Faerie and the Edges of Possibility

 

Faerie and the Edges of Possibility

The reality of Faerie and the value of it were of great concern to Tolkien. In his letters and foreword to The Lord of the Rings, he criticized allegory as a way to read his novels, and in his lectures, he disliked the breaking of immersion for Faerie. Because rejection of what he perceives as the nature fairy stories is thereby a rejection of scripture and the benefits conveyed by these works. Yet, his ideas can be extended beyond his discussion into the realm of mathematics.

Recovery, escape, and consolation are crucial ways to understand the value of fairy stories and high literature in general, as described in his lecture "On Fairy Tales". He describes how, depending on the setting, a contemporary or historical setting, or a fantasy setting, will impact the benefits that can be achieved by it. Those that take place in historical or contemporary settings can be equated as a more realistic element, but with lesser power than Faerie. Their lesser power is due to their limited aspects of creation: stuck to one place or time within the world. Instead of having the ability to unchain many aspects of one's thoughts and to participate in creation. Whereas Faerie is wholly dependent on creation, similar to how mathematical fields are dependent on the enumerated axioms, unlike physics, which is constrained to understanding the world. This greater degree of freedom must therefore allow for greater possibilities.

Tolkien illustrates it most with Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, where he is a stand-in for the resultant power of Faerie, and the fresh eyes or clean windows one finds after being transported to this new world. Both recovery and escape are illustrated by Frodo after he leaves the land of stories told by Tom Bombadil, returning to the forest. Frodo did not know whether one day or many had passed, but he knew that he was “only filled with wonder. The stars shone through the window and the silence of the heavens seemed to be round him” (Fellowship, 148). Here, he is only seeing the world with eyes filled with wonder, but he is transported closer to the All, becoming aware of the heavens in a way different than before. Recovery is seen first and foremost, with seeing things again for the first time, and so is escape in how he was so utterly sucked into that he did not know how time had passed. Implicitly, there is the idea that with the transportation to another world, upon the return to the main one, there is a clearer sight of transcendental properties. The mention of the heavens and this newfound awareness is crucial; the heavens are transcendental, and it is only after this realization that he inquires into what Tom really is. It is clear that Tom takes on these mythical aspects.

Faerie appears to open the mind to new possibilities —to engage in a true act of creation, unconstrained by worldly realities. However, by doing so, certain fundamental truths become revealed and explored. The fundamental quality that allows these benefits is due to an important internal consistency of Faerie itself. The world must flow together and be true, or true within itself.

Tolkien’s connection between Faerie and scripture is that scripture contains elements of Faerie, where everything is consistent within the world and is sometimes, begrudgingly, accepted as true by skeptics due to this inner consistency and impact. These stories are real in the liturgy. And it is through these stories that the work of God is meant to be revealed. Littered throughout the gospels are ways that can be interpreted to see or understand God’s action on earth, thereby allowing the reader to understand His creation in their everyday life. Here, scripture acts in a similar way to how Tom's stories acted for Frodo.

While Tolkien does not explicitly say that Faerie can unchain the human mind to explore and create that which is possible and true about the world, yet not immediately evident. The unchaining of inner aspects by Faerie can be likened to how men have received similar impacts from religion. Take, for example, Kurt Gödel; his firm religious beliefs allowed him to transcend contemporary mathematical thoughts and conceive that due to the nature of God, there must be true but unknowable aspects to the universe (for more information, please search Gödel's theorem of incompleteness). While it may have been philosophy and scripture that allowed his great advancement in proving complex mathematical and logical systems as inconsistent, the principles he used were Platonic ideas that transcend the mere limits of the observable world. Similar to how, after Frodo became transported through the tales of Faerie, he became aware of the silence of the heavens; Gödel, with help from scripture, became aware of the nature of the heavens' connection to the world.

Beyond the mere similarities of Gödel and Faerie, there exists a strong connection between the creation of Faerie and mathematics, which is not explored by Tolkien. Areas of mathematics arise when certain axioms are created, and then proofs are deductively derived based on these available properties of the axioms, which, for the system to be useful, it needs to be self-consistent. The creation of fantasy contains many of the same elements: a new world is created out of first principles, and then Tolkien argues that the world should be self-consistent. What is remarkable about both is that when done well, they find transcendental properties of the world applicable to our world. Tolkien’s critique of allegory is derived from how proper fairy stories examine these universals, and often, readers will misinterpret it as allegory.

Tolkien does not examine one of the crucial ideas underlying Faerie, scripture, and mathematics, which are elements not immediately perceptible in our world or existing in a completely different universe that, when taken seriously and self-consistent, can reveal important truths and new sight about the world we must live in every day. 

-ESW

Primary Truth and Secondary Meaning: Tolkien’s Theory of Sub-Creation

 “The magic of Faërie is not an end in itself, its virtue is in its operations”

What I find far and away most interesting about Tolkien’s argumentation on the land of Faërie and the importance of fairy stories is that he always begins from a philological lens, arguing from words and their derivations critical starting points that form the foundation of his later arguments. In this practice, as is true in so many ways for Tolkien, he resembles philosophers from long ago rather than the scientification that he found deleterious in the modern world.

Given that he argues from philology, it would make sense that the word of Faërie would have important linguistic elements—as, indeed, it does. For Tolkien, the purpose of words and names is not merely as a “label,” as he begins in the Mythopoeia. Rather, there is a deeper potential sense, that there are “great processes” marching on behind and beyond the words themselves. In the course of our making fairy stories, telling them, and working through them we engage in sub-creation. This process, sub-creation, is critical for Tolkien’s construction and conception of fairy stories. I propose that the sub-creation that Tolkien is arguing about and for is the addition of a deeper meaning than a mere label to a word and thus, by stringing together multiple words into a story, to stories as well.

That words have deeper inarticulable meanings is a fairly obvious proposition—thinking about one’s “home” as a “residence” causes a change in meaning far greater than their respective dictionary definitions would imply. If my residence were destroyed, I might talk with my insurance company and ascertain the extent of my deserved compensation. If my home was destroyed, I would (rightly) be in shambles. But the process by which words come to acquire a deeper meaning I think is what Tolkien, at his core, is arguing—they come to mean something by a process of story, by sub-creation.

Among the marvels of the Christian Story, which seems to be core to Tolkien’s world-building, is the fact that within the Christian Story there are mythical marvels that are, critically, significant. These marvels have been imbued with a meaning deeper than their direct label. The salvific nature of God is that he has saved us, the “corrupt making-creatures,” in a manner respective to our nature (On Fairy Stories, 88). In short, he gave us a primary story, the Christian Story via Creation, through which we can provide meaning via sub-creation.

The Christian Story is the first among the stories with significance, and it is pre-eminent among that class of “beautiful fairy stories” that are found to be “primarily” true, i.e. in accordance with history. But it is interesting to note again the importance of a deeper, non-label meaning even to the Christian Story—for the joy that one gets from it, while the best and truest joy, is not fully unique to it. Rather, all fairy stories, if found to be both a fairy story and also in accordance with history (“primarily” true), and in the finding of this truth they do not lose their “mythical and allegorical significance” (note again the use of significant), generate joy (On Fairy Stories, 89). 

I read the imbuing of this significance similarly to the imbuing of words with meaning. There is a primary truth, the verifiable face of the thing, the historically accurate nature or scientific accuracy or what have you, in a story. This is akin to the dictionary definition of a word. There is, further, a mythical and allegorical meaning to a story. I would contend that this is akin to the connotation some words have and others lack.

This lends further color to the constantly-referenced idea that for Tolkien there must be an internal consistency of reality. In so many ways, the way Tolkien constructs this internal consistency resembles the creation of a primary truth for something he knows not to be primarily true. The massive genealogical tables, new languages, and accurate cartography lend the same feeling that a history book does—namely, that it is telling a tale of something that happened. Even Tolkien’s literary work, in the manner of its release, resembles the medieval history he did so much of—the wider Silmarillion, which includes in a very minor aside the entire LOTR story, tells different stories that it feels of far wider importance, quite similarly to medieval chroniclers with differing frames. That Bilbo and Frodo also are discussed at such length writing about what they’ve seen, and that Sam aims to write down and preserve the Elvish stories, actively force them to engage with the construction of the primarily true.

But in this construction of the primarily true it makes the fairy story, in this case the realm of Middle Earth, come together with far greater power. For, like the Christian Story, there is no better joy than finding a story that is both primarily true and significant. The process of sub-creation, then, imbues the words we know have definitions, as all words have or will acquire a definition, with the greater significance they need to truly mean something. Interestingly, though, without the provision of the primarily true, sub-creation does not appear to work—from Imagination through Art to Sub-Creation, there is no addition of the primarily true, yet for the best fairy stories, as Tolkien himself implies in his own world-building, the primarily true must be added. While sub-creation is the addition of a deeper, an “allegorical and mythmaking,” significance, there are critical prerequisites to such additions.

-NFH

The Enchanter's Power

 

“Faerie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted” (On Fairy Stories)

    Tolkien believes that fairy stories aren’t allegorical representations of solar phenomena (in the vein of Max Müller) nor remnants of ancient tokenism (as Andrew Lang argued), rather they are about something Tolkien calls ‘Faërie.’ So we began our discussion with the question: what is Faërie and how is it created? In short, the answer to the first part of the question seems to be that Faërie is the created story-world and a framework in which to perceive it. As for its creation, Tolkien argues that the key lies in the language used.

Yet trees are not 'trees,' until so named and seen—

and never were so named, till those had been

who speech's involuted breath unfurled,

faint echo and dim picture of the world (Mythopoeia)

    In Mythopoeia, Tolkien suggests that we can only understand the world around us through stories, and in naming things, we participate in their creation. Human beings are therefore ‘sub-creators’: our words shape, order, and reveal the world as intelligible. Language, then, is not merely descriptive but generative. Storytelling is a mode of engaging with reality, a way of participating in creation itself. For example, the Grimm brothers, by publishing the folk stories of the various German states, were defining a collective identity in the century leading up to the unification of the German Empire in 1871. Similarly, Elias Lönnrot’s compilation of Finnish oral poetry into the Kalevala in 1835 not only preserved these stories, but elevated the Finnish language at a time when Finland was still under Russian rule. These stories helped define a people through their language, imbuing their land with mythic significance and transforming Finnish, the language of the lower class back then, into a vehicle of beauty and national consciousness.

“But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent” (On Fairy Stories)

    To Tolkien, adjectives grant the mind an "enchanter's power" to separate qualities (like green) from objects (like grass). This mental ability to abstract and recombine properties is the root of magic and fantasy. Once the mind can conceive of separating qualities, it inevitably desires to wield that power creatively, leading to the sub-creation of new forms and the beginning of Faerie. 

    To enter such a work world, the reader doesn’t have to be in a state of “willing suspension of disbelief” (i.e. passive tolerance of fiction), but rather in the enchanted state of ‘Secondary Belief’ in which the mind enters the Secondary World and accepts it as true. Faërie isn’t separate from the real world, it’s the real world re-seen through enchantment.

Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow;

Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow (LotR, book 1, chapter 7)

    Tolkien emphasizes that achieving this effect—making a Secondary World believable—requires immense skill, “a kind of elvish craft.” An example of such sub-creative power within Lord of the Rings is Tom Bombadil. He tells the previously sheltered hobbits tales of the history of their world, leading them to “strange regions beyond their memory and beyond their waking thought, into times when the world was wider” until they were “enchanted” and “under the spell of his words” (book 1, chapter 7). Although the reader doesn’t get to hear his tales directly, we do get to see snippets of his earlier songs, such as the one above in which he uses lots of simple adjectives to create a vivid image of himself in the reader’s mind, drawing us into his world.

    In On Fairy Stories, Tolkien identifies three primary functions of fairy stories: Recovery, Escape, and Consolation. Through his stories of the past, Tom Bombadil helps the hobbits recover truth about their world by showing them how it got to its current state, letting them see it as it is meant to be seen. This also gives them the chance to escape the misery of their journey for a day. 

    Through sub-creation, language strips away the dullness of habit that obscures reality. Things that have become invisible through over-familiarity—such as “the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread”—are restored to their proper wonder. By re-presenting the world through imaginative language, Faërie allows us to encounter ordinary things as if for the first time, newly vivid and charged with significance. 

    As for the final (and “highest”) function, consolation, he says that “[the fairy-tale setting] denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world” (On Fairy Stories). Tolkien’s use of evangelium (“good news”) is deliberate. The joy offered by fairy stories is an unexpected turn toward hope, what he famously calls a ‘eucatastrophe,’ interrupting the reality of suffering.

    Thus, fairy stories like Tom Bombadil’s resemble the religious narratives Tolkien heard growing up in Birmingham Oratory. As he writes in Mythopoeia, “we make still by the law in which we’re made.” Human sub-creation mirrors divine creation, and in entering a Secondary World through genuine belief, one does more than entertain a fiction. One participates, however faintly, in the creative act itself. In this way, the experience of fantasy approaches something like worship: an imaginative encounter with truth, beauty, and meaning that reflects the deeper structure of reality.

- Maya El Shamsy