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