Bash Bewoulf ? Booo ! Bolster Beowulf !

Yay, even more Tolkien ! Because why the hell not ?

This time it's his 1936 lecture-essay Beowulf : The Monsters And The Critics. I'm afraid in my last encounter with the much-loved Beowulf poem, I committed a grievous error. I said that Beowulf was just pure entertainment, damn finely-crafted entertainment, but nothing at all sophisticated. At it's core, it's about a great big strapping man who beats up monsters. Sounds simple enough. Pretty much nobody objects to great big strapping men beating up monsters. It's been good solid family fun for thousands of years.

Tolkien, ever wiser, convincingly suggests that there's a lot more to it than that. As with On Fairy-Stories (see previous two posts), his lecture has broad-ranging implications, both for Tolkien's' own creations and for the significance of mythology in general.

The Critics

Simply put, many erudite and learned critics have argued much as I have, that Beowulf is a hero who fights monsters and that's all there is to it. "There is nothing much in the story... The hero is occupied in killing monsters... Beowulf has nothing else to do", says one, noting that the Greek heroes did plenty of other things besides. This would be a tale told by a poet, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing !

The anti-fantasy bias even affects the study of mythology. It, "'puts the irrelevances [the monsters] in the centre and the serious things on the outer edges", says another, suggesting it needs more about the character and his quest for revenge instead of "a wilderness of dragons".

Tolkien deplores all this as missing the fucking point. He doesn't suggest that it's actually a work of staggering complexity – it isn't – but he does suggest there's a great deal more subtlety at work than the critics suppose. Rather than dissecting every individual action that happens, he says that the "special virtue" of the poem, "resides, one might guess, in the theme, and the spirit this has infused into the whole". The author deliberately made it all about monsters for a damn good reason, not just because monsters are exciting. The monsters and the hero alike, the major themes, have deep significance, just not in the usual way the literary-minded critics were expecting*.

* The only other remotely comparable work I've read, in terms of its contemporary setting, is Njal's Saga. I'm sure the critics love it but I found it mostly torturous and dull.

In fact, Tolkien says in what I assume is a moment of getting quite carried away with himself, Beowulf is "not an epic" at all and even, "we must not view this poem as in intention an exciting narrative or a romantic tale."

Ooo....kaaay....

Here I think he patently goes too far, for the extraordinarily simple reason that the tale clearly is terribly dramatic – and romantic, in the tragic-hero sense. It beggars belief that so skilled a poet could accidentally have written it so. It's possible Tolkien is using the words in an odd, technical sense here, at least as far as "epic" goes. And whether he personally finds the tale exciting or not doesn't affect the rest of the analysis, nor do the excitement and simplicity of the main events detract from any deeper significance they may hold. Rather the reverse.

The Myth

Why does the poet have his hero fight monsters then ? Precisely because of their otherworldly nature, says Tolkien. This is what gives the poem the elevated status of the mythological, beyond mere drama. Tolkien begins by summarising several key qualities for capturing a sense of the mythic. One of his favourite points, judging by both the History of Middle Earth and On Fairy-Stories, is the need to create a sense of depth, of distance from the reader not merely in space or time but in something more fundamental, of being in a realm not only distant to but different from our own.

The whole must have succeeded admirably in creating in the minds of the poet's contemporaries the illusion of surveying a past, pagan but noble and fraught with a deep significance — a past that itself had depth and reached backward into a dark antiquity of sorrow. This impression of depth is an effect and a justification of the use of episodes and allusions to old tales, mostly darker, more pagan, and desperate than the foreground...  it used knowledge of these things for its own purpose — to give that sense of perspective, of antiquity with a greater and yet darker antiquity behind.

The sense of the other-worldly is what gives mythic tales an ineffable quality that is absent from other stories. For me at least a horror story about a creature of the darkness is so much more interesting, so much more disturbing, than the ones about axe murderers than the like. I'm always disappointed when, in Predator (excellent movie though it is), the mysterious occurrences are explained as nothing more than an invisible alien. This operates on known and knowable rules; it becomes predictable, and though the film remains a first-rate action movie beyond that point, something is lost. By contrast, supernatural horror retains a greater sense of threat even when the cause and purpose of the danger is revealed.

The sense of creating a feeling of mystery, something that cannot be understood even by the author, is crucial to myth as well :

The significance of a myth is not easily to be pinned on paper by analytical reasoning. It is at its best when it is presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit what his theme portends; who presents it incarnate in the world of history and geography, as our poet has done.

Which is worth bearing in mind. Elsewhere Tolkien ascribes a motivation and reasoning to the poet which I suspect describes Tolkien himself more than the original author, but the intention of capturing that which is "indescribable, though not imperceptible" is plausible. Of course this is how we usually think of myths, as trying to explain the inexplicable, resulting in sometimes strange, bizarre stories that are nevertheless relevant in helping us to understand ourselves.

The Monsters

Clearly if the poet wants to create this mythological effect, he cannot very well have Beowulf fight "some Swedish prince". I think this point is arguable. Would Achilles feel less mythological and more merely legendary if the gods were excised from The Iliad ? Possibly – but not necessarily, if his attributes were sufficiently enhanced. Which of course they were, with his feats of arms clearly superhuman rather than merely extraordinary. That said, in the space available, by far the easiest and probably the most satisfying option available to the poet of Beowulf is to make the whole thing about the monsters. Tolkien bluntly dismisses the idea of having less monsters as "nonsense" :

I can see the point of asking for no monsters. I can also see the point of the situation in Beowulf [i.e. all the villains are monsters]. But no point at all in mere reduction of numbers. It would really have been preposterous, if the poet had recounted Beowulf's rise to fame in a 'typical' or 'commonplace' war in Frisia, and then ended him with a dragon. Or if he had told of his cleansing of Heorot, and then brought him to defeat and death in a 'wild' or 'trivial' Swedish invasion !

Beowulf faces a series of adversaries. If he starts by being pitted against plausible villains then he is immediately established as an fundamentally ordinary hero tackling basically ordinary problems*, and to then bring in supernatural entities would feel distinctly strange (it would be possible to do this, I think, but not in the space available). The reverse would be even worse : to start with a monster and then revert to normality is a massive anti-climax. So instead we get a series of increasingly difficult challenges, fundamentally unrealistic but narratively satisfying. And realism in myth, is, as I've said previously, an inherently bad idea, something that should be deliberately avoided at all costs**. Tolkien continues :

* Beowulf and the Photocopier of Doom, anyone ?
** That is, obviously, for the core difference between that world and reality. Other attributes can and probably should be allowed to be more familiar.

If the dragon is the right end for Beowulf, and I agree with the author that it is, then Grendel is an eminently suitable beginning. They are creatures, feond mancynnes, [foes of mankind] of a similar order and kindred significance. Triumph over the lesser and more nearly human is cancelled by defeat before the older and more elemental. And the conquest of the ogres comes at the right moment : not in earliest youth... but in that first moment, which often comes in great lives, when men look up in surprise and see that a hero has unawares leaped forth. The placing of the dragon is inevitable: a man can but die upon his death-day.

Grendel is established as a foe of unnatural quality by so easily consuming Hrothgar's presumably otherwise-competent warriors, thus giving Beowulf a chance to shine as the monster's counterpart. Similarly, having the dragon at the end enhances the stature of both Beowulf and his greatest adversary — particularly as the dragon actually succeeds in killing Beowulf. Tolkien notes that dragons are used extremely sparingly in northern literature for good reason :

A dragon is no idle fancy. Whatever may be his origins, in fact or invention, the dragon in legend is a potent creation of men's imagination, richer in significance than his barrow is in gold.

Apparently the dark age authors were able to prevent any sort of inflation with what must surely have been a huge temptation... dragons are marvellous villains, so why not add more ? Because then they have to either become easier to defeat, which cheapens their worth, or they just win, which would be pointless. All well and good, but Tolkien even has the audacity to suggest that there are in fact only two dragons of any significance : Beowulf's bane, and Fáfnir . That's something to which no self-respecting Welshman could ever agree*.

* Likewise, when in the History of Middle Earth, he describes how the English should be the ones having the "correct" fairy mythology (to the deliberate slight of the Celtic nations**), and when he elsewhere complains bitterly about the most minor and unimportant of changes suggested by others while himself freely doing away with hundreds of pages of his own text with the mere slip of a pen.... I couldn't help but feel that on occasion – and just on occasion mind you – Tolkien was as capable of the rest of us of being a massive twat.

** Christopher Tolkien, The Book of Lost Tales Volume II, p. 290 : "the Irish and the Welsh tell garbled things... a specifically English fairy-lore is born, and one more true than anything to be found in Celtic lands."

The Religion

But if the monsters are narratively necessary for creating a sense of myth, what do they represent ? Demons, says Tolkien. He claims that this is one of the main points to the story, that it is written by a fully-fledged Christian writer, not someone existing in a muddled combination of Christianity and paganism. 

The monsters are not an inexplicable blunder of taste; they are essential, fundamentally allied to the underlying ideas of the poem, which give it its lofty tone and high seriousness. The key to the fusion-point of imagination that produced this poem lies, therefore, in those very references to Cain which have often been used as a stick to beat an ass — taken as an evident sign (were any needed) of the muddled heads of early Anglo-Saxons.

And quoting with approval an earlier critic :

The gigantic foes whom Beowulf has to meet are identified with the foes of God. Grendel and the dragon are constantly referred to in language which is meant to recall the powers of darkness with which Christian men felt themselves to be encompassed. They are the 'inmates of Hell', 'adversaries of God', 'offspring of Cain', 'enemies of mankind'... Beowulf, for all that he moves in the world of the primitive Heroic Age of the Germans, nevertheless is almost a Christian knight.

Beowulf is fighting the forces of darkness and evil in ways which the Greek heroes, Tolkien notes, never do. Their gods and monsters serve quite different roles. Tolkien is convinced the poet is a full-blooded Christian, but that the monsters are still in development : Grendel is not quite fully demonic, but is a step in that direction. 

There's a lot to unpack there, so let's start with the monsters. What would a monster have to do to constitute a true demon ? According to Tolkien it would have to corrupt and destroy the soul, something Grendel and the dragon stop short of. Pagan cultures did include non-corporeal aspects but this is not present here, perhaps further evidence for the Christianity of the author.

Doubtless ancient pre-Christian imagination vaguely recognized differences of 'materiality' between the solidly physical monsters, conceived as made of the earth and rock (to which the light of the sun might return them), and elves, and ghosts or bogies. Monsters of more or less human shape were naturally liable to development on contact with Christian ideas of sin and spirits of evil. Their parody of human form becomes symbolical, explicitly, of sin, or rather this mythical element, already present implicit and unresolved, is emphasized: this we see already in Beowulf, strengthened by the theory of descent from Cain (and so from Adam), and of the curse of God.

Because of his [Grendel's] ceaseless hostility to men, and hatred of their joy, his superhuman size and strength, and his love of the dark, he approaches to a devil, though he is not yet a true devil in purpose. Real devilish qualities (deception and destruction of the soul), other than those which are undeveloped symbols, such as his hideousness and habitation in dark forsaken places, are hardly present...  he is not when wrestling with Beowulf a materialized apparition of soul-destroying evil. 

Grendel was a fleshly denizen of this world (until physically slain)... Grendel remains primarily an ogre, a physical monster, whose main function is hostility to humanity (and its frail efforts at order and art upon earth)... The dragon wields a physical fire, and covets gold, not souls; he is slain with iron in his belly.

So the connection to Cain points to an evolution in thinking of monsters as being demonic, but the development was as yet far from completed. They have a sinister quality lacking in the Greek monsters, and, crucially, while Grendel "bore God's wrath", "the Cyclops is god-begotten and his maiming is an offence against his begetter, the god Poseidon". The monsters of Beowulf, as in Norse myth, present a threat (if only implicit and not fully developed) to the whole world order; the monsters in Greek myth are themselves part of the world order, as natural as anything else. Conversely Beowulf, says Tolkien, is no less than God's solution to the problem of those monsters. These two powerful opposing forces fulfil different roles to the heroes and monsters of the Greeks.

But I think Tolkien is perhaps a little too obstinate in insisting that there is no "muddled thinking" of the poet here, too eager to defend his Christianity. As mentioned, I think he is perhaps reading himself into the author's mindset :

So far from being a man so simple or so confused that he muddled Christianity with Germanic paganism, the author probably drew or attempted to draw distinctions, and to represent moods and attitudes of characters conceived dramatically as living in a noble but heathen past.

This is possible. We should allow that a mind capable of constructing a poem of such "metrical art, style, [and] verbal skill" (Tolkien puts him on par with Milton), whatever era in which he writes, is also thinking deeply about the issues described, and of wanting to create a similar tale of a semi-imagined past as modern fantasy authors, for similar motivations. But can we really say anything about whether the author (or his audience) genuinely believed in a mix of paganism and Christianity ? I think no, and it doesn't matter all that much. The author has incorporated aspects of his own culture, as anyone must do. Reinterpreting, reimagining the mythical tales within a relatively new Christian lens is in no sense "muddled" thinking : rather he has come up with a new explanation for monsters. Tolkien expresses a better view of this synthesis and incorporation, I think, elsewhere :

The criticism that the important matters are put on the outer edges misses this point of artistry, and indeed fails to see why the old things have in Beowulf such an appeal : it is the poet himself who made antiquity so appealing. His poem has more value in consequence, and is a greater contribution to early mediaeval thought than the harsh and intolerant view that consigned all the heroes to the devil. 

Now possibly if he'd had Jesus fighting Odin, that would constitute muddled thinking, trying to combine fundamentally incompatible beliefs. But even then perhaps not, if Odin had been reduced to a status of a prophet or an angel. And even if he had, does that detract from anything ? No. Not if there was some valuable symbolism as to the nature of the world or human morality. I agree with Tolkien that there is no semblance of "muddled thinking" here, but I don't agree with have to assume the poet is "fully Christian" in the modern sense. Nor need we assume the audience was at similar level; the poet might have been a genius writing for a bunch of backward yokels who believed in all kinds of supernatural nonsense, or writing for like-minded intellectuals – neither scenario takes away any value from the poem.

There are however fundamental aspects to the ancient religions which were incompatible :

The [Greek] ruling gods are not besieged, not in ever-present peril or under future doom. The gods are not the allies of men in their war against these or other monsters. The interest of the gods is in this or that man as part of their individual schemes, not as part of a great strategy that includes all good men, as the infantry of battle. In Norse, at any rate, the gods are within Time, doomed with their allies to death. Their battle is with the monsters and the outer darkness. They gather heroes for the last defence.

This may make the southern gods more godlike — more lofty, dread, and inscrutable. They are timeless and do not fear death. Such a mythology may hold the promise of a profounder thought. [But]...  in a sense it had shirked the problem precisely by not having the monsters in the centre — as they are in Beowulf to the astonishment of the critics. It is the strength of the northern mythological imagination that it faced this problem, put the monsters in the centre, gave them Victory but no honour, and found a potent but terrible solution in naked will and courage.

Beowulf thus faces a threat, or at least the beginnings of one, more terrible than anything Jason or Achilles or Odysseus had to contend with. And that the monsters can ultimately win, that there is no divine solution given to Beowulf to aid or rescue him, is perhaps the poem's most important theme.

The Hero

Key to this is that Beowulf ultimately dies. The easiest, noblest interpretation of this is that Beowulf does what he knows to be right even at the cost of his own life. Unlike other heroes he is not rewarded with immortality on this earthly plane, not granted any special exemption : he simply dies, as he was always going to, being anyway elderly at this point. Yet he fights the dragon nonetheless.

He is a man, and that for him and many is sufficient tragedy... this paradox of defeat inevitable yet unacknowledged, [is] its full significance.

Tolkien suggests a bittersweet interpretation of the poem, which I can't say I much like. If the poet was indeed a fully modern Christian, he says :

One thing he knew clearly : those days were heathen — heathen, noble, and hopeless...

Disaster is foreboded. Defeat is the theme. Triumph over the foes of man's precarious fortress is over, and we approach slowly and reluctantly the inevitable Victory of death. 

[Beowulf's] funeral is not Christian, and his reward is the recognized virtue of his kingship and the hopeless sorrow of his people... Within the limits of human life Beowulf neither lived nor died in vain — brave men might say. But there is no hint, indeed there are many to the contrary, that it was a war to end war, or a dragon-fight to end dragons. It is the end of Beowulf, and of the hope of his people.

This doesn't so much sound bittersweet as simply bitter ! I can't agree with it. Yet while Beowulf accomplishes nothing so grand as defeating paganism, there is still a moral lesson here, and a very powerful one at that (even neglecting the possibility of an eternal afterlife, which Tolkien little mentions) :

'The Northern Gods', Ker said, 'have an exultant extravagance in their warfare which makes them more like Titans than Olympians; only they are on the right side, though it is not the side that wins. The winning side is Chaos and Unreason' — mythologically, the monsters — 'but the gods, who are defeated, think that defeat no refutation.' And in their war men are their chosen allies, able when heroic to share in this 'absolute resistance, perfect because without hope'.

Which could be lifted straight out of The Lord of the Rings, the idea that if a task must be attempted, then the attempt must be made regardless of the chance of success; even victory of the enemy does not prove the rightness of their cause. Beowulf is a hero not because of his feats of arms but because he fights a battle he knows he cannot win, that the only solution is "naked will and courage". I don't agree that the death of Beowulf represents the end of hope, because after all the dragon is slain. Of course the audience mourns the passing of a hero, but the hero has achieved his purpose, quite unlike the earlier, more pagan stories :

The monsters had been the foes of the gods, the captains of men, and within Time the monsters would win. In the heroic siege and last defeat men and gods alike had been imagined in the same host. Now the heroic figures, the men of old, hæleð under heofenum [heroes under heaven], remained and still fought on until defeat. For the monsters do not depart, whether the gods go or come.

This would be a better argument, I think, in favour of the poet being fully Christian. The monsters do not win here. Beowulf fights until death, not defeat. As Tolkien elaborates, the stories evolve over time until the earthly defeat is rendered impotent :

It is no defeat, for the end of the world is part of the design of Metod, the Arbiter who is above the mortal world. Beyond there appears a possibility of eternal victory (or eternal defeat), and the real battle is between the soul and its adversaries. So the old monsters became images of the evil spirit or spirits, or rather the evil spirits entered into the monsters and took visible shape in the hideous bodies of the þyrsas [giants] and sigel-hearwan* of heathen imagination.

* I cannot find a straightforward explanation of this term, but it seems to have something to do with Ethiopian balrogs ! 

Here Tolkien becomes I think himself confused. His following prose is beautiful, but seems quite clearly to say that the author was "muddling" pagan and Christian myth despite his earlier, vocal protestations that this is not the case; now he implies that the poet was after all unwittingly mixing older and more contemporary values, even the very story itself :

The plot was not the poet's; and though he has infused feeling and significance into its crude material, that plot was not a perfect vehicle of the theme or themes that came to hidden life in the poet's mind as he worked upon it.

We get in fact a poem from a pregnant moment of poise, looking back into the pit, by a man learned in old tales who was struggling, as it were, to get a general view of them all, perceiving their common tragedy of inevitable ruin, and yet feeling this more poetically because he was himself removed from the direct pressure of its despair. He could view from without, but still feel immediately and from within, the old dogma : despair of the event, combined with faith in the value of doomed resistance.

But no matter. What matters is that the great theme of the poem is mortality and how central this is to the world view of the poet and his audience. In no small part the poem reflects a changing view of the nature of reality. It is not necessary, not in the slightest, that Beowulf's death be so utterly hopeless for it still to be full charged of poignancy.

The World

Unconcerned with the pettiness of the details of human life, Beowulf seeks to explore greater themes of our own mortal nature – nothing less, at times, than our place in the cosmos. Tolkien rejects "that judgement that the heroic or tragic story on a strictly human plane is by nature superior". If I was looking for vindication of my thesis that Tolkien's own works achieve their emotional power by providing a connection between small and cosmic-scale processes, his Monsters and the Critics essay provides the strongest, most direct evidence of this line of thinking I've yet come across.

He who wrote hæleð under heofenum may have meant in dictionary terms 'heroes under heaven', or 'mighty men upon earth', but he and his hearers were thinking of the eormengrund, the great earth, ringed with garsecg, the shoreless sea, beneath the sky's inaccessible roof; whereon, as in a little circle of light about their halls, men with courage as their stay went forward to that battle with the hostile world and the offspring of the dark which ends for all, even the kings and champions, in defeat. That even this 'geography', once held as a material fact, could now be classed as a mere folk-tale affects its value very little. It transcends astronomy. Not that astronomy has done anything to make the island seem more secure or the outer seas less formidable.

It's a running theme in The History of Middle-Earth that Christopher Tolkien is quite clear his father was being literal when I would normally have assumed he was being metaphorical; a sword that "shone with white flame" should be envisaged by the reader as really doing so. Here too this is evident. "Heroes under heaven", as least in Tolkien's view (and again he may be reading himself into the author) is not intended as metaphor but a literal description, or at the very least, it gives significance to the tale by invoking the cosmic. The reader or listener is deliberately made to recall these much grander themes in relation to the otherwise smaller, more worldly events.

It is just because the main foes in Beowulf are inhuman that the story is larger and more significant than this imaginary poem of a great king's fall. It glimpses the cosmic and moves with the thought of all men concerning the fate of human life and efforts; it stands amid but above the petty wars of princes, and surpasses the dates and limits of historical periods, however important. At the beginning, and during its process, and most of all at the end, we look down as if from a visionary height upon the house of man in the valley of the world. A light starts — lixte se leoma ofer landa fela — and there is a sound of music; but the outer darkness and its hostile offspring lie ever in wait for the torches to fail and the voices to cease. Grendel is maddened by the sound of harps.

One wonders if this has any bearing on the music of the Ainur, but perhaps that's a step too far. But the point stands. Even if the poet accidentally hit on a successful trick, this cosmological context is crucial in elevating the poem from a tale, however well-told, of a big strapping man fighting enemies (however inhuman), into something truly mythic, something with that ineffable quality that marks a story as "a product of thought and deep emotion", something that resonates deep within the human psyche.

Conclusions

 

And to think the monsters were called "irrelevances" ! This is both wrong and backwards. Backwards, because the monsters, the supernatural aspects, are the most important part of the story, and wrong, because nothing is truly irrelevant. The character of Beowulf does matter, just not as much as the forces he contends with.

This way of thinking is not consigned to a hopelessly-snobbish literary elite. I remember in primary school shortly after Jurassic Park was released that a classmate (all of us aged around 10 at the time) said that she didn't like it because it's got no story. I was aghast. Little me thought that exploring how dinosaurs and people might interact was quite interesting enough, thank you; slightly older me realised that the story also cautions against capitalism and the need for respecting the power of science. This is not an unimportant tale at all : in the modern, technology-based world it could hardly be more important, and not a whole mountain of Mr Darcys can compete with the impact of a single velociraptor. They'd be torn to pieces, literally and figuratively.

Even one of my best friends maintains that Jurassic Park is memorable because of the characters. Well, I suppose they have their role to play in exploring the different attitudes to genetic engineering, and at least we're not caught up in the pointless intricacies of their love lives. But it's very much the monsters in the centre of this one, and anything else is catastrophically missing the point.

Mythology does not have a monopoly on morality, however. Nor does speculative fiction more generally have any especial claim on profound insight or emotional resonance; it is perfectly possible to be deeply moved by a story set entirely in familiar surroundings. But speculative fiction does claim a unique status on the type of exploration it permits. How we are shaped by our place in the cosmos and our mortality, how we would fare with different lifespans, how we would and should behave in different realities... these are hardly the only valid forms of literary exploration. But they are, I think, the greatest and most important, and a bunch of squabbling East Ender's or the lord of some country mansion alike are utterly insignificant compared with the power of the Force, and do not hold a candle compared to the prospects of a post-scarcity economy, time travel, or demonic foes astride the earth.

All that being true, I'm still wary of reading too much into things. Beowulf still could be viewed as a story about a great big strapping man who fights monsters. To see only the surface level and be enthralled by it is nothing shameful. And perhaps the author never really intended anything more than that, although that seems unlikely : to have the demons lurking in the darkness described as the spawn of Cain, and to have the heroes referred to in heavenly terms, is really too much for such a well-crafted work to be the result of accident. But even if we grant this possibility, the analysis is still fascinating. We are not compelled to take everything literally. The last words, of course, belong to Tolkien.

And the pretence that all prayers are answered, and swiftly, would scarcely have deceived the stupidest member of his audience. Had he embarked on such bad theology, he would have had many other difficulties to face... indeed His permission of the assaults of Grendel at all upon such a Christian people, who do not seem depicted as having perpetrated any crime punishable by calamity. But in fact God did provide a cure for Grendel — Beowulf. He could hardly have been less aware than we that in history, and in Scripture, people could depart from the one God to other service in time of trial — precisely because that God has never guaranteed to His servants immunity from temporal calamity, before or after prayer. It is to idols that men turned (and turn) for quick and literal answers.

"On Fairy-Stories" (II) : Eucatastrophe if you want to

Time for part two of my commentary on Tolkien's commentary on fairy-stories. Last time I began with a look at Tolkien's views on what constitutes a fairy story, while they're so often derided, and how they have fallen from grace. I'll return to these themes here, but I want to begin with my main disagreement with Tolkien's essay. I ended the first part with some examples of technological progress that Tolkien dismisses as having claim on being especially "real", and while I agree with the sentiment, there are aspects of this to which I cannot but raise issue.

Against technology ?

In part three of my cosmology series, I cited examples of Tolkien describing beautiful crafts in steel and stone, home and hearth, as evidence against a perceived anti-technological bias. I still think this is true, but he was living at the wrong time. I can't agree that motor-cars and electric lights are mere passing fancies; as evidence that technology is temporary – let alone bad ! – these are surely ill-chosen examples. Certainly the exact details of artificial lighting and transportation will change, but to abandon them altogether ? It seems absurd. Man has lacked these things for most of his history, but has wished for them since the first monkey was afraid of the dark. They will not be relinquished.

Tolkien goes further than this, going on something of a more general anti-technology rant which is by far my biggest point of contention* :

* Besides the religious arguments. I'm going to largely omit these because it would be unfair and pointless of me to comment on them. 

It is after all possible for a rational man, after reflection (quite unconnected with fairy-story or romance), to arrive at the condemnation, implicit at least in the mere silence of “escapist” literature, of progressive things like factories, or the machine-guns and bombs that appear to be their most natural and inevitable, dare we say “inexorable,” products.

The maddest castle that ever came out of a giant's bag in a wild Gaelic story is not only much less ugly than a robot-factory, it is also... a great deal more real. Why should we not escape from or condemn the “grim Assyrian” absurdity of top-hats, or the Morlockian horror of factories?

I agree that some implementations of technology are indeed ghastly, especially the factories of Tolkien's day – never mind the horrors of war. But this is rotten cherry-picking. What of modern medicine that heals the sick, keeps us in good health for years longer ? What of our warm homes with creature comforts undreamt-of to any castle-dwellers of old ? No, I think there's a distinct element of a rosy-tinted view of the past creeping in here. I think he makes a a much better point with :

For my part, I cannot convince myself that the roof of Bletchley station is more “real” than the clouds. And as an artefact I find it less inspiring than the legendary dome of heaven. The bridge to platform 4 is to me less interesting than Bifröst guarded by Heimdall with the Gjallarhorn.

Again, the ideas in fantasy are inherently interesting; to consider them is a worthwhile exercise in itself, but if one wants a more pragmatic excuse : all abilities need to be operated at their limits or else they decline. To employ that "only real mind-expanding drug" of speculative fiction is inherently a healthy act. Yet Tolkien didn't seem overly-keen on fantasy's cousin, the far more technology-driven science fiction :

These prophets often foretell (and many seem to yearn for) a world like one big glass-roofed railway-station. But from them it is as a rule very hard to gather what men in such a world-town will do. They... will use this freedom mainly, it would appear, in order to play with mechanical toys in the soon-cloying game of moving at high speed. To judge by some of these tales they will still be as lustful, vengeful, and greedy as ever; and the ideals of their idealists hardly reach farther than the splendid notion of building more towns of the same sort on other planets. It is indeed an age of “improved means to deteriorated ends.”

Certainly this is true to a degree... I remember reading somewhere (I cannot find the reference) that early weather forecasters hoped it would have a really transformative effect on all aspects of life. And to some extent it did, it's just that the effects have now become accepted as normal. But it didn't stop blood feuds or change politics, and nobody would really expect it to. Weather forecasting does not easily for interesting science fiction make.

But... oh, would that Tolkien had seen Star Trek ! To me this is the epitome of Utopian world-building, with technology at its heart that plays an explicit role in changing the nature of the beast. And this is far more relevant. Just because weather forecasts don't make us better people does not mean all technology is sociologically insignificant. Far from it. Man, in my appraisal, is technological by nature, driven with equal validity to fantasy as he is to imagine ingenious new devices. Technology and society go hand in hand, they cannot be separated. If only Tolkien had met H. G. Wells, what a conversation that would have been ! 

Tolkien might, I guess, argue that all our modern devices are fleeting in the grand span of history, but I would suggest that we have always wished for improvements. What's changed in the last few centuries is that conditions have become suitable to fully unleash this latent desire, not that the desire itself is anything new. Even now, much of its full potential remains unrealised, but to me, ultimately the dream is a harmony in which technology is the very thing which allows us to flourish without destroying the precious natural world. Both woodlands and WiFi can be enriching to the human experience; dreams of reverting to a more primitive lifestyle are fatally flawed. 

I think Tolkien expresses things far better elsewhere in the essay :

Fantasy can, of course, be carried to excess. It can be ill done. It can be put to evil uses. It may even delude the minds out of which it came. But of what human thing in this fallen world is that not true? Men have conceived not only of elves, but they have imagined gods, and worshipped them, even worshipped those most deformed by their authors' own evil. But they have made false gods out of other materials: their notions, their banners, their monies; even their sciences and their social and economic theories have demanded human sacrifice. Abusus non tollit usum [abuse does not take away use]. Fantasy remains a human right.

Critically creative children

The important point for me has always been in distinguishing fantasy from reality. So long as that is done, almost any act of imagination has value. 

Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make. If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts or evidence), then Fantasy would languish until they were cured. If they ever get into that state (it would not seem at all impossible), Fantasy will perish, and become Morbid Delusion.

That last part is, of course, a perfect description of QAnon and the like. Sigh.

Tolkien certainly didn't reject science, even if he did have distinct qualms about technological progress. But it's this raw power of imagination, and the capability to apply it wisely, which gives fantasy more the potential to help, rather than hinder, rational thinking. Proper encouragement of fantasy, if we are suitably introspective, helps us ask exactly what it is about the tales that distinguishes them from reality :

No one, I fancy, would discredit a story that the Archbishop of Canterbury slipped on a banana skin merely because he found that a similar comic mishap had been reported of many people, and especially of elderly gentlemen of dignity. He might disbelieve the story, if he discovered that in it an angel (or even a fairy) had warned the Archbishop that he would slip if he wore gaiters on a Friday.

Last time we started examining why fairy stories have becoming erroneously aimed at children, but the importance of critical thinking in understanding the narrative raises the stakes considerably. At first glance Tolkien seems to have contradictory opinions about the extent to which children can make these kinds of distinctions. On the one hand :

The common opinion seems to be that there is a natural connexion between the minds of children and fairy-stories, of the same order as the connexion between children's bodies and milk. I think this is an error; at best an error of false sentiment, and one that is therefore most often made by those who, for whatever private reason (such as childlessness), tend to think of children as a special kind of creature, almost a different race, rather than as normal, if immature, members of a particular family, and of the human family at large.

Which is a sentiment shared by Pratchett in many places (and perhaps consistent with the sentiment that people mistake fantasy for idle, uncontrolled dreaming). But on the other hand, children are by definition ignorant :

Children's knowledge of the world is often so small that they cannot judge, off-hand and without help, between the fantastic, the strange (that is rare or remote facts), the nonsensical, and the merely “grown-up” (that is ordinary things of their parents' world, much of which still remains unexplored). But they recognize the different classes, and may like all of them at times. 

This surely makes it easier to convince them that stories are "true". At first I found Tolkien to be conflicted on this issue, sometimes seeming to argue that children are easily persuaded and at other times being more ambiguous. But his main point is that children do not have any special preference for fairy stories, that this is only something adults inflict on them. 

On thinking this over, I think the apparent contradiction can be resolved. I think children do have a preference for all things of an otherworldly nature in the broadest sense (cartoons, stories about animals, dinosaurs – stuff in general they don't experience in their everyday lives). But this is, as I've pointed out before, only because they're ignorant and know it, unable to avoid trying to fill their minds like a sponge, so naturally they're curious about anything they've never encountered : as Tolkien says, to children the worlds of adults are just as comparably different to their own as are those of fairy tales !* 

* The imaginative leap to a world of talking trees is perhaps less than one required to understand why in the world one would shut oneself in an office all day.

The key point is one of specificity : there's nothing special about fairy stories in particular in this respect. Children do need content which is simpler than what adults can process, but it's adults who have decided to make fairy stories simple. The stories themselves are fully capable of having rich complexity; it's only by design they have become reduced.

Tolkien elaborates that the need to "believe" as a child is nothing very pronounced (likewise, as a child I cared not a whit for acting ability because I simply wasn't able to distinguish the good from the bad), negating the importance of their critical thinking skills or lack thereof. For children it's about desire :

I had no special “wish to believe.” I wanted to know. But at no time can I remember that the enjoyment of a story was dependent on belief that such things could happen, or had happened, in “real life.” Fairy-stories were plainly not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability.

The dragon had the trade-mark of Faerie written plain upon him. In whatever world he had his being it was an Other-world. Fantasy, the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds, was the heart of the desire of Faërie. I desired dragons with a profound desire.

The world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir 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 the unharvested sea and long for them in his heart. For the heart is hard though the body be soft.

Which is a perfect description of little me ! (Albeit in my case dinosaurs came first, dragons later). And, I imagine, for many millions of other nerdy children too. This desire for other realities persists into adulthood, having nothing to do with childishness at all. Whither it comes, who knows ?

The chief flavour of that tale lingering in the memory was not beauty or horror, but distance and a great abyss of time, not measurable even by twe tusend Johr*. Without the stew and the bones — which children are now too often spared in mollified versions of Grimm — that vision would largely have been lost.

* German for "two thousand years" as used in a particular Grimm fairy tale.

(Re-reading The Hobbit, I find that Tolkien doesn't shy away from the darker stuff, but he doesn't ram it down the reader's throat either. The scariness is carefully tempered, but not absent. Childish imaginations easily run riot with this; they don't need the full horrors spelled out for them in graphic detail because they'll do that for themselves anyway.)

All the same, I think we're largely misled into believing this creative capacity is something that all children have, and have beaten out of them by the education system (or whatever one cares to blame). It's just an unformed, ignorant mind struggling to form a coherent world view, not something of some peculiarly spiritual significance to childhood that people seem to ascribe to it. In my experience, children are apt to taunt and even bully each other over things they deem silly, or even just for the sake of it – because they can. They are ignorant, but not uncritical, and not unjudgmental either.

Humility and innocence — these things “the heart of a child” must mean in such a context — do not necessarily imply an uncritical wonder, nor indeed an uncritical tenderness. Chesterton once remarked that the children in whose company he saw Maeterlinck's Blue Bird were dissatisfied “because it did not end with a Day of Judgement, and it was not revealed to the hero and the heroine that the Dog had been faithful and the Cat faithless.” “For children,” he says, “are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.”

The eucatastrophe (no, not Brexit)

Whether a story should end with justice or mercy is not a matter that can be easily generalised. For a fairy tale the key point, says Tolkien, is that the ending is happy – which I suppose can equally mean either punishing transgressions or forgiving those who repent. It's the happiness which matters. Had Red Riding Hood simply been eaten, it would be a cautionary tale about cross-dressing wolves and nothing more. If the Ugly Duckling had grown up to plot bitter revenge against the world, it would be the Count of Monte Cristo but with ducks. Had Cinderella turned up to the ball reeking of such a stench of pumpkin that no handsome prince would get within fifty paces, it would be a lesson in proper vehicle design and material engineering.

So the ending must be happy. In particular, Tolkien describes the "highest function" of fairy stories is to facilitate a very special kind of happy ending, the eucatastrophe (see link for a discussion of the notion in a wider context) :

A sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

I suppose that like any good plot twist, the reader should never be able to see the eucatastrophe coming, but as soon as it occurs it must feel inevitable. 

The peculiar quality of the ”joy” in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth.

In Tolkien's own works, the destruction of the Ring is a eucatastrophe, a triumph beyond all hope. Others have noted how this is due not to luck but to fate, with Tolkien having considered various alternative ways to get the Ring into the volcano – not always as pleasant as the final version, but effective nonetheless. Of course the reader basically knows the Ring is going in one way or another, but they also know it's thwarted such efforts before. It's a shame that the Lord Of The Rings was published before The Silmarillion, because in that work the villains more frequently win outright. 

For Tolkien the eucatastrophe reflected a deep religious belief about the way the world works, with Christ being mankind's ultimate salvation, on which I will not comment. More practical examples might include the invention of vaccines and antibiotics, the theory of evolution... these things may have been inevitable, but they were also unknowable before they occurred. We don't ever expect something as monumentally transformative as the discovery of how to harness electricity to occur, yet such things do happen.

Eucatastrophes then, reveal an underlying "truth" that not all is joyless, that the unpredictable nature of reality is not always to our detriment. That while we can commit acts of limitless horror, we can also overcome them. "That there's some good in this world, Mr Frodo. And it's worth fighting for."

Conclusions

For me the key point of fantasy, the thing that makes it challenging to do well, is that it must be believable but unrealistic. It must contradict known laws or it's mutated into science fiction (not that there's anything necessarily wrong with a blending of genres !). Reality and realism must simply "go hang", at least as far as the physical principles which are at work, and without that it's simply not fantasy.

And for the greatest works this lack of realism can, nay must, apply even to characters. In The Nature of Middle Earth, Tolkien is explicit that the Valar must behave with higher moral standards than us flawed mortals, at "whatever cost of peril" their principles require, regardless of the risk. "A wizard should know better !" is a line thus charged with cosmic significance, that these higher beings are not Olympian gods fraught with all the flaws of ordinary humans, but actually morally superior as well – they are in that sense all the less real, less pagan, and more Catholic. Avoid all that and the myth sinks to the level of Harry Potter, giving ordinary belligerent schoolchildren magical powers just for shits and giggles.

Well, that's maybe a little unfair. There's nothing wrong with this sort of fantasy-opera, of course, just as there's nothing wrong with space opera. Rather this distinguishes the different sorts of fantasy, the mythical from the merely magical. These kinds of adventure stories do have value, but a value all of their own, altogether distinct from the ancient myths.

If the eucatastrophe is the "highest function" of the fairy tale, then what is the highest function of fantasy more broadly ? Besides considering how different world views are interesting in and of themselves, I suggest that it's examining the effect these changes would have on us, above all their sociological and moral implications.

For example, I consider The Time Machine one of the greatest works of science fiction not only because it takes the science extremely seriously (likewise Tolkien says that the one thing in fantasy that must not be mocked is the magic itself), but also because it explores sociological issues. It looks at the changes that occur on a species-wide level, rather than trying to wedge-in some new-fangled device without actually changing anything more broadly (in essence is giving its characters no more than an amusing toy), or giving some special ability to a single chosen individual.* You can have fascinating moral and psychological examinations in such restricted cases, of course, but when you open these radical ideas up to everybody, only then do you full embrace what they really mean. An island full of dinosaurs makes for one of my favourite movies, but it's only a metaphor for the powers of genetic engineering, not a full-throated examination in itself of just how far it could go. 

* One of the biggest annoyances of Stargate SG1 was that they kept the stargate an implausible secret for the whole run of the show; far more interestingly, The Long Earth series gives the ability to jump to parallel worlds to absolutely everybody. That said, the political episodes of SG1 tended to be dreadful, and I think the writers lacked both the skill and desire to explore the full ramifications of a public Stargate. It probably wouldn't have worked.

Jurassic Park of course raises another key difference between science fiction and fantasy : the difference between could and should. In hard sci-fi the author ought to strive for the greatest realism and honesty they can, to consider what would (or at least could) happen regardless of their own preference, to consider how it would affect people who were not similar to themselves. In fantasy the remit, perhaps, is instead to consider what should happen, how fantastical developments can be best utilised (or horrific ones overcome) – in short, to explore morality. And not even the most bigoted literature-drama-snob could possibly consider that issue to be silly or unimportant.

Perhaps science fiction and fantasy aren't two halves of the same coin, though they certainly share some important characteristics. Perhaps instead science fiction and fantasy are more like mathematics and physics : fantasy explores all of parameter space with minimum of hindrance, whereas science fiction follows the same principles but under much stricter constraints. Perhaps instead of being the sides of a coin they're more like branches in a great Tree of speculative fiction, each with its own distinct purpose but rooted in the same soil. Regardless, for me this remit to consider other possibilities, to examine the human condition under other skies and other Suns, makes for the greatest stories of all, "the ones that really mattered.... Those were the stories that stayed with you".

Tolkien's "On Fairy-Stories" (I)

Since completing my five-part series on the cosmology of Middle-Earth, I've read more than enough "bonus Tolkien" (volumes 1-5 of The History of Middle Earth) that I'm going to have to work out how to distil it all into an appendix post. This is not an easy task, at least not if I want it to be short enough that I can finish writing it and other people can finish reading it.

Currently I'm in a protracted break from The History, but I couldn't resist reading Tolkien's 1947 essay On Fairy-Stories. Originally delivered as a lecture in 1939, this is a wide-ranging essay which I think is a must-read for fans of the genre. While there are parts I vehemently disagree with, in the main I found it extremely insightful : with impacts for literature, creativity, and even on occasion critical thinking, that extend well beyond its titular remit. Needless to say, the prose is also simply beautiful and it's almost worth reading for that alone.

As usual here, I'm going to present the most interesting major themes from the essay, rewording and rearranging them for my own purposes.

What a fairy story is – and what it isn't

You might remember my attempt to define and distinguish fantasy and science fiction. Fantasy, I hold, is a story about a modification to the way the world works that is expressly forbidden by the known laws of physics. The less consistent the modification with the attributes of the real world, the more fantastical the tale. In particular in the sub-genre of mythology this often involves mind shaping matter – on scales from the mundane to the magnificent. Taken to extremes, fantasy and myth explore everything as the acts of unfathomable, capricious deities; mountains are not formed by geological processes but result purely from the whims of the gods. 

Thórr has (as far as our late records go) a very marked character, or personality, which cannot be found in thunder or in lightning, even though some details can, as it were, be related to these natural phenomena : for instance, his red beard, his loud voice and violent temper, his blundering and smashing strength... If we could go backwards in time, the fairy-story might be found to change in details, or to give way to other tales. But there would always be a “fairy-tale” as long as there was any Thórr. When the fairy-tale ceased, there would be just thunder, which no human ear had yet heard.

Such stories are not necessarily self-inconsistent, but neither do they do necessarily posit that there is some alternative set of "rules" which must be obeyed. Instead they retain consistency but within an entirely different paradigm that rejects physical laws altogether. There may or may not be mental laws to such worlds, but a rock is never compelled to fall under gravity or a planet remain in its orbit. The very basis of the system is utterly, profoundly different. It is not so much that the deities have some special physical "powers" beyond the wit of mortal man, but that things work in a fundamentally nonlocal, even perhaps non-causal way.

Science fiction, on the other hand, takes the opposite approach. It can modify the known laws or even replace them, but they work in a qualitatively similar, rigorous, mathematical way to those we actually experience*. There is a similarity and sometimes an intersection with fantasy (they are not mutually exclusive**) in that both concern modifications to the operation of the world. Both, at their core, ask the speculative question, "what if... ?". Good examples in both genres tell tales which could not be told without these modifications; lazier examples use spaceships and monsters as little more than window-dressing.

* If you insist that the laws of science and mathematics are purely descriptive and not "real" in a stricter sense, then you might prefer to say that the rules of the highest fantasies cannot be described mathematically.
** The extremely strict rules governing magic in Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicles comes to mind here.

Tolkien's essay, I think, by and large agrees with this. To lightly mix some relevant quotes :

Fairy-stories are not in normal English usage stories about fairies or elves, but stories about Fairy, that is Faërie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being. The definition of a fairy-story — what it is, or what it should be — does not, then, depend on any definition or historical account of elf or fairy, but upon the nature of Faërie: the Perilous Realm itself, and the air that blows in that country. I will not attempt to define that, nor to describe it directly. It cannot be done. Faërie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible. 

Faërie 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.

The stories are about this different reality, a different way of imagining the world. Tolkien's genius was to develop this in breathtaking, convincing detail. He says that far from relying on suspension of disbelief, a good fairy story must do exactly the opposite. It must convince the reader, body and soul, that the world described is if not actually real then at least plausible, and that the different setting is crucial :

It is precisely the colouring, the atmosphere, the unclassifiable individual details of a story, and above all the general purport that informs with life the undissected bones of the plot, that really count... What happens is that the storymaker proves a successful “sub-creator.” He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. 

I briefly interject only to point out that while a fantasy world may well have its own laws, even inviolable ones, these must be of a wholly different order to those of science fiction. Tolkien continues :

If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay*, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is [only] a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed.

* "Seriously, it gets good at episode 5 !"

Rather amusingly he then describes cricket as similarly inducing this state of suspending belief and enchantment ! But if this is a substitute for "true" belief the sentiment seems clear that it is a poor one. 

I believe it was Arthur C. Clarke who said something to the effect that fantasy is how we wish the world to be, whereas science fiction deals with possibilities that we might not always enjoy if they were ever realised. There's a strong aspect of this here too. Fairy tales have a simplicity which is very appealing :

In Faërie one can indeed conceive of an ogre who possesses a castle hideous as a nightmare (for the evil of the ogre wills it so), but one cannot conceive of a house built with a good purpose — an inn, a hostel for travellers, the hall of a virtuous and noble king — that is yet sickeningly ugly. 

The apparent simplicity is deceptive, but necessary – allowing that "fairy" is only a sub-genre of the more general fantasy; not all myths count as fairy. Tolkien lists many examples of fantasy tales that are not fairy : "beast-fables" where animals play the roles of humans, "traveller's tales" such as those of Gulliver (primarily satirical in nature), and those of the "it was all a dream variety". He doesn't disparage any of these*, indeed lavishing high praise on Gulliver, he only notes that that they're simply not fairy tales. You certainly can have good people with "sickeningly ugly" houses in other genres !**

* While I think "it was all a dream" is one of the most boring and lazy literary excuses for retcons that one can employ, stories which are from the outset about dreams – like The Sandman, Inception, The Matrix and the like – are obviously perfectly respectable. Tolkien also notes there is an overlap with the dreamlike quality of fairy stories, but stressed that the author of these must still try to convince the reader that they are "true" or they have no worth.

** I really like how in most Victorian science-fiction, the vehicles – the Nautilus, the Time Machine, Verne's lunar orbiter – all tend to be described as positively delightful places to be in themselves. The modern tendency is to make the protagonists suffer for the sake of it; Victorian authors were perhaps more optimistic, but also set themselves a greater challenge by avoiding the narratively unnecessary bleakness porn. They didn't make their characters suffer needlessly.

Tolkien doesn't eliminate or discourage the possibility of mixed genres. But one key, essential quality of a fairy story, he says, is the happily ever after : 

Or to take the extreme case of Red Riding Hood : it is of merely secondary interest that the retold versions of this story, in which the little girl is saved by wood-cutters, is directly derived from Perrault's story in which she was eaten by the wolf. The really important thing is that the later version has a happy ending (more or less, and if we do not mourn the grandmother overmuch), and that Perrault's version had not. 

Elsewhere he laments that fairy tales have been allowed to fall into childish silliness, and that the "real" elves were magnificent, heroic figures not at all resembling Tinkerbell, and similarly deals harshly with those who would sanitise and censor what were originally some rather dark and disturbing tales. It is, I suppose, all about the ending : terrible things may well be allowed along the way, and though perhaps not everything is remedied at the end, enough must be resolved satisfactorily enough that the reader accepts the outcome as for the best. I shall return to this in its proper place in part two.

Why adults think fairy stories are silly

For now this is a good moment to introduce the importance of fairy stories to adults. Not those who read them as anthropological "curios", however legitimate that study, but those who read them "as tales", who appreciate their literary qualities. The obvious issue here, which Tolkien attacks head-on, is that such things are so widely regarded as simple, frivolous, idle playthings for children, and aren't often held up as serious literature.

I'm going to quote Tolkien a little out of context here. What he describes as a mistaken origin of the stories, I think this works extremely well for describing their sociological evolution :

At one time it was a dominant view that all such matter was derived from “nature-myths.” The Olympians were personifications of the sun, of dawn, of night, and so on, and all the stories told about them were originally myths (allegories would have been a better word) of the greater elemental changes and processes of nature. Epic, heroic legend, saga, then localized these stories in real places and humanized them by attributing them to ancestral heroes, mightier than men and yet already men. And finally these legends, dwindling down, became folk-tales, Märchen, fairy-stories — nursery-tales.

Yet I suspect that this flower-and-butterfly minuteness was also a product of “rationalisation,” which transformed the glamour of Elfland into mere finesse, and invisibility into a fragility that could hide in a cowslip or shrink behind a blade of grass.

In various places he describes this process of the shrinking and fading of the Fae as a long but inexorable process within his own creation of Middle Earth, and this key word "rationalisation" fits beautifully : the fantastical, magical elements of his creation markedly receding over time, giving way to a far more ordinary world in which the magical elements are used ever-more sparingly. Here, he suggests how the tales have been allowed to fall into abject silliness by neglect, ending at last in genuinely silly stories which might entertain idiots and children* but don't offer much to the serious, sophisticated reader. Small wonder they aren't treated as proper literature when they have degenerated so far from their noble origins.

* I am being unfair. Tolkien actually has some strong Views about treating children as stupid.

So would a beautiful table, a good picture, or a useful machine (such as a microscope), be defaced or broken, if it were left long unregarded in a schoolroom. Fairy-stories banished in this way, cut off from a full adult art, would in the end be ruined; indeed in so far as they have been so banished, they have been ruined.

The old stories are mollified or bowdlerized, instead of being reserved; the imitations are often merely silly, Pigwig-genry without even the intrigue; or patronizing; or (deadliest of all) covertly sniggering, with an eye on the other grown-ups present.

Clearly the "modern" tendency of well-intentioned idiots to tinker with the original works, often grim and dark and bloody in the case of fairy stories, is nothing new. But the mistake, of course, is then to assume that because a story contains pixies and dragons it therefore must be silly and worthless. And Tolkien only partly lays the blame on the genuine poor quality into which the tales have fallen. In other respects, it's firmly the fault of the audience who should know better. Again to lightly re-arrange some quotes :

Fantasy, of course, starts out with an advantage : arresting strangeness. But that advantage has been turned against it, and has contributed to its disrepute. Many people dislike being “arrested.” They dislike any meddling with the Primary World, or such small glimpses of it as are familiar to them. They, therefore, stupidly and even maliciously confound Fantasy with Dreaming, in which there is no Art; and with mental disorders, in which there is not even control: with delusion and hallucination.

But the error or malice, engendered by disquiet and consequent dislike, is not the only cause of this confusion. Fantasy has also an essential drawback : it is difficult to achieve. Fantasy may be, as I think, not less but more sub-creative; but at any rate it is found in practice that “the inner consistency of reality” is more difficult to produce, the more unlike are the images and the rearrangements of primary material to the actual arrangements of the Primary World.

That the images are of things not in the primary world (if that indeed is possible) is a virtue, not a vice. Fantasy (in this sense) is, I think, not a lower but a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent.

To create a world so very different from our own, and to describe it so convincingly that the reader really believes in it, is a formidable technical challenge. Even writing a good story set in our own world is problematic enough, but start to insist that the whole of the narrative reality functions differently and you've got yourself a much bigger problem. What Tolkien labels as the "bastard form" of pantomime, "buffoonery"... this is easy. But serious fantasy is hard, and by extension, rare. 

(I will add two minor caveats. First, I think he goes too far – much too far ! – in poo-poohing the witches in Macbeth. Second, that the highest quality works are the least common is true of pretty much everything.)

Adults tend to avoid fantasy, then, partly because it's often badly done and partly from an unfair bias against, of even fear of, the unknown. They look to such petty concerns as character development because it's easier to both understand and to portray. In Tolkien's day this was even more true, since technical limitations would have made it impossible to create a convincing dragon or monster in the theatre or on screen. It was damn difficult even in a book, but in other media nigh-on impossible.

If you prefer Drama to Literature (as many literary critics plainly do), or form your critical theories primarily from dramatic critics, or even from Drama, you are apt to misunderstand pure story-making, and to constrain it to the limitations of stage-plays. You are, for instance, likely to prefer characters, even the basest and dullest, to things. Very little about trees as trees can be got into a play.

I'm sorely tempted to write a post entitled "Against Character Development", not because there's really anything wrong with it, but because people are still obsessed with it as the be-all and end-all of stories. Sod that. Far more difficult, more interesting, and more rewarding to explore in a story is the speculative, what-if aspect. Realistic, interesting characters, difficult though they may be, are child's play compared to examining the very conception of reality. It is that, I suggest, which should be the primary aim of the fantasist – to construct a new world view, and not to muck about more than necessary with petty frivolities like whether so-and-so should fall in love with whatshisname or whether they should succumb to unbearable ennui.

Why adults should read fairy stories

And that's one of my chief delights in Tolkien's fantasy, the ability to surrender my own world view and temporarily embrace one which is paradigmatically different. One can do this with philosophical tracts as well, but fiction comes with additional powers not found in explicit essays and treaties. Fiction allows a very much fuller exploration of all the consequences of the suggested alterations to the world, almost like running a simulation, in conjuring vivid mental images and the lived experiences of its characters. Even when it fails, when we have to enter the dreaded "suspension of disbelief", it offers insight into psychology of both author and reader – the question as to why we disagree on a particular point is often fascinating in revealing our different perspectives. Lastly, character development I will begrudgingly admit does matter, offering the power to move the reader in a way that a point-by-point examination of the possible consequences has no chance of ever approaching.

(I will however retain my snobbish hat against character development and still pronounce this need to engage with the emotions of the reader as somewhat base, but only because I think the literati types have for so long done the opposite. I am being somewhat tongue-in-cheek here.)

Tolkien appreciates that fantasy helps us engage with critical thinking and reasoning, but that deserves its own section. He lists three other positive benefits of the genre : recovery, escape, and consolation. All three are closely connected.

"Escapism" is surely the most common charge used as an attempted criticism of the genre. The idea being, I suppose, that readers are simply indulging in things of no value and having no bearing on the real world. Tolkien disparages this attitude as confusing escape with desertion :

Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison*, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter... they would seem to prefer the acquiescence of the “quisling” to the resistance of the patriot. To such thinking you have only to say “the land you loved is doomed” to excuse any treachery, indeed to glorify it.

* I shall assume he means "unjustly" here, otherwise it feels a bit strange to imply that prisoners should try to escape ! 

For Tolkien large parts of the world are dark and cruel, they are things you should escape from rather than engaging with. As a veteran of the Somme and having lived through WWII, we can hardly deny him this. The need to escape, to think of better, more worthy things than one's own four grim walls, is closely tied to recovery and consolation. A potent reminder in terms of the suffering Tolkien himself endured is briefly examined here.

On the notion of the world being "less real", there's an aspect to this which I both strongly agree and disagree with. Tolkien lambasts the notion that things like motor-cars and electric lights are especially "real", and I fully endorse the sentiment (but not the specifics, which I leave to part two). Our little corner of the cosmos has no claim on any special privilege whatsoever, except in regard to ourselves. Conversely, stories set on other worlds have every claim to validity and the optimistic element is (for me at least) far more inspiring than making things depressing for its own sake* – without in the least bit denying the value of unhappier tragedies. Both have their proper place. 

* Indeed, you can't be said to "escape" if you transport yourself to a worse place ! You can get yourself out of your own perspective, but that's not really the same thing.

And of course, these accusations of fantasy being "not real", by which I think people mean "not relevant to me personally", are extremely similar to those thrown at all blue-skies research, usually by small-minded imbeciles. Would that we could rid ourselves of such petty fools.

Now of course, one may argue far more legitimately, "but this way the world physically operates is just of no interest to me personally", and while we might then pity such fools, we could accept it. Bafflingly, not everyone is thrilled about the prospects of understanding galaxy evolution. Very well, that's their loss. But then we ought to enter in effect into a kind of contract : I promise not to disparage your obsession with your make-believe sports team if you promise to allow me my magic rings and enchanted lands. 

Conclusions

I think of fantasy and science fiction as being two halves of the same coin, both concerned primarily with how the world can or should work. Fairy stories are certainly "escapist" in that they have happily-ever-afters, but this is not true of fantasy in general : and neither happy endings nor escapism are damaging in themselves. It is true that adults have allowed fairy stories to become silly and immature, but this does not speak against the nature of the genre, only its authors.

Why has this happened ? Is it because children have some innate preference for this sort of thing ? Are they innately more curious about the mundane, unimportant characteristics of the world and less interested with "higher" matters of the accurate portrayal of character interactions ? I certainly don't think so, and neither did Tolkien. It's literary snobbery and nothing else. 

Nor is fantasy mutually exclusive with other genres; a fantasy enthusiast is not by any means unconcerned with psychology but can in fact be sometimes all the more so. "History often resembles 'Myth,'", said Tolkien, "because they are both ultimately of the same stuff." That is, stories. What better way, then, to consider psychology and sociology but by exploring different circumstances in which people find themselves ? What better way to consider the human condition ?

Next time I'll look further at how examining the details of fantasy helps us remain connected with, not separated from, reality, how it helps us to think critically and why this is important for children. I'll also look at Tolkien's complicated views on science fiction and technology and his putative "highest function" of fairy tales, the under-appreciated eucatastrophe.