I’m writing this week, still and always. The heat’s heavy, and as it presses down on us through the day we linger in the backyard longer than we should, learning to make marks on rocks with other, sharper rocks.
Recently I read Tolkien’s essay On Fairy-Stories, printed in a small Unwin book along with his short story Leaf by Niggle. I found the book in Montreal at a science fiction convention in 2018, I believe, but I’d not opened it until this week. A decent portion of my reading in the Pandemic has involved treating our shelves as bookstore and library, the way a hibernating bear burns its own fat. There are fewer unread books in my house than there used to be.
I knew I’d read Leaf by Niggle as a teenager—a wonderfully sweet and strange story, gently and generously Christian in a way that on this re-reading reminds me more of G.K. Chesterton than of C.S. Lewis, though the Lewis comparison is also apt I suppose. It’s odd, always, reading Tolkien writing about a world that fits together more like the one he saw outside his window. Also odd, the vagaries of memory. Before re-reading Leaf last night I would have sworn that there was a war in it—not direct, not described, but lurking and shaping the events of the story, much in the way that wars and plague shape To the Lighthouse. If there is a war in Leaf by Niggle, though, it’s deep and still, like a black hole, detectible only by its distortions of visible light. Or I was making it up altogether. There is something ominous, though, about Leaf’s descriptions of Niggle’s country, about the demands it places on its citizens, about its need for lumber and canvas, about the absent builder, even about the strictures of the Village Councilman’s language. For all its joy, it casts eerie shadows.
But I found, to my surprise, that I’d never read On Fairy-Stories. I couldn’t, to be sure, remember having read it. But it’s referenced so often—especially the part about how a prisoner’s duty is to escape, so often repeated in LeGuin’s paraphrase—that I was sure I must have been assigned it, or skimmed it, somewhere. Nope! I feel sheepish about this, which is why I’m keeping it secret between you, me, and the Internet. Imagine a philosopher being sure she must have read Plato’s Republic at some point, or a sculptor figuring that they must have seen the Pieta. Maybe not quite that egregious an oversight—it’s a piece of analysis, not a primary work, but here we have one of the most significant and enduring English-language fantasists, a foundational figure in at least two of my favorite hobbies (fantasy writing and tabletop roleplaying), writing about the thing I do. You’d think I would have made sure I knew what he had to say.
By way of partial excuse—I think I labored, for a long time, under the impression that the best way to learn art was to do a lot of it, rather than to read or listen to what other people had to say about it. I still think doing is vital, and should occupy the driver’s seat—if you spend more time learning about the practice of art than actually practicing, you’ll not have context to make use of the good advice that is out there. Also you won’t have the context needed to tell the good advice from the bad. Once you’ve done a lot of work, if you’re lucky you may find yourself mired in fruitful perplexities. You’re far enough into the woods to know the meaning of the word lost. At that point, you also know what you need from a guide.
On Fairy-Stories is a wonderful essay, deeply thought. Find a copy and read it yourself. In lieu of offering a Grand Theory of the essay, which I’m still turning over in my mind, I offer two things that struck me, by the wayside:
First, Tolkien believes that English literary criticism borrows too much from dramatic criticism in its insistence on character as the most important feature of story-making. Feel free to get your yuks in about Tolkien’s characters, but I love the way he articulates this point. “If you prefer Drama to Literature (as many literary critics plainly do), or form your critical theories primarily from dramatic critics, or even from Drama, you are apt to misunderstand pure story-making, and to constrain it to the limitations of stage-plays. You are, for instance, likely to prefer characters, even the basest and dullest, to things. Very little about trees as trees can be got into a play.”
Second. I’m not sure what to do with this at all: Tolkien remarks, in discussing the origins of his own personal love of fairy stories (using the term broadly, as he does throughout the essay, to describe much of what we’d now call Fantasy), that he wasn’t particularly taken by them in his childhood or youth. The paragraph ends with the following sentence:
“A real taste for fairy-stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war.”
That’s all he says on the subject. Here, too, the war lurks.