"Genuine fairy-story" ?

[Aiwendil]

What a great idea for a thread! I wish I had time for the kind of thoughtful post this topic deserves. Anyway, a few miscellaneous points have occurred to me while reading the discussion.

Squatter wrote:

I have to ask at this point whether Tolkien was really trying to write fairy-stories at all. Much of what he says in his lecture applies to fantasy as well as his official theme, but I'm by no means sure that we can see his own fiction as a representation of Faërie.

I wonder about the distinction between fantasy and fairy-story. In my reading of OFS, Tolkien draws no such distinction - though he is careful to distinguish beast fables and such from genuine fairy-story. By "fairy-story", I think it is clear, he does not mean to restrict himself to that genre (or sub-genre) that is typically called "fairy tale" today.

It occurs to me that it might be an interesting exercise, and might teach us something about the distinctions that ought and ought not to be made here, to see if we can classify various works as "fairy story", "fantasy", "fairy tale", "myth", or whatever other possible categories we might be interested in. Where would Beowulf go? What about Grimm's fairy tales? The Silmarillion? The Book of Lost Tales? Which belong to which category?

I think that what we would find is that it is hard, if not impossible, to distinguish fairy-story from fantasy, and those again from myth.

The Silmarillion is a collection of high myths completely founded in the sub-created world. There is no connection with the primary world unless we allow Ælfwine, a character who is conspicuous by his absence in the 1977 publication.

Yet Tolkien spent a great deal of time on the Eriol/Aelfwine story in his pre-LotR writings; and the character still appears as late as the 1950s. Indeed, it was only when Tolkien had settled on another "transmission story" for the Silmarillion (i.e. through Numenor to Gondor and Rivendell, and probably via Bilbo's Translations from the Elvish) that he dropped Aelfwine.

The missing element in LotR is the journey into Faërie: the hobbits are already citizens of Middle-earth; they do not arrive there from our primary reality.

This is a good point, and certainly there is an important distinction to be drawn between what might have been called "transition" and "immersion" fantasy. But does Tolkien restrict the scope of the term "fairy-story" to the former? I cannot recall his doing so. After all, works like Beowulf or the Kalevala do not involve a journey beginning from our reality.

Bethberry wrote:

It certainly suggests that The Hobbit and the Legendarium were not initially conceived under the auspices of his thoughts about fairie, and so leads quite directly to consideration of how LotR might differ from those two earlier works.

I'm not so sure. The fact that it was written around 1937-1938 does not necessarily mean that the ideas in it were wholly new to him at that time. I suspect that the view of fairy-stories he presents was long in formation. Is there any evidence that his views had changed significantly prior to OFS?

I also feel I should point out that the Silmarillion cannot be thought of as an "early work" simpliciter (not that you necessarily were suggesting this).

Lalwende wrote:

Well if we hope in any way to reflect Faerie then yes, a tale does have to reflect the amorality of Faerie, as that's the nature of the place/concept - its somewhere outside the rules, beyond the law and out of most people's comprehension.

What is meant by "reflect Faerie"? I think that this is a point worth considering very carefully.

Faerie is, after all, not a real place that can be accurately or inaccurately described (I fear I'm straying in the direction of the dreaded C-thread, but I shall boldly press on). Faerie may, in a sense, be "real" insofar as it refers to a massive complex of cultural and psychological facts; but to speak of representing Faerie itself as distinct from human perception and interpretation thereof (i.e. as something "out of most people's comprehension") seems to me to be meaningless.

Of course, without resorting to talk about Faerie itself, we can ask about amorality in existing fairy-stories. There are two important questions we ought to ask. First, does Tolkien's definition of a 'fairy-story' say anything about amorality? Second, do existing specimens of fairy-story uniformly exhibit amorality?

The answer to the first question is clearly "no". Tolkien doesn't even use the word "amoral" or "amorality" in the essay, and he certainly doesn't posit this as a criterion for fairy-story. Insofar, then, as we are investigating whether Tolkien's fiction conforms to his views on fairy-stories, the matter of amorality is irrelevant.

The second question is more interesting. Certainly there are a great many amoral fairy-stories; and I would agree that Tolkien's work is unusual in this regard. But I think that the amorality of fairy-stories has been somewhat overstated. There are, after all, important examples of fairy stories that are not amoral, and even some that are highly moral. Look at "Beowulf" or, even better, "Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight".

Ungoliant most defintely is ambiguous, check out the evidence in the Spiders thread that Bethberry and myself found.

I must disagree. Ungoliant is evil. One can, of course, play all kinds of games along the lines of "the Silmarillion is a biased account" (though I confess that what it might mean for a fictional story to be fictionalized is unknown to me). But if we are talking about Tolkien's work, you have to accept that Eru is good and Ungoliant is not.