Tolkien’s “Tree and Leaf” is a book I’ve wanted to read for some time. At first glance, it’s an odd publication. It consists of Tolkien’s lecture “On Fairy-stories”, originally delivered in 1938 and published as an expanded essay in 1947, and a brief story “Leaf by Niggle” written during the same period, when Tolkien was still in the early phase of writing “The Lord of the Rings”. The texts are, however, connected. In a way. Sort of. In the essay, Tolkien attempts a demarcation of the “fairy-story” as genre. It shows Tolkien’s reflections on the growing project he was embarking on at the time. “Leaf by Niggle”, on the other hand, is a story about an artist: a “painter who can paint leaves better than trees.” This painter, much like the writer Tolkien, was a bit anal – so he “used to spend a long time on a single leaf, trying to catch its shape, and its sheen, and the glistening of dewdrops on its edges. Yet he wanted to paint a whole tree, with all of its leaves in the same style, and all of them different.”
The story is a moral tale and it didn’t catch my interest. But the essay did, partly because I found it provocative. Tolkien explains why fairy-stories are distinct from beast-fables, dream tales, and science fiction – and why they are not to be confused with nature myths such as the ones in Greek mythology. They do not necessarily deal with fairies or elves, but with “Faërie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being”.
The attitude in this first part of the text is defensive. He argues (convincingly) that people in any age group can appreciate stories with supernatural elements in them; in so far as fairy-stories are regarded by adult readers as children’s literature, this is so for historical, not for logical reasons. Tolkien’s defense of fairy-stories, however, quickly turns into an offensive, and throughout most of the essay it appears that a deep understanding of artistic variety is perhaps not one of Tolkien’s prime qualities.
Is Tolkien’s fairy-realm a real or made up place? Is it a construction of the fantasy-writer’s or an independently existing thing, revealed by the writer’s imagination? I am not sure what to make of Tolkien’s remarks on the matter. He tells us that the substance of fairy-stories is at its core “indescribable, though not imperceptible”, and he frequently seems to indicate that the realm exists outside historical boundaries:
“… the definition of a fairy-story – what it is, or what it should be – does not […] depend on any definition or historical account of elf or fairy, but upon the nature of Faërie”.
Very well, then – but doesn’t the “nature of Faërie” depend on historical definitions? Tolkien refers to Faërie as a “country” and as a “soup” – i.e. something you can be dipped in – which leaves its mark on history (through tales). While Tolkien as a scholar is not uninterested in untying “the intricately knotted and ramified history of the branches on the Tree of Tales” – and some of the most interesting bits of the essay shows him doing this – it appears that he does not really perceive of the fairy-realm as something that has a beginning and an end.
Tolkien introduces the concept of “sub-creation”, the sketching of a universe. Sub-creating means achieving “the inner consistency of reality” within a fictional fantasy framework and therefore is more complex than mere imagination. The story-teller is a spell-caster whose success depends on his ability to produce a consistent reality. Is it really the case that consistency equals success in story-telling? Tolkien is often praised for his talent as a story-teller and of course for his creation of a complex fantasy world complete with races, languages, and history. The latter is, of course, an impressive feat that could only have been performed by someone who obviously enjoyed doing it. But personally, I do not think Tolkien was an eminent story-teller. Tolkien will use several pages on describing how a certain road bends, how this and that lake is situated close to this and that mountain, and other geographical points that do not contribute to the story. He is much more interested in details as these than in, for instance, characters or pacing of the plot.
Pictures have an obvious advance over words here: Many geographical details that require long descriptions can be shown visually in a moment. But Tolkien dislikes illustrations or scenic representations of the written word. The reason he gives for this is that they limit the imagination. When reading about a hill or a forest, the reader will see before him his own idealized Hill or Forest of special importance for him – but in a staged play or in an illustrated book, he is forced to accept a certain rendering of it.
This is of course true. But if you consider the argument closely, it becomes clear that the same applies to literature. For example, Tolkien may describe Frodo travelling through a forest, and reading the word “forest” I will (perhaps) get a mental image of my idealized Forest. But any further description on Tolkien’s behalf – of the trees, signposts, atmosphere, etc. – will limit the freedom I as a reader have in my interpretation of Frodo’s forest surroundings. Perhaps the trees in my ideal Forest are of a different sort than in the wood Tolkien describes.
It is true that the word “forest” in itself is much less concrete than a picture of one; but sub-creation is achieved not through single words but through complex descriptions which are by their nature “limiting”. I suspect that Tolkien dislikes pictures because a) the intrusion on his imagination by others quite frankly annoys him, and b) he feels that images somehow make concrete what he thinks of as eternal. I further suspect that this taboo of his is akin to the mystic’s or the religious person’s desire not to profane what he considers sacred through images of it.
This isn’t quite so far-fetched as it might at first seem. With his contempt for modern inventions such as electric street lights (which you are not even allowed to “tear down”), his idealization of “escapism” in literature and his general disregard for twentieth century “barbarism”, Tolkien – in any case- writes like a Gnostic. In good fairy-stories, he explains, there is a moment of “joy”, a “turn” that makes a lasting mark on the reader/listener:
“The peculiar quality of the ‘joy’ in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. It is not only a ‘consolation’ for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question, ‘Is it true?’”.
This is the moment when sub-creation is truly achieved, the reader being charmed into believing in the truth of the fairy reality. It is also an equivalent to the mystic experience that changes your view of the external world. A little surprisingly, Tolkien puts forth the Christian point explicitly near the end of the essay: “… among the marvels [of fairy-stories] is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe” in which “the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfilment of Creation”, namely “the Birth of Christ”.
Not being a Catholic, and not sharing Tolkien’s viewpoints on the modern world, there is much in Tolkien’s essay that I disagree with. It is not really clear – to me at least – why the Evangelium of the Gospels should represent a highpoint of sub-creation more than, say, “Little Red Riding Hood”. But there is also much that I can sympathize with: Tolkien’s intention of taking the fairy-story seriously as a genre that has only accidentally come to be connected with children’s literature, and his intention of defining the mystical fascination that fairy-story literature provokes in some readers – a fascination that I fully share and have shared for as long as I can remember. In an interesting comparison between “drama” and “fairy-stories”, Tolkien points out that whereas drama always focuses on characters and human relationships, fairy-stories frequently focus on forests, lakes, kingdoms, and so on. I find this to be important – perhaps the most important observation in the entire essay – that fairy-stories are primarily about places, not people.
Skrevet af larsgorzelak 
