The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 3: Reader’s Guide PART 2. Christina Scull

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СКАЧАТЬ it was inspired by the medieval bestiary, which describes the characteristics of animals and draws from them Christian morals. This, in turn, was based on earlier sources, including the ?second-century compilation entitled Physiologus (‘Naturalist’).

      Tolkien followed this model but added elements of contemporary culture. Iumbo (i.e. Jumbo) describes the elephant as ‘a moving mountain, a majestic mammal’, whose nose ‘Performs the functions of a rubber hose / Or vacuum cleaner as his needs impose.’ His vice is drugs, ‘the dark mandragora’s unwholesome root’, a notion from the bestiary. This fills him ‘with sudden madness’, and he ‘blindly blunders thumping o’er the ground’, crushing villages in his path. When he tires he leans against a tree, but hunters who know of this habit cut the trunk so that it will collapse, with the elephant – which, according to the bestiary, cannot rise again on its own. In the Physiologus the elephant falling to the ground because of a tree is related to Adam’s fall.

      Oliphaunt in turn is a reduction of Iumbo, made simpler and cleansed of anachronisms. In The Lord of the Rings it is meant to be traditional verse, and indeed is in the form of nursery rhymes with which readers in English are familiar: it retains the essential characteristics of the elephant in a concise form and in a rhyme that is easy to remember (‘Grey as a mouse, / Big as a house’, etc.). These qualities have made the poem a popular choice to include in anthologies for children.

      A private tape recording of Oliphaunt, made by Tolkien in 1952, was issued on the album J.R.R. Tolkien Reads and Sings His The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers/The Return of the King (1975; first reissued in 2001 as part of The J.R.R. Tolkien Audio Collection; see *Recordings).

On Ælfwine’s Spelling. Description of the orthographic practice of Ælfwine (*Eriol and Ælfwine), published as part of ‘Qenya Spelling’ in Parma Eldalamberon 22 (2015), pp. 67–78, edited with commentary and notes by Christopher Gilson and Arden R. Smith.

      Ælfwine in the context of *‘The Silmarillion’ translated Eldarin legends and chronicles into Old English. Tolkien wrote six versions of this brief account of Ælfwine’s work, one entitled Ælfwine, four with the title as given for this entry, each on two sides of a single sheet. All of the versions appear to date largely ‘from the period when Tolkien was working on *The Etymologies around 1937 or 1938, or shortly after this …’ (Gilson and Smith, p. 57), except for the sixth version which is from the early 1950s. The editors point out that ‘mentions of Ælfwine’s transcription of names are given in the Outline of Phonetic Development and the Outline of Phonology’ (p. 60; see *Quenya: Outline of Phonology).

On Fairy-Stories. Lecture, first published in Great Britain in *Essays Presented to Charles Williams by Oxford University Press, December 1947, pp. 38–89. A slightly revised text was first published in *Tree and Leaf, in Great Britain by George Allen & Unwin, London, in May 1964, and in the United States by the Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, in March 1965. See further, Descriptive Bibliography B19, A7. References here are to the appearance in the 1988 edition of Tree and Leaf.

      SYNOPSIS

      Tolkien first gives a general definition of what may be found in a fairy-story:

      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. [p. 9]

      He then attempts to answer the question the question ‘What is a fairy story?’, turning to the *Oxford English Dictionary but finding its definitions too narrow. He rejects the notion of fairies as ‘supernatural beings of diminutive size’, propagated by works such as Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–6) and Michael Drayton’s Nymphidia (1627), and notes that although ‘fairy as a noun more or less equivalent to elf’ (p. 12) was hardly found until the late fifteenth century, faërie, meaning the realm of fairies or ‘Elfland’, appeared in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (c. 1390). Tolkien also rejects the definition of fairy-story (or fairy-tale) as simply ‘a tale about fairies, or generally a fairy legend’.

      Fairy-stories are not in normal English usage stories about fairies or elves, but stories about Fairy, that is Faërie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being. Faërie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.

      Stories that are actually concerned primarily with ‘fairies’, that is with creatures that might also in modern English be called ‘elves’ are relatively rare, and as a rule not very interesting. Most good ‘fairy-stories’ are about the aventures of men in the Perilous Realm or upon its shadowy marches. [p. 14]

      Tolkien would exclude from a list of ‘fairy-stories’ traveller’s tales such as Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), dream-fiction such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), and beast-fables such as Reynard the Fox, although the latter has a connection with fairy-story in that it ‘derives from one of the primal “desires” that lie near the heart of Faërie: the desire of men to hold communion with other living things’ (p. 19).

      Considering the origin or origins of fairy elements in stories, he finds little value in folklorists’ relation of tales according to similar motives. ‘It is precisely the colouring the atmosphere, the unclassifiable individual details of a story, and above all the general purport that informs with life the undissected bones of the plot, that really count’ (pp. 21–2). Using Sir George Webbe Dasent’s words, he says that ‘we must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled …. By the “the soup” I mean the story as it is served up by its author or teller, and by “the bones” its sources or material – even when (by rare luck) those can be with certainty discovered. But I do not, of course, forbid criticism of the soup as soup’ (pp. 22–3).

      He notes various theories concerning the origin and history of fairy-stories, ‘independent evolution (or rather invention) of the similar; inheritance from a common ancestry; and diffusion at various times from one or more centres’, of which the first ‘is the most important and fundamental’ (p. 23). *Philology is no longer thought to be of such significance; nevertheless, the human mind and language have played a part.

      The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and be able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into swift water …. Or we may cause woods to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and put hot fire into the belly of the cold worm [dragon]. But in such ‘fantasy’, as it is called, new form is made; Faërie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator. [pp. 24–5; see *Sub-creation]

      After a discussion of mythology and religion related to folk- and fairy-tales, and of the magical face of fairy-story (notably in ‘The Golden Key’ by *George MacDonald), Tolkien comments that ‘new bits’ have been continually added to the constantly boiling ‘Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story’ (p. 28), and shows how fairy-tale elements may become attached to ‘the great figures of Myth and History’, such as Arthur (*Arthur and the Matter of Britain). The antiquity of some of СКАЧАТЬ