"Genuine fairy-story" ? - The Barrow-Downs Discussion Forum

littlemanpoet · 10-02-2006, 09:48 AM

I'm rather amused (as I hunch you are, Lal) that what I see from a Christian point of view as a descent, you from a pagan point of view see as an ascent, and vice versa. It has been said among Christians that the Fall turned the world upside down and backward, and the Incarnation and its aftermath turned it right side up again; which you would of course consider upside down and backwards.

And this may be the "corrective" that Tolkien was trying to achieve in LotR, but especially in The Silmarillion, as compared to paganism. Thus, perhaps, part of "genuine fairy-story" was, for him, a reclamation of myth from not only its nursery backwaters, but also its paganocentric locale, by placing it squarely in an Eru based cosmos?

10-02-2006, 09:48 AM	#35
littlemanpoet Itinerant Songster Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: The Edge of Faerie Posts: 7,066	I'm rather amused (as I hunch you are, Lal) that what I see from a Christian point of view as a descent, you from a pagan point of view see as an ascent, and vice versa. It has been said among Christians that the Fall turned the world upside down and backward, and the Incarnation and its aftermath turned it right side up again; which you would of course consider upside down and backwards. And this may be the "corrective" that Tolkien was trying to achieve in LotR, but especially in The Silmarillion, as compared to paganism. Thus, perhaps, part of "genuine fairy-story" was, for him, a reclamation of myth from not only its nursery backwaters, but also its paganocentric locale, by placing it squarely in an Eru based cosmos?