The Fantastic Secret of Tolkien's Fairy-Tales

Literature and Saint Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises

In the Fantasy World

For many of those who have read J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary works and particularly for most of the critics who hope to attain glory in the field of letters, one of the most common questions concerns the “recipe” for the success of his writings. What makes his fairy-stories so appealing? Why have they been read and reread by so many people who constantly acknowledge their indescribable charm? What makes the literature he created so fascinating and how did he manage to engage the reader so deeply in the fantastic world that he described?

In keeping with the evidence given by Tolkien himself, as well as by his son, Christopher Tolkien, Bilbo Baggins’s creator resorted to a well-known technique in composing his tales. He employed multilayered literary compositions made up of numerous stories and descriptions covering several eras or epochs, thus arousing the reader’s interest and holding his attention by means of a fabulous network of narratives hiding behind the ones the reader is already familiar with.

Besides this extensive stratification of legends, there is an essential key-element that accounts for the great impact of Tolkien’s work, i.e. their truthfulness. In reading them, one experiences the strong feeling that one takes part in another extremely vibrant reality pulsating with life and meaning.

Extraordinary creatures, wonderful spots like the Shire and Rivendell, or dreadful ones like Moria and Mordor, great heroic deeds, and a fierce fight between good and evil, all of them enthrall the reader to the point that he is drawn into the vortex of the story, participating in the great Tale as adults rarely do. In fact, Tolkien himself constantly regarded the realm of the fairy-tale as a “true” realm, but not necessarily in terms of the “truth” that pertains to our real and perceptible world, but in terms of the “truth” of the moral and spiritual meanings generally connected with tales and with their historical and mythological sources. Here is what he stated in an undated letter written to Milton Waldman, probably in 1951:

After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of ‘truth’, and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear.¹

Tolkien’s overall conception regarding fairy-stories and Faërie, the world in which they take place, is based on the veracity of the imaginary space in which they unfold: not taking them seriously means not really penetrating into their world, which is far from being “unreal,” although its reality is of a different order than that our “real” world. That is why his stories should be treated with utmost seriousness, regardless of their subject matter or of the reader’s age.

To the reader’s seriousness there objectively corresponds the truth of the imaginary world of the narrative proper. This is another aspect of the long sought-after “recipe” which Tolkien used and which, seconded by his literary talent, earned him the lasting admiration of millions of readers. Everything ties in with Tolkien’s outlook on the status of Imagination. As we shall see later on, this outlook clarifies the impact that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings have had on the general reader.

The Lord of Faërie

Of all the theoretical texts written by J.R.R. Tolkien, no one can match his brilliant essay entitled “On Fairy-Stories.”² Being a reduced version of his overall vision of the nature and function of the fantastic story, the essay revolves around certain specific themes of classical Catholic theology, among which we find the biblical anthropology illustrated in the Old Testament by the Book of Genesis, where we read that “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (1: 27).

Having been created by a unique and omnipotent God, the absolutely sole Being who can rightfully be called “creative”—since, according to the ex nihilo dogma of creation, He created the world of nothing—man can only be a creator of the second rank, a “sub-creator,” who, as Tolkien says, can produce secondary creations by means of Art. The reason for that is a simple one: man can never create out of nothing. He always starts from pre-existing given ingredients in order to manifest his creative imagination. In the case of a fairy-tale, the main ingredient, or, if you wish, the “place” of the creative act is none other than the anthropological dimension that we have just mentioned, i.e. the writer’s fantasy or imagination. Speaking of this faculty of the human soul, Tolkien associated it with the human mind, to begin with:

The human mind is capable of forming mental images of things not actually present. The faculty of conceiving the images is (or was) naturally called Imagination.

Because imagination allegedly lacks the ability to conceive images of things that are out of sight, it is frequently wrongly associated with dreams and also often enough looked down on as unreal or false. Tolkien went out of his way to grapple with the pejorative meaning of fantasy, commonly disparaged and snapped at, and renewed its significance. Firstly, he pointed out that fantasy (phantasia) is an energy and an intellectual power:

The mental power of image-making is one thing, or aspect, and it should appropriately be called Imagination.

Secondly, he showed that out of the many reasons why Imagination is misapprehended, the lack of Imagination is at the top, as there are people who would simply not blend their “real” world with the richness of inner life.

In the midst of an epoch characterized by the development of the sciences based on mathematical abstractions and rational-discursive thinking which minimized the value of the human soul and of its creative faculties to the point of erasing it altogether, laying the blame on Imagination was a common attitude. Through his entire perspective, Tolkien contributed to the rehabilitation of the value of Imagination and of the human soul, two dimensions that he considered closely related to reason—as can be plainly seen from his assertion that “Fantasy is a rational, not an irrational, activity.”

Thus he made a clear cut distinction between the irrational activities of fantasy, such as the ones practiced by the avant-garde poets as well as by surrealistic painters, and the rational activities which include the literature of Faërie. It all depends on a specifically Christian ascetic rigour of the human intellect, which favours a beneficial use of Imagination or Fantasy only insofar as it is clear and penetrating:

Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary.

Resting on an anthropological model by virtue of which each faculty of the eternal soul—be it the intellect, the discursive reason or the imagination—has a well-determined place, Tolkien distinguished between the positive activity of fantasy sustained by an intellect which had been purified of passions and the maleficent activity of an imagination which is no longer controlled by the mind. He was familiar with the foul effects of communism and fascism resulting from an imagination that had been perverted by a criminal and unbalanced mind.

The Craft of the Elves and Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Anthropology

The reader who is not familiar with the principles of medieval anthropology, which was rooted in the Platonic philosophy as well as in the Aristotelian philosophy and systematized by Saint Thomas Aquinas, may find Tolkien’s view a little bit fuzzy or complicated. In order to overcome such potential difficulties, we shall first review the medieval view of man and then return to Tolkien’s outlook on Imagination, which originated in a theological vision of man and of the world—a vision that had nothing in common with the modern philosophy inaugurated by René Descartes and Immanuel Kant.