Words, Worlds, and Wonder: Tolkien and the Fairy Story
When you pick up a book and feel as though you have traveled outside of time while reading, there is a strange magic. You didn't really leave the world, but rather entered it more fully, as though the narrative had given you a clearer perspective. This past week, while reading The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien's theoretical works, I sat with that emotion for a considerable amount of time. When a story has that effect on us, what precisely is going on? And why did Tolkien devote so much of his intellectual life to attempting to provide an answer to that query?
"On Fairy-Stories" is his most direct attempt to respond. The essay reads more like a defense of a deeply held belief than an academic exercise. Tolkien was challenging the prevalent belief of his time, which was that fairy tales were primarily for children and should be abandoned once reason fully developed. That, in his opinion, was incorrect.
As usual, he starts his argument with a word. Tolkien places fairy tales within Faerie, the realm or state in which fairies exist, a realm that contains the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky, the earth, and everything in it, instead of just being about fairies in the strict sense. We can already see what he is doing, which is to broaden the category until it becomes something significant and expansive. Little winged creatures have no place in Faerie. Any reader who has lost themselves in a book will instantly recognize it as the texture of a world experienced with full attention.
From this starting point, Tolkien develops the idea of sub-creation, which I believe forms the core of his argument. According to Tolkien, fantasy is a sub-creation exercise in which the author creates a Secondary World that the reader's imagination can access. What is related within it is "true" because it complies with the rules of that world. Although this may seem like a fancy way of describing what any novelist does, Tolkien's stakes are much higher. Sub-creation is more than just decoration or invention. According to Tolkien, literary works always refer back to the Creator and have their roots in created reality. Because we were created in a Creator's image, we are creators. Creating worlds is not an escape. I believe that most of us already understand that it is one of the most fundamentally human things we do. When was the last time you read far too late or experienced true sadness upon the conclusion of a series? That pull is not insignificant.
At this point, Tolkien's literary theory and faith become inextricably linked. He created the term "eucatastrophe" to refer to a situation in a narrative where defeat appears to be complete but is not, something that previous criticism was unable to fully capture. Perhaps the most well-known example is the destruction of the One Ring. Even though Frodo is unable to destroy it on his own, it is nevertheless destroyed. There's more going on here than just heroism. Tolkien views this kind of turn as more than just a literary delight. According to him, the Gospels contain a fairy tale of a greater kind, one that elevates the goal of sub-creation to the realization of Creation itself and embraces all the essence of fairy tales. According to his interpretation, the Incarnation and Resurrection are the greatest eucatastrophes in history; they are actual occurrences that possess the structure and emotional impact of the greatest fairy tales, giving them their most profound resonance. This elevates the fairy tale rather than diminishing the gospel.
The Lord of the Rings' Tom Bombadil does something subtly amazing in this setting, so it is worth stopping here. One of the most contentious characters in all of Tolkien's works, Tom was frequently brought up as a sort of conundrum in our class discussions. He defies all allegorical interpretations, is completely unaffected by the Ring, and cannot be explained. Simply put, he is the Master of Wood, Water, and Hill, singing his way through an increasingly gloomy world. In his letters, Tolkien himself opposed attempts to reduce Tom to a single meaning, arguing that any story worth telling can have a moral without being reduced to just one. Even though it isn't allegorical, I believe Tom's place in the context of faith and fairy tales is actually pretty obvious. He serves as a reminder that Middle-earth existed long before the Quest and will continue to exist long after in a tale full of significance and ramifications. He stands for something that is impervious to corruption because it lacks comprehension. And that is a kind of grace for a tale that is profoundly concerned with the corrupting weight of will and power.
Despite the essay's brilliance, "Leaf by Niggle" portrays these concepts in miniature and with a tenderness that it is unable to quite match. The narrative centers on Niggle, a painter who is constantly distracted by obligations, neighbors, and the everyday stresses of life while working compulsively on a large canvas of a tree. He never completes it. Before he can, he passes away. However, he finds that his vision has been realized in a way that his brushstrokes could never have accomplished in the purgatorial space that follows his death. The Great Tree is now fully realized, fulfilling all the goals his flawed painting had been pursuing.
This story has an almost intolerable poignancy when read after "On Fairy-Stories" because you can see what Tolkien is saying about himself. He was Niggle, constantly editing, creating maps, languages, and genealogies while being conscious that the entire enormous structure might not be completed. He expressed genuine worry about this in his letters, fearing that the tree would remain a canvas of strewn leaves and that the work would never be finished. However, the narrative does not end in despair. It gently but firmly asserts that sub-creative work has a purpose and that, despite its flaws, an incomplete leaf points toward a complete tree.
After sitting through all of these readings together, I find myself questioning the cost of holding onto Tolkien's beliefs. Imaginatively, not theologically. It takes a kind of persistent imaginative faith to believe that our little creative acts of meaning-making are actually connected to something greater, that the leaf points toward the tree and the story points toward a story. Tolkien contends that healing, escape, and comfort are the fundamental gifts of fairy tales. They give us the uplifting joy of eucatastrophe, help us regain lost perspectives, and provide a much-needed break from the grind of everyday life. But beneath all three of those functions lies something more fundamental: the insistence that joy is not naive. That the happy ending is not a lie told to children.
This, in my opinion, explains why Tolkien's theoretical writings, which are completely distinct from the Middle-earth he created, still seem so vivid. He is carefully arguing, with roots in both language and religion, that the human urge to tell stories is a participation in something genuine rather than a weakness that can be explained away. Regardless of one's religious beliefs, that assertion has merit. Tolkien would advise you to pay attention the next time a story takes you by surprise and causes that odd catch in your throat, that unexpected and unexplainable joy. There's a real thing going on.
- AJS
