[Fordim Hedgethistle]

I must say that I am rather overawed by the eloquence and (yes, let me say it) beauty of the recent posts’ descriptions of the enchantment that we all feel in the encounter with Middle-Earth. While I share this sense of enchantment at a deeply visceral level, I have been feeling, at the same time, a slight nagging doubt nibbling at the edge of my mind as I read through this discussion (surprise surprise).

My doubts stem from a problem about this very idea of enchantment that I don’t think we’ve really confronted yet (although SpM did, I think, allude to it in his reference to the “perilous” realm of Faerie). The problem stems from the ‘source’ of the enchantment – what is it, precisely, that is enchanting us as we read LotR (if, indeed, the enchantment happens, which it does not for many). There have been so far in this discussion at least three possibilities floated in response to this:

1) The enchantment is the result of the text’s “access” to some “other realm” of experience (be it called Faerie or God or Jungian archetypes or whatever). In this case, it would seem that the reader is enchanted through the text by that other realm.

2) The enchantment is the result of the immense craft and skill of Tolkien as an artist. He has told such an enchanting story that we cannot help but get caught up in it.

3) We are enchanting ourselves, insofar as we choose to immerse ourselves within that world and “make” (accepting and co-creating) it our own.

With each of these three possibilities, however, I think there is a slightly different danger to the enchantment.

1) If we regard the source of the enchantment as something external to the text – another ‘real’ realm of Faerie or God or archetypes or whatever – then we are saying that as we become enchanted by the text we are doing so only because or insofar as we accept the reality of that other world. To be enchanted by the novel (to take pleasure in reading it, to accept it) is not just to accept the reality of the other world that it accesses, but to acknowledge it. This is a problem, I think, insofar as there are plenty of people who are enchanted by the text (myself among them) who are committed materialists and thus reject utterly the ‘reality’ of an-other realm (be it Faerie or God or archetypes or whatever). Is my enchantment in the text “wrong”? Am I some big dupe who is not really “getting it”? Am I not “really” enchanted by it, unlike those lucky and more refined spirits who do believe in the “reality” or “truth” of that other realm?

2) If we regard the source of the enchantment as something internal to the text – as something that has been created by Tolkien’s ability to put words on a page in an enchanting, or aesthetically pleasing manner – then we are saying that as we become enchanted by the text we are being enchanted by an illusion: that is, by something that is not “real” at all, but simply by the beauty of the art work before us. The problem with this approach, is, I think, self-evident, as it empties the work of the kind of reality that would make the subcreated secondary world applicable to the primary world we live in (to borrow davem’s “A Shop on the Edge of the Hills of Fairyland” it would be to say that the painting is only a painting and that we find it a pleasing picture of a place that doesn’t and cannot exist).

3) If we regard the source of the enchantment as something individual – as the result of our willed immersion in the text – then we end up in an endless round of navel-gazing as we affirm our own personal views (“this is what I think the text is about”) as false universals (“this is what the text is about”).

I have already seen in the discussion that none of us really want to adopt any one of these three extreme measures all on its own. In fact, I’m sure that you will all want to argue that the source of the enchantment is some kind of amalgam or relation of all three. But this presents us with a whole new set of problems, I think, insofar as the three “types” of enchantment we’ve looked at so far are not really compatible:

1) The reality of the enchantment cannot simultaneously be both external (from an-other realm) and individual (from us). Either the external reality exists (and thus ‘lives’ in us) or it does not – you have to choose one or the other (as we all do, every moment of our lives: and, of course, there’s no right or wrong answer to this question).

2) The reality of the enchantment cannot simultaneously be both internal (from the text) and external (from an-other realm), or internal (from the text) and individual (from us), since if the enchantment is the result of Tolkien’s craft, then it is not related to reality at all.

The core problem with whole idea of enchantment seems to me to be that it leads somewhat too easily (necessarily?) toward a rather dictatorial approach to the text: the only way to answer the question “what is enchanting about the text” is to say “what is enchanting about it to me” and then to pretend that we can somehow make the leap from our own individual responses to some sort of universal application to all people (“I am enchanted by the text’s access to Faerie, so that’s what enchants everyone else”; “I am enchanted by the beautiful story, so that’s what enchants everyone else”; “I enchant myself by accepting the text, so that’s what everyone else must do to be enchanted as well”).