There Would Always Be a Fairy Tale

More Essays on Tolkien

Verlyn Flieger

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781631012884
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria en la ciencia ficción

Devoted to Tolkien, the teller of tales and co-creator of the myths they brush against, these essays focus on his lifelong interest in and engagement with fairy stories, the special world that he called faërie, a world they both create and inhabit, and with the elements that make that world the special place it is. They cover a range of subjects, from The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings and their place within the legendarium he called the Silmarillion to shorter works like "The Story of Kullervo" and "Smith of Wootton Major."

From the pen of eminent Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger, the individual essays in this collection were written over a span of twenty years, each written to fit the parameters of a conference, an anthology, or both. They are revised slightly from their original versions to eliminate repetition and bring them up to date. Grouped loosely by theme, they present an unpatterned mosaic, depicting topics from myth to truth, from social manners to moral behavior, from textual history to the micro particles of Middle-earth.

Together these essays present a complete picture of a man as complicated as the books that bear his name—an independent and unorthodox thinker who was both a believer and a doubter able to maintain conflicting ideas in tension, a teller of tales both romantic and bitter, hopeful and pessimistic, in equal parts tragic and comedic. A man whose work does not seek for right or wrong answers so much as a way to accommodate both; a man of antitheses.

Scholars of fantasy literature generally and of Tolkien particularly will find much of value in this insightful collection by a seasoned explorer of Tolkien's world of faërie.

PART ONE

“A Perilous Land”

Defining Faërie

Faërie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold.

—J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories”

Tolkien’s famous essay “On Fairy-stories” begins with a warning: there are pitfalls and dungeons for the unwary and overbold. The words sound both ominous and cautionary, and taken together suggest more than peril; they predict reprisal. This is not an expected consequence of the reading of fairy tales. But Tolkien knew what he was talking about. Wary or unwary, bold or overbold, he’d been there. As a reader, he knew the power over the imagination of what he called Faërie, the state of enchantment, and the fate of those who lose themselves within it. As a scholar, he knew it was perilous to try to define fairy stories, to discover where they came from, to interrogate their relationship to “real life,” to analyze the unanalyzable craft of sub-creation, or to defend the value of fantasy; nevertheless, he proceeded to do all of those things, as the essays in this section show.

His statement, later in “On Fairy-stories,” that “there would always be a ‘fairy-tale,’” forms the main title and is the focus of my essay on his essay, putting the latter in the context of the myth and folklore controversies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My next essay, “But What Did He Really Mean?” examines the contrasting and sometimes contradictory statements that Tolkien made over the years about Faërie, about the amount of conscious Christianity in his work, and about the integrity of his sub-creation. “Re-creating Reality” is a further examination of his theory and practice of fantasy. “War, Death, and Fairy Stories in the Work of J. R. R. Tolkien” takes as its premise Tolkien’s statement in The Silmarillion that death is the “gift” of the godhead and examines his various and sometimes perplexing treatments of death in The Lord of the Rings. “Eucatastrophe and the Dark,” written for an MLA handbook on teaching Tolkien, discusses my strong belief as a teacher at both graduate and undergraduate levels in the importance of introducing students to Tolkien’s fiction through the competing lenses of his two landmark essays, “On Fairy-stories,” which emphasizes the happy ending, and “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” which focuses on the inevitability of death and final darkness. Together, these two sides of his vision set up the polarity and tension between light and dark that I see as a hallmark of his fiction.

“There Would Always Be a ‘Fairy-tale’”

J. R. R. Tolkien and the Folklore Controversy

In March of 1939, with the Second World War about to begin, a middle-aged professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University with a private hobby of inventing myth and languages took time out from both occupations to deliver the annual Andrew Lang Lecture at St. Andrews University in Scotland. Surprisingly, Tolkien’s talk was the first in the series to deal with Lang’s work in myth and folklore. He called his lecture, which he later expanded and published as an essay, “Fairy-stories.” In it, he recalled that his own taste for fairy stories was “wakened … on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war” (MC 135).

The war to which Tolkien referred was not the one about to start but its predecessor, soon to be known as the “First” World War. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to track the connections that might have linked fairy stories, the past war, and the one ready to start as he spoke at St. Andrews. World War I began in August 1914. In September of that year, John Ronald Tolkien, then a twenty-two-year-old student at Oxford awaiting military call-up, wrote a fairy-tale poem titled “The Voyage of Eärendel,” about a celestial mariner who sails the night sky to seek peace for Middle-earth. It was the beginning of his invented mythology (Carpenter, Tolkien 71; BLT II 267, 277n).

Tolkien’s so-called mythology for England has been much discussed among scholars of his work, and his own words about his motive in undertaking such a project have usually been taken at face value:

I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff…. I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend … which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country…. I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. (Letters 144–45)

The concept is clear, and the entirety of Tolkien’s Silmarillion cosmology as published in The History of Middle-earth fits the description like Cinderella’s slipper. However, the historical and intellectual background from which that concept emerged has been too little considered.

The two coincident events mentioned earlier, the start of Tolkien’s mythology and the start of World War I, were themselves coincident with a third—not a beginning this time, but an end. This was the close of what Richard Dorson calls the “golden century” of British folklore studies, 1813 to 1914 (Peasant Customs ix). More than mere chronology connects all three. While the start of war was not the inspiration for Tolkien’s mythology, which had been taking shape in his mind for some time, the immediacy of the conflict and its threat to European national identities if Germany should prevail may well have acted as a spur. The outbreak of hostilities had the opposite effect on folklore studies. The exigencies of war slammed the door on the first burst of international cooperation in this area of research.

Tolkien’s often-republished essay “On Fairy-stories” is usually read in the context of his own work as his creative manifesto, explicating the principles he was even then putting into practice in his own mythological fiction. In the last month of 1937, over a year before his St. Andrews lecture, he had begun the sequel to The Hobbit requested by his publisher, George Allen and Unwin, a work that, after long labor, became The Lord of the Rings. Begun as “the new Hobbit” (Letters 112), this project began almost immediately to veer away from the juvenile tone and content of the earlier book, gravitating toward the older and much darker material of the Silmarillion mythology originally intended “for England.” It seems reasonable to suppose that Tolkien’s theoretical discussion of fairy stories would be colored by his practice and that the standards he set out in the lecture would be those he was even then engaged in developing through his own experience.

There is, however, a wider and more complex intellectual and historical background into which both the lecture and the fiction fit, for the principles set forth in his essay were not just the working template for his own story but also a direct reply to and argument against the current major folklore theories. At the time Tolkien spoke at St. Andrews, the golden century—the first fine, careless rapture of folklore studies—was long over. Nonetheless, the questions that had concerned the folklorists—according to Dorson, “[t]he origin and dispersion of the Aryans, the mythopoeic view of early man, the animistic philosophy of savages, the survivals of primitive belief among peasants” (Peasant Customs x), together with the Sherlockian search for answers and the close-up inspection of trees that left researchers unable to see the forest—were all still operable factors. By 1939, it was time to review and reevaluate the state of the question, and Tolkien, no folklorist but a myth-maker, felt (though he modestly denied it) equal to the task. Much of his argument in “On Fairy-stories” was both a capsule history of and a rebuttal to the theories of the folklore movement.

The issues over which the folklorists disagreed are precisely the topics Tolkien addresses in his lecture, and that he counters with his own more imaginative analysis of the nature and appropriate uses of fantasy. To enter the debate, Tolkien selected three names representing the major and contending schools of theory that had generated and sustained the controversy. From comparative philology, he took Max Müller and his follower, George Webbe Dasent, and from evolutionary anthropology, he took Müller’s chief opponent, Andrew Lang.

Tolkien faulted all of them and the theories they represented for “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” (MC 119). In his view, these folklorists were not reading stories at all; they were examining data, a process which to him was a gross misuse of the enchantment, what he called the quality of Faërie, that he found in fairy tales. His response began with a discussion of what fairy stories were not, followed by his judgment of what they were and how they worked. The result was an on-the-spot forging of his own working theory, hammered out on the anvil of the folklore controversy.

From each contending school of thought, Tolkien plucked a phrase or idea to address, which he then used in topic sentences in his lecture. From Müller, he took the concepts of nature myth and solar mythology, and the idea of mythology as a disease of language (Müller 2: passim), all of which were staples of Müller’s groundbreaking first essay, “Comparative Mythology,” published in 1856. From Lang, he took the idea of human maturation as the model for cultural evolution, an idea that had led Lang to conclude that the matter of fairy stories was primitive, and that consequently the stories themselves were fit only for children, concepts he spelled out in one of his most widely read books, Custom and Myth. From Dasent’s introduction to his translation of Moe and Asbjørnsen’s collection of Norske Folke-eventyr (rendered in English as Popular Tales from the Norse), Tolkien took an extended metaphor, the “soup” of story and the “bones of the ox” from which it is boiled (Dasent 7).

Some background is necessary here. The origins of folklore research go back to the gentleman antiquaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, John Leland, William Camden, and John Aubrey. To begin with, their investigations into the antiquities of England were chiefly topographical and included Stonehenge, Avebury, and a variety of other monuments, mounds, long barrows, and standing stones. The first great literary flowering came in the eighteenth century with the ballad collections of Thomas Percy and Francis Child. Late in the eighteenth century, the German Johannes Gottfried von Herder argued persuasively for oral traditions rooted in the language of the unlettered “folk” as the repository of any country’s cultural identity. It was an idea whose time had come, and by the early nineteenth century the hunt was on, no longer for physical ruins but for narrative folk traditions as reservoirs of national spirit.

This was Dorson’s “golden century,” the era of the great collectors. The brothers Grimm in Germany, Moe and Asbjørnsen in Norway, Elias Lönnrot in Finland, and in the British Isles, John Francis Campbell of Islay in Scotland, Sir John Rhys in Wales, Thomas Croker and Jeremiah Curtin in Ireland, and Thomas Keightley in general all turned to the “folk” to discover a mythic past. Their research was coincident with a resurgence of interest in cultural and national identity. Germany had not long been a united nation when the Grimms began looking for philological material to validate that unity. Likewise, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, the Celtic outposts in the British Isles, were reaching for and finding evidence of a cultural history independent of English hegemony. An especially notable success was that of Elias Lönnrot, whose collection of Finnish folk songs, arranged and published as Kalevala, gave his native Finland, for centuries the shuttlecock of Russia and Sweden, a national identity.

Despite all this nationalistic fervor, however, once the stories were collected and set down it became uncomfortably clear that they were made of pretty raw material: incest, rape, bestiality, child murder, cannibalism, and the like. Two of the Grimms’ stories Tolkien mentions in his lecture—“The Frog-King” and “The Juniper Tree”—amply illustrate this. “The Frog-King” is about a princess who promises to marry a frog if he will retrieve her ball from a well. When he does indeed fetch her the ball, she is faced with the disagreeable prospect of fulfilling her promise and admitting the frog to her bed. The fact that the frog magically and at the last minute turns into a handsome prince is irrelevant to the real frisson of the story, the monstrous notion of a young woman going to bed with a frog. This is made explicit in the narrative when the frog jumps on to her pillow as she prepares for the night and demands to share her bed.

“The Juniper Tree” hinges on cannibalism. The story tells of a wicked stepmother who murders, cuts up, stews, and serves her young stepson to the boy’s father for dinner. The boy’s stepsister (a more loving relative than her mother) saves the bones from the stew and buries them under a tree in the yard, from whence the boy is resurrected as a bird. This “gay and vengeful bird-spirit,” as Tolkien describes it (MC 128), brings about the death of the stepmother by dropping a millstone on her. As in “The Frog King,” the taboo is not violated, for the father, though ignorant of the content of the soup, inexplicably loses his appetite. Nevertheless, the concept is introduced.

The proper Victorians were properly horrified at such goings-on, prompting a search for anything that could explain or justify such barbarities as child murder, anthropophagy, and bestiality and such logical inconsistencies as just how a union between a girl and a frog could be consummated. In Britain, the battle lines were drawn between the mythologists and the anthropologists, specifically represented by Max Müller and Andrew Lang. Müller used comparative philology, relying heavily on Greek and Vedic sources, and found the origins he sought in evidence from Sanskrit, Homeric Greek, and in comparisons of Indo-European (or as he termed them “Indo-Aryan”) languages. The search for Aryan roots was full of pitfalls, and it did not take long for some collectors to fall into them, and to look for what they wanted to find instead of finding whatever was there. Nazi Germany was the extreme and ugly culmination of the early Indo-Aryan theory.

Müller introduced his argument in an epochal essay, “Comparative Mythology” (1856), later reprinted as volume 2 of his four-volume Chips from a German Workshop (1867–75). Here he proposed that myths as we have them arose through verbal misapprehension (Dorson, Peasant Customs 67), the late misunderstanding of early, primarily Sanskrit Vedic names for celestial phenomena. According to Müller, the concepts of the Aryan gods arose in the “mythopoeic” age (qtd. in Dorson, British Folklorists 162). As the migrations of the Indo-Aryan people splintered them into separate groups, so their language and its related mythology splintered into various offshoots. During this process, the original true, “nature/solar” meanings were forgotten, surviving only in mythical words and phrases that were retained although their original referents were forgotten.

The stories and names that then developed to explain these phrases constituted Müller’s notion of mythology as “a disease of language”: that invalid understanding from which new stories—the myths as we know them—were created (Dorson, British Folklorists 162). The natural phenomena originally referred to—sun, sky, dawn, night, earth, wind—were replaced by heroic personifications—Apollo, Zeus, Eos, Nyx, Gaia, and others. Müller’s conclusion was that by tracing the words back to ancient forms it was possible to arrive at their original referents. However, he was constrained by his own catchphrases, for his interpretation of mythology as a disease implied a previous state of health, a state presumably expressed in the “original” language of solar mythology. Moreover, the assumption that there had been an “original,” therefore “true” solar meaning that had been lost, had the predictable but deplorable consequence of elevating the “Aryan” peoples and languages to primacy, and, by implication, denigrating the non-Aryan “others.”

When you look for things, you are apt to find them, and pretty soon Müller was finding solar mythology everywhere and seeing solar heroes in every myth he examined. Any time a hero went into a cave, or traveled from east to west, or died in battle, that was the sun setting. A hero vanquishing a dragon was the rising sun conquering the night. And so on. Those who followed in Müller’s wake elaborated his theory but stuck to his methods. Adalbert Kuhn, a German scholar described by Dorson as “one of the foremost of the philological mythologists” and the chief proponent of the “lightning school” (British Folklorists 171), proposed a variation that substituted lightning for the sun and found electrical phenomena in Zeus and Indra, and lightning-related fire in the story of Prometheus. Kuhn expanded Müller’s theory to include a variety of weather phenomena—clouds, lightning-bolts, thunder—but did not substantially change its direction.

Müller’s philological principle ruled uncontested for nearly a decade before it was, as Tolkien put it, “dethroned from the high place it once held in this court of inquiry” (MC 121). The dethroner was Andrew Lang, who opposed Müller vigorously and vociferously for more than twenty years and finally toppled him. Lang’s Custom and Myth attacked comparative mythology for its self-limitation to Aryan-speaking peoples and replaced philology with anthropology. To his credit, Lang avoided the Aryan/racial pitfall, but only to fall into the trap of social Darwinism, a pit of almost equal size and...