Tolkien and Fantasy

  Many people love the world of Fantasy, of impossible, 'unreal' things, beings, happenings. A childhood without magical stories is surely a childhood bereft of some of its greatest treasures. Those ogres, beanstalks, forests and wolves, the alluring cottage made of gingerbread, cakes and candy in Hansel and Gretel, shiny poisoned apples...Never trust appearances...The adult who 'grows out of it' needs perhaps more to think about growing back in. These great characters, events and places seem always to have been there, as we connect, or reconnect, with a lost sense of wonder. They work too as grand archetypes whose meaning is at once immediate and yet ungraspable by the rational mind.

   Charles Williams in the last post brings some of this into the normal world, of rural Hertfordshire. His friend Tolkien, famous for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, stands as perhaps the greatest fantasy writer of all with his invention of Middle Earth. I remember one summer holiday as a teenager sitting in the back yard at home and reading the whole thing in one go. It transformed my life, because oddly it was real, and even more oddly, (and this is where I should have been carted off to an institution for the imaginatively deranged) more real than the world as it usually appears, the workaday world of objectives, facts, productivity, empty texts, deadlines, endless rush, and of course, the news.  So, was my impression madness? Just sad escapism? Tolkien himself doesn't think so... Here is an extract from his work entitled Tree and Leaf, a reflection upon the nature of fairy tales, and the World of Fairie:

 

"I will now conclude by considering Escape and Consolation, which are naturally closely connected. Though fairy-stories are by no means the only medium of Escape, they are today one of the most obvious and (to some) outrageous forms of 'escapist' literature; and it is thus reasonable to attach to a consideration of them some considerations of this term 'escape' in criticism generally.

  I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the misusers are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds. Evidently, we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using Escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter. Just so a party-spokesman might have labelled the departure from the misery of the Führer's or any other Reich and even criticism of it as treachery. In the same way these critics, to make confusion worse, and so to bring into contempt their opponents, stick their label of scorn not only on to Desertion, but on to real Escape, and what are often its companions, Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt. Not only do they confound the escape of the prisoner with the flight of the deserter; but they would seem to prefer the acquiescence of the 'quisling' to the resistance of the patriot. To such thinking you have only to say 'the land you loved is doomed' to excuse any treachery, indeed to glorify it. 

  For a trifling instance; not to mention (indeed not to parade) electric street lamps of mass-produced pattern in your tale is Escape (in that sense). But it may, almost certainly does, proceed from a considered disgust for so typical a product of the Robot Age, that combines elaboration and ingenuity of means with ugliness, and (often) with inferiority of result. These lamps may be excluded from the tale simply because they are bad lamps; and it is possible that one of the lessons to be learnt from the story is the realisation of this fact. But out comes the big stick: 'Electric lamps have come to stay', they say. Long ago Chesterton truly remarked that, as soon as he heard anything had 'come to stay', he knew that it would very soon be replaced - indeed regarded as pitiably obsolete and shabby. 'The march of Science, its tempo quickened by the needs of war, goes inexorably on...making some things obsolete, and foreshadowing new developments in the utilisation of electricity': an advertisement. This says the same thing only more menacingly. The electric street lamp may indeed be ignored, simply because it is so insignificant and transcient. Fairy-stories, at any rate, have many more permanent and fundamental things to talk about. Lightning, for example. The escapist is not so subservient to the whims of evanescent fashion as these opponents. He does not make things (which it may be quite rational to regard as bad) his masters or his gods by worshipping them as inevitable, even 'inexorable'. And his opponents, so easily contemptuous, have no guarantee that he will stop there: he might rouse men to pull down the street-lamps. Escapism has another and even wickeder face: Reaction. 

   Not long ago - incredible though it may seem - I heard a clerk of Oxenford declare that he 'welcomed' the proximity of mass-production robot factories and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic, because it brought the university into 'contact with real life'. He may have meant that the way men were living and working in the twentieth century was increasing in barbarity at an alarming rate, and that the loud demonstration of this in the streets of Oxford might serve as a warning that it is not possible to preserve for long an oasis of sanity in a desert of unreason by mere fences, without actual offensive action (practical and intellectual). I fear he did not. In any case the expression 'real life' in this context seems to fall short of academic standards. The notion that motor-cars are more 'alive' than, say, centaurs or dragons is curious; that they are more 'real' than, say, horses is pathetically absurd. How real, how startlingly alive is a factory chimney compared with an elm-tree: poor obsolete thing, insubstantial dream of an escapist!

   For my part, I cannot convince myself that the roof of Bletchley station is more 'real' than the clouds. And as an artefact I find it less inspiring than the legendary dome of heaven. The bridge to platform 4 is to me less interesting than Bifröst guarded by Heimdall with the Gjallarhorn. From the wildness of my heart I cannot exclude the question whether railway-engineers, if they had been brought up on more fantasy, might not have done better with all their abundant means than they commonly do. Fairy-stories might be, I guess, better Masters of Art than the academic person I have referred to. 

   Much that he (I must suppose) and others (certainly) would call 'serious' literature is no more than play under a glass roof by the side of a municipal swimming-bath. Fairy-stories may invent monsters that fly the air or dwell in the deep, but at least they do not try to escape from heaven or the sea. 

   And if we leave aside for a moment 'fantasy', I do not think that the reader or the maker of fairy-stories need even be ashamed of the 'escape' of archaism: of preferring not dragons, but horses, castles, sailing-ships, bows and arrows; not only elves, but knights and kings and priests. For it is after all possible for a rational man, after reflection (quite unconnected with fairy-story or romance), to arrive at the condemnation, implicit at least in the mere silence of 'escapist' literature, of progressive things like factories, or the machine-guns and bombs that appear to be their most natural and inevitable, dare we say 'inexorable' products."