You say 'Faeries' & I say 'Fairies'

[davem]

Addendum

Originally Posted by Bb

He thus had to domesticate his elves and cleanse them of their capricious ways which were not sympathetic to humans. Otherwise he would have had an evil realm which was beyond the power of the good he wished to portray.

I wonder if this all grew out of his initial decision to write his mythology from an Elvish perspective. I don't know if Tolkien was the first author to do this, but generally speaking writers of fairy stories write about the inhabitants of Faerie - as seen from the 'outside'. Tolkien wrote, effectively, as an Elf, seeking to tell their story from their pov. Yet he was not only not an Elf, he was a Catholic Christian, & so he would have had a very specific worldview/moral value system- as Bb points out. This consequence of this would have been that his Elves & Faeries would be 'Christianised' - they would think & act not simply like humans but like Christian humans (even the 'sinners' among them would have committed 'Christian' sins).

This, I suppose, really means that Tolkien didn't write about 'real' (ie genuine - in a 'folkloric' sense) Elves & Faeries at all. But the question I originally asked remains - why change traditional Elves & Faeries so much - to the point where they bear little or no resemblance to the original figures of folklore? Tolkien's influence on people's perceptions of Elves, Dwarves, Goblins, etc has been so pervasive that many readers automatically think of Tolkien's version of Elves when they hear the word - just as people pre-LotR would have automatically thought of 'Flower Fairies'. Yet both of those concepts were false as regards genuine Fairies.

The interesting thing is that Tolkien (in On Fairy Stories) condemned the 'Flower Fairies' imagery for its falseness & 'Pigwiggenry', yet his own 'Elves' are just as 'false' a creation & no closer to genuine Elves & Fairies. Was his intention to use Faerie for his own ends - make it safe & Christian, remove the 'dangerous' pagan elements & make Faerie a means to 'evangelise' his own people - that seems to have been his intention according to what we read in Garth's biography.