to the ‘mental scene’ of the poem:
Trees are chosen because they are at once easily classifiable and innumerably individual; but as this may be said of other things, then I will say, because I notice them more than most other things (far more than people). In any case the mental scenic background of these lines is the Grove and Walks of Magdalen at night.
In J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography (Allen & Unwin, 1977, pp. 146-8), Humphrey Carpenter identified this occasion that led to the writing of Mythopoeia. On the night of 19 September 1931, C. S. Lewis invited my father and Hugo Dyson to dinner in Magdalen College, and afterwards they walked in the grounds and talked, as Lewis wrote three days later to his friend Arthur Greeves, of ‘metaphor and myth – interrupted by a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining. We all held our breath, the other two appreciating the ecstasy of such a thing almost as you would.’ In a subsequent letter to Greeves (18 October 1931)3 Lewis recounted the ideas proposed by Dyson and my father in respect of the ‘true myth’ of the story of Christ; and both in his Biography and more fully in The Inklings (Allen & Unwin, 1978, pp. 42-5) Humphrey Carpenter has imagined the discussion of that night, drawing from Lewis’s letters and from the tenor of the argument of Mythopoeia.
The second marginal note to the final text can be conveniently given here, though it is explanatory and does not bear on the history of the poem. The reference is to the eighth line of the ninth verse (bogus seduction of the twice-seduced): ‘Twice-seduced, since to return to earthly well-being as a sole end is one seduction, but even this end is mis-sought and depraved.’
At the same time as these notes, my father wrote at the end of the manuscript: ‘Written mainly in the Examination Schools during Invigilation.’
The text of Mythopoeia printed here is that of the final version exactly as it stands in the manuscript. Though the textual history is complex in detail, it can be said that the development of the poem through seven versions was largely a matter of extension. In the earlier forms it was much shorter, lacking the three verses beginning Blessed are, and ending with the line nor cast my own small golden sceptre down.
CHRISTOPHER TOLKIEN
ON FAIRY-STORIES
I propose to speak about fairy-stories, though I am aware that this is a rash adventure. Faërie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold. And overbold I may be accounted, for though I have been a lover of fairy-stories since I learned to read, and have at times thought about them, I have not studied them professionally. I have been hardly more than a wandering explorer (or trespasser) in the land, full of wonder but not of information.
The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveller who would report them. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost.
There are, however, some questions that one who is to speak about fairy-stories must expect to answer, or attempt to answer, whatever the folk of Faërie may think of his impertinence. For instance: What are fairy-stories? What is their origin? What is the use of them? I will try to give answers to these questions, or such hints of answers to them as I have gleaned – primarily from the stories themselves, the few of all their multitude that I know.
FAIRY-STORY
What is a fairy-story? In this case you will turn to the Oxford English Dictionary in vain. It contains no reference to the combination fairy-story, and is unhelpful on the subject of fairies generally. In the Supplement, fairy-tale is recorded since the year 1750, and its leading sense is said to be (a) a tale about fairies, or generally a fairy legend; with developed senses, (b) an unreal or incredible story, and (c) a falsehood.
The last two senses would obviously make my topic hopelessly vast. But the first sense is too narrow. Not too narrow for an essay; it is wide enough for many books, but too narrow to cover actual usage. Especially so, if we accept the lexicographer’s definition of fairies: ‘supernatural beings of diminutive size, in popular belief supposed to possess magical powers and to have great influence for good or evil over the affairs of man’.
Supernatural is a dangerous and difficult word in any of its senses, looser or stricter. But to fairies it can hardly be applied, unless super is taken merely as a superlative prefix. For it is man who is, in contrast to fairies, supernatural (and often of diminutive stature); whereas they are natural, far more natural than he. Such is their doom. The road to fairyland is not the road to Heaven; nor even to Hell, I believe, though some have held that it may lead thither indirectly by the Devil’s tithe.
O see ye not yon narrow road
So thick beset wi’ thorns and briers?
That is the path of Righteousness,
Though after it but few inquires.
And see ye not yon braid, braid road
That lies across the lily leven?
That is the path of Wickedness,
Though some call it the Road to Heaven.
And see ye not yon bonny road
That winds about yon fernie brae?
That is the road to fair Elfland,
Where thou and I this night maun gae.
As for diminutive size: I do not deny that that notion is a leading one in modern use. I have often thought that it would be interesting to try to find out how that has come to be so; but my knowledge is not sufficient for a certain answer. Of old there were indeed some inhabitants of Faërie that were small (though hardly diminutive), but smallness was not characteristic of that people as a whole. The diminutive being, elf or fairy, is (I guess) in England largely a sophisticated product of literary fancy.4 It is perhaps not unnatural that in England, the land where the love of the delicate and fine has often reappeared in art, fancy should in this matter turn towards the dainty and diminutive, as in France it went to court and put on powder and diamonds. Yet I suspect that this flower-and-butterfly minuteness was also a product of ‘rationalisation’, which transformed the glamour of Elfland into mere finesse, and invisibility into a fragility that could hide in a cowslip or shrink behind a blade of grass. It seems to become fashionable soon after the great voyages had begun to make the world seem too narrow to hold both men and elves; when the magic land of Hy Breasail in the West had become the mere Brazils, the land of red-dye-wood.5 In any case it was largely a literary business in which William Shakespeare and Michael Drayton played a part.6 Drayton’s Nymphidia is one ancestor of that long line of flower-fairies and fluttering sprites with antennae that I so disliked as a child, and which my children in their turn detested. Andrew Lang had similar feelings. In the preface to the Lilac Fairy Book he refers to the tales of tiresome contemporary authors: ‘they always begin with a little boy or girl who goes out and meets the fairies of polyanthuses and gardenias and appleblossom … These fairies try to be funny and fail; or
