[Aiwendil]

Mister Underhill wrote:

To clarify my own feeling slightly, I’m not really “concerned” about analyzing “enchantment”. If I were, I probably would have quit the Downs years ago. I merely observed that the analysis, for me, doesn’t get me any closer to understanding why or how it works.

Ah. I'm sorry for mischaracterizing your view.

Davem wrote:

I have to wonder about this 'denial' of an 'objectively existing faerie' realm. Especially from someone involved in a project to produce a 'coherent' Silmarillion - what are you doing if not trying to put together a vision of Middle Earth from lots of scattered & contradictory sources - so you must have some sense of what Middle Earth 'should' be like. You must have some sense of there being a coherent story, a coherent world - as if all the existing stories are 'windows' onto this 'Archetypal' secondary world.

I think that there is a coherent story to tell about Middle-earth. Actually, I think that there are many mutually contradictory coherent stories to tell about Middle-earth. Middle-earth surely is an imaginary place. But "Faerie" cannot simply be Middle-earth. If Faerie were literally equal to Middle-earth, it could not also be the Faery of SoWM or the Little Kingdom of Farmer Giles or any other such place. My point was that "Faerie", if it is a meaningful term at all, does not refer to some self-consistent place, real or imaginary.

Secondly, Tolkien believed in 'faerie', & spent his life trying to present it to us, so even if you don't like or agree with the idea you have to accept that that is the position Tolkien was coming from,& what motivated him. His original reason for beginning to write was not to 'invent' a new mythology, but to rediscover one that was lost. So He clearly believed that this mythological secondary world had once existed, & was still accessible, indeed that it was still around in some form - in traditional beliefs, stories, place names & partiularly in language.

First of all, I must point out that while Tolkien was an extremely intelligent and talented person, he was not infallible. That he held some opinion does not mean that that opinion is necessarily correct.

However, I do not think that my views on this matter contradict Tolkien's.

Let's try to be clear about one thing: Tolkien did not literally think that he was rediscovering a lost mythology in the Silmarillion. He did not expect ancient records to turn up containing the original version of the Turin legend any more than he expected the shards of Gurthang to be unearthed by archaeologists. What he did perhaps think was that he was reconstructing certain ideas that had existed in ancient mythologies, or inventing ones that could very plausibly have existed.

Let me point out that I never denied that "Faerie" is a meaningful, or even important, concept. What I argued was that:

1. Faerie is not literally a real place.
2. Faerie is actually not so much a place, real or imaginary, as it is a set of images, moods, ideas, and associations.
3. The primary purpose of fantasy is not to provide a window to Faerie; rather, the purpose of Faerie is to provide a kind of power to fantasy.

Yet this is exactly what we have in Smith, & Smith is far from boring or pointless. For me it is one of the most powerful & moving works Tolkien ever wrote. We are simply seeing a series of unconected scenes, & visions, with no connecting narrative - at least while we follow Smith through Faerie. Smith has very few 'adventures' in the sense the term is usually understood. He simply walks in Faerie, & things happen, in which he plays little or no active part. The point of the story - if there is one, is that merely wandering in Faerie is of value, & enchanting enough. I have to say that for me, Smith is more 'Tolkienesque' than anything else he wrote (does that make sense?). It is 'pure' Faerie, with no narrative drive as such, no 'quest'. All the rules are put aside & we are taken into Faerie more totally than anywhere else since the Lost Tales.

I will not touch the issue of allegory in Smith - save to mention that I see it as at least quasi-allegorical in intention.

But as for "pure Faerie without adventure" being sufficient - it works well enough within the context of this work, but how much longer could Smith be before it became dreadfully boring? And how many works like Smith could one tolerate before one hungered for a book in which something actually happens?

To be honest, while I did enjoy Smith, it is far from my favorite work by Tolkien. I much prefer Giles. To me, the chief value of Smith seemed to lie in its consideration of Faerie as such, sort of as a meta-fantasy or disguised piece of literary theory more than as a work of fiction in its own right.