[davem]

Originally Posted by drigel

Mine too. I think the fact that a good deal of darkness (Doom, Kinslaying, etc) related to in the Silm was Elf upon Elf, and attests to the fact that not everything was skipping joyously through the woods in Faerie land.

Certainly there is 'darkeness' in Tolkien's Faerie, but it is a 'logical' darkness. What I mean is that the 'chaotic' nature of traditional Faerie is absent - possibly because as an orthodox Christian Tolkien thought in terms of an opposition of Good & Evil, rather than the 'Pagan' opposition of Chaos & Cosmos. The 'Doom' & the Kinslaying are acts of moral evil. In the traditional Faerie there are constant battles between Fairy tribes, there is malicious destruction & cruelty, but there is also a strong trend of childlike, 'innocent', cruelty - like children pulling the wings off flies, or the legs off spiders - not out of a desire to hurt but simply to see what happens. This 'cruelty' seems to reflect a sense of wonder, an eternal curiosity. There are stories of Fairies discovering that a human had seen them & blinding them, stealing babies out of cradles, or beautiful young humans to come & live with them to join their revels. Its about an absence of human feelings & emotions (&, not being human, why should they be expected to share our values?)

So, we're not talking about darkness in the sense of moral evil at all in many instances. Its not that Tolkien was unaware of this side to Fairies - he translated Sir Orfeo, with its account of the kidnapping of Orfeo's wife, Heurodis, & her imprisonment by the Fairy king, & Aotrou & Itroun has a very malicious Fairy, but he seems to have produced a Faerie which was incredibly idiosyncratic & to have created it for a moral/philosophical purpose - well & good - yet he presents this 'Faerie' as Faerie itself. Or, more precisely, at some points he refers to his Faerie as something he has invented - a 'symbol'

My symbol is not the underground, whether necrological and Orphic or pseudo-scientific in jargon, but the Forest:

this 'Faery' is as necessary for the health and complete functioning of the Human as is sunlight for physical life:

while at other times he seems to refer to it as a realm in its own right - neither symbol nor metaphor. In the Fairy Stories essay he refers to it in both ways - without any reference to his own creation. As he does in this essay.

It is plainly shown that Faery is a vast world in its own right, that does not depend for its existence upon Men, and which is not primarily nor indeed principally concerned with Men. The relationship must therefore be one of love:

Faery, for Tolkien, seems to be both a 'real' objectively existing place, or state of being, seperate from, but in relationship with, our own world (hence his constant references to not 'inventing' the Legendarium, but rather 'discovering what really happened') & as 'merely' a metaphor a way of speaking about our ideal relationship to creation - & in its essence it can't be both. Yet it seems that at some times it is wholly one & at other times it is wholly the other. But it becomes more complex, because this 'objective realm' of Faery to which he refers is not the Faerie of tradition - that too is his own creation. In other words he is claiming an objective existence for something he himself constructed - because his Faery is to be found nowhere else in folklore, legend or myth.