Can one simply walk into Faërie?

"Here is the clue that solves the great Tolkien puzzle. The puzzle is why, of all humans who ever took pen to paper, Tolkien has produced by far the most convincing, desirable, beautiful, believable, and awesome Elves. And the answer is that he must have been an Elf. Or at least he had Elf blood somewhere in his ancestry. For if any work of literature in the history of the world is a 'Faërian drama,' it is the Lord of the Rings."

- Peter Kreeft, The Philosophy of Tolkien: The worldview behind the Lord of the Rings, p.79

              It seems clear that the main topic of debate of our last class was: what to make of Tolkien’s seemingly obnoxious claim that “the mere stories […] arose in my mind as ‘given things’ […] I always had the sense of recording what was already ‘there,’ somewhere: not of ‘inventing’” (Letters, p. 145)? Tolkien’s Legendarium is widely regarded as one of the most intricate, vast and incredibly consistent bodies of literature ever written. As a friend of mine once put it, there is nowhere on the map of Middle-Earth that you could point to and not have a lot to say about it – from vegetation, to genealogy, to linguistic traditions (including flaws deliberately carved into linguistic systems that Tolkien invented to convey organicity to the whole). Evidently, a great deal of Tolkien’s “body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story” was inspired by previous works, cultures and myths – just think how Melkor’s fall resembles the Christian myth of Lucifer’s fall, or how Beren and Lúthien remind us of Tristan and Iseult and, why not, Romeo and Juliet. However, it is equally true that a lot of it can be considered original work: as some students pointed out in class, Tolkien de facto invented what we now know as the Fantasy genre. It is intriguing, then, that Tolkien seems to want to distance himself from his majestic work (I am cautiously avoiding the word “creation” here for reasons I address below) and place himself simply a translator of the Red Book of Westmarch.

To try to understand what Tolkien is doing, we need to understand three core concepts that undergird his work and, to a large extent, his worldview: the existence of “Faërie,” the notion of “sub-creation,” and the idea of an “elf-friend.” In his seminal On Fairy Stories, Tolkien defines a fairy-story as “one which touches on or uses Faërie, whatever its own main purposes may be” (Tolkien Reader, p. 39), with Faërie being “the real or state [that] contains many things beside elves and fays, and beside dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants and dragons […] all things are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted” (TR, p. 38). More importantly, to Tolkien it is vital that any “genuine fairy-story […] should be presented as “true” (TR, p. 42), and this notion is central to understanding his approach to the Legendarium. For Tolkien, a good story is one that has its readers enter into a state of “secondary belief” – that is, create a “Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he [the story-maker] relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside.” (TR, p. 60). Indeed, that is why Tolkien strives so hard to make the Legendarium so believable, to make sure that we seamlessly enter the realm of Faërie (as the hobbits felt when they entered Tom Bombadil’s house); so much so that a willing state of “suspension of disbelief” is not even necessary for enjoying the story, because we actually believe it. But how is this possible?

As we discussed in class, Tolkien operates masterfully at the edge between our Primary World and the Secondary World he wrote about. All of the small details that define his “world-building” process are meant to reinforce the veracity of the story that the characters find themselves into. For instance, when Sam realizes, looking at the star-glass Galadriel had given the hobbits, that his tale took place in the same world in which the old tales of Beren, Lúthien and Eärendil took place (LOTR, book IV, p. 712), and who in turn are the very fabled people that Strider sung about at Weathertop (LOTR, book I, p. 191). Don’t we have the same feeling when we discover an ancient family heirloom with a history that goes way back, and we are suddenly forced to realize that we still live in the same world that people lived way in the past? There are many other such examples that we touched upon in class, like how Tolkien deliberately evoked King Sheave from Beowulf in his writings (Lost Road, p. 101), blurring the lines between Primary World literature and his own universe. But beyond these literary devices, the themes developed in Tolkien's Legendarium reverberate greatly with the questions we face in our primary reality, as he puts it in letter 131: "all this stuff is mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality and the Machine" (Letters, p.145). All of these mechanisms, both small and large, weave beautifully Tolkien’s secondary world with our primary reality make him a “successful sub-creator” (TR, p. 60) in his own words. 

Tolkien uses the idea of “sub-creation” to represent a form of art, in which one takes something that already exists (“creation”) and shapes it in a way as to take it in a new direction, add to it and, in doing so, also honor it. As he puts it: “the achievement of the expression, which gives (or seems to give) ‘the inner consistency of reality,’ is indeed another thing, or aspect, needing another name: Art, the operative link between Imagination and the final result, Sub-creation” (TR, p. 68). To Tolkien, the Elves are the “representatives of sub-creation par excellence” (Letters, p.146), in that their “magic is Art” that seeks to further creation, honor it, instead of owning it, or claiming power over it (which does not mean they cannot be corrupted, as the story of Fëanor shows us). That concept is what confers a certain duality upon Tolkien’s Legendarium: his works are, in our primary reality, sub-creations of his, but to the characters living in them (and to us, readers, when we are immersed in them), they are taken to be the creation themselves – which is why Tolkien wants to be seen as the mere translator of the Red Book of Westmarch, a book that narrates a (secondary) world that exists and that he is introducing us to.

Finally, this brings us to the concept of “elf-friend.” As Flieger points out, the concept of an elf-friend, the one that can bridge the gap between our primary reality and Faërie, is a recurring theme in Tolkien’s works: “the many marks left by AElfwine are the foorprints of one who never completely vanished from Tolkien’s mythology, a witness and participant who observes, often experiences, and in some fashion transmits to others the stories in which he appears” (The Footsteps of AElfwine, p. 189). In this sense, the tale of the Smith of Wootton Major is a great example of the role that elf-friends play in Tolkien’s works. The major elf-friend, the grandfather Master Cook plays a vital role in bringing Alf – who we later discover is actually the King of Faërie, but whom people take for granted – to Woottom Major and making sure that the magic star ends up with his grandson. Having received the star, Starbrow is granted passport into Faërie, a mysterious and somewhat perilous realm that inspires him to become a quirky, singing figure but ultimately a great artisan-smith (sub-creating many beautiful things). The elf-friend plays a vital role in introducing Smith to Faërie, a world that skeptics and narrow-minded people in the story take for granted but that ultimately houses great adventures. Without his grandfather and Alf, Starbrow would not have been able to explore it, and it is thanks to him (by passing along the star) that this gift will be enjoyed by others. In the end, as Flieger argues, this concept that Tolkien developed through so many characters (including Frodo, Sam, Bilbo, Strider, and many others across the Legendarium) reflects the role that Tolkien consciously or not, ascribes to himself: Tolkien is “the ultimate, the overarching elf-friend […] he is the bridge between the worlds” (The Footsteps of AElfwine, p. 197). 
With all that in mind, we can find an answer to the question posed initially: Tolkien distances himself from the position of “creator” and adopts the role of Elf-Friend, the mediator that invites us to the magical universe of the Legendarium because he wants us to transport us into Faërie along with him. Most importantly, as he puts it: "if you are present at a Faërian drama you yourself are, or think you are, bodily inside its Secondary World [...] Enchantment produces a Secondary World into which both designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their sense while they are inside; but in its purity it is artistic in desire and purpose." (TR, p. 74-75). 

- LR