[davem]

Found this interesting:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/s...215993,00.html

The wild ones


Fairies and other spirits have long haunted the words and images of English literature. AS Byatt looks beyond the bright-cheeked children and pretty dolls of Edwardian illustrators to explore the menace that lurks beneath

Interesting reading & more importantly it calls into question Tolkien's statements re fairy stories being reduced to 'children's literature' & relegated to the nursery in OFS - he attacks Victorian/Edwardian fairy stories for trivalising Faerie. Yet, as we see here, there was a very dark, threatening, aspect to the fairy literature of the time - a whole dimension which Tolkien chooses to ignore.

And yet, its influence is not entirely absent in his own work:

Reading about all these people, grown-up boys with a sly interest in cruelty, incompetent grown-ups attracted by an imaginary world in which real horrors lurked, clubmen reproducing in their fastnesses the stodgy food of the schools where they had tortured and been tortured, the bright Edwardian nursery frieze can be seen with real goblins and greenteeths, wurricoes and strangling willows just visible behind the bright-cheeked children in their aprons with their nice apples and dolls.

'Greenteeths & strangling willows do indeed haunt the Old Forest ('Greenteeth' is a reference to Jinny Greenteeth, a female river spirit of British folklore with a tendency to drown unwary travellers, as Goldberry attempted with Tom on their first meeting).

I wonder why Tolkien leaves all this kind of faerie literature out of OFS? Is it because it would completely destroy his argument re 'Escape' - who would choose this dark Faerie world of animal torture & babies being buried alive as a place of Escape:

Take Maurice Hewlett, whose book The Lore of Proserpine is an apparently factual account of his relations with the fairy world. As a small boy he saw in the woods a fairy child his own age. It is throttling a rabbit, for pleasure, "the way children squeeze a snap-dragon flower to make it open or shut its mouth". Hewlett observed that the fairy's "cruel fingers, as if by habit, continued the torture, and that in some way he derived pleasure from the performance". Hewlett is interested in the fairies precisely because their nature has other laws, which include indifference to cruelty.

John Anster Fitzgerald painted a series of sleeping figures - an artist, some young girls - dreaming drugged visions of wraiths, demons and insect-like tormentors. He painted rats, white mice and sinister-looking flowers. His world is brightly coloured, almost hectic. His fairies are not kind. They persecute small creatures, torture snails and robins. If their faces are doll-like, it is because their feelings are alien. His Ariel lies on a branch of blossoming hawthorn in a diaphanous, flowery garment that seems to sprout out of him/her. It has a pretty face and mad, protuberant blue eyes - like a china doll come unpleasantly to life. It is not human. It is weird. The creatures relate to that disturbing Victorian poem, "Goblin Market", which attracted illustrators from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Housman and Rackham. Housman's goblins have things in common with Grahame's human animals, except that they are nasty: half-mole, half-imp, or half-rat, half-dwarf. They have dangerous rodent teeth in black visages. Rackham's goblins have a certain comic, nursery quaintness, a darker version of Beatrix Potter.

Barrie's chilling portrayal of Peter's inhumanity almost gets out of hand - the narrator sweetly describes the little graves Peter makes in the gardens for babies who fall out of the perambulators and die, but he then insinuates that Peter may sometimes have buried them alive. "I do hope that Peter is not too ready with his spade. It is all rather sad." Worse is his own heartlessness. He is annoyed with David's mother for discovering that he has put David's combinations on with the buttons at the front. He punishes her by sending a photo he has taken of David being hanged from a tree. Executions again.

As I say, this kind of thing hovers just on the edge of M-e, in the darker parts of the Old Forest, but in the main we don't see it - though we could imagine Orcs indulging in such things, in their case they would find an evil joy in it, rather than an amused, if slightly detatched, pleasure from the exercise.