SmP
I suppose it depends what we understand 'Faerie' to be. Our ancstors really believed in the 'other world'. To them, fairies were real beings, as were dwarves, goblins, giants, dragons, etc. Even into the 20th century people in rural areas believed in the existence of fairies. There are numerous accounts from Ireland, by Yeats & Lady Gregory, from Scotland, Wales & Brittany (for example in WY Evans-Wentz's book 'The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries). There is also a very interesting book by a seventeenth century Scottish clergyman, Robert Kirk, called 'The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns & Fairies' which deals with the Highland Seers he dealt encountered & their ability, through the 'second sight' to see fairies (inhabitants of this 'other world', & interact with them. I've also come across accounts from Iceland of people seeing Elves. These are very much the kind of beings Tolkien describes - in appearance at least.
If we take the folklore accounts, then there was a strong belief in the existence of this other level of reality. Certain places, like crossroads, or special trees (notably Oak or Thorn) which were believed to be 'crossing places' into the other world. In Ireland there was a belief that when Men arrived the fair folk retreated inside the earth, where they continued their old life uninterupted. There are accounts in the legends of people entering into fairy hills & finding themselves in 'Faerie', with an open sky above them, & landscapes of hills, forests & mountains. A common tradition is that time itself moves at a different rate, or that it ceases to exist while in faerie.
Clearly we can find 'echoes' of these traditional beliefs in Tolkien's works - many of his Elves live in underground realms, & in Lorien there is an implication that time moves at a different pace.
Tolkien seems to make use of these traditions. In fact, the more you know about these traditions the clearer it becomes that Tolkien hasn't just taken creatures from tradition, like Elves & Dwarves, but many of the beliefs of our ancestors & woven them into Middle Earth. But this has been pointed out by people like Shippey. Tolkien was, at least at first, attempting to recreate a lost world, trying to link together scattered beliefs & traditions so as to get closer to the world our ancestors inhabited imaginatvely.
So, does this mean that we have in some way 'inherited', in our 'genes' (or whatever the psychological equivalent of genes are) some awareness of this 'other world', & that Middle Earth in someway opens a kind of 'window', as you put it, onto this other reality? That's difficult to say, & many Christian Tolkien fans of a more 'fundamentalist' persuasion would be decidedly uncomfortable with this whole idea, believing that 'pagan' gods & such like were all tricks of the Devil intended to 'lure' our ancestors to damnation, or at the very least the result of their being in a state of 'ignorant savagery' from which they needed the teachings of the church to save them.
But what relevance all these traditions have to our understanding of Tolkien's work is questionable. Tolkien makes the point in the Fairy Stories essay that when we read fairy stories we aren't reading them, or more importantly understanding them in the way our ancestors did. For instance, how many people put up a Chrismas tree in full knowledge of its origins in tree worship, which can be traced back to Yggdrasil, the world Tree, whose branches linked together the Nine Worlds of Norse cosmology (Yggdrasil meaning Ygg's, or Odin's, 'horse' - a 'kenning' or poetic image - Odin hung on the Tree for nine nights in order to gain knowledge of the Runes, & therefore of the magical power they conferred), or even further back, to the tree climbed by the ancient shamans in order to gain access to the other world? The fact is, most people don't know that tradition, & wouldn't care about it if they did. They put up their Christmas tree because its 'traditional', & the meaning it has for them comes from their memories of family Christmasses spent decorating it & seeing it in a corner of the room during the festivities.
In other words, we can read too much 'meaning' into these 'mythical' histories, & give too much weight to them. There is a real danger of breaking a thing to find out what it is made of, of breaking the enchantment by attenmpting to find out too much about the spell & the one who cast it. Your 'vision' of the moonlit landscape stretching away to distant mountains may well be archtypal, it may have been a 'glimpse' into the otherworld, which our ancestors would have told you was always 'hiding' just out of sight. Maybe you had a 'falsh' of second sight (are you the seventh son of a seventh son - I think we should be told
-it is the kind of thing those seers would have taken quite seriously).
But none of that is really relevant. What matters is the
effect that 'vision' had on you. Whether it was inspired by your reading of Tolkien or not, you 'saw' something (some 'place'?) that was not of this world. You saw into a 'secondary world' - your 'own' Middle Earth if not Tolkien's. Maybe you should see where that vision takes you - perhaps you could be another Tolkien. What kind of world was it, who lives there, what's on the other side of those mountains, who is wandering those woods besides you. That's the real question, not where the 'vision' came from, but where it enables you to go imaginatively. Possibly Tolkien's original inspiration came from just such a 'vision', & look what a merry dance he's lead all of us since seeing it
