“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.
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