J.R.R. Tolkien and the Significance of Fairy-Story

Andrew Schuman

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“The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present evil; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords.” -J.R.R Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories  
   
    J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, delighted in leading his readers into the rich and mysterious land of fairy-story. Faerie, the name he gave to this other-world, was a land Tolkien counted himself fortunate to have wandered, a realm filled with timeless truths to explore, behold, and survey. Throughout his adult life, Tolkien loved this “perilous realm,” a place where the very possibility of dragons made the world “richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost to peril.”[1] For the past half century, millions of readers have followed Tolkien into the land of Faerie, delighting in the people, history, cultures, languages, and landscapes they have encountered along the way. In 1997, Waterstone’s poll proclaimed The Lord of the Rings “the best book of the century,” and it is estimated that over 93 million copies have been sold worldwide.[2]
   
    Even so, despite the resounding popularity of his books, The Lord of the Rings has been far from universally praised. Criticisms of juvenility and escapism have been frequently levied against Tolkien’s books— 20^th century embodiments of the ancient genre of fairy-story—particularly by academics and professional literary critics. One critic deemed the books unrealistic and psychologically comforting “flights from reality,” and another decried them as “prose of the nursery room...Winnie the Pooh posing as epic.”[3] Tolkien, an esteemed professor of ancient literature at Oxford University, was quick to deny such criticisms, believing that they revealed an unfortunate, but all too common, ignorance of the true nature and value of fairy story. For him, fairy-story was “one of the highest forms of literature, and quite erroneously associated with children.”[4]
   
    Unlike his critics, Tolkien believed that fairy-stories had many “permanent and fundamental things to talk about” and were of tremendous value to adults as well as to society as a whole.[5] Of the many functions of fairy-story, Tolkien believed that the most valuable was its ability to elucidate certain universal truths that are rarely seen clearly in everyday life. Tolkien wrote that fairy-stories “contain in solution moral and religious truth...but not explicit,” and reveal some aspects of truth “that can only be received in this mode.”[6] Specifically, fairy-stories provide readers with a unique window to glimpse, as the fabric of story unravels in the unfamiliar land of faerie, moments of joy and truth which are nothing less than “rays of light through the very chinks of the universe around us.”[7] For Tolkien, these rays of light emanate from the Creator Himself, and point towards the greatest truth and greatest fairy-story of all, the story of Jesus Christ, the God-man who rose from the dead to save sinners; the fairy-story which is also a fact. 
   
    But first, what is a fairy-story? Today, the term is not often used, and when it is it usually describes a fantastical story for children. For Tolkien, fairy-story means something quite different, and has little to do with fairies, the mythical creature of diminutive size. Fairy-story— a literary form as old as language itself— does not depend upon any particular turn of plot or display of characters but rather is a story which draws upon the elements of the other-worldly land of Faerie, indeed the very “nature of Faerie: the Perilous Realm itself, and the air that blows in that country.”[8] This Other-World from which fairy-stories are born Tolkien does not attempt to describe directly, except to say that while it is indescribable, it is not imperceptible. Many things are contained in Faerie, besides “elves and fays, and besides dwarves, witches, trolls...it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth...and ourselves, mortal men.”[9] Faerie is land filled with imagined wonder, at once identifiable when encountered, but strange. As Tolkien describes his first encounter with a dragon, “The dragon had the trademark of Faerie written plain upon him...in whatever world he had his being it was an Other-world.”[10]

    As Tolkien’s encounter with the dragon suggests, at the heart of the realm of Faerie, and good fairy-stories, is fantasy, the “making or glimpsing of Other-worlds.”[11] Exceeding the power of mere imagination, which is the innate human ability to form images of things not present, fantasy adds to these ideal creations an “inner consistency of reality.”[12] Good fantasy therefore, allows the reader to enter into a fully believable and internally consistent secondary world, without demanding a willing suspension of disbelief. This is because, despite the unfamiliarity, everything works according to the “laws of that world... you believe it, while you are, as it were, inside.”[13] The feelings of incredulity that readers at times feel when reading fantasy—feelings which then lead the reader to a willing suspension of disbelief, or to close the book— Tolkien attributes to poorly created fantasy, not fantasy itself. Only when the terrain of Faerie is fractured by internal inconsistency does doubt arise; then the reader is “out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from the outside...the spell is broken.”[14]
   
    Creating good fantasy therefore, far from an activity akin to spurious daydreaming, is in fact, according to Tolkien, a high form of art, “indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent.”[15] This potency is derived from the ability of well crafted fantasy to afford the reader with an experience much akin to—and every bit as real as— visiting a foreign country. Indeed, Tolkien believed that it is incomprehensible for a secondary world that achieves an inner consistency of reality to “not in some way partake of reality.”[16] This is because the human art of making fantasy is essentially a sub-creative art, one that necessarily draws from the reality of the primary world. Made in the image of the original Maker, Tolkien believed that humans have the ability to create new worlds by redistributing nouns and adjectives to introduce things such as the terrible blue moon, silver leaves, and rams with fleeces of gold. Even still, our secondary worlds remain rooted in the created reality that we know. “The Primary World, Reality, of elves and men is the same,” Tolkien wrote, “if differently valued and perceived.”[17]
   
    The ability of fantasy to reveal elements of reality in an unfamiliar world, free from the drab and triteness of everyday perception, Tolkien believed was one of the greatest functions of fairy-stories. “They open a door on Other Time,” Tolkien wrote, “and if we pass through, though only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself, maybe.”[18] Tolkien’s critics at times accused him of escapism, but for him, they were confusing the “Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.”[19] Tolkien acknowledged that entering a secondary world was indeed an escape, but not an escape from reality. Since our perception of reality in the primary world suffers from being fundamentally ‘bent’ by the Fall— that is, the fall from grace in elemental Eden— as well as the jaundicing affect of over familiarity, the reality glimpsed in fairy-stories can even afford us with rare moments of clarity. This does not confer that Faerie is necessarily more real than the primary world, but merely that in the strange land of fairy-story one may catch glimpses of those transcendent truths that lie outside Time itself.
   
    In the same vein, one may apprehend in fairy-stories those things that are really of value, not only in the land of Faerie, but in our world as well. At times these can be the most simple of things. Tolkien confides that it was in fairy-stories that he “first divined the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.”[20] By encountering the centaur and the dragon, Tolkien hoped that we would look at the creatures in our world with a new wonder, and “suddenly behold, like ancient shepherds, sheep, and dogs, and horses- and wolves.”[21] This process of glimpsing the intrinsic value of everyday elements in our world, Tolkien believed was a high function of fairy-story and he called it recovery, the “regaining of a clear view.”[22] Fairy-stories, in this regard, provide a valuable service to the individual as well as society since they allow their readers to “clean their windows,” so that the things seen may be “freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity.”[23] In turn, this enables readers to reenter the primary world with fresh eyes and quick hearts, and by according every object with the degree of love appropriate to it, to live more virtuously.

    However, Tolkien believed that even more significant than the brief glimpses of transcendent truths and values, which often lead to recovery, was the ability of fairy-stories to break the “evil enchantment of worldliness”— the belief that the immediate world is all there is— and arouse deep-seated longing for Other-worlds. “If they awakened desire,” Tolkien wrote, “satisfying it while often whetting it unbearably, they succeeded.”[24] This longing to “go through the looking glass, to reach fairy land”—as Tolkien’s longtime friend and fellow Oxford professor, C.S. Lewis explains— is far from a desire to retreat into imagined worlds of wish-fulfillment. Instead it is a “longing for he knows not what,” an innate desire which points beyond itself to something other and outer, transcendent and beautiful. [25] This desire for something which no experience in this world can fully satisfy offers something invaluable to the reader: it “stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach.” [26]

    This unquenchable desire for something unreachable is one of the driving forces in The Lord of the Rings; it motivates Aragorn and Boromir to fight for the fading glory of Westernesse, Gimli to sing of the bygone splendor of the Mines of Moria, and Legolas to long for the Undying Lands over the Sea. For Tolkien, the deep-seated longing found within humans, like the Elves, is a longing for an undying land which is also home. “Certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth.” Tolkien explains, “We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of ‘exile.’”[27] In this way, by arousing a longing for the transcendent, fairy-stories encourage us in our pursuit of those things of enduring truth and beauty, a search which ultimately leads to the Creator.

    The greatest function of the fairy-story however, lies in a particular experience afforded the reader at the end of the tale which is the product of what Tolkien calls “the Consolation of the Happy Ending.” This consolation, which Tolkien considered requisite for all fairy-stories, is a sudden and joyous ‘turn’ that occurs just as all hope is lost, a good catastrophe— eucatastrophe, as Tolkien called it— a “sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur.”[28] In the Hobbit this eucatastrophe comes as Bilbo cries above the din of battle “The Eagles! The Eagles are coming!”[29] At this moment of deliverance the reader is given a “fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”[30] The moment of eucatastrophe is the highest function of the fairy-story because in this moment we glimpse joy, our heart’s deepest desire, which like an epiphany “passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through.”[31]

    For Tolkien, eucatastrophic joy possessed great metaphysical as well as personal significance. This kind of joy Tolkien was quick to distinguish from happiness; in fact it was a kind of acute longing qualitatively far closer to sorrow or grief than any sort of pleasure. As Tolkien’s colleague C.S. Lewis explains, joy is an “unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable that any other satisfaction.”[32] Distinct from many emotions which seem to be generated inside of oneself, eucatastrophic joy comes distinctly from the outside; indeed, it is a response to the revelation of grace. A remembrance of the grace in elemental Eden, joy is mankind’s most fundamental desire, but more importantly, it is the product of a “sudden glimpse of the underlying reality.”[33] Indeed, the eucatastrophic joy experienced in a sub-created fantasy world provides a “brief vision that the answer may be greater— it may be a far off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world.”[34] According to Tolkien, the true significance of the sub-created eucatastrophe, and thus the fairy-story, was that it pointed to, and stemmed from, the greatest eucatastrophic tale of human history, the Gospel of Jesus.

    In this true fairy-story, the moment of eucatastrophe, the sudden turn and miraculous grace, is the redemption of man through the incarnation and resurrection of Christ. Tolkien himself said it best when he wrote:

“The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels- peculiarly artistic, beautiful and moving: ‘mythical’ in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy.”[35]

    For Tolkien, joy possesses such significance because no matter where it is experienced, it points to the Great Joy, the Christian Gloria, which is produced by glimpsing the transcendent truth of Christ’s incarnation, resurrection, and eucatastrophic redemption of mankind. The transcendent reality that Joy glimpses, that exiled human nature longs for, and that fairy-stories ultimately point toward, is the reality of God in the person of Jesus Christ, Redeemer and Savior. Such sub-created stories possess inherent value as well because the joy that they inspire in the moment of consolation is of the same quality as the Gospel inspired joy in the primary world, if not of the same degree. Tolkien stated that “such joy has the very taste of primary truth” and would be of the same degree as that of the gospel story if the capacity of the sub-creator were not finite. Tolkien stated, “The Christian joy, the Gloria, is of the same kind; but it is pre-eminently (infinitely, if our capacity were not finite) high and joyous.”[36]
   
    The Gospel story, the story that God is telling us and that we are a part of, is the greatest of all fairy-stories, it has the utmost ‘inner consistency of reality’ because it has primary standing. As Tolkien expressed, “Legend and History have met and fused.”[37] In order to help us comprehend the significance of this monumental union of the imaginative and factual worlds, Tolkien asks us to imagine the “particular excitement and joy that one would feel, if any specially beautiful fairy-story were found to be ‘primarily’ true, its narrative to be history, without thereby necessarily losing the mythical or allegorical significance that it possessed.”[38] Of all the people impacted by Tolkien’s understanding of the Gospels as the myth that became fact, the most obvious appears to be C.S. Lewis. Shortly after becoming a Christian in his early thirties, Lewis wrote to a friend, “What Tolkien showed me was this…the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”[39]

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