Two passages from an essay by Stratford Caldecott 'Tolkien's Elvish England' seem relevant here. The first is from an essay by Chesterton, the second is by Caldecott himself.
Quote:
Quote:
|
What is wanted for the cause of England today is an Englishman with enough imagination to love his country from the outside as well as the inside. That is, we need somebody who will do for the English what never been done for them, but what is done for any outlandish peasantry or even any savage tribe. We want people who can make England attractive; quite apart from whether England is strong or weak.... To express this mysterious people, to explain or suggest why they like tall hedges and heavy breakfasts and crooked roads and small gardens with large fences, and why they alone among Christians have kept quite consistently the great Christian glory of the open fireplace, here would be a strange and stimulating opportunity for any of the artists in words, who study the souls of strange peoples...
|
It is also in fairy-tales, or in Faerie itself, that our nation, or landscape, our place in the world is made luminous, and revealed to be more than it appears to the mundane consciousness. "Elvish England" is in this sense the only true England, because it is England seen with eyes that reveal the meaning of things, and the meaning of things (as Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy) is simply that they are "magic." They might not have been at all, and the fact that they are as they are is due to an act of will on the part of the Creator. Thus "England" cannot be perceived-we will miss it entirely if we do not view it as an imaginative construction, in other words as a story. And furthermore this is a story we are helping God to write. We are part of the magic. We imagine "England" into existence, and if we cease to believe in it, it will cease to be. The National Census cannot reveal England. It can only truly be seen wrapped in the mists of imagination, in the myths and folklore that tell us what it feels like to belong to this landscape & this tradition.
|
The essay is in the latest issue of the
Chesterton Review. An interesting point Caldecott makes in the context of this thread is that what ended the 'Edwardian' period, in art as in every other way, was the single most formative event in Tolkien's creative (& personal) life: WWI. LotR could not be an 'Edwardian' novel for that reason alone - after WWI there was no real going back...