Texts for this week: Tolkien’s “On Fairy Stories,” “Monsters and the Critics,” and “Forward to the Second Edition” of The Lord of the Rings; Verlyn Flieger’s “There Would Always be a Fairy-Tale: J. R. R. Tolkien and the Folklore Controversy” in Tolkien and the Medievalist
Discussion Questions for this week:
- In his work “On Fairy Stories” (1939) Tolkien offers numerous definitions for what a fairy story is and is not. Consider some of the distinctions he gives, and how his theory informs his own methods in story-telling. Are there some common techniques he identifies, and employs, in creating a fantasy? Are these techniques, tropes and archetypes integral to story-telling, and if so, why?
- In “The Monsters and the Critics” (1936) Tolkien argues against scholarly examination of this poetic text, because it detracts from its value as a work of art. What insights can be gleaned from Tolkien’s thesis, as it pertains to his own work? What might the benefits and limitations be in considering a text, as Andrew Lang would have it, as a cultural artefact?
- In Tolkien’s “Preface,” he flatly denies that the Lord of the Rings has any allegorical elements; however, this assertion is also paired with numerous suggestions from Tolkien that Middle Earth and the War of the Ring could be compared to the destruction and evil of his own political present. How does Tolkien define “allegory,” and is there value in critiquing his texts from a new historicist perspective? How might all or any of the works we’ve read this week be defined by their historic moment?
- For Tolkien, narratives are “capsules” with both contain, suspend and capture time; this can either be a state of being, an idealized past, or a cultural portrait. Consider the ways in which Tolkien defines “time” in these texts, and how time plays a role in the deployment and signification of story-telling: as a history (shared past), as a life stage (childhood), and as a part of civilization (primitive, archetypal origin-story or canonical Literature).
Introduction
Tolkien often conceived of stories, like the branches of linguistic family trees, as many leafed branches stemming off of the same root. As you will read in the “Introduction” to his Tales from the Perilous Realm, Tolkien’s story “Leaf by Niggle” is in many ways analogous to Tolkien’s own world-building technique – one in which many leafed parts add to the complexity and profundity of their shared, mythic-historic past. His Tales and even Lord of the Rings are branches out from the mythopoetic history of Tolkien’s Silmarillion, and his scholarship bred out of his “fascination of the desire to unravel the intricately knotted and ramified history of the branches on the Tree of Tales [as it was] closely connected with the philologist’s study of the tangled skein of Language” (“Fairy Stories” 7). The purpose of assigning two of Tolkien’s most influential essays, “On Fairy Stories” and “The Monsters & the Critics,” as well as his “Forward” to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, is to emphasize the significance of Tolkien’s work within our wider cultural understanding of what myth is and what it is not, how it functions, and what its limitations are.
The “dangers” of the Perilous Realm are not only imagined ones, but the real implications they have for our human capacity to conceptualize and recreate terror; every horror that Tolkien conceived as an author, as well as those he experienced as a soldier, was ultimately man-made. Although Tolkien’s “Forward” rejects any clear parallels between the Elder Days, the War of the Ring and the two great wars he experienced as a young man and father, there are hints that the real and imagined are indeed connected. Great loss can only be conveyed through a great depth of feeling, as Tolkien alludes in his non-committal statement: “one has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression.” Although his mythopoetic works may not be connected to one specific moment in time, they are burdened and informed by the weight of his experience; or as he writes in “On Fairy Stories,” his appreciation for fantasy was “wakened…on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war.” The significance to both historical and ahistorical approaches to these texts, and the tensions between them, served as the basis for our discussion and analysis of Tolkien’s scholarship.
The Function of Fairy-Stories: Tolkien and the Folklore Movement
Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories,” delivered as part of the Andrew Lang lecture series at Oxford in 1939, can be considered in two main ways: as both “a capsule history of and a rebuttal to the theories of the folklore movement” (Flieger 27). During our discussion, we considered Tolkien’s scholarship as both a time-capsule, specific and responsive to his historic moment, as well as a significant text in the historiography of Folkloristics and scholarship in comparative mythologies. His work redefines the categories of “myth,” “fairy-story,” “enchantment” and even “history,” in ways which can be both contested and translated into our contemporary discussion of both his work, and the role of stories in general. First, in terms of its historic moment, the date of Tolkien’s lecture is significant. Delivered on the eve of the Second World War and responding to the first, “On Fairy Stories” revitalized the importance of folkloristics just as what Richard Dorson calls the “‘golden century’ of British folklore studies, 1813 to 1914” had come to an end. Tolkien makes it clear in his essay that folk tales did not captivate him as a youth, but became significant through his scholarship and experiences of war; conscripted into the Allied forces at the age of 22 in 1914, his first poem “The Voyage of Eärendel” articulated his desire for a diplomatic and peaceful resolution thee world’s first experience of global, and total war. We will of course be seeing Eärendel again in the twenty-fourth chapter of the Silmarillion, later this month.
You can find young Tolkien’s 1914 poem The Voyage of Eärendel here: https://twilightswarden.wordpress.com/2011/06/18/the-last-voyage-of-earendel/
Tolkien’s Historical Moment: Etymologies, Etymology and Inter-War Anxieties
For Tolkien, and for Folklorists, philology and mythopoeia were closely linked; efforts to purify these offshoot branches of Indo-European origin-stories necessitated reducing this “soup” to its rawest elements. For Max Müller, simmering the soup involved tracing etymologies to source word-meanings, eventually leading him to identify a key “solar” ingredient in folkloristics. He saw the diversification of Indo-European languages, ethnicities and cultures as a muddying of meaning, and attracted numerous supporters among anthropologists and mythographers to this “lightning school.” Myth’s regional or cultural specificity, which Tolkien argues gives vitality to stories, was Müller’s reason for calling myth “a disease of language.” Tracing a “pure” Aryan meaning within the semiotics of transnational mythologies of course became a tool of the Germanic volk tradition, which elevated the Aryan race in the same stroke that it degraded ethnic or cultural difference (Flieger 30). In reaction, fairy-story writer Andrew Lang asserted that myths had anthropological significance, and preserved a sort of “primitive” zero-point of prehistorical societies (Flieger 30). He argued that “The origin of the irrational element in myth and tale is to be found in the qualities of the uncivilized imagination” (Dorson, qtd. in Flieger 31). Leaning towards “Social Darwinism,” and based in a positivist view of knowledge-systems, Lang also relegated myth into a hierarchy in which literature is a manifest expression of national progress, as well as a mature, advanced and complex culture. Both of these theses point to the possible misappropriations of myth and literature to reinforce ethnic or cultural hierarchies, no better example of which is the Nazi regime during WWII.
Tolkien noted in his “Forward” to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings that he had no way of knowing how the same philological and folkloric roots of his own writings would be appropriated in the rhetoric of German propaganda. The historiography of mythological and folklorist studies, as briefly discussed by Flieger and Tolkien, nevertheless hints at numerous ways in which the search for authenticity or nationality, as well as the “unravelling” of narrative complexity, could provide material for a supremacist group. In one of his letters to his second son, Michael, dated 9 June 1941, he wrote
I have in this War a burning private grudge – which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making forever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light. Nowhere, incidentally, was it nobler than in England, nor more early sanctified and Christianized… (Tolkien, Letters 55-56)
Tolkien’s own comparison between the English immortalization of “that noble northern spirit” through scholarship and the “accursed” use of these same origins in German nationalism is of course a problematic contrast as well, and worthy of further discussion. This extract from his letter is still a telling bit of ephemera; it alludes to the possessiveness of scholars, or even citizens, over the stories which are part of our identity and upbringing. It is also considering how the meaning of a work of art changed in this new era of mass media, propaganda, and manufacturing; this is the reason why we brought up German philosopher Walter Benjamin, and his description of the story-teller in an inter-war world. Here are two of his essays which you might find worth reading:
The Storyteller (1920): http://numerocinqmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/The-Storyteller-Walter-Benjamin.pdf
The Work of Art in an Age of Technological Reproduction (1936): https://monoskop.org/images/6/6d/Benjamin_Walter_1936_2008_The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Its_Technological_Reproducibility_Second_Version.pdf
For future consideration, you might also be interested in the ways this “northern spirit” is still being in-volked by white supremacist movements today, and how the academic community is responding to these developments: https://psmag.com/education/nazis-love-taylor-swift-and-also-the-crusades/
Folklore, Newly Defined: Tolkien on Time, Childhood, and Poetic Pasts in Fairy-Story Realms
Tolkien offers multitudinous definitions of what “Faerie” and “fantasy” entails for both the reader and creator. Primarily, he is concerned with their function, which is often phrased in terms of wish-fulfillment. Fairy-stories do not demand a suspension of disbelief, or even a naïve inability to distinguish between what is real, and what is not; they are a colorful manifestation of things that cannot be seen, felt, or experienced in the outer world. Their unrealism does not detract from their historic, symbolic or poetic value, and indeed the distinction between the real and the imaginary is necessary in the realm of fantasy; as he writes of his youth,
I never imagined that the dragon was of the same order as the horse. And that was not solely because I saw horses daily, but never even the footprint of a worm. The dragon had the trademark of Faerie written plain upon him. In whatever world he had his being it was an Otherworld. Fantasy, the making or glimpsing of Otherworlds, was the heart of the desire of Faerie. I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighbourhood, intruding into my relatively safe world, in which it was, for instance, possible to read stories in peace of mind, free from fear. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fafnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril. The dweller in the quiet and fertile plains may hear of the tormented hills and unharvested sea and long for them in his heart. For the heart is hard though the body be soft (Tolkien, “Fairy”)
Desire does not have to come in the form of a dragon; in his essay, Tolkien also alludes to elements of the Edenic or pastoral, scenes with to him in an inter-war, Depression era London would have seemed as far and as foreign as those of the Rohan or Gorgoroth. The more desolate the urban scene before him, the greater the tendency for us to escape in the realm of Faerie. “It is indeed an age of ‘improved means to deteriorated ends,” Tolkien writes, “It is part of the essential malady of such days – producing the desire to escape, not indeed from life, from our present time and self-made misery – that we are acutely conscious both of the ugliness of our works, and of their evil.” For Tolkien, the robot-factory and “roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic” is no more “real” than a dragon, or a centaur.
How real, how startlingly alive is a factory chimney compared with an elm tree: poor obsolete thing, insubstantial dream of an escapist!
We should look for at green again, and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue and yellow and red. We should meet the centaur and the dragon, and they perhaps suddenly behold, like the ancient shepherds, sheep, and dogs, and horses – and wolves. This recovery fairy stories help us to make. In that sense only a taste for them may make us, or keep us, childish. (Tolkien “Fairy Stories”)
Tolkien’s fairy-story time-capsule both argues for, and attempts to capture, an extra-temporal state or place of fantasy and yet also locates itself in its external contexts. In many ways, his thesis is a critique on modernity and technological development, based on the adage that before you know what you’re running to (a desire, or fantasy) one must know what one is running from – an escape from modern life, or war. Fantasy has two main purposes for Tolkien, neither of which are contingent on a given age demographic or place, but are founded on “certain primordial desires.” The first of these desires is “to survey the depths of space and time,” and the second is “the desire to hold communion with other living things.” Tolkien identified the fairy-tale’s ability to suspend time and to transform reading into an immersive, experiential practice; it is invested in the nuanced poetry and aestheticism of the past, as he discusses in his work on Beowulf.
Tolkien’s Monsters and the Critics: Beowulf, Nationalized Mythologies, Elegies and Allusions
The Beowulf text was first translated and published in 1815, almost thirty years after Icelandic archivist Grimure Jonsson Thorkelin discovered it by accident. Hidden away in the depths of the British Museum after 1753, Thorkelin was the one who sought lost fragments of the tale in Danish Ports and the British Isles; although there has been much debate over whether this heroic mythopoeia is English or Danish, it now marks the beginning of our English canon – this corpus of high literature that is such a trademark of national identity. Tolkien resists reading Beowulf as a historic text; as Tolkien notes, Thorkelin called it De Danorum Rebus Gesfis, “of the deeds of the Danes,” and Archibald Strong in 1921 stated that “Beowulf is the picture of a whole civilization, not of the Germania which Tacitus describes. The main interest which the poem has for us is thus not a purely literary interest. Beowulf is an important historical document.” Beowulf, as an elegy with imaginary elements, is also in many ways a time capsule: like the fairy tale, it is both conscious of its historic moment and yet also captures it eternally. Here is a culture “embalmed” in an ancient text, in the same way that the lays recited by Anglo-Saxon scop immortalized the deeds of heroes, reinforced their communal values, and augmented the social capital of heroes still living. As Tolkien writes in “On Fairy Stories,” “something else that these traditions contain: a singularly suggestive example of the relation of the ‘fairy tale element’ to gods and kings and nameless men, illustrating (I believe) the view that this element does not rise or fall, but is there, in the Cauldron of Story, waiting for the great figures of Myth and History, and for the yet nameless He or She, waiting for the moment when they are cast into the shimmering stew, one by one all together, without consideration of rank or presence” (Tolkien, “Fairy Stories”).
Tolkien is of course resistant to an anthropological reading of Beowulf and fairy-stories, as forwarded by Thorkelin and his followers; his essay is about considering Beowulf for its lyricism and beauty, not as a cultural artifact. Part of his reasons for doing this is liberating certain “supernatural” elements from the narrow view of criticism and breaking down the dichotomy of Beowulf as “high art” with a low topic. He sees the monsters as the most explicit instance of this; but because of the dragon (and Grendel’s) symbolic value, they appropriately parenthesize Beowulf’s rise and fall as a king. As Tolkien notes, the dragon takes three forms: it exists as an allusion to Fafnir, the dragon of the Volsungs, alluded to in a song in praise of the Geatish king; it is also the Midguard serpent surrounding the world, alluding to the threats of a “shoreless sea,” the end of man’s known world and the terror of not knowing what lies beyond it. It is also “draniconitas rather than draco: a personification of malice, greed, destruction (the evil side of heroic life) and of the undiscriminating cruelty of fortuna that distinguishes not good or bad (the evil aspect of all life).” Grendel is likewise connected to the landscape, to the terrors which come from the mere to the familiar, once-secure spaces of the hall, both an intruder and a defender of his own no-man’s land. Although Tolkien insists that Beowulf is not a “picture of a whole civilization,” it is imbued with cultural values, tropes, and fears upheld by the Anglo-Saxons; many of these themes and symbols are also highly present in Tolkien’s work, as we will discuss in the coming weeks. Here are some of sources on Anglo-Saxon poetry which might be of interest:
Seamus Haney’s translation of Beowulf: https://mralbertsclass.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/beowulf-translation-by-seamus-heaney.pdf
On danegeld, see The Battle of Maldon: https://anglosaxonpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/battle-of-maldon/
On mortality, the rise and fall of mankind, and the effects of time, see The Ruin: https://anglosaxonpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/the-ruin/
On the word-hoard and the “embalming” effect of lays and poetry, see Widsith: https://anglosaxonpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/widsith/
Tolkien’s “Preface to the Second Edition” : The Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion as Mythopoeic Allegory
In Tolkien’s “Forward” to the Lord of the Rings, he clearly states that these tales were not to be viewed as an allegory; but there is an inconsistency between this disassociation of the Ring trilogy from its extrinsic, historic moment and Tolkien’s intrinsic use of mythological tropes as a self-conscious strategy. Within the same page that he denies any allegorical connection between inter-war politics and this multilateral, fantasy war between mankind and the darkest manifestations of evil, Tolkien draws the parallels himself:
The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Baradur would not have been destroyed but occupied. Saruman, failing to get possession of th eRing, would in the confusion and treacheries of the time have found in Mordor the missing links in his own researches into Ring-lore, and before long he would have made a Great Ring of his own with which to challenge the self-styled Ruler of Middle-earth. In that conflict both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves. (Tolkien, “Forward”)
We did not get to discuss how Tolkien’s work might be discussed as “allegorical,” although there was some debate over the limitations and functions of allegory (versus “association”) itself. This is open to further consideration as the term progresses.
Conclusion
Tolkien’s work cannot be disassociated from his scholarship; considering Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion as mythopoeic works necessitates a thorough understanding of its functions, workings, and the layered allusions which give high or historical fantasy its verisimilitude. What makes his world-building so convincing is that it emulates truth, and there are “dangers” to this Perilous Realm beyond human imaginings; in Nazism, Tolkien saw Norse, Anglo-Saxon and ancient Vedic icons repurposed as justification for cultural and ethnic genocide. There are strong thematic connections between Tolkien’s mythopoeia and myth-as-history, all of which are really “made of the same stuff.” We hope that this discussion as set up our critical engagement with Tolkien’s Silmarillion, and the way that we understand the function, structure, and significance of folk-tales, Faerie, and origin-stories in general. Please comment with your own thoughts, unanswered questions, and insights on the readings.
