[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by Tolkien, OFS

Fairie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold.

Pitfalls indeed, for already we are fallen into one, that of confusing what we are talking about.

Actually, yes, I was interested in seeing if Tolkien followed his own understanding of fairie. Did his left brain do what his right brain said? Did Tolkien the creative writer actually do what Tolkien the scholar said happened in the Perilous Realm?

In this, I greatly admire Squatter, thorough-going analysis. It is something I will return to in later posts, for the question of whether one begins in the primary world and walks into Fairie is an important one, as lmp asks. And yes, I also think that not all of Tolkien's work works the way he says fairy does.

Raynor points out how Sauce and Lal take this a different way, to consider what aspects of Fairie Tolkien did not cover. This question can be related both to the essay OFS and to his fiction, but it was not the main thrust that inspired this thread. So, we have two questions: "Did Tolkien get it right about Fairie? Does he cover all the aspects of it?" and "Does OFS provide a way in which we can understand what Tolkien was doing in his fiction?"

Both are equally valid approaches, but they are different and we should keep that difference in mind.

A thread, of course, belongs to those who post on it and develop its ideas. If people wish to compare Tolkien's fiction to other fairie tales (something which we have covered in many other threads, as Lal's helpful links demonstrate, why, then, they are free to take that tack. (I would really like to see a thead which compares Johanna Clarke's fairie with Tolkien's, as Spm suggests here.) Yet that does squew the topic.

I rather like Squatter's observation that fairie must start in the real world, as Gawain does. Yet I think Tolkien was striving to distinguish primary world from sub-created world. I think he wanted, above all, to make story the primary quality of discussion and not reduce fairie to sociology or history or anthropology. It might be incidental that LotR begins already in the perilous realm with hobbits because that in itself is the nature of fairie, the sustained wonder at things we wish for. The important point about Sir Gawain is that the realism of the medieval world does not dismiss the fantasy elements.