"Genuine fairy-story" ?

[littlemanpoet]

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

SpM brings up the important point that there needs to be amorality in Fairy tales, as Faerie is itself amoral. That's not to say immoral, as that's quite a different thing.

Does there really need to be amorality in Fairy tales? I rather think Tolkien makes a good point by saying that human fairy tales are about humans in Fairy, not about Fairies; Fairies wouldn't write stories about Fairy since they live it. Humans are inescapably moral beings, thus their Fairy Stories must be moral stories, regardless of whether Fairy is itself amoral.

However, Tolkien's Middle Earth, with all of its Fairies (Elves) is not in the least amoral. It seems to me that a rather important question, along with those that have been raised already, is NOT "Was Tolkien wrong?", but "Why did Tolkien make his Fairy Realm moral?"

Originally Posted by Lal

The last one is there as inside, you will find a fair bit of evidence and argument to suggest that there is actaully one very odd and ambiguous character in Tolkien's world and that's Ungoliant.

But not morally ambiguous.

[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!

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

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.

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Originally Posted by Fordim

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?

Good to see you again, Fordim. I'm always deeply suspicious of opinion posts that remain unchallenged in their fundamentals, particularly mine. In this case, however, you do misunderstand me. I agree with your reading of the passage I quoted, and my comments should be read in that light. I was, in fact, pointing out that Tolkien very rarely shows us beauty and evil together, although he identifies this as an element of fairy-stories, an element of which he appears to approve. In fact, he seems to regard the tendency for evil and ugliness to become conflated in the contemporary mind as a symptom of moral and aesthetic degeneration; yet despite this the motif occurs more frequently in his fiction than does that of evil beauty. Since Tolkien's use of the first person necessarily includes him in the group described, it's probable that he recognised this a tendency in his own imagination as well as that of the modern collective consciousness which he describes.

If the deluding beauty of Lucifer were not in some way involved in Tolkien's vision of evil I should be extremely surprised. Morgoth and Sauron both share qualities with the Great Adversary, who is the inevitable model for evil in the Christian mind. Lucifer was once the brightest of angels, and in at least one Anglo-Saxon poem both he and his rebel angels are portrayed as retaining the ability to appear in the angelic form that once they possessed. In fact this is central to the temptation of Eve in Genesis B, a poem both several hundred years older and quite a lot better than Paradise Lost. For Tolkien not to be influenced by an element of his own religion's philosophy which he would encounter regularly in his philological studies he would need to be more difficult to influence than even C.S. Lewis thought. I suspect that the same motif had influenced medieval fantastic fiction, whence come many of Tolkien's theories about fairy-stories.

Unfortunately time is short, so I must break off here. Really I only wanted to clarify my point above, and I hope that I've managed to do so.

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by lmp

Does there really need to be amorality in Fairy tales? I rather think Tolkien makes a good point by saying that human fairy tales are about humans in Fairy, not about Fairies; Fairies wouldn't write stories about Fairy since they live it. Humans are inescapably moral beings, thus their Fairy Stories must be moral stories, regardless of whether Fairy is itself amoral.

Well if we hope in any way to reflect Faerie then yes, a tale does have to reflect the amorality of Faerie, as that's the nature of the place/concept - its somewhere outside the rules, beyond the law and out of most people's comprehension. If humans are inescapably moral (and some might argue we are at root simply apes with the evolutionary benefits of walking upright, having opposable thumbs and having a varied diet) then the writers of Faery tales might put a moral 'spin' on them. In fact its probably right that there are moral spins on all Faery tales written by humans as we only have our own understanding of the world on which to base our writings of encounters with Faerie. Therefore if we take a particular moral stance then we might put that spin on our stories to a greater or lesser degree.

This of course is without considering the purpose of the tale. Are we talking about Hansel and Gretel, which serves the purpose of teaching children not to stray from the path and end up in strangers' houses? Or are we talking about Bluebeard which teaches young women about predatory men and how to bring them to heel? Or are we talking about Tam Lin which simply relates a juicy tale of a pair of lovers and how the pregnant girl extricates her lover from the clutches of the Faerie Queen? The last type of tale does not really have a specific moral message (you could find one but then you'd have to smash up the story so much it would lose it's sense of Faerie magic), and is probably there to satisfy the human urge for narrative. Adventure, peril, love and sex. A lot of Faerie Tale is there to entertain simply, like an old fashioned version of the mdoern soap opera.

Originally Posted by lmp

However, Tolkien's Middle Earth, with all of its Fairies (Elves) is not in the least amoral. It seems to me that a rather important question, along with those that have been raised already, is NOT "Was Tolkien wrong?", but "Why did Tolkien make his Fairy Realm moral?"

We have already found that the tale Tolkien created was not an amoral one, and it is possibly due to his wish to create a myth that was "purged of the gross", as to be honest, Faerie Tale is not about redemption or hope or joy or any of those things, its about danger, wicked fun, dreams, bodily fluids and death. Many of the tales are about parents murdering or abandoning their children, about predatory men, periods, adultery, and all kinds of other stuff that Tolkien did not write about (well not much anyway, The Children of Hurin is another matter...). I'd love to have put Tolkien and Angela Carter in the same room and sat back and watched the fur fly.

Originally Posted by lmp

But not morally ambiguous.

Ungoliant most defintely is ambiguous, check out the evidence in the Spiders thread that Bethberry and myself found.

Originally Posted by Fordim

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.

Of course Tolkien made great use of language, its origins and meanings, and this is a great interpretation of Recovery, but you've spoiled it now by saying that this appreciation of language is 'lamentably absent today' as that's just wrong! You could have a whole army of modern writers after your blood, and in the front line would be the poets with their pitchforks, closely followed by a lot of other writers of the most unlikely kind. For example the copywriters who bend, twist and turn words to get the exact phrase which will both catch the eye and be deep with alternate meanings. I've written speeches and believe me, those words are not used as 'coal-carts', every single word and where it is placed counts, and I mean seriously counts; the top speech writers are cherished as finding a brilliant one is like finding moondust.

For me the sense of Recovery is in the sense that Tolkien created his mythology to dedicate to England. He did indeed gather up a sense of Englishness, encapsulating so much of what our language means to us, our tales and most of all, our land, redolent with history and the people who walked it before us. As Tolkien's narrative unfolds (and lets's be frank, the narrative is the most important factor, lets not damn the poor professor into Pseud's Corner, he was above all an exceptionally gifted storyteller, of the most magical kind, and that gift is an intangible one) we are taken along and see the things we'd not noticed before. We see the trees, the foxes, the barrows, the ruined forts, the elusive Elves, we see what was all around us all along and we hadn't bothered opening our eyes to really seeing before. There's the Recovery for me. And it worked in a very real sense as after reading his work, I Recovered all the stories about this country that had slipped form my notice and might well have remained that way.

Originally Posted by Bethberry

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.

Standing outside Time is something we all, as mortals seek to do (even if we have accepted Death already, as I have, I've already seen what it's like!) as the torment of being trapped in time, in a temporal existence sometimes makes us feel we are limited. That's why we like History and why we like the opposite, Sci-Fi. It allows us an escape of the here and now of the cubicle and the morning bus ride and the bills. We can walk with our ancestors or our descendants.

davem didn't make the claim about Death, Tolkien did. That's what it's about, and what as I said on davem's thread, I suspect all fantasy is ultimately about. What's interesting is the way that the different writers deal with it. Tolkien deals with it by trying to take us outside time, but he also tells us that whatever we think, one day we will all be dead and in the ground with the worms. Pullman deals with it by telling us to do things with our lives and not wish them away, to have true tales to tell the Harpies when we die.

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

Of course Tolkien made great use of language, its origins and meanings, and this is a great interpretation of Recovery, but you've spoiled it now by saying that this appreciation of language is 'lamentably absent today' as that's just wrong! You could have a whole army of modern writers after your blood, and in the front line would be the poets with their pitchforks, closely followed by a lot of other writers of the most unlikely kind. For example the copywriters who bend, twist and turn words to get the exact phrase which will both catch the eye and be deep with alternate meanings. I've written speeches and believe me, those words are not used as 'coal-carts', every single word and where it is placed counts, and I mean seriously counts; the top speech writers are cherished as finding a brilliant one is like finding moondust.

Ah, but my dear Lal, you are rather proving my thesis! Of the instances you cite above I would argue that the overwhelming majority attitude (I would never say "all") is of a decidedly un-Tolkienian type. There are, of course (as in every era) wonderful wordsmiths who craft elegant and beautiful language. But it's that very attitude toward writing as a "craft" which I was talking about -- the presumption amongst most modern writers is that words are objects which they can use instrumentally. The two examples you cite give the full spectrum of what this means:

The current dominant attitude in poetry is that language is an object in and of itself that can be played with, worked upon, abused and generally "used". Words are themselves the things that poets play with, resulting in such extraordinarily wonderful works like Eunoia by Canada's own Christian Bok. This book is composed of five chapters, with each chapter devoted to a single vowel -- meaning, in each chapter there is a series of poems in which only one vowel may be used. To cite just one example:

Whenever Helen needs effervescent refreshments, she tells her expert brewer: ‘brew me the best beer ever brewed.’ Whenever she lets her fermenters ferment the perfect beer, revellers wreck the kegs, then feed themselves the lees. Retchers retch; belchers belch. Jesters express extreme glee. Wenches then sell these lewd perverts sex

(If anyone wants to see the whole collection there’s a wonderful hypertext edition available free.)

The "meaning" of words is contained by the play and craft of the poet -- words are rendered meaningful through the process of poetic articulation.

The other example of speechwriters is akin to this. There are superb speech writers and I do not look down upon their ability, but the sense of language there is that there is a "message" which needs to be appropriately "packaged" and "delivered" to an audience. The coal-car metaphor is entirely apt -- the speech writer finds the perfect words with which to bear meaning from the hidden mine to the light of audience understanding. The purpose of said communication is not to unlock the intrinsic meanings of the words themselves but, like the poets, to use the words for some other purpose.

With Tolkien, the attitude could not be more different. He does not simply see language as important, he sees words themselves as harbingers and bearers of meaning that is to be unlocked (recovered) by story. This is the reverse of the modern way of thinking: now, we use words to tell stories; Tolkien used stories to recover for words their full meaning. Remember Treebeard's discourse upon the world "hill" -- for him, language, history and story are one and the same. To speak the word of something is to tell you all about that something. Gandalf is much the same on a moral plane: he tells Frodo at the beginning of their journey that "pity" is important, and then there is a 1200 page novel to elaborate upon (recover) a much richer and fuller sense of the word than exists today ("pity" from pieta, the divine grace which comes to humans for their suffering; the reflection in the temporal realm in relations between self and other of the beneficent nature of the universe in which God's grace and revelation is manifest in His Pity for the world when he sent himself/his son to die for our sins -- I do not sermonise, I merely elaborate upon what pity "really" means in the fullest etymological and philological sense, not as we have it today).

For the contemporary poet, "pity" is an interesting object-formation that can be organised and played with and deployed in an imaginative process of meaning-creation; for the speech-writer, "pity" is a useful word that can be appropriately used to convey a particular meaning with specific polemical and rhetorical effect. For Tolkien, "pity" is a word that unlocks and reveals an entire history of struggle, sacrifice and redemption -- a story that he finds necessary to recover a sense of the word utterly lost by the first two modes.

[Lalwendë]

I'm afraid this all makes Tolkien sound like an out and out pretentious Pseud! He did not construct the whole LotR around his conception of the meaning of the word Pity. It's an interesting reading, but is far too reductive. It might in fact be the kind of clever literary trick employed by one of the modern 'literary/Booker-seeking' novelists, but it entirely bypasses all notion of story, which for Tolkien was the driver, certainly as he got older and settled down to writing The Hobbit and LotR. That's how his notion of Eucatastrophe works, as a shocking turn of narrative, not via trickery with language.

Nobody would disagree that Tolkien explores language and works with multiple meanings, but the danger of reading too much into this is to bypass narrative drive. Had LotR lacked this then it wouldn't have been popular except amongst those who maybe wished to impress their tutors with all the 'clever books' they'd read. If you want to find a writer who really does do what you say, go directly to James Joyce and do not pass Go.

Words are objects, and writing is a craft. Tolkien uses words in the same way as any other good writer, recovers older meanings, constructs new ones, plays with them to put together something of his own. Yes, plays, as what Tolkien does is only another way of playing, trying to find layers of old meaning much as a modern writer might play with the multitudes of meaning associated with the word 'black'. That's how the writer uses the creative process and his/her craft, to sweat over pulling together narrative, tone, style, character and meaning. Tolkien does this to no lesser or greater a degree than any other writer. Ultimately it doesn't really matter what modern or ancient micro-theories we apply to his work, its all done in the hope that we can somehow crack the formula and produce something similar, but we won't.

We can't just generalise and say that x, y or z modern writer does not work with words in the same way that we think Tolkien did. On the contrary, modern fiction has far more of this than Tolkien's work has! Possibly why his work is derided so much is that he does not resort to the trickery of the Pseuds, his work with words is subtle and embedded. And it takes a reductive reading to bring that out. On the surface LotR is nowt but a great story, quite different to modern fiction.

And poetry does not 'contain' or limit the meaning and importance of words. If anything it allows them to go free, and these words are more open to exploration and the possibility of recovery.

[Aiwendil]

What a great idea for a thread! I wish I had time for the kind of thoughtful post this topic deserves. Anyway, a few miscellaneous points have occurred to me while reading the discussion.

Squatter wrote:

I have to ask at this point whether Tolkien was really trying to write fairy-stories at all. Much of what he says in his lecture applies to fantasy as well as his official theme, but I'm by no means sure that we can see his own fiction as a representation of Faërie.

I wonder about the distinction between fantasy and fairy-story. In my reading of OFS, Tolkien draws no such distinction - though he is careful to distinguish beast fables and such from genuine fairy-story. By "fairy-story", I think it is clear, he does not mean to restrict himself to that genre (or sub-genre) that is typically called "fairy tale" today.

It occurs to me that it might be an interesting exercise, and might teach us something about the distinctions that ought and ought not to be made here, to see if we can classify various works as "fairy story", "fantasy", "fairy tale", "myth", or whatever other possible categories we might be interested in. Where would Beowulf go? What about Grimm's fairy tales? The Silmarillion? The Book of Lost Tales? Which belong to which category?

I think that what we would find is that it is hard, if not impossible, to distinguish fairy-story from fantasy, and those again from myth.

The Silmarillion is a collection of high myths completely founded in the sub-created world. There is no connection with the primary world unless we allow Ælfwine, a character who is conspicuous by his absence in the 1977 publication.

Yet Tolkien spent a great deal of time on the Eriol/Aelfwine story in his pre-LotR writings; and the character still appears as late as the 1950s. Indeed, it was only when Tolkien had settled on another "transmission story" for the Silmarillion (i.e. through Numenor to Gondor and Rivendell, and probably via Bilbo's Translations from the Elvish) that he dropped Aelfwine.

The missing element in LotR is the journey into Faërie: the hobbits are already citizens of Middle-earth; they do not arrive there from our primary reality.

This is a good point, and certainly there is an important distinction to be drawn between what might have been called "transition" and "immersion" fantasy. But does Tolkien restrict the scope of the term "fairy-story" to the former? I cannot recall his doing so. After all, works like Beowulf or the Kalevala do not involve a journey beginning from our reality.

Bethberry wrote:

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.

I'm not so sure. The fact that it was written around 1937-1938 does not necessarily mean that the ideas in it were wholly new to him at that time. I suspect that the view of fairy-stories he presents was long in formation. Is there any evidence that his views had changed significantly prior to OFS?

I also feel I should point out that the Silmarillion cannot be thought of as an "early work" simpliciter (not that you necessarily were suggesting this).

Lalwende wrote:

Well if we hope in any way to reflect Faerie then yes, a tale does have to reflect the amorality of Faerie, as that's the nature of the place/concept - its somewhere outside the rules, beyond the law and out of most people's comprehension.

What is meant by "reflect Faerie"? I think that this is a point worth considering very carefully.

Faerie is, after all, not a real place that can be accurately or inaccurately described (I fear I'm straying in the direction of the dreaded C-thread, but I shall boldly press on). Faerie may, in a sense, be "real" insofar as it refers to a massive complex of cultural and psychological facts; but to speak of representing Faerie itself as distinct from human perception and interpretation thereof (i.e. as something "out of most people's comprehension") seems to me to be meaningless.

Of course, without resorting to talk about Faerie itself, we can ask about amorality in existing fairy-stories. There are two important questions we ought to ask. First, does Tolkien's definition of a 'fairy-story' say anything about amorality? Second, do existing specimens of fairy-story uniformly exhibit amorality?

The answer to the first question is clearly "no". Tolkien doesn't even use the word "amoral" or "amorality" in the essay, and he certainly doesn't posit this as a criterion for fairy-story. Insofar, then, as we are investigating whether Tolkien's fiction conforms to his views on fairy-stories, the matter of amorality is irrelevant.

The second question is more interesting. Certainly there are a great many amoral fairy-stories; and I would agree that Tolkien's work is unusual in this regard. But I think that the amorality of fairy-stories has been somewhat overstated. There are, after all, important examples of fairy stories that are not amoral, and even some that are highly moral. Look at "Beowulf" or, even better, "Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight".

Ungoliant most defintely is ambiguous, check out the evidence in the Spiders thread that Bethberry and myself found.

I must disagree. Ungoliant is evil. One can, of course, play all kinds of games along the lines of "the Silmarillion is a biased account" (though I confess that what it might mean for a fictional story to be fictionalized is unknown to me). But if we are talking about Tolkien's work, you have to accept that Eru is good and Ungoliant is not.

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by Aiwendil

What is meant by "reflect Faerie"? I think that this is a point worth considering very carefully.

Faerie is, after all, not a real place that can be accurately or inaccurately described (I fear I'm straying in the direction of the dreaded C-thread, but I shall boldly press on). Faerie may, in a sense, be "real" insofar as it refers to a massive complex of cultural and psychological facts; but to speak of representing Faerie itself as distinct from human perception and interpretation thereof (i.e. as something "out of most people's comprehension") seems to me to be meaningless.

It's real alright. That's what I mean by beyond comprehension, as most people don't understand Faerie and how to recognise it, even less how to get there. Tolkien might have been there - there is a tantalising echo in SoWM where Smith sees the warriors step down from their boat that came from somewhere beyond his comprehension. I know where there are slips into Faerie, blurs in time and consciousness, they're all over the place. It's beyond rational thought.

Of course, without resorting to talk about Faerie itself, we can ask about amorality in existing fairy-stories. There are two important questions we ought to ask. First, does Tolkien's definition of a 'fairy-story' say anything about amorality? Second, do existing specimens of fairy-story uniformly exhibit amorality?

The answer to the first question is clearly "no". Tolkien doesn't even use the word "amoral" or "amorality" in the essay, and he certainly doesn't posit this as a criterion for fairy-story. Insofar, then, as we are investigating whether Tolkien's fiction conforms to his views on fairy-stories, the matter of amorality is irrelevant.

The second question is more interesting. Certainly there are a great many amoral fairy-stories; and I would agree that Tolkien's work is unusual in this regard. But I think that the amorality of fairy-stories has been somewhat overstated. There are, after all, important examples of fairy stories that are not amoral, and even some that are highly moral. Look at "Beowulf" or, even better, "Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight".

I agree, however, our readings of the Saxon and medieval texts must be tempered by bearing in mind that these may have been transcribed by Christians who obviously wouldn't be amoral! To get to those amoral tales you need to find the tales not sanctioned by the Church, those preserved by the ordinary people. Even Beowulf isn't entirely without the chaos of Faerie. And I have to question if specifically Christian writings (which Beowulf isn't, although written down by someone of the early religion) would really get to what Faerie is - it would be like reading a Hindu tale in order to try and understand the nature of Jesus.

I must disagree. Ungoliant is evil. One can, of course, play all kinds of games along the lines of "the Silmarillion is a biased account" (though I confess that what it might mean for a fictional story to be fictionalized is unknown to me). But if we are talking about Tolkien's work, you have to accept that Eru is good and Ungoliant is not.

Hey, what about Reader Response? I can think of Eru as evil if I want! Anyway, just check out some of the text that we found as it at the very least suggests that Tolkien began with a distinctly amoral character for Ungoliant. Note also that she is exploited by Melkor, and Tolkien states that nobody knew where she came from, not the Elves nor Melkor; she came from The Void, she was not an Ainur nor was she an animal, she just was.