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How Trees Behave-Or Do They?
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Flieger, Verlyn |
| Copyright Year | 2013 |
| Abstract | ON MARCH 8 1939 J.R.R TOLKIEN GAVE A LECTURE on "Fairy Stories" at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. Some four years later, probably some time in 1943, he revised his talk for publication in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, adding new material to the original lecture. Among the additions was a lengthy discussion on the possibility of fairies (which he conflates with elves) as real beings. It includes the following passage, introduced by a phrase that comes up more than once in the essay, "If Fairies exist": a conditional followed by the implicative conjunction "then." In logic this is called the "if-then" construction, a hypothesis followed by a deduction and its consequences. For Tolkien the consequence in this case was that fairies "are a quite separate creation living in another mode." He went on to say, "They appear to us in human form (with hands, faces, voices and language similar to our own) [...]. For lack of a better word they may be called spirits, daemons [...] subject to Moral Law, capable of good and evil, and possibly (in this fallen world) actually sometimes evil." He then gave an example: Thus a tree-fairy (or a dryad) is, or was a minor spirit in the process of creation who aided [...] in the making effective of the divine Tree-idea or some part of it, or of even of some one particular example: some tree. He is therefore now bound by use and love to Trees (or a tree), immortal while the world (and trees) last--never to escape, until the End. It is a dreadful Doom [...] in exchange for a splendid power. What fate awaits him beyond the Confines of the World, we cannot know. It is likely that the Fairy does not know himself. It is possible that nothing awaits him--outside the World and the Cycle of Story and of Time. (Manuscript B 254255, emphasis in original) This is an arresting passage for several reasons. First, few people today believe in fairies. Tolkien writes as if he did. Starting in the conditional mode with "if" Tolkien moves almost immediately to the declarative, assuming the reality of what is for most people the stuff of myth and fable. Second, he picks a specific kind of fairy, a dryad, to illustrate his hypothesis. In Greek mythology the dryad was a spirit in the form of a young maiden or woman. While Tolkien uses the Greek word to support the English phrase, his interest in folklore would was almost certainly have made him aware of more Northern European examples, such as those mentioned by the anthropological folklorist Edward Burnet Tylor in Primitive Culture: The peasant folklore of Europe still knows of willows that bleed and weep and speak when hewn, of the fairy maiden that sits within the fir-tree, of that old tree in Rugaard forest that must not be felled, for an elf dwells within, of that old tree on the Heinzenberg near Zell, which uttered its complaint when the woodman cut it down [...]. (qtd. in Dorson 194) Third, Tolkien's discussion appears in a scholarly essay, not a piece of imaginative fiction. Dryads were much beloved of the Romantics such as Keats and Coleridge, and romantic Edwardians such as Arthur Rackham, but they were rather out of fashion in the modern and post-modern criticism of Tolkien's twentieth century. Tolkien, psychologically and spiritually closer to Keats and Coleridge and Rackham, has in his fiction many kinds of fairies, which he called elves. He has Light Elves, Dark Elves, Grey Elves, High Elves, Deep Elves, Wood Elves, even Half-elves. Does he have any Tree-fairies? Any dryads? Given its faerian beauty, we might be tempted to start with Lorien, whose mallorn trees with silver bark and gold leaves and white blossoms seem obvious candidates, and whose presiding spirit Galadriel could easily pass for a dryad as the term is conventionally understood. But obvious is not always best, and a close look shows more differences from Tolkien's Tree-fairy than similarities. … |
| Starting Page | 21 |
| Ending Page | 21 |
| Page Count | 1 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Volume Number | 32 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://dc.swosu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1084&context=mythlore |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
