s “On Fairy-stories.” Distinguishes the Gothic (“the literature of fear”) from fairy-stories and most children’s fantasy (“the literature of joy”). Additional Keywords Children’s fantasy; Fairy tales; Romanticism; Sublime in literature; Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy-stories” This article is available in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol22/iss1/2 P a g e 4 I s s u e 8 3 A utum n 1997 M y t h l o r e The Fantastic Sublim e T olkien's "O n F airy-Stories" and the R om antic Sublime David Sandner In his essay "On Fairy-Stories," Tolkien defines fairy infinity. The critic Raimonda Modiano writes: -stories not by the presence of fairies, but rather the for Coleridge the essential qualities which occasion the sub­ presence of Faerie, of another world, unreachable within lime are boundlessness and indefiniteness, Yet Coleridge's the text itself: emphasis is not so much on infinite extension as on the The definition of a fairy-story — what it is, or what it should quality of perceptual indistinctness which allows certain be — does not, then, depend on any definition or historical objects to lose their individual form and blend with one account of elf or fairy, but upon the nature of Faerie: the another into a whole, though not one that can be grasped Perilous Realm itself, and the air that blows in that country. fully. (115) I will not attempt to define that, nor describe it directly. It The hidden mountain blending with the sky implies more cannot be done. Faerie cannot be caught in a net of words; for than mountain and sky, a completeness and wholeness be­ it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imper­ ceptible. (114) yond the world. It implies the consubstantial world, the one life of the spirit. For Coleridge, "the lack of distinct bounda­ Tolkien speaks of fantasy as a wind that blows from beyond ries and spatial specificity serves as the means of conveying the world, a typical Romantic metaphor for describing an to the m ind an impression of unity" (115). W here the m oun­ overflow of feeling moving through the soul (Abrams, 26) tain uncovered would be merely "Grand" or "Majestic," the and for the unseen presence of the world of the spirit. hidden summit is "Sublime" (Modiano, 114). Fantasy itself cannot reveal this other world; it can only bring the reader to the moment of perception before appre­ Wordsworth describes the natural sublime as "dwell­ hension of it, that is, to the moment of the expression of its ing in the light of setting suns,/ And the round ocean and quality of being "indescribable, though not imperceptible." the Living air,/ And the blue sky, and in the mind of man" Fantasy can bring the reader right to the edge of the prime­ ("Tintem Abbey," 97-9). The setting sun, half-faded into val forest that is so often the border of fairyland in fairy night, the round ocean, disappearing over the horizon, the tales. But the reader must step inside alone. living air, the wind blowing from beyond the world, are Romantic images of loss, of what cannot be fully known. In Romanticism, the apprehension of the world of the No natural object in itself is sublime. The mind, suddenly spirit in nature has been called the "natural sublime" In free from the phenomenal through indefiniteness and sug­ the sublime moment, the contemplation of a natural object gestiveness, experiences the sublime, The sublime is cen­ leads to an aesthetic rapture, which produces a correspon­ tered in subject not object, in a dissolution into unity that dent overflow of feeling, revealing the transcendent. In reveals an absolute essence — to the mind. "Tintem Abbey," Wordsworth describes In his essay "The Fantastic Imagination" the nineteenth- a sense sublime century fantasist George MacDonald describes the effect of Of something far more deeply interfused.... fantasy literature with images recalling Coleridge's misty A motion and a spirit that impels mountaintop and Wordsworth's setting sun: "A fairytale, All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts, a sonata, a gathering storm, a limitless night, seizes you and and rolls through all things" (95-102). sweeps you away" (319). In both Romantic poetry and Coleridge calls it the experience of "the one Life within us fantastic literature, the imagination reaches beyond its and abroad,/ Which meets all emotion and becomes its grasp in a movement towards transcendence. soul" ("Eolian Harp," 26-7), the great movement of some­ In his book, The Romantic Sublime, the critic Thomas thing, not the self, which exists without and within, sweep­ Weiskel describes the structure of the sublime as divided into ing the self away in a unity of this world and the world of three stages. In the first phase, the mind is in a determinate, the spirit. habitual relationship with the contemplated object. In the Coleridge presents as an example of the sublime "A second phase, in an overflow of feeling, the habitual relation Mountain in a cloudless sky, its summit hidden by clouds of mind and object suddenly breaks down. Surprise and and seemingly blended with the sky, while mists and astonishment is the affective correlative, and there is an floating vapors encompass it, is sublime" (Shawcross, immediate intuition of a disconcerting disproportion be­ 342). For Coleridge, a natural object, to engender the sub­ tween inner and outer. Either mind or object is suddenly in lime, must have an incomplete quality that paradoxically excess, and then both are since their relation has become leads the mind to seek for more, It must be suggestive of radically indeterminate. In the third, or reactive, phase of the M y t h l o r e I s s u e 83 A u t u m n 1 9 9 7 P a g e 5 sublime moment, the mind recovers the balance of outer to give them "Jack-the-Giant-Killer" or the "Seven Champi­ and inner by constituting a fresh relation between itself ons" or anything, which being their sphere of action, should and the object such that the very indeterminacy which not feed self-pride. (Shakespearean Criticism, 2: 292) erupted in phase two is taken as symbolizing the mind's For Wordsworth and Coleridge, realistic children's stories relation to a transcendent order. (23-4) only serve to make children acutely self-conscious and prideful, It is better to release them into fairy tales and the The second phase is experienced as the tearing of a veil imagination, into dreams of other worlds, and closer to the between this world and another field of experience altogether, remembrance of the glory of the world of the spirit. one both more immediate and more intense. Paradoxically, the transcendence of the sublime, although centered in the subject, The critic Northrop Frye discusses self-forgetfulness in requires, in order to reach through the veil to the moment of fantasy literature in general: unity, a self, effacement, a loss of the self. Whether romance begins with a hero whose birth is, as Wordsworth says, a sleep and a forgetting, or whether it This loss, which might be regarded as a kind of freeing begins with a sinking from a waking world into a dream of the self, is expressed in Romanticism through two dis­ world, it is logical for it to begin its series of adventures with tinct kinds of forgetfulness, or rather, two distinct states of some kind of break in consciousness, one which often in­ being —the world and the world of spirit— each requiring volves actual forgetfulness of the previous state. We may call one to forget about the other state. First, an a priori, or this the motif of amnesia. (102) in-bom, forgetfulness of the world of the spirit out of The loss of self is not without dangers, however. Frye which one came into existence, makes the experience of describes fantasy's "break in consciousness," such as the second phase of the sublime a revelation of sudden "wandering into the land of fairies," as "involving a remembrance, the dropping of an amnesia, the return of change so drastic as to give the sense of becoming someone something lost.
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