[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by SpM

I have no wish to take this thread off at a tangent

What are you calling Tangent, Sauce? You know I am interested in the question of Tolkien’s depiction of evil and you were simply trying to get to it before I could.

There’s some neat stuff developing here, so I hope what I have to say in this post won’t derail it.

I have been fascinated by OFS since I first read it. It was courageous stuff, giving a formal academic lecture about fantasy and fairy tales in 1938. And if that wasn’t enough to whet my interest, Tolkien in the original introduction says it was written at the same time as LotR was started. So, whatever went into OFS was rattling around up there along with the beginnings of the Ring saga. This reason in itself suggests it might be interesting to apply the essay to Tolkien’s fiction. It certainly suggests that The Hobbit and the Legendarium were not initially conceived under the auspices of his thoughts about fairie, and so leads quite directly to consideration of how LotR might differ from those two earlier works. Maybe his thought was inchoate in the earlier works but finally born out in the latter? (And, of course, I suppose we would have to consider how CT may have shaped The Silm as it was eventually published.)

There are many things intriguing about OFS. Tolkien’s insistence that there are misguided notions about fairie tales for one. And his insistence that there are higher and lesser forms of fantastical literature, to say nothing of his defense of fairy tales as adult rather than children’s literature. As I read OFS, I keep in mind two of his comments from elsewhere: that it was WWI which made him a serious reader of fairie, although he was heading over to the Perilous Realm already before the War took him there directly; and that the War made others readers of fairie as well. I’ve always thought that there was more to these comments than mere escapism, “Run away! Run away!” in Python terms.

These comments must, I think, relate to what Tolkien suggests is the essential nature of fairie, not magic, nor elves, nor darkness nor travel, nor wild imagining, but “Recovery, Escape, and Consolation” . Yet why is this? Is it Tolkien’s religious sense being imposed upon fairy tales? Does he force eucatastrophe on the stories?

It may be—and here I have to say that I don’t share Helen’s reading of eucatastrophe in every fortunate turn of events in LotR, for I think there is a particular state of mind which must accompany the fortuitous redirection. There is not just unexpected deliverance in Tolkien’s theory, but an accompanying recognition of imperfection of the world, of evil, of doom. Frodo accepts his defeat before Gollem becomes the agent of the deliverance, just as Gawin submits to his fate, not expecting reprieve at the hands of the Green Knight. It is not simply that something redeems the sorry or perilous state of the hero, but that the hero must come to accept his final defeat, this tragedy or catastrophe, before he will be for the time being delivered from it. And in any case, he carries with him a token of that tragedy, the scar on Gawin's neck from the third strike, barely averted, and the loss of a finger in Frodo's case.

What is this that requires such doom in fairy for Tolkien? What made Tolkien create this special kind of fantasy he insisted was the higher order of fairie?

I don’t think it was his religion. I think it was his philology. And last night, I was finally able to put the last piece together in this puzzle (for me at least), due to an important tip from Rune, Son of Bjarne, who alerted me to a particular meaning of fey. The Old English word fey had a different meaning than the Middle English word fay.

Originally Posted by Dictionary.com

Word History: The history of the words fey and fay illustrates a rather fey coincidence. Our word fay, “fairy, elf,” the descendant of Middle English faie, “a person or place possessed of magical properties,” and first recorded around 1390, goes back to Old French fae, “fairy,” the same word that has given us fairy. Fae in turn comes from Vulgar Latin F ta, “the goddess of fate,” from Latin f tum, “fate.” If fay goes back to fate, so does fey in a manner of speaking, for its Old English ancestor f æge meant “fated to die.” The sense we are more familiar with, “magical or fairylike in quality,” seems to have arisen partly because of the resemblance in sound between fay and fey.

Somewhere in the Letters or Carpenter’s biography is the statement that all of Tolkien’s writing derived from his work with language. (I do hope I've got that right.) He created a world to explain words. And here in this linguistic coincidence of fay and fey lies his life long fascination with the Perilous Realm: that it is a world where we can with arresting newness and strangeness confront death and our mortality, but come away without despairing loss.

Originally Posted by OFS

they [these old fairy stories] open a door on Other Time, and if we pass through, though only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself, maybe.

Some time ago I posted on the Downs that a later reading of LotR made me see that the quest is about Death. (Yes, this was years before a prominent Downer made a similar recent claim. ) But then, I thought it was merely my personal circumstances which inspired this reading. Now I have—at least to my satisfaction—a philological argument to support that reading.

Yet whether other fantasy—or even The Hobbit and The Silmarillion-- must conform to this sense of the Perilous Realm is for others to discuss. I'm sure it will be possible to work evil and amorality and travel to and from into the Cauldron!