[Bêthberry]

We Downers are all very adept at picking and choosing quotations from The Professor--or any author, for that matter-- to shore up our side of the discussion, but often a quotation cannot of itself provide a preemptive strike or hard and fast evidence of a position unless the entire context of the essay is considered and applied with the quotation. We are like Protestants who delight in chapter and verse while being woefully unable to provide a thematic framework which puts the quotation in context.

Tolkien wrote OFS to ofset a trend which disturbed him--the trend to relegating fairy tales to the children's nursery. He wrote to restore fantasy to full fledged position in the adult literature of a nation and culture. To that end, he sought to prove that fairy stories partake of certain qualities which adult literature of his time had. One of the most important qualities was credibility: is this world, story credible? This accounts for Tolkien's careful explication that fantasy not insult reason or scientific verity--note his use of the word verity rather than veracity. Yet fantasy is not, for Tolkien, beholding to the world of historical fiction: a recognition of fact, not a slavery to it, he writes. (I think it was Ibrin who first made this point and kudos to her for this.) The world in fantasy must be credible and natural, but also--and this is the difficult part for a writer to achieve--strange, unusual, utterly something other at the same time. It is the realm of Fairie, in which fairies have their being, as Tolkien puts it.

Originally Posted by OFS

The definition of a fairy story--what it is, what it should be--does not then depend upon any definition or historical account [my italics] of elf or fairy but upon the nature of Fairie, the Perilous Realm itself, and the air that blows in that country.

Those of us who are charitable might add here that Fairie does not depend upon any historical account of war either. (And in this analysis Tolkien is typically English in understating his contribution when he refers to his "imperfect vision of it". )

And later in the essay Tolkien differentiates his idea of sub-creation from representation or symbolic interpretation of the beauties and terrors of the world. Literary belief in Fantasy, for Tolkien, has to do with Art, with the magical qualities of story telling, where unlikeness to the Primary World and freedom from the domination of observed 'fact' engage strangeness and wonder in the Expression.

Another way of expressing this is Tolkien's idea about how fantasy distances us from our own time, which would also make it not susceptible to authenticating it by events of our time.

Originally Posted by OFS

For one thing, they are now old, and antiguity has an appeal in itself--distance and a great abyss of time. . . . They open a door on Another Time, and if we pass through, though only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside of Time itself, maybe.

In fact, Tolkien argues that things in Fairey which do not conform to the primacy world are not grounds for criticism:

Originally Posted by OFS

That the images are of things not in the primary world (if that is indeed possible) is a virtue, not a vice.

For Tolkien, Fantasy plays strange tricks with the world, and that includes not just elves and hobbits and balrogs, but war as well as trees which grow in darkness without light.

So, in short, there be my pickin's of quotations. (Everything I have bolded save for Downers' names are Tolkien's words from OFS unless otherwise noted.)