From
The Imaginative Conservative:
Ireland most intuitively comes to mind
as such a place, a lost world, where remnants of enchantment are still
visible, even palpable. Consider the Irish Fairy Tree, a hidden tree
covered in colorful ribbons where wanderers write their wishes and wrap
them around its branches. These trees are believed to be the homes of
fairies, and it is considered bad luck to cut them down or disturb them.
They are often exceptional, standing alone amidst the wild Irish
landscape that inspired many a writer; few places are as blessed in
myth, folklore, literature, music, and faith as the Emerald Isle. I
travelled to Ireland five years ago and was disillusioned (to say the
least) by the lack of enchantment and reverence left in the minds of its
citizens, but my faith in the reality of the country’s (true) magic was
restored—as it will be for any visitor—by walking alone through its
green and gray ruins.
The topic of this essay is not Ireland,
however, as it would take much more time and space to discuss such a
wild and forgotten land. Its scenery, replete with enchantment, opens
the theme for this piece, which is a reflection and analysis of
Tolkien’s splendid essay “On Fairy Stories.” But first, a poem:
Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.
“The Stolen Child” (1889) by W.B. Yeats
always echoes when I re-read Tolkien’s “On Fairy Stories.” Yeats wrote
the poem long before Tolkien delivered the essay as part of the Andrew
Lang lectures at the University of St Andrews. Tolkien wrote, “Faerie is
a perilous land”—do we sense peril in Yeats’ poem?
We should, but not because the land that
he describes is inherently dangerous. What Tolkien called Faerie is
such a foreign realm that it is perilous for us. What kind of
world is this, where fairies weave “olden dances” (17), mingle their
hands and glances (18); where they chase bubbles “while the world is
full of troubles” (22) and play tricks on “slumbering trout” (32)? It is
a world of enchantment that coexists with our own. Yeats’ “faery” world
exists within his native Ireland: Sleuth Wood and Glen-Car. The poem,
moreover, is called the “stolen” child, but in reality, the protagonist
to whom the fairies speak is never coerced; he leaves willingly,
although beckoned by the tempting fairies. He is told to come away with
them, “for the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand”
(12, 27, 41). This refrain conveys a harsh world from which the
protagonist needs to escape. Perhaps the fairies are trying to protect
the child from the reality of this world. (Read more.)
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