SHORT TOLKIEN COMPLAINT

I don't remember when I last re-read THE LORD OF THE RINGS, but it's definitely been over twenty years.  I've finished the first two volumes and have begun RETURN OF THE KING, but as I read the books, I find myself calling to mind my original reaction from the 1960s:

A lot of Tolkien's characters are BLOODY BORING!

The Oxford don does come up with a number of good touches for his main characters, and those touches are the reason why the book has remained popular these many decades.  But a lot of his subordinate characters are dullards. Yes, Theoden and Denethor serve different plot-purposes, and enjoy different character-arcs-- but as characters, one is no more developed than the other. Many Tolkien-fans despite the film-adaptation by Peter Jackson, but at least I didn't have trouble distinguishing one king from the other.

I remember thinking back in the 1960s that this was the one thing that kept LORD OF THE RINGS from greatness: that so many of the characters were dull ciphers, no more alive than figures in a history-book. I wished that someday someone--maybe even me-- might write an epic fantasy in which even the subordinate characters were intensely alive, were individuals as developed as fictional characters can be.

And yet, on some occasions, I've seen Tolkien attacked for his lackluster characters-- and I usually find myself coming to his defense, possibly because there is a special art to fantasy-characterization that isn't identical with the world of "realistic literature."

TOLKIEN'S "ON FAIRY STORIES": A DELVING, PT. 6

Tolkien's next consideration is "origins."  Here he finally breaks down and uses the term "folklore" as a wider phylum that embraces his more restrictive category of "fairy stories."  However, he never defines this term adequately, either in his own terms or in those of some respected academic.  He also makes his first references to the academic concept of "myth," and for the same essential purpose:" to show that academics have attempted to restrict the raw material of both subjects too neatly.  But while Tolkien's invocation of folklore studies are too general, his invocation of myth-studies are both overly specific and overly limiting. 

Tolkien is entirely opposed to the folklorists' tendency to lump all tales together on the basis of shared patterns.  He names off several disparate tales that have been so confounded; for convenience, I'll use just one: the supposed identity of both "Eros and Psyche" and "Beauty and the Beast."  Tolkien asserts that the reductive approach steamrolls over important differences in the stories for the sake of stressing only the similarities.

There's some justice in this. While "Eros" and "Beauty" certainly share some important story-motifs, there's no doubt that the stories are very different in plot, character and theme. 

On the other hand, Tolkien goes a little too far later, when he claims that there's a similar gulf separating the RED RIDING HOOD of Charles Perrault (which has an unhappy ending, where the wolf simply eats Red) from later versions with happier denouements.  That the endings are different, and that they have an altering effect on the theme, one cannot doubt.  But in contrast to the "Eros/Beauty" pairing, these are more like variations on a common theme.  The fact that each tale-teller surely meant to represent his version of RRH as "the" version actually reinforces the position of the folklorists.  Disparate versions of a given folktale simply do not have the creative standing Tolkien applies to tales that simply share a few major motifs.

As if to dodge objections by academics steeped in their professional specialities, Tolkien confesses that he is too "unlearned" to dwell on the matter of origins. He merely provides a sketch of the methods by which traditional stories have been propagated: (1) "independent evolution," aka "invention," (2) "diffusion," and (3) "inheritance."  Tolkien broadly implies that scholars focus too much on the latter methods, all the better to defer what he considers the key consideration:

Of these three invention is the most important and fundamental, and so (not surprisingly) also the most mysterious. To an inventor, that is to a storymaker, the other two must in the end lead back. Diffusion (borrowing in space) whether of an artefact or a story, only refers the problem of origin elsewhere. At the centre of the supposed diffusion there is a place where once an inventor lived. Similarly with inheritance (borrowing in time): in this way we arrive at last only at an ancestral inventor. While if we believe that sometimes there occurred the independent striking out of similar ideas and themes or devices, we simply multiply the ancestral inventor but do not in that way the more clearly understand his gift.

 

Tolkien, having marginalized the contributions of the folklorists, immediately turns to the complementary academic theorists of myth-- or one of them, at least.

Philology has been dethroned from the high place it once had in this court of inquiry. Max Müller's view of mythology as a “disease of language” can be abandoned without regret. Mythology is not a disease at all, though it may like all human things become diseased. You might as well say that thinking is a disease of the mind.
 

 I certainly agree with these assertions.  Not only is Muller's theory worthless today, save as an indicator of early patterns in myth-analysis, the bloom was off that particular rose in 1939 as well.

However, what Tolkien omits in his quick dismissal of Muller is that the whole point of Muller's "disease of language" theory was to assert that myths originated because men had personified natural forces.  From Wikipedia:

For Müller, the culture of the Vedic peoples represented a form of nature worship, an idea clearly influenced by Romanticism. He saw the gods of the Rig-Veda as active forces of nature, only partly personified as imagined supernatural persons. From this claim Müller derived his theory that mythology is 'a disease of language'. By this he meant that myth transforms concepts into beings and stories. In Müller's view 'gods' began as words constructed in order to express abstract ideas, but were transformed into imagined personalities. Thus the Indo-European father-god appears under various names: Zeus, Jupiter, Dyaus Pita. For Müller all these names can be traced to the word 'Dyaus', which he understands to imply 'shining' or 'radiance'. This leads to the terms 'deva', 'deus', 'theos' as generic terms for a god, and to the names 'Zeus' and 'Jupiter' (derived from deus-pater). In this way a metaphor becomes personified and ossified. This aspect of Müller's thinking closely resembled the later ideas of Nietzsche

Tolkien, having said that Muller is yesterday's news, roundly contradicts himself by writing as if the only then-extant theory of mythology was the theory of "gods-as-incarnate-natural-forces"-- which is to imply that Muller was the dominant scholarly influence in myth-studies after all.  It's certainly possible that Tolkien may have been thinking of authors who advocated the "nature myth" theory without endorsing "the disease of lanugage," but he does not name any such authors.

One need not be an expert on the academic myth-studies scene of the period to know that non-nature-centered theories of myth existed. My own source is Ernst Cassirer's book MYTHICAL THOUGHT, which attests to such theories dating back to the late 1800s.  To be sure, Cassirer's 1925 book was not translated into an English edition until 1953, long after Tolkien penned this essay.  Still, it's one thing for an author to modestly claim that he is "unlearned," perhaps with the strategy of convincing readers that he really is not.  It's another thing for an author to give ample evidence that he hasn't done his homework.

 Even though Tolkien is manifestly incorrect to assume that all mythographers were guilty of (say) understanding "Thorr" as nothing but a nature-myth, he makes this generalization to support a greater point: that even myth-characters possess a characterization essential to their narrative nature; that Thorr can't simply be reduced to his allegorical aspects. 

As it happens, in many respects Tolkien's focus on the interrelatonship of language and stories very much resembles the German idealism of Cassirer.

The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval. The human mind, endowed with the powers of generalization and abstraction, sees not only green-grass, discriminating it from other things (and finding it fair to look upon), but sees that it is green as well as being grass. 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. And that is not surprising: such incantations might indeed be said to be only another view of adjectives, a part of speech in a mythical grammar. The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both.
 

 In other words, the ability to parcel out aspects of the creative order also carries with it the power to imagine transgressions of that order.  Though not until near the essay's end does Tolkien unfold the majority of his Christian concerns, one can certainly find mentions of them here, as when he alludes to "fallen man" in paragraph 28.  Thus for Tolkien man's ability to transgress the natural order can be turned to good or to evil.

 When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter's power—upon one plane; and the desire to wield that power in the world external to our minds awakes. It does not follow that we shall use that power well upon any plane. We may put a deadly green upon a man's face and produce a horror; we may make the rare and terrible blue moon to shine; or we may cause woods to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and put hot fire into the belly of the cold worm.
 

 However, this mental capacity also gives man the power, as I mentioned in Part 2, to "imitate God" in a good way-- perhaps extending even to the Catholic miracle of transubstantiation.  It's in this section that Tolkien first links the idea of Faerie to this creative ability.

 Faerie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator.
 

The remainder of the "Origins" section largely repeats Tolkien's anti-reductionist stance with variations.  Therefore in my next essay I'll proceed to his next heading, entitled "Children."

TOLKIEN'S "ON FAIRY STORIES": A DELVING, PT. 5

Finishing up the section in which Tolkien discusses the types of stories that he doesn't deem "fairy stories..."

There's not a great deal to add with respect to Tolkien's exclusion of "any story that uses the machinery of Dream, the dreaming of actual human sleep, to explain the apparent occurrence of its marvels."  The only example he gives is that of Lewis Carroll's two ALICE books, which probably were deemed "fairy tales" by some adults simply because they contained marvels (albeit rationalized) and were (in theory) aimed at children.  But as Tolkien says in his footnotes, it's also widely recognized that the ALICE books are satire, which carries little mood of "faerie." 

At the same time, there do exist works that evoke a strong "faerie" touch despite resorting to dream-mechanism.  Ironically, though the Oz books of Frank Baum are not justified as dreams, MGM's 1939 film does convey a strong mood of enchantment, despite telegraphing the "only a dream" ending early in the narrative.

Tolkien's ruminations on the "beast-fable" are a little more involved.  It's true that there are many stories-- particularly those of Aesop and Uncle Remus-- in which the only marvelous element is that animals are portrayed as doing very human things.  And Tolkien is also correct in saying that such stories, insofar as they cease to deal with "the proper languages of birds and beasts and trees," do not possess the faerie charm; that they are merely extensions of a human ethos and do not address the faerie desire to know "communion with other living things."

Still, Tolkien provides insufficient examples of those stories that successfully blend faerie magic with anthropomorphic animals.  One might expect him to discuss traditional folktales, since he has been so insistent about disincluding literary fantasies of various types. Instead his positive examples include "the stories of Beatrix Potter" and a George McDonald tale.  He mentions the Egyptian "Tale of Two Brothers" as a positive example of the motif of the "soul/heart separated from its body," but this doesn't support his point about beast-fables. He seems to have tossed it in as a counter-example to the beast-fable "The Monkey's Heart," in which a character alludes to such a separation but no such separation actually takes place.  In my somewhat humble opinion he might have done better to have discussed a traditional folktale in which the beast-element is tied in with some magical circumstances, such as-- just to name one at random-- the Grimm's tale Hans My Hedgehog.  In contrast to an over-anthropomorphized "fairy tale" like "Puss in Boots," "Hedgehog" should satisfy Tolkien's desire to find an "arresting strangeness" in his tales of faerie.

TOLKIEN'S "ON FAIRY STORIES": A DELVING, PT. 4

Continuing with Tolkien:

In the pages following his remarks on magic and enchantment, Tolkien, having already disagreed with the characterization of fairies themselves as darling little peewees, takes similar issue with how many people define "fairy stories."

He remarks, a little dismissively, of the disproportionate influence of French folktales (my word) on the concept of the fairy tale:

The number of collections of fairy-stories is now very great. In English none probably rival either the popularity, or the inclusiveness, or the general merits of the twelve books of twelve colours which we owe to Andrew Lang and to his wife. The first of these appeared more than seventy years ago (1889), and is still in print. Most of its contents pass the test, more or less clearly. I will not analyse them, though an analysis might be interesting, but I note in passing that of the stories in this Blue Fairy Book none are primarily about “fairies,” few refer to them. Most of the tales are taken from French sources: a just choice in some ways at that time, as perhaps it would be still (though not to my taste, now or in childhood). At any rate, so powerful has been the influence of Charles Perrault, since his Contes de ma Mère l'Oye were first Englished in the eighteenth century, and of such other excerpts from the vast storehouse of the Cabinet des Fées as have become well known, that still, I suppose, if you asked a man to name at random a typical “fairy-story,” he would be most likely to name one of these French things: such as Puss-in-Boots, Cinderella, or Little Red Riding Hood. With some people Grimm's Fairy Tales might come first to mind.
 

It's a shame that Tolkien did not take a stab at generalizing what sorts of "magic" and "enchantment" might appear in these dominantly French tales, even though they did not usually contain fairies as Tolkien perceived them.  What would he have made of the archetypal "fairy godmother" of CINDERELLA, for example, given that he preferred to view his world of faerie as much less predictable in its effects:

In that [faerie] realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveller who would report them. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost.

Also lacking in Tolkien's essay is a definition of the folktale as such, which would take in some though not all of the tales he refers to.

Instead, Tolkien takes something of a digression by taking issue with the incorrect labeling of various stories with marvelous content as "fairy stories."

Such tales report many marvels, but they are marvels to be seen in this mortal world in some region of our own time and space; distance alone conceals them. The tales of Gulliver have no more right of entry than the yarns of Baron Munchausen; or than, say, The First Men in the Moon or The Time-Machine.
 

Unquestionably Tolkien is right that some modern children's tales-- or stories that are deemed as children's tales-- have been lumped in with fairy tales.  Tolkien cites a particular Andrew Lang collection that includes Swift's voyage to Lilliput, and in this century television watchers have been treated to the dubious teleseries ONCE UPON A TIME, which flings together folktale characters like Rumplestiltskin and the Beanstalk-giant with literary creations like Pinocchio and Captain Hook. The tales of Munchausen would in my opinion also belong to the category of literary creations.

His point about two Wellsian science-fiction novels is harder to follow.  I doubt that Tolkien had ever heard such technological marvel-stories referred to as "fairy stories," so it follows that his main point is that these items, that are never referred to as fairytales, are closer in spirit to faerie than the work of Jonathan Swift, since Swift's Lilliputians only resemble the smaller breed of fairies in terms of size, and not in terms of content.  He then makes an odd digression.

Indeed, for the Eloi and the Morlocks there would be a better claim than for the Lilliputians. Lilliputians are merely men peered down at, sardonically, from just above the house-tops. Eloi and Morlocks live far away in an abyss of time so deep as to work an enchantment upon them; and if they are descended from ourselves, it may be remembered that an ancient English thinker once derived the ylfe, the very elves, through Cain from Adam.
 

Is Tolkien stating that such technological marvels participate in the same "enchantment" as his concept of faerie?  In all likelihood Tolkien did not pursue this thought with any rigor, for then he abandons it to speak of his central theme again.

The magic of Faerie is not an end in itself, its virtue is in its operations: among these are the satisfaction of certain primordial human desires. One of these desires is to survey the depths of space and time. Another is (as will be seen) to hold communion with other living things. A story may thus deal with the satisfaction of these desires, with or without the operation of either machine or magic, and in proportion as it succeeds it will approach the quality and have the flavour of fairy-story.
 

More discriminations to come in Part 5.

TOLKIEN'S "ON FAIRY STORIES": A DELVING, PT. 3

My theory that Tolkien regarded human beings as a "supernatural" by virtue of their ability to imitate the deity finds some support in another of the more heavily-quoted passages of ON FAIRY STORIES.

Now, though I have only touched (wholly inadequately) on elves and fairies, I must turn back; for I have digressed from my proper theme: fairy-stories. I said the sense “stories about fairies” was too narrow. It is too narrow, even if we reject the diminutive size, for fairy-stories are not in normal English usage stories about fairies or elves, but stories about Fairy, that is Faerie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being. 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.

Now on the face of things, this sounds like a contradiction when placed alongside Tolkien's earlier claim that "it is man who is, in contrast to fairies, supernatural."  One must wonder that if mortal men are "supernatural," why does faerie contain them only when they are "enchanted?"  Why would mankind not belong to faerie at all times?

My solution to the conundrum falls in two parts.  First, I believe Tolkien made about man being "supernatural" to counter the usual belief that it was fairies and their relations who held that status.  If as I believe Tolkien identified fairies with nature, then they are coterminous with nature and so cannot be either above or beyond it, as mankind can.  Certainly I don't think it's coincidence that in this passage it parallels all the supposedly-supernatural denizens of Faerie-- elves, giants, dragons, etc.-- with various natural phenomena: heavenly bodies, living creatures, and natural foodstuffs ("wine and bread," which also happen to be significant in Catholic liturgy).

However, on a second level Tolkien was certainly aware that mortals tend to be governed by their more mundane moods, in which they don't often have much patience for tales of faerie or even narratives of Christian salvation.  Therefore, "man" can be supernatural in a way that fairies cannot be, because man is able to transcend his mundane nature whenever he  becomes "enchanted."

It's slightly after this that Tolkien descants for the first time in the essay on "magic," tying it in to the nature of Faerie:

...“fairy-story” is one which touches on or uses Faerie, whatever its own main purpose may be: satire, adventure, morality, fantasy. Faerie itself may perhaps most nearly be translated by Magic—but it is magic of a peculiar mood and power, at the furthest pole from the vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific, magician.

It follows that Tolkien's concept of magic heavily draws on the idea of one being "enchanted."  Certainly magic in  Tolkien's faerie-universe cannot be drearily functional, along the lines of the "scientific magician," by which I assume Tolkien means the "stage magician."  One sentence later Tolkien adds:

There is one proviso : if there is any satire present in the tale, one thing must not be made fun of, the magic itself. That must in that story be taken seriously, neither laughed at nor explained away.

To laugh at the magic, one assumes, would undermine one's credence-- one might even call it "faith"-- in the magic within the fairy-story.  The concept of magic as vital to the world of Faerie would seem to be tied into Tolkien's concept of man as being capable of being "supernatural" so long as he is "enchanted."

Having finished his preliminary meditations of Faerie, Tolkien next proceeds to the question of the origin of fairy stories, which I will examine in my next Tolkien essay.

TOLKIEN'S "ON FAIRY STORIES": A DELVING, PT. 2

This passage from the Tolkien essay will be familiar to many readers of fantasies:

The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveller who would report them. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost.

The passage contains one of Tolkien's key concepts in the essay, the idea that fairy-stories promote the feeling of "enchantment" which may also be a "peril."  As I note in my previous essay, Tolkien was not interested in comparativism, so he did not wonder about whether other species of fantastic fiction offered similar "enchantments."  His sphere of comparison, to the extent that he makes one explicit, would seem to be that of naturalistic literary works. In 1936 many academics regarded naturalistic modernism as the *sine qua non* of good literature, and anything else was "escapist"-- a term with which Tolkien would take issue later in the essay.

A few paragraphs later Tolkien makes this assertion, which has not been reprinted quite so often.

Supernatural is a dangerous and difficult word in any of its senses, looser or stricter. But to fairies it can hardly be applied, unless super is taken merely as a superlative prefix. For it is man who is, in contrast to fairies, supernatural (and often of diminutive stature); whereas they are natural, far more natural than he.
 

This is an interesting way of approaching the question of "what is natural."  For proponents of literary naturalism, man was the measure of all things, and man was inherently a creature bounded by natural law.  But Tolkien was a Christian, and for him man has a unique contact with God.  No other creature can relate to God as man does; no other creature can attempt the so-called *imitatio dei*-- which ability, as we will see later, extends also to Tolkien's magisterial concept of "subcreation."

The inhabitants of "faerie," then, occupy a middle ground between "Heaven" and "Hell," a sphere which might be deemed the realm of Pure Nature, not yet redeemed but capable of redemption through Man-- who is for that reason truly "supernatural."  The comment upon man being more "diminutive" is a barb at those who assume that "fairies" must be cute little sprites, and doesn't make quite as much logical sense as the "supernatural" line, since most archaic representations of "the fay" show them as being of human proportions.

More to come.

TOLKIEN'S "ON FAIRY STORIES": A DELVING, PT. 1

I've given a certain amount of thought over the years as to what the particular charms of "otherworldly fantasy" as compared to those of other types of fantastic fiction. I've coined my own word for such fiction-- "the metaphenomenal," which I sometimes toss out in my film-reviews-- but I'll avoid that theoretical briar-patch here.

I mentioned in that initial post that I believed Tolkien would have many if not all the answers.  But now that I've reread it, I think the essay offers some interesting points, but it doesn't solve all the problems.

"On Fairy Stories," as Tolkien himself says on his first page, is entirely about identifying the nature of the genre Tolkien advocates. This is essentially an insular endeavor, one not concerned with drawing comparisons to other genres. Once or twice Tolkien makes reference to fantasy's "rival" (my word) science fiction, but he doesn't offer a sustained comparison between the two.  He makes some isolated comments about how fantasy differs from naturalistic fiction as well, but Tolkien is also not particularly interested in these differences except insofar as they help him define the genre of "faery stories"-- which in his mind would seem to include THE HOBBIT, completed a few years before the essay.  By extension, that would imply that he deemed the rest of his works to be in the same genre as well, though few moderns would refer to LORD OF THE RINGS and SILMARILLION as "fairy stories.".

So as I pick my way slowly through the various complexities of Tolkien's most famous essay in future posts, I will do so with the knowledge that Tolkien was manifestly NOT interested in what interests me in the definition of fantasy: i.e., what makes it different from other forms of fantastic fiction.

More to come.