[davem]

This mention of prophecy ties in with what I was saying yesterday. Both Robert Kirk & Thomas the Rhymer, who was given the gift of 'the tongue that cannot lie' (or prophecy) by the Queen of Elfland, are traditionally believed to have been taken into Elfland rather than dying. It was believed that those who spent time visiting fairyland during life would pass into that realm, & carry on living there, outside time. Tolkien seems to have been taken with this idea of a mortal who stumbles into Faery, & then passes into that realm, leaving the mortal world forever. Frodo is an example, I suppose. There seems to be a sense of unfullfillable restlessness which comes to those who enter faerie, a need to go back there, which can never be sated.

Yet the case is different with Smith. As Flieger puts it, comparing Smith & the Sea Bell, (quoted from A Question of Time)

'The visions in each work are equally beautiful & terrible, but in Smith, as in The Hobbit, the torment is stilled, & the traveller returns to peace with himself & with his world. Like Frodo, Smith must finally leave Faery & not return, but unlike Frodo, he finds consolation in family & friends, in the things of this world. Like the voyager in the Sea Bell, the traveller in Smith of Wooton Major is given to know that this Otherworld is not for him; but unlike the voyager he, he is not summarily & arbitrarily banished from the enchantment (though it must be acknowledged that on one occaision he is sternly warned away). Rather, he comes finally to give it up of free will - albeit reluctantly - & returns to ordinary life & love, not isolated but enriched by where he has been & what he has seen....It was in the writing of Smith that Tolkien came to confront & accept the limits of his own ventures into Faerie, his own travel through time, & it was in that story that he came finally to acknowledge in the way he knew best his growing sense that his time was running out.'

She goes on with reference to an essay Tolkien wrote about the story:

'Where the Elven dwellers in the Faerie world of 'The Sea Bell' ignored the overtures of the solitary voyager & were indifferent to his desires, the Elven folk of this latest Faerie are actively concerned with & perhaps even dependent on the spiritual life of Wooton Major & therefore (it would seem) are careful for the welfare of its inhabitants. It is their unsolicited effort to bring Wooton back from its increasing vulgar materiality that forms the deeper background to the 'external' history that lies behind the story....Both these writings (the story & the essay about it) are deply involved in Tolkien's effort to attain the ....unstated goals in the writing of Smith, the reconciliation of Faerie time & human time & the independent yet interdependent nature of the two worlds'

Tolkien continues in the essay:

'Faery represents at its weakest a breaking out (at least in mind) from the iron ring of the familiar, still more from the adamantine ring of belief that is known, possessed, controlled, & so (ultimately) all that is worth being considered - a constant awareness of the world beyond these rings......Faery might be said indeed to represent 'imagination'; esthetic, exploratory & receptive. & artistic; inventive, dynamic, (sub)creative......the begining & ending of a story is to it like the edges of a canvas or an added frame to a picture, say a landscape. it concestrates the tellers (sic) attention, & yours on one mall part of the country. But there are of course no real limits: under the earth, & in the sky above, & in the remote & faintly glimpsed distances, & in the unrevealed regions on either side, there are things that influence the very shape & colour of the part that is pictured. Without them it would be quite different, & they are really necessary to understanding what is seen'

Final quote from the essay: (Tolkien is speaking about the relationship of Faerie & the human realm)

'this relationship is 'one of love: the elven folk, the chief & ruling inhabitants of faery, have an ultimate kinship with Men & have a permanent love for them in general. Though they are not bound by any moral obligation to assist Men, & do not need their help (except in human affairs), they do from time to time try to assist them, avert evil from them & have relations with them, especially through certain men & women whom they find suitable.''

So we have a vision of two worlds, the inhabitants of each interacting, & forming relationships, based on the love of the one for the other, but all we have is 'glimpses' of that world, limited by the 'frame' of the story. So Middle Earth is Faerie, the same Faerie that Smith enters through the power of the Star, & the same Faerie that we glimpse in dreams & visions, both beautiful & perilous, with 'dungeons for the overbold'.

So, what, from this perspective, would constitute 'canon'? If both Smith & Roverandom are windows onto Faerie (& the 'Little Kingdom' of Giles, we must also suppose), & if the inhabitants of Faerie even speak to us, & show us visions of their world, then the precise limits & definitions fade & vanish, & we are left with enchantment. Would Tolkien have thought 'canon' more important than this enchantment - probably not by the time he came to write Smith.

Smith is an odd story to end up writing. He spent so long defining with incredible precision the 'rules' of his 'secondary world', setting its limits, historical, linguistic, social, religious. But then, in his final stab at a fairy story, he introduces us to a world without those rules & limits. A fanfic set in Middle Earth, in order to convince, has to obey all the rules. A fanfic set in Smith's Faery would, it seems have to obey almost none, as long as it captures the spirit, casts the spell. Yet Tolkien seems to imply that the two worlds are the same, & its only a different focus, a different 'frame' around the two stories, that gives the illusion that they are different worlds. Galadriel & the Queen of Smith's Faery are not so very different creatures. Perhaps in Smith Tolkien was dismantling his 'canon' & throwing open a 'window' to let in the air of another world, having realised that his 'Tree', the Legendarium which he had worked on all his life was just one tree in the forest of Faerie that Smith wandered in.