Unraveling the Enchantment: Why Tolkien Opted for Dreams as a Portal to the Past and Future

 As a child, I was entranced by the depiction of the elvish civilization in Tolkien's works, and have since pondered what makes it so captivating. Initially, I had believed that the Elvish art depicted in Peter Jackson's films was what captivated me.  Jackson masterfully utilized Art Nouveau as the main style for Elvish architecture in Rivendell, with its flowing curves and colors that evoke a sense of connection to nature and moral goodness, characteristic of the “Firstborn". Upon further reflection, I came to the realization that Tolkien likely did not intend for the beauty of Elvish craftsmanship, marvels, or even magic to be the core elements that captivate those “Elf-friends”. But if not those, then what exactly does? I believe that this question is closely tied to why Tolkien selected dreams as a means to revisit the past and foresee the future. As a result, I will commence my discussion by delving into potential answers to this inquiry.

Before answering this question,  I would like to present an alternative version of time travel for "The Lost Road," which we can then compare to the original. Here's the story:

As the persecution of the Faithful by the King's party intensifies, Elendil grows increasingly anxious that their cause will soon come to an end. To preserve their legacy, he seeks a way to pass on their fight. With the assistance of the Eldar from the West, he creates a device that allows him to communicate with Alboin and share his story.

I'm curious to know what you think about this "who lives, who dies, who tells your story" plot. Although some may argue that it fills a gap by explaining how Alboin can suddenly speak words he never thought he'd say, I strongly believe that introducing such a plot risks undermining everything Tolkien aimed to accomplish with his work. To understand this point, we may first notice the similarities between this plot and plots in films like Interstellar. While Interstellar may be considered a classic in science fiction, it is still just that - a work of science fiction. Remember that Tolkien is regarded as a giant in the realm of fantasy, as opposed to science fiction. What is the difference in essence? Drawing from my own reading experience, I have observed that science fiction writers like Jules Verne often exhibit a deep admiration for human technology, while also conveying a sense of disenchantment with our world based on it. As readers of Tolkien, we can observe this sense of "disenchantment" portrayed in The Lord of the Rings through Saruman's destruction of Fangorn (To Saruman, Trees are just trees), and this is everything that Tolkien is against. Taking into account this perspective, we can approach the question more closely: What is the true enchantment of the elvenland and, more broadly, Tolkien's fantasy? And what are the elements that an "elf-friend" is expected to discover and adore during “their perilous journey”? In my opinion, the true enchantment lies in the creation and the gift of Eru, which is unlike anything from elf, human, or Sauron.

This leads to another question: what are the specific creations and gifts from Eru, and how are they connected to Tolkien's choice of using dreams as a "portal" for time-traveling?

The first and perhaps most fundamental gift from Eru is the gift of life itself. This encompasses both the physical and spiritual forms of life, and it is a gift that should be respected and cherished by all beings. Therefore, the act considered as Melkor's most unforgivable crime is his corruption of the Elves into Orcs. The portrayal of time machines, such as the TARDIS in Doctor Who, in science fiction often suggests that they pose a risk of altering the life form of their passengers during transportation (taking the case of River Song as an example), whether it be physical or spiritual. This concept runs contrary to the belief in Tolkien's works that the creation of Eru should not be violated. However, dreams offer a perfect sandbox where one can experience, learn, and feel without changing anything in either world.

The other gifts bestowed by Eru are highly dependent on the individual recipients. As suggested in Le Roman de la Rose：

Some say that there’s nothing in dreams

But lies and fables; however, one may

Have dreams which are not in the least

Deceitful, but which later become clear.

Apacen (Foresight) are among the gifts reserved for a select few Elves and Men. Dreams and visions serve as the natural means through which these gifts are expressed and utilized: Idril Celebrindal dreams about the fall of Gondolin and prepares a secret way for exodus; In the film, Arwen Undómiel, despite foreseeing both death and life on her path, chooses to continue on her journey.  These are the most enchanting moments in Tolkien’s world. 

There are more gifts bestowed upon ordinary mortals that are equally beautiful. In dreams, we often experience a feeling of déjà vu. This feeling may be the inspiration for the parallel scenes in The Lost Road; Another remarkable gift from Eru is the ability to choose to carry our loss, longing, and pain with us, and to transform them into our fantasies and dreams. Without such gift, how could Tolkien create Nirnaeth Arnoediad (Battle of Unnumbered Tears) and the Dance of Tinúviel?

Dream is a gift and may be the last comfort for the wanderers crossing oceans of time and space. -Y.P.L

Words, wine, and wafers: Eucharistic reflections

"Take this, all of you, and eat of it:

for this is my body which will be given up for you.

Take this, all of you, and drink from it:

for this is the chalice of my blood,

the blood of the new and eternal covenant.

which will be poured out for you and for many

for the forgiveness of sins.

Do this in memory of me.”

– Words of Institution in the Roman Catholic Church

Throughout many mythic traditions, we have countless stories of cultures eating their gods. Sometimes this consumption is violent, as with the omophagia in the Dionysiac cult. Sometimes, it is controlled and metaphorical, like the kykeon in the Eleusinian Mysteries. Always, the participants are changed somehow; they are given a better afterlife, more power, a closer connection with the divine.

At the Catholic mass, the wafers and wine (grain and grapes like the Greeks!) turn into the literal body and blood of Christ. Like Tolkien’s work, it refers to something greater – a moment in the Gospel, the eucatastrophe – but importantly, it is not an allegory. The Eucharistic consecration is not a lovely falsehood or noble lie, but an absolute state of reality. 

Along with being the most true (on a higher plane of truth, really), the Eucharist is also fundamentally mysterious. Mystery in the Christian tradition means something that can only be shown by the revelation of God, not through human reason. Though the framework we usually use to describe Eucharistic theology is pre-revelation (Aristotelian), the substance/accidents concept confounds natural reason. It is only through Christ revealing this truth at the Last Supper that this understanding becomes possible.

At the moment of consecration, so that the bread and wine may become body and blood, the priest says these Words of Institution (above, required words bolded). As we discussed, language begins with incarnation, but language also becomes incarnation. As the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, so too do the words make flesh again at every (valid) mass. Perhaps another reason that ghosts don’t have language is that they are no longer in need of this incarnation; they have either been saved or not. If God became man to teach us, as Augustine said, maybe the ghosts have learned all they can. 

As Tolkien further pointed out in our reading last week, these words are also an act of creation. The priest in persona Christi names the food and drink as the body and blood, thereby creating a new substance through speech. Christ is the new Adam (Romans 5:12-21) and the priest is both Adam and Christ. The priest participates in creation not only like God but also with and through God. This also makes Christ the truest of the Elf-Friends, as He is both “inside and outside the story… both a character in the drama [the body and blood] and a frame for the narrative [the one instituting]” (The Footsteps of Aelfwine, 184). In this way, He is not just a mediator, but the mediator (1 Timothy 2:5) and he mediates during not just any fairy-story, but “a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories” (On Fairy-Stories, 88).

As we discussed in class, language also has a way of transporting us across time. Though this has the anthropological/philological/social explanation we outlined, I also want to highlight the fact that these Words of Institution also have a very literal time-traveling effect in that the mystery of the Eucharist makes each mass also contemporaneous with the Last Supper (and possibly the Wedding Supper of the Lamb, I am not sure). 

There’s also something fundamentally important about the fact that the Eucharist is food. As with Tolkien’s linguistic cellar, language is like wine and language makes wine – both in the consecration and echoing all the way back to Cana. Tolkien’s representation of a priest, as addressed briefly in Shippey, is a cook. In The Lord of the Rings, there’s the very literal sign of the Eucharist in the lembas bread, a wafer that will renew the strength of a man on their journey as they seek the way (John 14:6). However, I feel as if that has been thoroughly covered and I rather want to think about what it means for something salvific to come from food.

As Christ is the new Adam, the redemption of man comes through a feast as the Fall came through one too. Feasting shows the bounty of God’s creation (“the green grass, the large slow oddity of cows,” Mythopoeia) and yet also the creativity of our industry (so many are involved in even the seeming simpleness of a food like bread). Wine, too, remains an important symbol. First, it shows the work of patient cultivation, for the “well-aged wines” of Isaiah 25:6 take many years to make. Likewise, the wine of language in the linguistic cellar combines a mastery of time travel in learning from the past as well as a command of present time in the commitment that is made to learn these languages. Additionally, wine exemplifies the joy of celebration in that abundance and the corporeal pleasure that can be directed to spiritual things: worshiping the Creator through His creation. Finally, eating with others at a feast both fulfills God’s commandment that man not be alone (Genesis 2:8) and, in another way, illustrates Tolkien’s insistence that a value of a story also comes from its transmission (Footsteps, 185). As there is a link between the event and the listener or reader, there is a link between the food and the diner. In the case of the Gospel and the Eucharist, this link is the most important relationship, a salvific relationship between God and man.

I know this was a lot of topics to cover, but I hope this even gestured at some of the thoughts I had after class today. I haven’t read nearly enough Eucharistic theology, but this is super interesting to me and I really hope to learn more about it! — KW

Helpful in the writing of this topic:

The Hungry Soul by Leon Kass

Euripides’ Bacchae

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter

Talking to a bunch of Catholic priests about the Eucharist

A bit of a funny aside: I am not the best at understanding spoken Latin, but I did RCIA at a church that does Latin masses (St. John Cantius) and the way they pronounce Latin is so different than I usually hear it pronounced. I know we talked about how English can be overwritten by Latin and thus gains the character of Latin (especially in the Our Father), but often in ecclesiastical situations, English is overwriting Latin in intonation. This means that the church-spoken Latin gains a character of its own and is recognizable as a dialect or even a separate language from Classical Latin. The most noticeable time to me is when people say “Deo gracias” after the readings.

What Makes a Myth-Maker?

 “Blessed are the myth-makers with their rhyme of things not found within recorded time.” - J.R.R. Tolkien, Mythopoeia

In class, we discussed the question of English mythology and what Tolkien was trying to achieve through his writing.  In his letter to Milton Waldman, Tolkien writes that his many stories developed separately, and ultimately the links between them emerged and created the world we know today.  In particular, he wrote that “always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there’, somewhere: not of ‘inventing’” (Letters, 145).  This idea that his stories are not truly original and rather were recordings of a mythology that was already out there made me want to take a closer look at some of the many storytellers Tolkien has given us.  I believe that they are, in some ways, reflections of himself and may grant us some insight into his own aims as a storyteller himself.  

Let us take Tom Bombadil, for example.  His stories hold a great power over the hobbits.  His manner of storytelling is manic, “sometimes half as if speaking to himself, sometimes looking at them suddenly with a bright blue eye under his deep brows.  Often his voice would turn to song, and he would get out of his chair and dance about” (Lord of the Rings, 161).  In particular, this style of speaking to himself, as if in a daze, is curious.  It seems as though he is not telling his stories for the entertainment of the hobbits, as he sometimes appears to forget that they are there altogether.  His stories are instead a way to answer the hobbits’ many questions and “as they listened, they began to understand the lives of the Forest, apart from themselves, indeed to feel themselves as the strangers where all other things were at home” (Lord of the Rings, 161).  Tom, great myth-maker that he is, draws the hobbits into his tale and places where they are strangers, but simultaneously tells them of the things they are to encounter on their journey and helps them understand the world they are about to enter.  

This is what Tolkien does for us.  We become absorbed into his world of Middle-Earth, a world in which we do not belong, and yet somehow we emerge with a greater understanding of our own journeys.  This is, after all, a history course.  We can see it in our discussion of how we each found Middle-Earth.  YPL studied medieval history and emerged with a greater understanding of not only Tolkien’s work, but why it calls to him.  Tolkien’s invention of Elvish inspired LN to study linguistics.  As a writer and prospective Creative Writing major, GE is inspired by Tolkien and the world he recorded for us.  We are all a testament to the fact that great storytellers are not just those who spin fantastic tales, but spin those tales so that we, the audience, might better understand the world around us and our place in it.

Finally, I want to conclude with a discussion of the concept of the elf-friend and how it relates to great storytelling.  The elf-friend draws the connection between our primary world and the Faërie world.  We see many elf-friends in the Lord of the Rings, from Sam, Frodo, and Tom Bombadil to Tolkien himself.  However, I was most fascinated by the one Tolkien introduces to us in Smith of Wootton Major, which I had never read.  It tells the tale of a smith who swallows a fay-star as a child, which eventually appears on his forehead, though it is written that few people in the village notice it.  Instead, “some of its light passed into his eyes; and his voice, which had begun to grow beautiful as soon as the star came to him, became ever more beautiful as he grew up.  People liked to hear him speak, even if it was no more than a ‘good morning’” (Smith of Wootton Major, 22).  However, while the most important effect of the fay-star was that it granted the smith access to the Faery world, he only ever told few people of his adventures, except his family.  Similarly, when he decides to give the fay-star away, Alf reveals that it was the smith’s grandfather who first brought it from Faery and Alf was the only person who knew that truth.  The secrecy around and impact of the fay-star emphasizes the link between great storytelling and world connecting.  Ignorant of the presence of the star, the villagers loved to hear the smith speak.  We can imagine how he would have captivated an audience if he ever shared his stories, given the effect the fay-star had on his voice over time.  It is reminiscent of the impact of Tom Bombadil’s storytelling, which leaves the hobbits in a daze, with no concept of how much time has passed.  

This exploration leads me to the same conclusion we reached in class: that Tolkien himself is the ultimate elf-friend, mythmaker, storyteller, whatever term suits your fancy.  In his writing, he bridges the gap between Middle-Earth and our own world, just as Tom Bombadil spins tales to inform the hobbits of world far away and yet very near, just as the smith probably would if he had chosen to share his stories with the villagers.  Anyone who doubts this, has only to revisit our discussion of how we all found Middle-Earth and ourselves in it.  - JMR

The Forge of Tolkien

Want more Tolkien with Professor Rachel Fulton Brown? Video lectures available at The Forge of Tolkien with subscription to Unauthorized.tv. Introduction and episode guide.