Tea at Trianon: On Tolkien’s “Fairy Stories”

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, April 27, 2020

On Tolkien’s “Fairy Stories”

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.)