The Realm of Faerie
A very bright and very earnest young man asked me as a personal favor to write an article explaining J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous essay ‘On Fairy Stories’. It is a task I am honored to attempt, but inadequate.
The essay is seminal for understanding the role modern fantasy should fill but which it so often does not. It is also one of many examples of the general rule that Christians see things in their entirety, which the pagan worldview can only partially see, and to which atheists are blind.
Professor Tolkien in his opening tells us precisely what questions he means to answer in the essay: What are fairy-stories, what is their origin, what is their use? This last point is the true meat of the matter. Tolkien’s theory is that the use of fairy stories falls is Recovery, Escape, Consolation.
But he starts with a word of warning that the subject matter is itself elfin:
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 peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveller who would report them. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost.
1. What are fairy-stories?
Tolkien says this rather simply:
Fairy-stories are not in normal English usage stories about fairies or elves, but stories about Fairy, that is Faerie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being. Faerie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.
Faërie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible. It has many ingredients, but analysis will not necessarily discover the secret of the whole. Yet I hope that what I have later to say about the other questions will give some glimpses of my own imperfect vision of it. For the moment I will say only this: a “fairy-story” is one which touches on or uses Faerie, whatever its own main purpose may be: satire, adventure, morality, fantasy.
Faerie itself may perhaps most nearly be translated by Magic—but it is magic of a peculiar mood and power, at the furthest pole from the vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific, magician. There is one proviso : if there is any satire present in the tale, one thing must not be made fun of, the magic itself. That must in that story be taken seriously, neither laughed at nor explained away.
You can see why I am inadequate to explain Tolkien’s word. His word are so luminous and clear, I have no way of knowing what is open to being misunderstood. Fairy stories are stories concerning that dangerous and luminous realm where creatures higher on the scale of being stand, elfs and spirits angels, but also dark elfs, unclear spirits, and fallen angels.
The magic of the higher beings is a living thing, a thing that enters the soul and allows the soul to become one with nature, momentarily overcoming the division and alienation from our world and the creatures over whom we hold dominion the Sons of Adam suffered in the Fall of Man. This magic is very much unlike the studies of the alchemist or chemist, astrologer or engineer.
2. What is their origin?
The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both. When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter’s power—upon one plane; and the desire to wield that power in the world external to our minds awakes. It does not follow that we shall use that power well upon any plane. We may put a deadly green upon a man’s face and produce a horror; we may make the rare and terrible blue moon to shine; or we may cause woods to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and put hot fire into the belly of the cold worm. But in such “fantasy,” as it is called, new form is made; Faerie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator.
In sum, the power of reason, the power to name objects, give men the power to invent stories. Tolkien uses the awkward phrase ‘sub-creation’ to refer to the process of combining thoughts to make new thoughts, or combining elements to make new products. We cannot make new worlds, but we can make new worlds in the imagination, new imaginary worlds. Since Tolkien is the foremost craftsman in this particular art since Homer, if not since Adam, I would suggest the wise heed his words on this.
(Creation is a word Tolkien reserves to the Divine Being. While this is pious, it is unnecessary, because it is unlikely the reader would mistake one for the other. I suggest using the phrase ‘creation ex nihilo’ for the divine act of making the universe, and creation can then be used for all creative acts of creatures constructing ideas and goods out of existing elements.)
3. What is the use of them?
Another famous line from the essay is here worth quoting in full:
It is usually assumed that children are the natural or the specially appropriate audience for fairy-stories. Actually, the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the “nursery,” as shabby or oldfashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused.
Thanks to the work of Professor Tolkien and the Inklings, and in some measure to auxiliaries such as Lin Carter of Ballantine Books, this sentence no longer applies to this generation. All the important work in literature is being done in fantasy and science fiction, and the popular tastes have finally caught up with us. We are those happy few who, when the world turned its back on Homer and Shakespeare and Wagner, and ignored the gods and ghosts and witches and magic rings, ignored the world. Now that fantasy has returned from its long exile to the mainstream and center of popular writing, the mundane and muggle writings, and the mummified remnant of literary critical who think themselves elite, are the ones who find themselves relegated to the play-room, or the musty attic.
Tolkien is, in fact, the one who coined the use of the term fantasy in the way literature now uses it:
For my present purpose I require a word which shall embrace both the Subcreative Art in itself and a quality of strangeness and wonder in the Expression, derived from the Image: a quality essential to fairy-story. I propose, therefore, to arrogate to myself the powers of Humpty-Dumpty, and to use Fantasy for this purpose: in a sense, that is, which combines with its older and higher use as an equivalent of Imagination the derived notions of “unreality” (that is, of unlikeness to the Primary World), of freedom from the domination of observed “fact,” in short of the fantastic. I am thus not only aware but glad of the etymological and semantic connexions of fantasy with fantastic: with images of things that are not only “not actually present,” but which are indeed not to be found in our primary world at all, or are generally believed not to be found there. But while admitting that, I do not assent to the depreciative tone. That the images are of things not in the primary world (if that indeed is possible) is a virtue, not a vice. Fantasy (in this sense) is, I think, not a lower but a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent.
Here I can serve as an interpreter, for the passage is prolix and mildly obscure.
All story telling is an admixture of fact and fancy. Facts are things in the world as we know, things are they are; fancy are things from beyond, things as they should be (and this is so whether we regret or rejoice that things are not as they should be).
All stories, even rather strict historical accounts of real events, have an admixture of fancy, if nothing else in the editorial selection of timing and material to produce a dramatic effect. Stories less realistic have more fancy introduced, poetic license, a degree of ritual and pomp in the telling: brave deeds, acts of craven cowardice, heroes more stalwart of damsels fairer or villains fouler, each far better and far worse than what is encountered every day, this grows as we add less fact and more fancy. Finally we reach a point we the tale contains talking beasts and spirits of astonishing aspect, miracles, ironic or ghastly coincidences, grisly horrors, sublime mountains or uncrossed seas, demigods and gods, angels and demons.
What Tolkien is saying there is that the tales that partake most of fancy and are least propped up by fact require more art and imagination on the part of the artist. A tale set in New York does not require the storyteller to invent any new settings, and may not allow it, especially if New Yorkers are in the audience. But a tale set in Oz or Middle Earth, Narnia, Poictisme, Cimmeria, Barsoom, Lud-in-the-Mist or Earthsea requires an abundance of invention. Even when the elfland is meant to parallel closely some real place, the storyteller might use his imagination to decide which elements of real history to leave in and which to leave out, and by leaving them in, he must integrate them seamlessly with his tale, and make them his own, lest the whole enterprise of creation miscarry, and the spell the story teller seeks to weave be broken by one scoffing laugh. What is true of settings is also true of props and characters: an elfish story which takes place (as nearly all fairy stories do) in the real world must have some visitor or visitation from a native of elfland, majestic or magical or monstrous, or else it is not a fairy story.
Science fiction and fantasy differ from all mundane and quotidian stories in exactly this one respect: more fancy is required both to tell and to savor them. Every other form of storytelling uses the same elements of plot, character, props, setting, theme, and so on. Only science fiction and fantasy have the additional element of world-building present, where the fantasy must abide by the dreamlike logic of magic which we all half-remember from childhood or dreams if not from previous incarnations, and science fiction must abide by the scientific worldview of the extrapolated into undiscovered regions. But whether fantasy or science fiction, this type of tale takes place either beyond the fields we know, or with some invader or visitor or fugitive from that great beyond visiting us here.
Tolkien, being a Christian seeped in the literature of Christendom, was able to see something his increasingly secular peers were increasingly losing sight of. He saw the relationship between the supernatural and the natural which rests at the heart of the spirit for storytelling.
Note that there is no nation, race, tongue or tribe of any race in any eras which lacks this spirit.
But what it that spirit? If the secular view of the world were correct, we are one animal among many, cleverer than they, but produced by the same blind natural processes: language can be accounted for, because it might enhance the ability of any family or tribe that had a gene for language some ability to retain and store survival information, survival strategies, and so on.
Language then could be used to abstract general rules from particular observations, to spread orders both tactical and strategic on survival and reproductive matters, or enact rules for increasing survival and reproduction chances, or to spread cultural information in the form of news and gossip when and only when such news or gossip aided survival and reproductive chances . There is no reason to have stories.
There is not even a reason to have fables after the fashion of Aesop, who likens kings to lions and courtiers to jackals and draws other clear and broad analogies. To say that the morals of the story are easier to remember if they are expressed in an imaginative and amusing form begs the question: for what Darwinian advantage to reproduction or survival accrues to creatures possessed of imagination and amusement? Merely to list the morals of the stories takes less time and memory and parchment than to list the stories; stories are innately inefficient. The secular view, if it were true, could provide an answer to the question of why natural selection would universally select the storytelling traits to all human beings; and to say the trait of storytelling was selected by a blind natural process because it fulfills the human imaginative need for storytelling is to argue in a circle.
The spirit of storytelling is the spirit of creation. We fallen men are somehow in our hearts dimly aware that a barrier surrounds us, an unseen veil severing us from lower animals as well as from higher spirits. We tell stories for many reasons, but one is to mitigate this one most horrible penalty of the exile imposed by expulsion from Eden, which is the penalty of no more seeing the friends and neighbors of the homeland to which one cannot return. We tell stories for many reasons, but one is to rectify in the imagination the wound of this exile, which we call the human condition.
Fantasy, of course, starts out with an advantage: arresting strangeness. But that advantage has been turned against it, and has contributed to its disrepute. Many people dislike being “arrested.” They dislike any meddling with the Primary World, or such small glimpses of it as are familiar to them. They, therefore, stupidly and even maliciously confound Fantasy with Dreaming, in which there is no Art; and with mental disorders, in which there is not even control: with delusion and hallucination.
Here Tolkien pauses to make the point that elfland is beyond the small cramped cell of our world, not within it, and has nothing in common with the small cramped cells into which madmen are thrust. If anything, it is the mere opposite. I know many people, I am one of them, who flees to Middle Earth in order, if in my imagination only, to breathe the atmosphere of a world more sane than our own, where kings are righteous and proud stewards are undone by pride, elf queens are fair, fell spirits are dark and dreadful, dragons are greedy and omnipotent, and even humble gardeners have a sense of solid decency. There is not a single sign anywhere of the defining insanities of the modern age.
To the elvish craft, Enchantment, Fantasy aspires, and when it is successful of all forms of human art most nearly approaches.
Tolkien with these words turns to the central discussion of the purpose of fairy stories: Recovery, Escape, Consolation.
Here I am reduced merely to writing a summation, and any one truly interested in the topic must read the original essay.
5. Recovery
The first proper use of fairy stories is recovery of the eyes of Eden, to see things unclouded by the hatreds and biases and hysterical lusts and hungers we breathe in with every breath of our fallen world.
We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness.
Recovery is regaining a clearer view, by which Professor Tolkien means a clear view of man and nature, man and heaven, man and hell, and man and the moral order of the universe.
Of course, fairy-stories are not the only means of recovery, or prophylactic against loss. Humility is enough. And there is (especially for the humble) Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy. Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle.
Chesterton, alas, is the only author I have ever encountered with this power.
6. Escape
The second and most noble lawful use of fairy stories is escape, that is, escape from the awful, ironclad, clanging, universe-sized coffin of an empty universe filled with nothing by confused naked apes, dumb animals, and roaring and titanic suns in space shining on an endless wasteland of dead worlds of ice or craters or lava, with venom for air, or vacuum. It is to escape from the factory.
Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it.
This means the escape from the world and worldly matters into the atmosphere of Elfland, which is to say, the mingled sulfur of Hell and the aether of Heaven.
Why should we not escape from or condemn the “grim Assyrian” absurdity of top-hats, or the Morlockian horror of factories? They are condemned even by the writers of that most escapist form of all literature, stories of Science fiction. These prophets often foretell (and many seem to yearn for) a world like one big glass-roofed railway-station. … To judge by some of these tales they will still be as lustful, vengeful, and greedy as ever; and the ideals of their idealists hardly reach farther than the splendid notion of building more towns of the same sort on other planets.
In Faerie one can indeed conceive of an ogre who possesses a castle hideous as a nightmare (for the evil of the ogre wills it so), but one cannot conceive of a house built with a good purpose—an inn, a hostel for travellers, the hall of a virtuous and noble king—that is yet sickeningly ugly. At the present day it would be rash to hope to see one that was not—unless it was built before our time.
Incidentally, this is the reason why I could not read to the end of IRON DRAGON’S DAUGHTER by that able and witty author, Michael Swanwick. The idea of a factory setting in faerie was too abhorrent to me. It was, in effect, an antifairy story, a deconstruction or mockery of fairy tales. Why need have I to read a mockery of elfland? I need only read a newspaper. Our world is a mockery of elfland, a diseased and decayed form of that shining and primal paradise, and we grew less and ever less like the original each day.
7. Consolation
This, however, is the modern and special (or accidental) “escapist” aspect of fairy-stories, which they share with romances, and other stories out of or about the past. Many stories out of the past have only become “escapist” in their appeal through surviving from a time when men were as a rule delighted with the work of their hands into our time, when many men feel disgust with manmade things. But there are also other and more profound “escapisms” that have always appeared in fairytale and legend. There are other things more grim and terrible to fly from than the noise, stench, ruthlessness, and extravagance of the internal-combustion engine. There are hunger, thirst, poverty, pain, sorrow, injustice, death.
And even when men are not facing hard things such as these, 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. Some are pardonable weaknesses or curiosities: 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, that longing which the aeroplane cheats, except in rare moments, seen high and by wind and distance noiseless, turning in the sun: that is, precisely when imagined and not used. There are profounder wishes: such as the desire to converse with other living things. On this desire, as ancient as the Fall, is largely founded the talking of beasts and creatures in fairy-tales, and especially the magical understanding of their proper speech.
And lastly there is the oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape: the Escape from Death.
But the “consolation” of fairy-tales has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires. Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending. Almost I would venture to assert that all complete fairy-stories must have it. At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairystory. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite—I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function. The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,” nor “fugitive.” In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur.
Fairy stories in other words are an attempt to use as an example in our imagination of the pleasures of heaven or the pains of hell, and to renew our half buried and half forgotten memories of what the world was like when our first ancestors in glorified bodies before the fall walked here: two figures naked but shining like the sun, impervious, agile, able to pass any distance or pass through any matter, being made of something more like thought, more like joy, than sullen flesh and blood.
Fairy stories are children’s exercises to accustom our minds to the great supernatural reality, the world larger and more glorious than this, the world beyond the walls of the world, which is our true home. Fairy tales are training for faith and joy. Joy is the serious business of heaven, and we best start training for it now.
8. The Epilogue: Christ and Oberon
I have no word to add to explain the epilogue of this essay. If you do not understand, my rephrasing will not clarify the deep matter here:
I would venture to say that approaching the Christian Story from this direction, it has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt making-creatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairystory, 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, selfcontained 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. It has pre-eminently the “inner consistency of reality.” There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.
It is not difficult to imagine the peculiar 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 had possessed. It is not difficult, for one is not called upon to try and conceive anything of a quality unknown. The joy would have exactly the same quality, if not the same degree, as the joy which the “turn” in a fairy-story gives: such joy has the very taste of primary truth. (Otherwise its name would not be joy.) It looks forward (or backward: the direction in this regard is unimportant) to the Great Eucatastrophe. The Christian joy, the Gloria, is of the same kind; but it is preeminently (infinitely, if our capacity were not finite) high and joyous. But this story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men—and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused.
But in God’s kingdom the presence of the greatest does not depress the small. Redeemed Man is still man. Story, fantasy, still go on, and should go on. The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the “happy ending.” The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
