hilarius-and-felix:

I’m sorry I haven’t been active lately. I’ve just moved and things have been chaotic, and in truth, activity on this blog is probably going to be a lot more sporadic in the future. However, I have noticed that the meta-ish mess I wrote, Tolkien Character Criticism, was going around again, and so I’ve been thinking more about character, story-telling, and Tolkien. And I have so much to say (though we’ll see how clearly I can do it!).

First, thanks to everyone who added on interesting comments to that post. A number of those centred around the idea that Tolkien’s writing is plot driven rather than character driven. This is probably true, but (alas!) I have nothing to say about it. I was not (and am not) really thinking about what form drives the story so much as what interest drives it.

I originally brought up allegory because I actually think that the medieval love of allegory and the modern love of character focused narrative spring from the same source. In The Allegory of Love, C.S. Lewis argues (convincingly, I think) that the original desire for allegory was a desire to get inside people’s heads, previously very difficult to do in a story. But the form allowed you to personify the different parts of a person and conceptualize how they interacted to get a better overall idea of the human experience. And that meant that eventually you could go back to direct narrative bringing greater psychological depth to the story. And getting inside character’s heads (and hearts)—feeling that connection to them—is something we love. And, really, why wouldn’t we?

“Never thine eyes behold a tree;
‘Tis no sea thou seest in the sea,
‘Tis but a disguised humanity.
To avoid thy fellow, vain thy plan;
All that interests a man, is man.”
                         —Henry Sutton.

We’re interested in people, because we are people. So it’s easy to claim that character is the most important element of a story. And there’s no shortage of arguments that development of and emotional connection to the characters is fundamentally the most important part. I once heard someone discuss a story they considered to be essentially perfect, only to later backtrack on this opinion when it was pointed out to them that the main character didn’t really grow or develop. Since that was the case, it clearly couldn’t be perfect. Nothing matters more than character.

Except, of course, character isn’t Tolkien’s focus. And I wouldn’t say that he’s interested in plot, in-and-of itself exactly, either. He’s interested in — I don’t know how else to put this — Faërie. “Faërie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold. And overbold I may be accounted,” He says in his essay On Fairy-Stories,

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 it’s 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.

So what does he mean by Faërie exactly? How would Tolkien define a ‘fairy-story’?

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 bedsides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it hold 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… The definition of a fairy-story — what it is, or what it should be — does not, then, depend on any definition or historical account of elf or fairy, but upon the nature of Faërie: the Perilous Realm itself, and the air that blows in that country.

This is what he’s interested in, “the air that blows in that country”. In a letter to Milton Waldman (published in the introduction of the Silmarillion), he says he wants his stories to “possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear… while possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic”. A kind of “air” is very vague, but I’m afraid it can’t really be put more clearly: “Faërie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible” (On Fairy-Stories).

Tolkien was not, however, unaware of the kind of focus people put on character, he talks about it in the very same essay:

If you prefer Drama to Literature (as many literary critics plainly do), or form your critical theories primarily from dramatic critics, or even from Drama, you are apt to misunderstand pure story-making, and to constrain it to the limitations of stage-plays. You are, for instance, likely to prefer characters, even the basest and dullest, to things. Very little about trees as trees can be got into a play.

To be honest, I think that to say character is always and only the most important thing to a story is to limit the breadth of actual human interest. Character can be the most important thing. In some stories it is, and that’s what draws you in. But you can be drawn in by other things too. The Silmarillion, The Lords of the Rings, they draw you in with something different: beauty and the air of elfland. “This book is like lightning from a clear sky,” wrote C.S. Lewis of Lord of the Rings, “Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron; here is a book that will break your heart.”