Warning! Danger: Dreams, Incarnation, and Real Peril in Fairyland

Tolkien often refers to Fairyland as the “Perilous Realm,” where there are “pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold” (On Fairy-stories). There is an inherent danger that comes with entering; it is not safe, and it is certainly not always comfortable. This danger is not illusory. In The Lost Road, Elendil warns Alboin that in accepting the chance to ‘go back,’ he “shall not be as one reading a book or looking in a mirror, but as one walking in living peril” (TLR 53). 

However, this ‘going back’ is facilitated by a dream. When Elendil first speaks to Alboin, Alboin is asleep in his bed, and the second time he enters Elendil’s world, he is asleep in his chair– in England. And, perhaps most tellingly, he is still there at the end of the adventure in Númenore: though the story was never finished, Tolkien left a note saying “Alboin is still precisely in his chair and Audoin just shutting the door,” exactly where he was before the dream began. 

This brings us to the question I have been grappling with: How can one be in real peril if the “Perilous Realm” is only a dream?

I am not sure I have come to a conclusive answer, but I think there is much to be gained from exploring dreams as language, the incarnation of language, and how incarnation relates to peril. 

In Tolkien’s stories, language and dreams function in a similar way: language is a mechanism for the transportation of ideas and meaning from one person to another, and a dream is a mechanism for the transportation of a mind into a different world (or in the case of Alboin, a different time). Both language and dreams act as portals, or pathways– arched doorways shining with letters and guarded by secrets, and often leading to uncomfortable places. 

In one of his Letters (180), Tolkien describes language as dependent upon the legends to which it belongs. Language needs stories, and it needs people to tell these stories; it needs embodiment, some kind of physical form (speech or writing done by people) in order to be a living language. As Ramer states in The Notion Club Papers, “language begins only with incarnation and not before it” (203). Dreams likewise require incarnation. Throughout the NCPs, Tolkien argues (through his characters) that though the mind’s attention may travel during dreams, it always remains inextricably linked to the body. Ramer again tells us: “Mind-body: they jump together, or neither jumps at all” (178). It is logical, then, to draw the conclusion that it is not only Alboin’s mind that undertakes the dream-adventure, but his body as well– and any “peril” he experiences in his dream will have an effect on him as a whole, mind and body both. 

It is in fact Alboin’s embodiment that makes the peril of the dream possible; one cannot experience peril without having something at stake, that something usually being his/her life. Furthermore, it is precisely this peril that makes the dream-world “Fairyland,” and perhaps more real than the waking world.

For example, when the hobbits are returning home to the Shire, Merry says, “It seems almost like a dream that has slowly faded,” and Frodo replies, “Not to me. . . . To me it feels more like falling asleep again.” Frodo has the feeling that his adventure, his part in the great tale or legend, was more “real” than his dream-like life in the Shire beforehand. The adventure brought with it high stakes and hardship, allowing Frodo to play a role in the battle of Good and Evil (peril!) that had previously seemed to him nothing more than a far-off myth. It is in this way that Alboin’s dream-world– his own legend that he finds himself in– could feel more “real” than the world of England. It is no surprise that Númenore, the world of Gods and prohibitions and world-altering decisions to be made, feels more like his “true country” (to borrow a phrase from Lewis) than a world where it is hard to see much significance in anything. In the dream-world, everything is heightened. 

I believe that when Alboin wakes up in his chair, he will not be unaltered. His brief journey into a different and heightened world will change how he acts and how he thinks, his body and his mind. Perhaps he will start to notice moments when the two worlds seem to merge and he can see himself as part of the story, the real story, happening even when England feels bland and life feels pointless. I think this is the way we are supposed to read fantasy tales like the Lord of the Rings. These stories are scary, and everything seems to matter astronomically; and yet we still want to be there, and we want to fight amidst the peril to be Good. It is our task to bring these alterations we find within ourselves back with us, so our journeys into Middle-earth are not fruitless. 

Ramer ends his story by telling how he woke up from his dream. When he focuses his attention on the planet Tekel-Mirim, everything stands still, and he realizes at once that he is looking at Oxford: “The clock on Saint Mary’s struck 7 a.m. – and I woke up for my appointment. To go to Mass. It was the morning of the feast of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, June 29th 1986, by our reckoning” (211). Tolkien takes us through a transition from one legend to another, from a subcreated dream-world to the true Legend of saints and sacrifice and bread becoming God embodied, and instead of having the feeling of “falling asleep again,” we have the feeling of waking up into a heightened world, where we are part of the True Story, perilous as it is. 

-LJE