Great Tales Never End: The Reality of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth

You would be hard-pressed to find a reader of Tolkien who does not describe Middle Earth as ‘alive,’ in some way or other. When we, as readers, travel through Middle Earth alongside the Fellowship, or Bilbo and the dwarves, we cannot help but feel a sense that we are beholding a real, definite world that exists outside of us – not merely as a fragment of our imagination. Indeed, the places we encounter in Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (which doubtlessly are the reason so many of us fell in love with Tolkien’s work) seem to be steeped in history, the languages of the Elves and other species of Middle Earth work through internally consistent linguistic structures, even the geographies and biological compositions of various regions – from the Shire to Lorien to Rohan – are carefully examined.

Tolkien himself agreed with this ‘realness’. In fact, in a letter to Milton Waldman (about the matter of publishing The Lord of the Rings) from 1951, Tolkien claims that he has “the sense of recording what was already ‘there’, somewhere: not of ‘inventing’” (Letters, 204). However, this perspective does not suffice to explain the reality of his work. Goethe, in his dedication for Faust, Part One, addresses the characters he created as if they were real people:

Ye wavering shapes, again ye do enfold me,

As rest upon my troubled ye stole;

Shall I this time attempt to clasp, to hold ye?

Still for the fond illusion yearns my soul?

Ye press around! Come then, your captive hold me,

As upward from the vapoury mist ye roll;

Within my breast youth’s throbbing pulse is bounding,

Fann’d by the magic breath your march surrounding.

 

To Goethe, it too seemed as though his epic creation took on a life, a reality of its own. Mephistopheles and Faust do not act on Goethe’s whim, but in accordance with their own motives and reasons. In fact, one might even argue that all great novels possess some sort of ‘reality’ – perhaps in the character’s psychology, in the story’s plot, in the overarching themes. What, then, makes Middle Earth different? Tolkien’s sentiment, just like ours, reaches further than great characters. Answering this question wholly is almost impossible. There have been many posts that touch on language, geography, and many other elements (much more eloquently than I could), all of which contribute to this reality. Thus, I wanted to think about the ‘layering of stories’, as we discussed in class.

 Before even finishing The Fellowship of the Ring, we feel that there exists a lot more in this strange world than the tale we are reading. On the very first page, we feel the history Middle Earth is imbued with – The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are but sections in the larger Red Book of Westmarch (LotR, Prologue), and various pieces of information about Hobbits and the Shire are relayed to us in a manner almost resembling a textbook. Thus, we begin to understand larger structures, social, political, historical, geographic, that precede the story we are reading and in which our beloved heroes exist. This feeling is amplified by the fragments of other, older stories that Aragorn, Bilbo and other tell us of. By Weathertop (which itself carries history, as Aragorn explains to the hobbits), Aragorn tells the hobbits about “the tale of Tinúviel” (LotR bk. I, Ch. XI), an age-old love story of Beren and Lúthien; Gandalf’s account of the One Ring’s history (LotR bk. I, Ch. II) reveals that the scope of this struggle supersedes that of Frodo’s journey; Frodo exclaims that “We are forgetting our family history!” (LotR bk. I, Ch. XII) when the company travels past the stone trolls (which readers would recall from The Hobbit).

However, this history does not merely aesthetically exist to enhance the world of Lord of the Rings – the story is rather a manifestation of and continuation of a much grander tale, in which everything fits. Readers have an intuitive sense of this during Lord of the Rings, later made explicit in The Silmarillion – the War of the Ring is but a minute section of the cosmological story of Middle Earth and its creation. Sam makes this pivotal realization on the stairs of Cirith Ungol, exclaiming that they ultimately in the same tale as that of Beren: “Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end?” (LotR bk. IV, Ch. VIII) Tolkien thus situates the story in a much larger history, in which greater forces are at play. Here again, the reader subconsciously feels that acute sense of reality, for we in our primary world are participants in grand workings that overshadow us ourselves.

Tolkien takes the reality of Middle Earth’s history and the cosmological forces driving it one step further. As a philologist and a scholar of medieval history, Tolkien is able to replicate much the same techniques we use for studying medieval history onto Middle Earth. Thus, the world is steeped in its own history – even the chronicle of the Lord of the Rings is given to us by way of Bilbo’s translations and transcriptions. This mirrors the transmission of our understanding of medieval history through manuscripts and the transcriptions thereof. The Red Book of Westmarch – a compilation of manuscripts about histories of the Shire and Middle Earth – itself is modelled on the Red Book of Hergest, a medieval manuscript Tolkien was familiar with. As we widen our vision from the adventures of The Hobbit to the cosmological scope of The Silmarillion, we see Tolkien’s vision: “a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story – the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths” (Letters, 203).

If we expand our vision even further, we find the root of Middle Earth’s reality. Although not allegorical, Middle Earth’s existential trajectory, from its creation to the later tales and happenings, is very familiar to us through Christian beliefs. We feel a reality that mirrors the path of our world, replete with its methods for history, its languages, its mythologies. This beckons the question – are we part of this tale? We know how Lord of the Rings ends, but Frodo reminds us: “No, they never end as tales, (…) but the people in them come, and go when their part’s ended.” (LotR bk. IV, Ch. VIII) Tolkien connects our primary world to the secondary world not through allegory, but by understanding the substance of reality. He understood how histories and stories intertwine, how they shape each other, how this creates the framework of reality. The great tales never end, and Middle Earth’s reality can be found between the lines of the stories that inhabit it, just as ours can be.

—EP

The Same Tale Still: What We Gain From Imagining Tolkien as History

Today, the Lord of the Rings is widely heralded as one of the greatest fantasy stories of all time, an incredible feat of creativity and imagination. It’s widely accepted that although Tolkien’s world is masterfully detailed and believable, the events of his stories aren’t “real” in the typical sense: being the inventions of a single man, they obviously are not reflective of true world history. What I therefore found most interesting in the process of learning more about Tolkien, especially in reading through his letters, were the ways in which Tolkien did in fact believe his stories to be real.

In his letter to his publisher Milton Waldman (Letter 131), Tolkien lays out his mission statement: inspired by the mythologies of other cultures (e.g. Norse, Greek), and the lack of a corresponding canon for England, Tolkien expressed a desire to construct a national mythology for England, based on his extensive research as a professor at Oxford. If Tolkien’s words are to be taken completely at face value, then the entire world of LOTR, indeed everything he ever wrote, is his conjecture of England’s distant past, just as much a scholarly endeavour as a creative one. Just as the LOTR trilogy takes place during the “Third Age” of Middle Earth, his and our modern era, the 20th and 21st centuries, would be the “Seventh Age” of this world. Therefore (outlandish as the notion may seem!), we too are a part of the story of the LOTR—entering into the same world as the Elves and Hobbits and Wizards, only doing so long after they have departed.

There is a scene in the LOTR (chapter 8, Book IV) where Sam and Frodo come to this same exact conclusion. Huddled in the dark in the mountains of Cirith Urgol, Sam recounts the tale of the Silmaril, detailed in the Silmarillion, paralleling Beren’s plight in Thangorodrim to his and Frodo’s present situation. Upon realizing that the star-glass around Frodo’s neck contains the same light as the Silmaril, Sam has an epiphany: he too is living within the story that he is telling. This astounds Sam: the Silmarillion, to these Hobbits from the Shire, probably feels as distant and fantastical as LOTR feels to us.“Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still!” Sam exclaims. “It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end?” Frodo’s response to this is profound: “No, they never end as tales,” he says. “But the people in them come and go when their part’s ended.” (Lord of the Rings, 697).

The emotional response I had reading this chapter, and the emotions Sam and Frodo must have felt coming to that realization, are similar to what I experienced reading Tolkien’s letter. I know that his novels are works of fiction, originating from his imagination; but in shifting my perspective to go along with Tolkien, in fully understanding the implications of his argument ("this is real"), I nonetheless felt wonder and awe at the possibility. Because what if we do all exist in the same story as these characters, these kings and heroes and villains and wars? How vast it would feel, how much more monumental our small roles, knowing what company we'd be in.

On a craft level, Tolkien the philologist’s natural path into this highly ambitious project was through language. Throughout all of his writing, he maintains an internal consistency of logic in the names of places, people, objects, and more. Every original Tolkienian word is connected to a wider web of etymology that grounds his world in a sense of very real history. For example, in the existing fragments from “The Lost Road,” the origin of the land of Númenor, many characters’ names (e.g. Alboin, Audoin) were taken from Lombardic kings in English history. There are also songs in the LOTR that seem to echo into our modern world: a longer version of the children’s nursery rhyme Hey Diddle Diddle, for example, appears in chapter 9 of Book 1, sung by Frodo at the Prancing Pony inn. Finally, Tolkien’s use of a frame tale, the Red Book of Westmarch, does much to make LOTR feel like real history. By positioning the LOTR novels as a translation/transcription of a manuscript Tolkien happened to find, originally written by the very characters in the story, the entire chronicle becomes a discovery rather than a novel creation. This also parallels the scholarly process of many historians. All of these details lend credence to the idea that our world and Tolkien’s are, secretly, one and the same.

It makes me wonder: someday, far down the line, after all of our parts in the story have ended, if a future society of humans were to rediscover Tolkien’s works, could they believe it to be some version of true history? It might seem far-fetched, but I think Tolkien’s care in grounding LOTR in reality places it just far enough into that gray area between reality and fantasy that it could happen. Even when discussing Tolkien's belief in his story's reality during class, I had moments of maybe, where this world seemed to transcend a fantasy novel created by a man in the 20th century and rather became a plausible origin story for England. "Secondary World" fantasy typically refers to stories existing in an entirely alternate world to our own, but Tolkien's trick of linking the world of LOTR to our modern one means that LOTR is neither strictly Secondary World nor Primary/Real World history. We are both inside the story and outside of it, participants and spectators to this tale.

This role we fill, through reading and discussing and even creating within the realm of LOTR, potentially transforms us into Elf-Friends. An Elf-Friend, in relation to Tolkien, is defined as one who acts as a bridge between worlds: an insider and outsider at once, both a participant in and the Teller of the tale. Characters like Sam, Frodo, and Bilbo are all Elf-Friends. Outside of the books, Tolkien is definitely an Elf-Friend; and I'd argue his son Christopher, who dedicated long hours to excavating and preserving his father’s work, compiling all he could to give to the world, is an Elf-Friend as well. Christopher exists both inside the story of his father (as Tolkien’s son) and also outside of it (as the compiler of his notes and, in the words of Verlyn Flieger, the “Teller to the Tale” (The Footsteps of Aelfwine, 185)). Acting as a Teller to a Tale is also an act of Love; you only revisit a story, especially after losing parts of it, if you love it enough to want to preserve it. In daring to make sure it is remembered, an Elf-Friend keeps the story alive, so that more can experience—as Frodo and Sam did in the dark, and as so many of us have throughout our lives—what it is like to be "in the same tale still."

- AXY

Tolkien's Foundations through Philology & Perspective

I find it most interesting to examine Tolkien's creative process through the lens of him as a linguist who happens to be a good writer, rather than the reverse. In most other fantasy, there may be some varying level of capability applied in the creation of languages, but it is for the most part applied after the worldbuilding and even writing process, translating songs or texts originally written in the author's native language into the target artificial language. Tolkien's process of creating a legendarium that is not only translated into english, but one built on being translated from several unrelated texts in different languages (Those of the Elves, Westron of the Men, various Dwarvish tongues, and all their various dialects). The main narrative of Lord of the Rings for example is held within the Red Book of Westmarch and was handed down from Bilbo, to Frodo, to Sam, and then through many unnamed hands and survived into the modern day to be translated from Westron into English. It is important therefore to emphasize that Lord of the Rings is meant to be read as a historical account that is as limited in scope and scale as its authors own perception. This was immediately clear when returning to the map in the beginning of the book: Besides vague place names and the occasional mention of specific cities, the maps omit the vast majority of any detail that is not directly interacted with by the characters that contribute to the Red Book. This is of course a generalization, and Lord of the Rings does include in it's appendices various elements from outside of the Hobbit's direct experience, but for the most part things that they did not see are omitted from the story. We can assume to some extent that the additional material from Frodo, Sam, and possibly(?) later authors may have added these, and that the accounts of non-hobbit characters in the fellowship was likely still penned by the Hobbits after oral recount of their experiences. 

But why the trouble? What does it matter to the casual reader that Lord of the Rings was supposedly not a novel but supposedly a translation of an 'original' text? What does it change to those that simply skip the introduction and never even know? It matters because it determined every subsequent creative decision that Tolkien made in his process. On the road to creating an artificial mythology to replace what was stripped by the Norman conquest, Tolkien had to first build the linguistic substrate from which the mythology could emerge organically, as opposed to a post hoc translation. The languages Tolkien created preceded legend, grows to explain the language in retrospect, the opposite of what many other fantasy authors do. This is most visible in the philology of the Elvish languages. Quenya and Sindarin where not exclusively developed for the purposes of Lord of the Rings. They where projects that he had began years before writing - systems developed for their own sake, and the mythology grew around the questions they raised. Why do these languages exist? Who spoke them? What happened to the speakers? Tolkien's subsequent works are in some regards (as reference in Letter 131) an attempt to create a world for these languages rather than the reverse. This is absolutely not a minor distinction in method either, it means that the internal structure of mythology is is linguistic rather than narrative. It turns the way I read 'plot holes' and such into philological, instead of writing problems.

The Lost Road makes this process legible because it is intentionally incomplete, whereas Lord of the Rings is specifically a finished, translated, and edited text presented to an audience. HME 5's text is layered, a narrative from many voices across different timeframes, without ultimate resolution. The project ultimately collapsed because the legendarium was not yet stable enough to support the transmission structure Tolkien was building on top of... What survives is the scaffolding that HME 5 leaves behind. Tolkien works out how myth travels across centuries, degrades, transforms, etc, and how a modern receiver would interpret it. This is the same problem that Tolkien had during the creative process for framing Lord of the Rings that was saved by the Red Book of Westmarch concept, except that the Red Book was mostly one narrative as opposed to a collection of stories, making the final narrative much more coherent and consistent. This is why Lord of the Rings has the atmosphere of of a historical document, even though those that skip the pretext may be ignorant of the fact that it is intentionally written to be one.

This is most directly visible in the Lord of the Rings prologue, were Tolkien lays out the chain of transmission for the Red Book, including it's various alterations and losses over time. As already discussed, the casual reader will likely skip this section (as I did in my haste to re-read the book over spring break), but it's presence is important for setting the lens through which the book must be read. The fact that the original Red Book is entirely written from the perspective of Hobbits, and as such is limited to their perspective or those they encountered, is crucial to the way in which we perceieve Middle Earth. This was discussed earlier in regards to the map, but in the actual text becomes even more clear. For example what comes to mind are scenes were Sam writes about his own uncertainty and fear of the future during the tenure of their journey, but only writes so after the conclusion of their greater journey, with the benefit of hindsight. Simply put, the account is not omniscient because the Red Book never was. Shippey in his own writing identifies this as one of Tolkien's central achievements in Lord of the Rings: The creation of thematic and linguistic depth through omission. 

"I wonder if you will ever read this ??"
-JRR Tolkien
I aim to include this in a future email someday

-LR

Elf-Friends of All Kinds

  One of the defining characteristics of Tolkien’s Fairy Stories is that they must maintain an “inner consistency of reality”, that is, not rely on a suspension of disbelief in the reader. A natural question that thereby poses itself is: how does one achieve that sense of reality within a story? Perhaps the first answer ought to be language, or, more specifically, adjectives, which others in this blog have discussed more deeply than I will do here. My main concern lies with another mechanism that Tolkien uses consistently throughout his stories, which is that of the “Elf-Friend.”

    In her essay “The Footsteps of Ælfwine”, Flieger presents the Elf-friend as, “the link, the connector or mediator between the ‘real’ or natural world and the world of Faërie–the supernatural world of myth and the imagination.” The importance of this figure, as we will see, is that elf friends  serve as a vessel through which the reader is able to navigate the world of Faërie without experiencing it as wholly foreign. In many cases the elf-friend will take on the role of storyteller, through which descriptions of the realm of Faërie are told and retold for the benefit of the reader. As we discussed in class and as Flieger notes, “the tale exists only in its telling.” What interests me, however, is the range of elf-friends that we encounter throughout Tolkien’s works. 

The first and perhaps salient example we shall treat is Aelfwine, whose name translates exactly to “elf-friend”. He was a bard of some renown, which already reinforces the idea of the elf-friend both experiencing the unknown and relaying such experiences to us. Moreover, he is stated to have traveled “the straight road” of the Elves and returned to tell the tale; he is the bridge between the reader and Faërie, without which we would be unable to properly understand or receive tell of such a world. 

Another major example is present in two of Tolkien’s major works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Both are largely concerned with, well, hobbits, as Tolkien describes in his not-so-brief sketch of his works to Milton Waldman: “...the tale of the Hobbit takes a virtually human point of view – and the last tale (LotR) blends them” (Letters, p. 204). It’s important to note that while The Lord of the Rings does have a larger narrative focus than The Hobbit, the story is told from the point of view of hobbits whenever possible. This is in large part because hobbits are the characters we are likely to feel closest to, being largely unfamiliar and unacquainted with the wide, complex world of Middle-Earth. It’s also an important reason why these works are more approachable to many than that of The Silmarillion, which is concerned primarily with elves, and thus feels more remote and ancient (though not necessarily a bad thing). It should be noted that hobbits also play a fundamental role in how the narrative is told, in that the story is canonically written by Bilbo and Frodo, which eventually becomes The Red Book of Westmarch. However, I will not go further into detail on this idea here, as we have other things to discuss.

These first two examples of elf-friends have been more typical, or middle of the road. The next few we will see will either drift too far into the world of Faërie, or stray too far away from it. The former is represented largely through The Silmarillion, whose elvish accounts allow us to step back in time and glimpse many of the stories that were mere legends and myths referenced within The Lord of the Rings. However, in doing so, they lose some of the familiarity that we grew used to in Middle-Earth. Arda and the Valar are far above what we could ever experience as mortals, and there is no character who serves as the bridge between reader and story that we are able to relate to (although it does progressively become more concerned with Men as it approaches the Third Age). 

To go in the other direction is to lose some of our connection with Faërie and elves. The first step this way is through Smith in “Smith of Wotten-Major”, who gains temporary access to the world of Faërie. The fay star on his forehead acts as his passport throughout his adventures, which seem more remote and foreign in a different way than those in The Silmarillion. Those tales, while distant, were so because of the person through which we received them. We are not elves, and are thus removed from their experiences. Smith, however, is human, and we feel a closer kinship with him. The foreign nature of his adventures stems from the lack of description that we receive on the land of Faërie. Whether it be elven mariners returning from the Dark Marches, the birch that saved him from “wild Wind”, or the elf-maiden that he danced with, we receive no further elaboration aside from that which describes his experiences alone. All we can glean is that Faërie is a land both mysterious and perilous, and one in which Smith is consciously and painfully a stranger. Importantly, Smith fails to recount his experiences properly, either because he cannot remember them or he is unable to put them into words. In any case, this is not his main objective, and he remains a traveler in those lands until he returns the fay-star at the request of Alf-prentice, the King of Elves. 

The final example I will use, and to me the most poignant, is that of the narrator in “Sea-Bell”. This is by far the furthest removed we have seen any kind of elf-friend, if we can name him as such. The call to Faërie is similar to Smith in that they both receive an object which serves as a bridge to the other world (in this case, a shell). In Sea-Bell, however, the narrator catches only glimpses of the elvish inhabitants, who seem to be avoiding him. All he witnesses are fleeting echoes of their presence in this land: 

“I heard dancing there, music in the air,

feet going quick on the green floors.

But wherever I came it was ever the same:

the feet fled, and all was still;

never a greeting, only the fleeting

pipes, voices, horns on the hill.”

Unlike Smith, who, while clearly a stranger in Faërie, at least is able to have some kind of relationship with elves, this speaker is bereft of any connection. The land he inhabits, like Smith, is foreign and perilous, but further, it is more actively malevolent towards him. This is provoked primarily once the speaker declares himself as king of the land (as he has seen no challengers to this claim), after which a dark cloud arises and chases him into hiding. While the speaker eventually returns to his home, the price he pays is severe; he is old, beaten, and bent, and no one has ears to listen to his strange tales:

“To myself I talk;

For still they speak not, men that meet.”

Smith is able to end his adventures to Faërie with some modicum of autonomy, even if it is bittersweet. Moreover, he is able to return home in peace, that is, in good standing with the elvish kingdom. While he does have to give up the key to entry to Faërie, he is given some choice in the matter. In "Sea-Bell", the narrator has no such choice; he is forced from Faërie, never to return again, and finds his key into Faërie “silent and dead”. 

I would wager to say that, along with some other allegorical implications that Flieger and Shippey propose (i.e. Smith represents Tolkien, Nokes as the critic lacking imagination), “Sea-Bell” provides the most severe condemnation of those who venture into Faërie in arrogance and ignorance. In opposition to Smith, who attempts to treat Faërie with respect and displays some sense about where he is to go and the powers above him, this narrator rushes with no knowledge of the land he wanders through and little respect for its inhabitants. He abuses the rare chance at entrance into Faërie and is driven out and suffers heavily because of it. This narrator embodies the literary critic who approaches fairy stories with disdain, and leaves with the misconstrued idea that there is nothing of substance there. I’m sure they perceived nothing of substance, or thought they did; but that is because they ventured into Faërie without the willingness or Sight to perceive and experience another world. Faërie rejected the critics just as much as the critics rejected Faërie from the realm of significance. 

The larger concern I hold, though, is not a criticism of critics, but to rue their relationship, or lack thereof, with Faërie. Like the narrator of “Sea-Bell”, they are at most able to catch memories of wonder or enchantment, not directly participate in them. Instead of experiencing the joy of eucatastrophe, they are left haunted and troubled by the feeling that a Mystery has passed them by, not to return again. 

- GTB

Words, Worlds, and Wonder: Tolkien's 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