Home volumes VI - IX

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Strider did not listen under the hedge before Bree, until - it seems - the very last months of composition; for nine years Aragorn was called Trotter (and in 1938 he was a hobbit).

My apologies if this reads cryptically. It is an observation from reading three and-a-half* volumes of 'The History of Middle-earth' series, which give the early drafts of the The Lord of the Rings: from the beginning of the new hobbit story in December 1937 to completion in summer 1948. *(the second half of volume IX turns to another story.) Of this whole, extraordinarily curious pile of manuscript pages, much and more could be said. But I find it hard to get my head around "Aragorn" = "Trotter".

[Chrysophylax Dives]

i should change my name - simon is worse than Trotter in this place.

[Flame Fried Ent]

Could be worse...Frodo was originally Bingo Bolger-Baggins....that’s about as strange as Trotter the Hobbit,

[Dwim]

I did read some of those volumes once, and personally found the concept of Trotter interesting yet confounding. He was named after the sound that either his shoes or his feet made. He either wore wooden shoes (strange enough for a hobbit), or his feet were wooden because he'd been tortured by Sauron. Am I remembering this correctly?

[Dimcairien Luiniel]

I do want to read those at some point. It would be fascinating to see how the story evolved to be the one that we know so well today. It would be a strange, yet interesting adventure.

[Flame Fried Ent]

Yes, @Dwim I do believe you're right. At least about the shoes...some sort of wooden clogs, if my memory serves. Not as sure about the whole torture thing, but wouldn't surprise me either.

@Dimcairien Luiniel, they are interesting to see the development of the legendarium. There's also a 2 volume History of the Hobbit as well, that's got some good parts too.

[Eldy Dunami]

To the best of my memory, there were a couple different versions of Trotter's backstory, and in one of them he is revealed to have wooden feet (hidden by his wooden shoes?) for the aforementioned reason.

[Galadrihell]

It’s funny to me because Trotter to me sounds almost like the opposite of Strider - Trotter to me implies the noise, yes, but not less so than “Clopper”, for example, which would also not have the connotations of pigs’ feet - more importantly to me, Trotter gives the impression of a short stride and short legs (as you might expect from a hobbit). Contrast that with Strider - who is also named “longshanks” in Bree IIRC, and “Wingfoot” by Éomer. Someone swift to travel and used to it.

Edit to close bracket

[Boromir88]

Sil that is interesting. I think of a horse's trot, which is a step up above walking pace. Definitely not very fast, and more like a casual speed to stretch the muscles.

I've only read Book of Lost Tales I and part of II. I've always been interested in the development process but have to get my mind out of the "you're reading a story" mode, which is kind of jarring with the HOME series. I do recommend Flame Fried Ent's suggestion of reading the History of the Hobbit.

[Narv]

Not really relevant but I remember buying Return of the Shadow (HoME VI?) at Powell's bookstore when I was 10 years old, thinking it was some kind of awesome secret prequel to Lord of the Rings. It was a very confusing couple of days before I gave up if I remember correctly.. but I do remember the Trotter thing, and I think that the Black Rider the hobbits hid from in the Shire was originally going to just be Gandalf? Anyway my 10 year old brain couldn't handle the meta-ness and I gave it up after that.

[Marceline]

@Narv - I did something similar at age 13 or so and checked out all the HoME books I could from the library (and then got confused, accidentally kept them too long, and had to pay giant late fees). I own several volumes now but like @Boromir88 said, the mental overhead of switching from just-reading-a-story-mode is hard, so I haven't read many of them through. Oops. I unfortunately feel like I would need classes to motivate me to read anything more complex than Unfinished Tales these days.

Also congrats on reaching 0 points, Narv!

[Arallyr]

I've started a reread of Return of the Shadow recently, and as usual find myself torn between excitement at witnessing the evolution of story to its final form and some uneasiness at reading material Tolkien never thought would be seen by the general public. But all things considered I think it is worthwhile reading for those interested.

I also think it very cool that our friend the sentient fox was in the story from the very earliest draft, and almost verbatim as he appears in the published FotR.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Personally, I've become addicted to reading the early drafts of The Lord of the Rings, which I very challenging but also rewarding, not least because I now read the published story differently. I've been studying these drafts for a few years and it took some while before I even understood how to read them. Looking back, I think a first challenge is to grasp that, in the early years of composition at least, we do not have before us an early draft of the story we now know as The Lord of the Rings but another story, a sequel to The Hobbit that, after a few years, became something else.

Once this is understood then Return of the Shadow prompts a re-reading of (the first edition!) of The Hobbit, suggesting that the original story of Bilbo Baggins is not quite the children's story everyone now thinks it is (and for a Tolkien fanatic it takes a great mental effort to free oneself of the riddle game as we know it and read Bilbo's original story as it was initially imagined - because the riddle game is the center of the story, and a different riddle game = a different story and even a different Bilbo Baggins).

Then identifying the slow steps by which this sequel to The Hobbit became something else reveals something of the fascinating process by which Tolkien came to understand the nature of the One Ring. Here one has to turn to 'On Fairy-stories', which began as a lecture in March 1939, in the wake of composition of the terrible encounter on Weathertop that, it seems to me, forced JRRT to grapple with the 'magic' of the Ring, thereby spelling out the relationship between the magic of the Necromancer and the enchantment of Galadriel (which is at the heart of this essay and, of course, finds parallel expression in the Mirror scene in Lothlórien, which was composed between delivery of the lecture and writing up the essay in 1943).

So, apart from anything else, these early drafts illuminate other writings and bring to light the curious connections between them. All this then impacts upon how one reads The Lord of the Rings. I now see the story surrounding Tom Bombadil as belonging to the original sequel, embodying certain ideas that Tolkien subsequently rejected. But then we see another side of Tolkien's genius: rather than scrap the Bombadil sections, or heavily revise them, he simply left them as they were. I find it hard to put this in words, but where 'modernist' contemporary writers were hung up on unity and secure foundations of their art Tolkien swims in a more medieval current. (When I think about this I keep coming back to a list of medieval movies I once read, where Monty Python's Holy Grail is held up as authentic because it consists of a series of stories with little connection between them.)

[Trotter]

I find it very easy to get my head around Strider's original name, though Trotter only really works as a nickname for a Hobbit, not for someone described by Sam as long-shanks.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I bring up these Home volumes here (a thread in the new plaza) because I think a chief failing of the administration of the old plaza was a failure to read them.

[Elenhir]

because I think a chief failing of the administration of the old plaza was a failure to read them.

That's a curious idea. Not quite sure how it would work.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@Elenhir that's just me venting about the shortcomings of 'Peeling the Onion,' which I've been engaging with intensely as part of the 'halfir archive' project. i think the chief flaw in the thread is a mining of these Home volumes as opposed to a careful reading of them.

[Troelsfo]

I'll quietly skip most of what @Chrysophylax Dives says, as it would be too darned boring to read me quoting a whole lot of text just to go nodding, and at intervals injecting something like “I agree” or “I think I know what you mean”

Once this is understood then Return of the Shadow prompts a re-reading of (the first edition!) of The Hobbit, suggesting that the original story of Bilbo Baggins is not quite the children's story everyone now thinks it is

This confused me a bit, Simon.

Do you intend to suggest that the first edition of The Hobbit is not quite a children's story, or that it is not quite the same children's story that we know from the second edition (but a children's story nonetheless)?

One of my own complaints about The Hobbit is that I do not feel that it takes itself seriously as a story. This is, to me, quite irrespective of being told for children or not, or of the episodic form of many medieval tales (the concept of a hero going on a journey where he – inevitably he's a ‘he’ – will encounter a number of unrelated small adventures, finally save the day in a bigger way, and that's it).

This feeling (on my side) of the story not taking itself seriously is at the same time both stronger in the first edition of The Hobbit, but is also more acceptable simply because that story is also more frivolous in the whole. In the second edition, especially with the recasting of the riddle game, the story seems to grasp for a seriousness that it cannot achieve. I also think this is part of what Tolkien was hoping to address with his 1960 rewrite, but all that that rewrite achieves is something that is even more trying to sit between two chairs – he would have needed to do a far more fundamental rewrite of the story to make it take itself seriously.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Do you intend to suggest that the first edition of The Hobbit is not quite a children's story, or that it is not quite the same children's story that we know from the second edition (but a children's story nonetheless)?

One of my own complaints about The Hobbit is that I do not feel that it takes itself seriously as a story. This is, to me, quite irrespective of being told for children or not, or of the episodic form of many medieval tales (the concept of a hero going on a journey where he – inevitably he's a ‘he’ – will encounter a number of unrelated small adventures, finally save the day in a bigger way, and that's it).

This feeling (on my side) of the story not taking itself seriously is at the same time both stronger in the first edition of The Hobbit, but is also more acceptable simply because that story is also more frivolous in the whole. In the second edition, especially with the recasting of the riddle game, the story seems to grasp for a seriousness that it cannot achieve. I also think this is part of what Tolkien was hoping to address with his 1960 rewrite, but all that that rewrite achieves is something that is even more trying to sit between two chairs – he would have needed to do a far more fundamental rewrite of the story to make it take itself seriously.

ASAFDFdrewrhlreqrhqe - Troelsfo, I went to reply but my brain has melted in the attempt. I will return with a cup of tea...

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@Troelsfo,

The Hobbit is through and through a children's story. It is in my opinion the greatest children's story, or at least the greatest of my childhood. As a 'Tolkien fan' The Hobbit is my star book, rated higher even that its noble sequel.

My fundamental gripe with just about anything I ever read about The Hobbit is that it is said to be 'only a children's book'. The Hobbit is a children's book and it is also something else, something profound, the key, in fact, to Middle-earth - or at least the key to what Middle-earth became after 1940 when the Doors of Durin were drawn as we know them.

Because it is such a marvelous children's story, and perhaps also because of the changing of the riddle game, and certainly because it has become branded 'the prequel to LOTR', people do not read The Hobbit seriously...

But Tolkien was a linguist. Language was what he was about. And The Hobbit takes us on a tour of the elements of language - a queer sign on a door, a letter marking a door on a map, moon-letters (that appear and vanish, like a spoken word), a key, and a magic sign that makes its wearer invisible. The Hobbit is composed around what I have come to call a grammar of holes, draws a picture of a name, and so spells out the ground of Ring-lore.

[Troelsfo]

@Chrysophylax Dives, I am happy to see that you value The Hobbit that highly, though I cannot follow you there. In my view it is a fair to middling children's book – far behind the works of authors such as Astrid Lindgren.

I wholeheartedly agree with Verlyn Flieger's assessment of the book in her essay “Tolkien on Tolkien” (I've quoted a few bits from it in the ‘Gandalf’ thread), though I might express myself even more strongly: The Hobbit does not belong in Middle-earth.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@Chrysophylax Dives, I am happy to see that you value The Hobbit that highly, though I cannot follow you there. In my view it is a fair to middling children's book – far behind the works of authors such as Astrid Lindgren.

I wholeheartedly agree with Verlyn Flieger's assessment of the book in her essay “Tolkien on Tolkien” (I've quoted a few bits from it in the ‘Gandalf’ thread), though I might express myself even more strongly: The Hobbit does not belong in Middle-earth.

Wow. I nearly pressed 'report' instead of 'reply'!

But seriously, while I half agree with the not belonging in Middle-earth, two things.

1. Obviously, there is a purely subjective element of taste here. I just love The Hobbit, always have, and in my heart I love the story more than I love Middle-earth. Quite why, I am not sure (though it is surely bound up in the circumstances of hearing the story read aloud as a seven year old whose family was going through a difficult time).

2. Having long pondered Return of the Shadow and the Home volumes either side of it, I have come to the conclusion that The Hobbit is the crucible of Middle-earth as we know it. I recognize that I am in a minority of one in this, but I think people have failed to see that this children's story is also a virtuoso intellectual performance in which Tolkien draws his theory of language before our eyes. (I recognize such claims rather require justification, but I will have to think carefully before attempting this.)

[Saranna]

Er - am I allowed to sort of agree with both of you @Chrysophylax Dives and @Troelsfo or is that just old age making me sentimental?

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@Saranna it might mean you are still half in the dark but it might mean you see better than both of us.

@Troelsfo Reading and replying to these posts in somewhat random order is a tad disorientating, but: the process Flieger describes, whereby 'On Fairy-stories' reveals a clarity lacking in *The Hobbit* is the very opposite of reality! Everyone understands *The Hobbit*. Nobody understands 'On Fairy-stories'. The answers are found in the story, Tolkien's theoretical essay on his own art is utterly mystifying and perplexing. This is to walk into Middle-earth backwards with a blindfold.

*Sub-creation*. What is this please? A definition is possible? An analogy would be welcome.

[Saranna]

@Troelsfo and @Chrysophylax Dives Actually, when I wasn't thinking, my brain came up with this formula: 'Although The Hobbit is not wholly of Middle-earth, it functions as a door into Middle-earth.' (OK, object away.)

Secondly, after umpty-hundred readngs I begin to feel I do understand 'On Fairy-stories', at least while reading it. And once you've read, as I have recently, Ker on 'The Dark Ages' and Chadwick on 'The Heroic Age' and Bowra's 'Heroic Poetry' even the parable of the Tower begins to make sense.

Sub-creation is making a world out of nothing in imitation of the act or moment of creation of the world in which we dwell; Middle-earth, Narnia, Discworld, my own Skorn, the Star Trek Universe. Or so it seems to me.

[I have to go away for a few weeks on family care commitments but look forward to seeing how this thread is doing when I come back.]

[Troelsfo]

A clarification re. my view of The Hobbit ...

Based on off-board feedback (thank you @Chrysophylax Dives, I have realised that I have expressed myself rather poorly, and I had therefore better clarify a couple of points with regards to how I see The Hobbit

I certainly do not dislike The Hobbit! I loved reading it out loud to my kids when they were at the proper age (not quite ready to read it themselves ... a couple of decades ago) – in some ways, I have long felt that that is the only way I, as an adult, can really enjoy the book :-)

But I make a distinction between liking and literary quality. With regards to the latter, it is my assessment that The Hobbit is not a very good children's book. Above average, certainly, but there is room for a lot of children's books between the average work and the very good. The Hobbit, in my opinion, occupies a place somewhere in that span. Reading my own comments again, I am not sure that such is the implication of the phrase “fair to middling” (for me, “fair” implied better than average, but not sublime, but running a check of on-line dictionaries would seem to imply that “fair to middling” implies something only marginally above average, which was not what I wanted to imply).

Also, saying, as I have done, that “The Hobbit does not belong in Middle-earth” does not prevent me from accepting that, by the expediency of what I would see as a regrettable narrative accident, the book nonetheless provided a part of the fertile leaf-mould in which Tolkien's ideas even of Middle-earth would grow further. I am not averse to the idea that writing The Hobbit provided Tolkien with chances for reflections or developing of ideas that would significantly impact the Middle-earth of the later ages (the Third Age in particular).

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@Troelsfo, this is probably a good moment for clarifications.

On my side, I have no problem with your literary opinion but merely a methodological objection to what I take to be your approach to the story, and Flieger's - and, in fact, everyone's. Simply put, my objection is that you are all in the wrong story!

I think we can (more or less) agree that, while he made use of certain Middle-earth elements, when Tolkien penned the adventure of Bilbo Baggins he was not exactly in Middle-earth. Now, to my mind this raises the question: 'Where exactly was he then?' But nobody ever asks this! Nobody asks the question, if Tolkien was not writing a Middle-earth story then what was he doing?

It is as if everyone takes it as a credible suggestion that he was absent-mindedly writing the prologue to The Lord of the Rings - which he got a bit wrong and had to correct afterwards. This is to read the past through the lens of what came afterwards.

'But it is only a children's story!' This characterization, together with the general description of the story as 'the prologue to LOTR' is a way of saying that the story does not warrant being considered in its own right. And it is a nonsense. As if a children's story is different from other kinds of story in requiring no design!

What I think is the underlying problem is that the story everyone knows is not the story Tolkien imagined and composed and first published. John Rateliff is indeed correct to hail the revised riddle-game as a literary masterpiece, but it was also an act of literary vandalism. It is as if someone cut out the face of the Mona Lisa and glued it on a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. The revised riddle-game changed Gollum, Bilbo Baggins, and the magic ring, and in doing so it ruined the underlying ideas of the story. The story you read to your children (and I read to mine) is a mutilated story.

But it is difficult to the point of impossible to lead Tolkien fans to read the original story properly. It seems that the revised version is in their DNA and they cannot escape from an underlying conviction that the original version was really a 'lie'!

[Chrysophylax Dives]

... after umpty-hundred readngs I begin to feel I do understand 'On Fairy-stories', at least while reading it.

[I have to go away for a few weeks on family care commitments but look forward to seeing how this thread is doing when I come back.]

Saranna, hope your family care went well. I wanted to ask you - and anyone else who feels able to comment - a question about 'On Fairy-stories' concerning a line that I have long felt goes to the very heart of the essay but one that I have never seen explained by anyone (which has much to do with my conviction that nobody understands this essay - though many think they do). In reference to 'Faërie', Tolkien writes:

I will not attempt to define that, nor to describe it directly. It cannot be done. Faërie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible. (Flieger & Anderson ed. page 32)

I don't mean to put you on the spot. But unless someone can explain what this means it seems to me that she or he does not understand the essay. And as I say, nobody to my knowledge has ever explained what it means.

[Saranna]

@Chrysophylax Dives Ooh - I must borrow the reply Patrick Curry made to me in 2006 at the end of the Exeter College Tolkien Conference. We were discussing the feelings that surround leaving such an event and I asked him, 'Are we waking from a dream, or are we falling asleep again?' His reply was 'Now you've asked me!' And now YOU have asked ME! I did say that I felt I understood OFS while reading it. Yet my question to PC may be more relevant than I think. Faerie and the imagination have qualities in common and when lost in a work about Faerie or even an actual experience of Faerie, if we are lucky enough to have one, we may find it hard to discern which level of experience can usefully be described as waking and which as dreaming/sleeping. In LOTR the characters often find it hard to describe what they want to convey about the Elves and about their own experiences in the Faerie realms of Middle-earth. (Though Sam makes a good job of describing Galadriel to Faramir.) Do you see what is happening in this answer? I feel that the phrase: 'Faërie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible.' makes sense to me but I cannot describe how. It's easy to say 'Tolkien makes some very evocative remarks' but not to then explain of what those remarks are evocative. I'll stop here and see what responses may come. But I agree strongly that this is a key reference in understanding OFS.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@Saranna, thanks very much for your reply, which I find wonderful. I very much like what you say, and am glad that we can agree that the quotation concerning the indescribable (but not imperceptible) quality of Faërie goes to the heart of the essay. With this foundation, can we return to Tolkien's notion of sub-creation? You wrote above:

Sub-creation is making a world out of nothing in imitation of the act or moment of creation of the world in which we dwell; Middle-earth, Narnia, Discworld, my own Skorn, the Star Trek Universe.

I don't think creation ex nihilo squares with what Tolkien says in his essay, which seems to connect mortal sub-creation always with use of (already given) language (elvish sub-creation apparently includes drama and - from the letter to Milton Waldman - making gems; but I leave this aside for now). My intention here is not to make a pedantic point about creation ex nihilo but rather to underline the importance of words to Tolkien's notion of sub-creation, and from this basis step back to the quotation concerning the impossibility of definition and direct description of Faërie.

Sub-creation is first mentioned in OFS as the culmination of the account of the remixing of nouns and adjectives to derive 'fairy elements' (like magic rings, swan robes, and a detachable heart). (Note that it is in an earlier version of this passage that the much quoted identity of language and mythology appears.) My point is that sub-creation is introduced as something that begins with the use of the fantastic instrument of language.

OFS returns to sub-creation in the section on 'Fantasy', where we discover that the making of a secondary world is required to lend credibility to a fairy element. Tolkien here denigrates (mortal) drama and argues that to make a 'Secondary World' requires 'a kind of elvish craft' that, when achieved, generates 'narrative art, story-making in its primary and most potent mode'. He declares: 'In human art Fantasy is a thing best left to words, to true literature.' (Flieger & Anderson ed., p. 61).

So, words are at the heart of both the making of a fairy element (a 'green sun' or a 'magic ring') and in the making of a secondary world that makes that fairy element credible. Faërie is made by our words, it is linguistic in its nature.

And yet Faërie 'cannot be caught in a net of words'!

You see my point? How can words fail to capture, describe, or define that which they have made? Until we can answer this apparent paradox then, I suggest, we do not yet understand what Tolkien really means by sub-creation. There is something more going on here than is explained by the conventional accounts of sub-creation in the Tolkien Studies literature; something that is missed if we deem Star Trek or Star Wars instances of sub-creation, something that is missed if we do not open ourselves to the experience of enchantment that is at the heart of Faërie - an experience that Tolkien suggests has something to do with the queer ways that the words we express act upon our minds and imaginations.

[Saranna]

@Chrysophylax Dives Quote: My point is that sub-creation is introduced as something that begins with the use of the fantastic instrument of language. and Quote: How can words fail to capture, describe, or define that which they have made? Until we can answer this apparent paradox then, I suggest, we do not yet understand what Tolkien really means by sub-creation. There is something more going on here than is explained by the conventional accounts of sub-creation in the Tolkien Studies literature; something that is missed if we deem Star Trek or Star Wars instances of sub-creation, something that is missed if we do not open ourselves to the experience of enchantment that is at the heart of Faërie - an experience that Tolkien suggests has something to do with the queer ways that the words we express act upon our minds and imaginations.

Yes these are the vital questions and the ones we continue to find hardest of all to answer. Perhaps our understanding of the subcreation (by humanity in general) of faery lies in our degree of belief, or our desire to believe, in the 'reality' of faery? Going right out on a limb, did Tolkien believe everything he wrote about Faery, and will we never understand him unless we also believe? [There are allusions here and there in OFS that could be seen to indicate actual belief.]

Alternatively, does the elusiveness of definition lie in Tolkien's apparently unique relationship with language - nb D'Ardennes and the question to Tolkien about having 'broken the veil and passed through.' Is this where the enchantment lies? and is enchantment so personal an experience, bordering on religion, that it may never be possible to express at all.

Now I am lost again in the web of words. Pull this to pieces and I will come back to it with pleasure!

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Hi @Saranna, it is a pleasure to discuss these questions with you. Your instincts are always good and your replies brighten my day! I think both your suggestions above are on the right lines, the trick being to fit them together.

A quick disclaimer. Our conversation about OFS arose because I took issue with what I took to be a suggestion (by @Troelsfo) that 'On Fairy-stories' (OFS) explains The Hobbit. Initially, all I wished to point out is that OFS is very difficult to navigate. Of that I am certain. The other side of this coin is that in now attempting to navigate the essay I don't feel certain of anything!

I will set down for you my own way of reading OFS, which in the first instance is based on what we know about its composition in relation to that of LOTR. Flieger & Anderson give some early drafts and suggest the earliest is close to the 1939 St Andrews lecture. In what they call 'draft A' we find the germ of most of the elements found in the published essay with the exception of the (vital) material found in the section 'Fantasy', which apparently dates to summer 1943, when Tolkien took a long break from composition of LOTR to write up his essay. Thus the story from Moria through to the destruction of Isengard was composed between the St Andrews lecture and the writing of the essay. Conversely, the section 'Fantasy' was composed only after passage through Lothlórien, where Galadriel had explained to Sam how mortals confuse elvish enchantment with the magic of the Enemy.

Now, we tend to think that theory informs practice and were we simply to compare texts it would be natural to assume that this passage in Lórien is a practical application of that part of the discussion in 'Fantasy' where, having earlier in his essay offered 'magic' as a translation of Faërie, Tolkien rescinds this translation and draws a profound opposition between magic and enchantment. I suggest that a key to understanding OFS is to recognize that the movement goes in the other direction: Tolkien 'discovered' his theory in Faërie! Put another way, he discovered his theory while enchanted and, perhaps, it can only be fully understood by us when we are enchanted.

I think this Faërie-origin holds for much of the section 'Fantasy'. As we know, early in OFS we are told that a definition of Faërie is impossible. Yet in this section Tolkien asserts “the powers of Humpty-Dumpty” and offers a definition of fantasy. One may quibble and say that Faërie and fantasy are not the same, but it seems to me that this sudden readiness to offer a definition indicates that Tolkien has passed the borders of Faërie. When we are reading the section 'Fantasy' we are wandering in a fairy story, reading, as it were, a report of Tolkien's visions of conversations with the elves.

To elaborate just a little. It seems usual to read in the section 'Fantasy' an account of Tolkien's own mortal art of fantasy (sub-creation as the making of a credible secondary world, etc.) that happens to be mixed with some odd references to elvish craft and drama. My own reading is rather that Tolkien is first and foremost setting out his vision of an elvish account of elvish art, and only from this elvish ground (and definition) inferring something of the nature of any mortal art of fantasy.

So, what I am proposing is something like this: in 1939 Tolkien put together a lecture for an academic audience, and in doing so drew a boundary around the limits of language, placing Faërie on the other side of that limit. In the early 1940s Tolkien wandered in his imagination deep within Faërie, reporting back on what he saw, first in his story and then in a new section of his essay. This new section revisits certain key themes of the lecture but does so from an elvish point of view, a point of view beyond the limits of mortal (but perhaps not elvish?) language. Strictly speaking, the section 'Fantasy' has the same epistemological status as a fairy story! But Tolkien is demonstrating that it is possible to step into Faërie and back again and, rather than speak mere delusion, apply to our own mortal actions something of his vision gleaned on the other side.

Here are elements of both your insights combined, albeit requiring careful qualifications. We have an idea of the limits of mortal language, and the idea that Faërie is found beyond those limits. This entails that any talk of 'elves' is, from our side of the divide (and, if we are not enchanted, where else can we stand?) metaphorical, an analogy of some sort. From this perspective, Tolkien did not believe in elves, if by elves we mean creatures literally like Galadriel; what perhaps he did believe was that 'elves' are a metaphorical name given to powers found beyond the limits of language, entities perceived (at least in the imagination) but not captured by words. He believed that language has a limit (at least for us mortals) but it is possible to pass over this border. Faërie is perceptible if not (directly) describable. He believed that his visions of the other side were real, and he was sufficiently convinced by his visions of Faërie in the early 1940s to draw them in words. Such words, as for example the descriptions of Galadriel, are not intended as literally true; nevertheless they reflect a vision of something on the 'other side' that Tolkien believed to be real.

As with my other long post on the Gandalf thread, I feel I have just got started and yet have already written too much. The above is just the beginning, and can be fleshed out, I think, by way of examining certain 'fairy elements' that appear in Tolkien's writings on both sides of the divide (e.g. towers and stones). But while that would be a whole other post, and a long one at that, it would perhaps not add very much to the underlying ideas here.

I appreciate there is much to take on board here, and this is really difficult material to digest (for years now I've felt like I've been banging my head against the wall while thinking about this). So I will be patient waiting for your reply. But I very much look forward to your response, which, critical or supportive, I know will be valuable.

[Saranna]

Yes it's definitely a headbanger @Chrysophylax Dives and to quote Byron one can think 'too long and deeply' and end up with ones brain 'a whirling gulf of fantasy and flame.'

I've just been writing on a totally different theme and am trying to clear my head to get back to this key question. If @Troelsfo has no time to get back and apply his own incisive brain to this it may end up in Plaza history as a long dialogue between two people who couldn't reach any conclusion about what they thought about whatever it was they were thinking about!

I still want to know about 'the veil' that D'Ardennes said Tolkien had 'passed through'; to which he agreed. I think that was something to do with an extraordinary perception of the inner workings of language.

Which is vital to the theme of enchantment since we can only discuss enchantment in language. But as Virginia Woolf said 'Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low.' Every time I come back to this thread I feel I am back at the starting line.

When you say 'Tolkien has passed the borders of Faërie' I wonder how that relates to the veil surrounding language. What and where is the 'other side'? ( ran a whole thread on the old Plaza called 'The other side of what?' with reference to Glorfindel appearing 'as he is on the other side.' But that is lost.)

Tolkien had insights into areas of experience and belief that many never dream of. I have a deep desire to find that in fact he did 'believe in' Faërie and entered it in reality, but at my age I ought to know better.

Your putting together of what you kindly call my own insights is fine, I approve and you've clarified what I was trying to say.

Russian dolls - my last bit of functioning brain this afternoon. The further in you get to this the more you find there is something else to get into. And to mix my metaphors, I think I have now run into a thick spider-web blocking my way and need to hack about with a sword to get any further. I will be back when I've done that.

Reality: the factory chimney or the elm tree? Or Faërie? Or all of the above.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

When you say 'Tolkien has passed the borders of Faërie' I wonder how that relates to the veil surrounding language. What and where is the 'other side'? ( ran a whole thread on the old Plaza called 'The other side of what?' with reference to Glorfindel appearing 'as he is on the other side.' But that is lost.)

Hi @Saranna,
I guess I was not as clear as I could have been... I was trying to say that Tolkien passed over the border and into Faërie when he passed beyond the limits of language. This is why the story in Lothlórien emphasizes vision so - we are now in a realm that is perceptible but not (literally) describable. It is true that Galadriel uses words (though she first engages the minds of the Company without them and then leads the two hobbits to look into her Mirror), but I take it that when Galadriel explains to Sam the difference between magic and enchantment Tolkien is describing in his own words the vision of Faërie from which this chapter is derived - the same vision that revealed to him the limits of his own language, which hitherto had conflated magic and enchantment.

All this is indeed difficult in the extreme. But for my own part, though I certainly don't claim certainty, I have arrived at conclusions on this matter.

[Saranna]

Well that's certainly clear @Chrysophylax Dives and thank you for this distillation of your conclusions, which I support. Although other people's conclusions may differ to a greater or lesser degree, it is of course of the nature of academic searching that we cannot all agree about everything.

The link I now have in my head is of a parallel between the crossing of Nimrodel and the breaking of the veil of language. Of necessity both lead to realms which can be experienced but never clearly described in mortal language. I am doing some work now on the traversing of water, and would note here that Celebrant is a perilous stream to cross and alarming to some members of the Fellowship. During the consequent dispute about blindfolding there is also the statement that 'You cannot cross the rivers again.' This emphasises the crossing into a region fundamentally different from the everyday - crossing into it means an inevitable meeting with 'the Lord and the Lady.' You can't go back, the changes that will happen to you here will be permanent changes. The double crossings of water reflect my feeling that the further in you get the more there is to deal with. (Tolkien is I feel better at this in this entry into Lorien/enchantment/the place beyond language than Lewis is with the 'higher up and further in' refrain in 'The last battle.' )

The point about engaging minds before using speech is also a very significant one and I may yet need to ask for permission to quote you if the water paper is ever finished!