[davem]

Originally Posted by LMP

Let us distinguish with care: Tolkien is saying that Faery does not equal Imagination, but represents it. Is this nevertheless a modern notion? Surely the ancients thought Faery to be real rather than imagined, but is that saying something different? Nevertheless, how does Faery represent Imagination? According to the paragraph I've quoted first, Imagination (as represented by Faery) is the one thing in our (modern) lives that cannot be known, possessed, controlled. While all else can be enslaved, human imagination remains free. And this is what Tolkien seems to be saying is Imagination without which humans cannot survive.

Who's imagination, though? Is this Faerie as the human imagination, or as the Imagination of the Deity? Maybe even the imagination of the earth itself (why not - if Tom can be the spirit of the countryside?) Faerie as the imagination of the earth strikes me as a distinct possibility, if Men are turning away from the earth & towards technology. Faeries would be the spirits of the earth attempting to awaken Men from their mechanistic 'dream' to reality once more. But I think this asks deeper questions about our relationship with the earth itself. If the Fairies of tradition are antagonistic to Men have we given them reason. Was there a time when we were in harmony with the earth - or sufficiently so that the Faeries more like Tolkien's Elves (or like some of them at least)? If so, then SoWM might represent the 'middle' period, when Faeries sought to bring us back to that harmonious relationship, & the traditional accounts our current state - we have rejected them with contempt, they respond in kind.

I see why you say this, but in your revisionistic zeal I think you may be overlooking what Tolkien faced in the construction of his own Legendarium, for admittedly he DOES hit upon love of humans as the Fairy motivation, and it does carry through his entire ouvre. I submit that Tolkien's thesis, if you will, was (in part at least) that human myths have lost all memory of a former race of being that were Fairy, namely the highest of them, because these very beings have departed from the shores of our middle earth. Therefore, I submit to you that Tolkien was consciously writing a corrective to what he saw as a lack, and thus I find it ironic that here we are these many decades later claiming that Tolkien got it wrong because the human record of the old myths do not contain the very thing he sought to correct in them.

Well, Tolkien invented this concept of Faeries having left these shores & their true nature having been forgotten. If there is such a 'lack' it is a consequence of his own belief/theory/invention. My question is, why invent such a thing? Is this 'lack' universally felt, or was it only felt by Tolkien himself? Well, no longer. We all feel that 'lack' (those of us who respond to his works, that is) but would we have felt it if he hadn't written his Legendarium? Has he actually made us feel the lack of something which we wouldn't have missed otherwise? My point is that we don't find Faeries/Faerie represented/representing in that way prior to him, but he claims in OFS that we did. The whole point is that ' the human record of the old myths do not contain the very thing he sought to correct in them' as you say. But in OFS he is claiming that they did/do contain that 'very thing'.

So I ask: is Tolkien's corrective (as I claim) worth consideration as such? Is it a valid addition to Faeriana?

Is Faerie a 'real' place. or simply a construct of the Human imagination. If it is the former, then one cannot simply 'add' things to it which become accepted on equal terms with what already exists there. One can only so that if it is 'merely' a human construct. If we could add things to it it would be our subject to manipulate & control, to use as we will.

On 'Allegory'

My hunch would be that, given all the backstory, he was aware of how the Great Hall replaced the Church in his village, from early on though not before he started it.

The reason I think his acceptance of 'allegory' in Smith is interesting is that every single time an allegorical interpretation of any of Tolkien's works is brought up those lones from the Introduction to LotR are brought up. I know very well that if I, or anyone else, had suggested that the Great Hall in SoWM was an allegory of the Church, the response would have been one of absolute rejection of the idea, because 'Tolkien disliked alllegory'.

But if Tolkien could write Smith as a 'Fairy story' & later 'discover' an allegorical dimension to it (after dismissing other people's allegorical interpretations: cf his appreciation of Roger Lancelyn Green's statement that to look for an allegorical meaning in Smith was like cutting open the ball to look for its 'bounce') then can we so easily rule out allegory in his other works? Whatever the answer to that question we now have to accept that Tolkien didn't find allegory as distasteful as he makes out in the LotR Foreword.