You say 'Faeries' & I say 'Fairies'

[davem]

Originally Posted by drigel

Mine too. I think the fact that a good deal of darkness (Doom, Kinslaying, etc) related to in the Silm was Elf upon Elf, and attests to the fact that not everything was skipping joyously through the woods in Faerie land.

Certainly there is 'darkeness' in Tolkien's Faerie, but it is a 'logical' darkness. What I mean is that the 'chaotic' nature of traditional Faerie is absent - possibly because as an orthodox Christian Tolkien thought in terms of an opposition of Good & Evil, rather than the 'Pagan' opposition of Chaos & Cosmos. The 'Doom' & the Kinslaying are acts of moral evil. In the traditional Faerie there are constant battles between Fairy tribes, there is malicious destruction & cruelty, but there is also a strong trend of childlike, 'innocent', cruelty - like children pulling the wings off flies, or the legs off spiders - not out of a desire to hurt but simply to see what happens. This 'cruelty' seems to reflect a sense of wonder, an eternal curiosity. There are stories of Fairies discovering that a human had seen them & blinding them, stealing babies out of cradles, or beautiful young humans to come & live with them to join their revels. Its about an absence of human feelings & emotions (&, not being human, why should they be expected to share our values?)

So, we're not talking about darkness in the sense of moral evil at all in many instances. Its not that Tolkien was unaware of this side to Fairies - he translated Sir Orfeo, with its account of the kidnapping of Orfeo's wife, Heurodis, & her imprisonment by the Fairy king, & Aotrou & Itroun has a very malicious Fairy, but he seems to have produced a Faerie which was incredibly idiosyncratic & to have created it for a moral/philosophical purpose - well & good - yet he presents this 'Faerie' as Faerie itself. Or, more precisely, at some points he refers to his Faerie as something he has invented - a 'symbol'

My symbol is not the underground, whether necrological and Orphic or pseudo-scientific in jargon, but the Forest:

this 'Faery' is as necessary for the health and complete functioning of the Human as is sunlight for physical life:

while at other times he seems to refer to it as a realm in its own right - neither symbol nor metaphor. In the Fairy Stories essay he refers to it in both ways - without any reference to his own creation. As he does in this essay.

It is plainly shown that Faery is a vast world in its own right, that does not depend for its existence upon Men, and which is not primarily nor indeed principally concerned with Men. The relationship must therefore be one of love:

Faery, for Tolkien, seems to be both a 'real' objectively existing place, or state of being, seperate from, but in relationship with, our own world (hence his constant references to not 'inventing' the Legendarium, but rather 'discovering what really happened') & as 'merely' a metaphor a way of speaking about our ideal relationship to creation - & in its essence it can't be both. Yet it seems that at some times it is wholly one & at other times it is wholly the other. But it becomes more complex, because this 'objective realm' of Faery to which he refers is not the Faerie of tradition - that too is his own creation. In other words he is claiming an objective existence for something he himself constructed - because his Faery is to be found nowhere else in folklore, legend or myth.

[drigel]

What I mean is that the 'chaotic' nature of traditional Faerie is absent

I finally am seeing what you are driving at Davem! The absense of this element of fairie is deafening in the Legendarium.

The easy way out would be 'translator's conceit', this being a history written by historians (who were mostly existing at the highest levels of their civilizations). I would tend to adhear to your Christianizing theory though. Although it still could be argued that much of the evil / malicious pranks and practices that were attributed to them (or piled on them) may be more of a reflection of the aftermath of humans becoming Christianized. Also, one should take into account how much of the chaotic element of nature was lumped into evil workings of the devil, post Chrisitianizing. The same element that had a persona of it's own for eons, very quickly became a result of sinfull living - we were flooded because we angered God, etc. Before this time, this similar thought might have been there with pagan gods, but not necessarily. That chaotic nature was more personified in the gods back then. They didnt necessarily have to have a reason to flood your crops, they just did - so deal with it....

This 'cruelty' seems to reflect a sense of wonder, an eternal curiosity. There are stories of Fairies discovering that a human had seen them & blinding them, stealing babies out of cradles, or beautiful young humans to come & live with them to join their revels. Its about an absence of human feelings & emotions (&, not being human, why should they be expected to share our values?)

That sense of "cruelty" in nature is a good point. Of course, from our point of view, we attribute cruelty to acts of nature. It's more pronounced as we become further removed from nature. Looking through the eyes of a pre-Christian society coping with life, this POV will of course be different. Couple that with the general ignorance of biologic systems and a pre-industrial non-scientific kind of learning of nature in general, then we may start to understand that eternal curiosity that you mention. Nature is nature. The truth is that nature has been doing it's own thing long before we came on the scene. But with our ancestors - back then, just about every aspect of life was cruel - from our POV.

So the unhindered, chaotic, wild and untamed aspect to Faerie is ignored in the Legendarium. Does omission mean the author wanted that separate from his Faerie, or does it just not fit with the theme and style he was striving for?

[davem]

A couple of things struck me the more I thought about Tolkien's 'Faery'. One is the way so many of his readers (& so many of the fantasy writers who have followed him - ie ripped him off) have accepted the 'objective' existence of his created Faery - his Elves & Dwarves & Goblins have been accepted by others, not simply Tolkien himself as existing 'out there', but more importantly so has his morality - the moral value system he imposed.

The other thing is the way in the essay he rejects out of hand any allegorical interpretation of Faery (only allowing it to be a 'symbol' - though where the exact dividing line between symbol & allegory is to be found is another question) as it appears in the story, but himself provides an allegorical interpretation of the 'human' world in the story.

[Formendacil]

In a world that is more and more becoming elastic in its moral standards, blurring the lines of good and evil, authors are following in the tradition of assigning morals like ours to non-humans, contrary to a more moral age, when authors assigned no morals like ours to non-human creatures...

[davem]

Originally Posted by Formendacil

In a world that is more and more becoming elastic in its moral standards, blurring the lines of good and evil, authors are following in the tradition of assigning morals like ours to non-humans, contrary to a more moral age, when authors assigned no morals like ours to non-human creatures...

Well, Tolkien certainly does. Clarke doesn't - in a footnote she mentions that faeries are effectively 'insane' - at least in comparison to humans. She is speaking as narrator though. Certainly her Fairies lack anything approaching a human standard of morality. Yet they seem to have a sense of right & wrong - its just not ours. Tolkien attributes the same moral value system to Elves, Dwarves & humans - & even his Orcs seem to have a 'moral' code. Gorbag or Shagrat (don't have the books with me) refers to the leaving of Frodo as a 'regular Elvish trick', & Shagrat declares Gorbag a 'filthy rebel'.

Tolkien's assigning of a common moral value system seems to deny any real moral difference between races. The only real difference between Elves & mortals seems to be that Elves are bound within the circles of the world while mortals are not. Effectively this reduces the difference between them to mortality.

In the Irish myths Fairies have a different origin to men. In the (Christianised) tradition the Fairies were originally the neutral Angels - they took no part in Lucifer's rebellion, but were caught up in the expulsion from Paradise & fell to earth - though not being evil they didn't end up in Hell & were fated to wander the earth. This would make them equivalent to Tolkien's Ainur - except there were no neutral Ainur: they either sided with Melkor or remained loyal to Eru.

It would seem that Tolkien's focus on Death as his chief area of exploration (he declared that LotR is 'about death, the inevitability of death) perhaps overrode other questions. Yet it lead him to ignore other issues. Its outside the tradition, yet we seem to accept it as being traditional - is this purely because so few of his readers have no knowledge of the traditions or is there more to it? Do we feel that Tolkien tapped into something that was originally there but was subsequently lost - as Drigel suggested, or is it that Tolkien's Elves are easier to relate to & identify with?

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by davem

It would seem that Tolkien's focus on Death as his chief area of exploration (he declared that LotR is 'about death, the inevitability of death) perhaps overrode other questions. Yet it lead him to ignore other issues. Its outside the tradition, yet we seem to accept it as being traditional - is this purely because so few of his readers have no knowledge of the traditions or is there more to it? Do we feel that Tolkien tapped into something that was originally there but was subsequently lost - as Drigel suggested, or is it that Tolkien's Elves are easier to relate to & identify with?

I'm not sure I quite follow this, davem. Are you including Tolkien's conception of death here when you talk about tradition? People's view of death derived from his ethical system is different from that in earlier cultures, no? Perhaps I don't know enough about the pagan myths you are referring to, but is fear of death derived from a fear of hell and damnation or does it extend to other religions and beliefs? Would the Numenorean fate have been possible outside of Tolkien's beliefs?

[davem]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

I'm not sure I quite follow this, davem. Are you including Tolkien's conception of death here when you talk about tradition? People's view of death derived from his ethical system is different from that in earlier cultures, no? Perhaps I don't know enough about the pagan myths you are referring to, but is fear of death derived from a fear of hell and damnation or does it extend to other religions and beliefs? Would the Numenorean fate have been possible outside of Tolkien's beliefs?

I was not as clear there as I should have been. I meant that his conception of Faery & the motives he assigns to Fairies (ie 'love') are outside the tradition. I simply meant that its possible that his desire to focus on & explore the nature of death may have lead (even required) his to assign a common moral value system to all his races. This would throw the death question into sharp relief.

Different religions & traditions have differrent beliefs - some of the Pagan traditions had a fairly unpleasant view of the afterlife - cf The Aeneid - others held out a more pleasant prospect. Some taught reincarnation. My point, as I said, was that maybe the exploration of death over rode everything else for Tolkien, to the extent that he was required to re-create the Elves in his own image, put them in the service of his story, effectively make them into 'symbols', even 'emasculate' them. Elves & Fairies were not like that pre-Tolkien. Post Tolkien they are generally thought of in that way. The wild, fear inspiring, awesome, disturbing Fairies & Elves of tradition, the ones who can transform us & our reality, are absent from Tolkien's world & have been replaced by a unique, beautiful, powerful creation of Tolkien's own - the older Fairies occasionally peep out, & at those points we may feel a thrill, but generally his Elves are 'good Christians'.