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An interesting thread topic indeed. But first:
Squatter are you sure you are apprehending the citation about beauty and evil correctly? You quote Tolkien as writing “to us evil and ugliness seem indissolubly allied. We find it difficult to conceive of evil and beauty together.” To me, this would appear as though he is arguing that to modern readers “us/we” evil and ugliness only “seem” to be “indissolubly allied” with the implication being that in true fairy-story this limitation of the modern imagination is overcome by a different, “older” view in which beauty and evil are not divorced but all too often commensurate. I wonder how much of the Apocryphal tradition concerning the deluding beauty of Lucifer lies behind this view?
Or do I misunderstand you?
But as to the Professor’s ability to write stories as he claims fairy-stories are properly written… I have always been struck by how clearly LotR works toward the sense of “Recovery” outlined in OFS. Again, away from my books so I am unable to provide specific citations, but I do know that the definitive idea of Recovery is that fairy-story uses the Secondary World as a means whereby we can see the Primary World from which it is built not so much in a new way, but in a “recovered” manner. That is, we can see the world and humanity “anew” in a light that is richer and fuller than we now possess. In this regard I think we see that throughout insofar as he shows us models of kingship, kinship, friendship, oath-taking, loyalty and even religious faith that are now absent from the world, but which perhaps we could benefit from. The primary example I would choose for this is the manner in which Tolkien is able to Recover a sense of caritas, of divine love of the other, for the sake of the other, which puts the self at the service of the other. In the end, it’s caritas that saves the day with all the heroes giving over their selves for the love of other people, or simply of people. The modern and shabby remnant we have of this concept is simply “charity” – not nearly what the theologians ans story-tellers of the Middle Ages meant, and what Tolkien is having us remember.
It’s in this recovery of words that Tolkien really shines. “Charity” is recovered in its fullest and richest sense; so are other words like “fellowship”, “power” and “kingly”. None of the words are used in the story as we use them today, but in a manner that evokes older and richer histories – demonstrating that these simple words which we take so much for granted offer us much more capacity than we give them credit for. Kind of like the hobbits!
I suppose in the end the single more important act of Recovery accomplished by his tales is an appreciation of language and of its importance and power that is lamentably absent today. With characters like Gandalf, Galadriel, Bombadil and Treebeard insisting on the importance of words and language, it’s pretty clear that words are not just a vehicle for communication but whole worlds of meaning in their own right. If I might be permitted a rather elaborate and self-conscious metaphor: he reminds a world now committed to the idea that words are coal-carts of a time when they were seen as rich mines.
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