But What Did He Really Mean?: Verlyn Flieger

But What Did He Really Mean?
Verlyn Flieger
“A coherent personality aspires, like a work of art, to con-

tain its conflicts without resolving them dogmatically”
—Judith Thurman.1
A lmost from the date of its publication, The Lord of the Rings has
been subject to conflicting interpretations, appealing equally to
neo-pagans who see in its elves and hobbits an alternative to the dreary
realism of mainstream culture and to Christians who find an evangeli-
cal message in its imagery of stars and light and bread and sacrifice.
All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.
Tolkien was more patient with enthusiasts of both sides than many au-
thors would have been, but he was also ambiguous, even contradictory
in stating his own position—for example in his letters as to whether
there was intentional Christianity in The Lord of the Rings, or in his es-
say “On Fairy-stories” (written before The Lord of the Rings but strongly
influencing it) whether elves (aka fairies) are real.
Thus he could tell one correspondent that The Lord of the Rings
was “fundamentally” religious and Catholic (Murray, Letters 172) and
another that he felt no obligation to make it fit Christianity (Auden,
Letters 144). He could, in “On Fairy-stories” both as published and in its
rough drafts, argue for elves as real yet on the same page—sometimes
in the same paragraph—call them products of human imagination.
He could in one breath talk about Faërie as an actual place and in the
next say it was the realm of fantasy. There are many such turnabouts,
reversals of direction that not only make him appear contradictory
but invite contradictory interpretations of his work, permitting advo-
cates with opposite views to cherry-pick the statements that best sup-
port their position.
One result of this ambiguity is that the same cherries can be picked
by both sides to support contending positions. For example, the same
passage in a letter to Robert Murray is cited by Joseph Pearce to defend
Tolkien’s Christian orthodoxy (Pearce, Man and Myth 109),and by Pat-
rick Curry to support his intentional paganism (Curry 109, 117–18).
Maybe this is what Tolkien intended. Maybe not. Michael Drout’s 2005
article “Towards a Better Tolkien Criticism” points out that the “over-
reliance of critics upon the Letters guides Tolkien scholarship down the
narrow channel” of finding a single theological meaning in Tolkien’s
Copyright 2014. West Virginia University Press.
works (21). Hoping to find broader avenues of meaning, I have divided
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Verlyn Flieger
my discussion into three sections, the first on the question of inten-

tional Christianity in his fiction, the second on the ancillary reality (or
not) of elves and Faërie, and the third on the related meaning of his
term Faërian Drama. The question in my title, “But What Did He Really
Mean?” is not intended to provide an answer, but to use the ambiguity
as a guide to what may have been issues as unresolved for Tolkien as
they were for his admirers.
Christianity
I will begin with the question that has caused the most controversy
among Tolkien’s readers, critics, and scholars—whether Tolkien con-
sciously built Christian references and imagery into his work, espe-
cially The Lord of the Rings. As with any correspondence, Tolkien tai-
lored his letters to their particular addressees. His most definite—and
most negative—statement came in a 1951 letter to Milton Waldman
of the Collins publishing firm. The letter was written to persuade Col-
lins to publish Tolkien’s fictive mythology, the Silmarillion, together
with the then-unpublished The Lord of the Rings, and it is therefore
more descriptive and rhetorical than conventionally chatty. Persua-
sion notwithstanding, it is important to note that although Waldman
was a fellow Catholic, Tolkien did not use shared Catholicism or even
shared Christianity as a selling point for his work. On the contrary, he
went in the opposite direction, telling Waldman that what disquali-
fied the “Arthurian world” as England’s mythology was that it was
“involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion.” He con-
ceded that “myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in
solution elements of moral and religious truth . . . but not explicit, not
in the known form of the primary world,” which explicitness seems to
him “fatal” (144). The word fatal is the key, and means exactly what it
says— “lethal,” “death-dealing.” Connecting a fictional mythology to
one from the real world would literally kill the fiction, reducing it to
a gloss. Robbed of independence, it would become allegory in which
every element would point to the other story.
Yet to another fellow Catholic, Robert Murray, who read The Lord
of the Rings in 1954, Tolkien took the alternative position (often cited
as proof of Christian content in his fiction) that his book was “a fun-
damentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but
consciously in the revision.” We should consider the possibility that
since by this time the book had been not just accepted for publica-
tion (by Allen & Unwin) but was well on its way to publication (Murray
read galley proofs), Tolkien now felt more confidant in affirming a
Christian stance. Yet he followed this affirmation with the rather odd
explanation, “That is why [my emphasis] I have not put in, or have
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cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults

or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is
absorbed into the story and the symbolism” (Letters 172). This takes
some unpacking. At first glance it seems to be saying that the work
is so suffused with Christianity that explicit reference is superfluous.
However, a closer look reveals words so carefully arranged to say both
everything and nothing that they practically invite competing argu-
ments. Joseph Pearce uses them to show that Tolkien meant The Lord
of the Rings to be “theologically orthodox” (Pearce 109), while Patrick
Curry cites them to support the book’s blend of “Christian, pagan, and
humanist ingredients” (117). Pearce calls the statements paradoxical.
Curry describes them as “syncretism.”
Pearce is not far off the mark. It does seem paradoxical to cite the
religiousness of a work as your motive for cutting out religion. More-
over, for an author who emphatically disavowed allegory to invoke the
“symbolism” of a work seems disingenuous to say the least. But Curry
is not wrong either. To omit all reference to religion opens the door
to a wider, more syncretistic and ecumenically inclusive audience,
allowing Curry, for example, to point out that the Valar “are related
to the ancient elements (fire, earth, air, and water) in a characteristi-
cally pagan way” (Curry 110–11). Such widely differing readings may
tell us as much about the scholars quoted as they do about Tolkien,
but it is significant that Tolkien opens the door to both. The key to this
apparent inconsistency may lie not just in the differing philosophical
adherence of the interpreters but also in the relationship of the writer
to the addressee. While Tolkien was writing to Milton Waldman, he
was speaking through Waldman to William Collins, chairman of the
publishing firm. The wording of the letter makes it plain that he was
seeking to get acceptance on its own terms for what he knew was a highly
idiosyncratic work and was thus forestalling comparison.2 He likens his
Valar to “the ‘gods’ of higher mythology, which can be accepted—well,
shall we say baldly, by a mind that believes in the Blessed Trinity” (Let-
ters 146), pointing out the difference, not the similarity.
The addressee of the other letter and its more orthodox state-
ments was Robert Murray, the grandson of Sir James Murray, founder
of the Oxford English Dictionary, on which Tolkien worked when he
first returned from France in 1917. Murray’s close friendship with
the Tolkien family was instrumental in his conversion to Catholicism
in 194546 (Scull and Hammond 614). At the time at which Tolkien
wrote, and for the many years after, Murray was a priest, a member of
the Society of Jesus. For Tolkien and Murray Catholicism was more
than a shared religion; it was a basis for their friendship. Tolkien pref-
aced his statements by telling Murray that he had “even revealed to
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me more clearly some things about my work” (Letters 172). To reply

to Murray’s comments by saying what he said to Waldman would have
been not just uncalled for, but insensitive and inappropriate.
Yet to tell Murray his revision was at first “unconsciously” Cath-
olic and later “consciously” so, and then a year later to write to W. H.
Auden that he had “very little . . . conscious . . . intention in mind at
any point” (Letters 211) marks a notable incongruity, for taken at face
value, each of these statements invalidates the other. Granted, the con-
texts for the two statements are not precisely similar, since the one to
Murray is predicated on Tolkien’s Catholic background and the one
to Auden on his artistic invention.3 The key to both statements is the
word conscious as describing the writing process. Nevertheless, since
Tolkien was neither a hypocrite nor a liar, something more than artful
dodging must be going on here. It seems possible that he meant what
he wrote at the time that he wrote it, and of course he had no reason
to go back and check the language of his letter to Murray, a fellow
Catholic, when he wrote as he did to Auden, a fellow writer and poet.
The identity of the addressee determined the tone and content of the
letter, as it does for most letter-writers.
For example, when Murray wrote that he found The Lord of the Rings
compatible with “the order of Grace,” and compared Galadriel to
the Virgin Mary (Letters 171–72), he was clearly invoking “the known
form of the primary world” that Tolkien repudiated in the Waldman
letter. Yet Tolkien responded, “I think I know exactly what you mean
by the order of Grace; and of course by your references to Our Lady,
upon which all my own small perception of beauty both in majesty
and simplicity is founded” (172). With Murray he avoided the uncom-
promising “fatal” he had used to Waldman in favor of gentler phrases
like “perception of beauty,” and “I know what you mean,” which can
convey agreement but not necessarily endorsement. It was a way to say
yes but not yes, not unlike what Tom Shippey has called “the special-
ised politeness-language of Old Western Man, in which doubt and cor-
rection are in direct proportion to the obliquity of expression” (xxi).
The same kind of agreement without endorsement can be found in his
1958 letter to Deborah Webster, where he cited one critic’s association
of lembas with the Eucharist, and another’s assertion that the character
of Galadriel was “clearly related to Catholic devotion to Mary” (Letters
288), which sounds suspiciously like “the known form of the primary
world.” Note, however, that unlike the letter to Murray, Tolkien was
here citing other people’s opinions, not his own. He did not commit
himself, merely commenting that “far greater things may colour the
mind in dealing with the lesser things of a fairy-story” (Letters 288). But
he did not say whose mind was thus colored.
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The Galadriel-Mary equation was a popular one with readers. A

1971 letter from Ruth Austin prompted Tolkien to respond that he
“was particularly interested” in her remarks “about Galadriel. . . .” As
with all the letters, we don’t know what Austin remarked, only what
Tolkien replied, which was: “it is true that I owe much of this char-
acter [Galadriel] to Christian and Catholic teaching and imagination
about Mary,” from which we may infer that Austin had made the Gal-
adriel comparison. While this response sounds like the same sort of
agreement without endorsement he had used with Webster, this time
Tolkien went further, adding, “but actually Galadriel was a penitent: in
her youth a leader of the rebellion against the Valar . . . At the end of
the first Age she proudly refused forgiveness or permission to return”
(Letters 407). Parsing the grammar, we see the declarative “it is true,”
followed by the conjunction “but” introducing the corrective “actu-
ally,” followed by “Galadriel was a penitent.” Since Catholic dogma
holds that Mary was conceived without sin, Tolkien’s “but actually”
really means “on the contrary.” It separates Galadriel’s penitence for
wrongdoing from Mary’s sinlessness. The distinction is doctrinal, and
his use of doctrine rather than diplomacy to discourage this interpre-
tation of his work is notable.
In his 1967 interview with Henry Resnik, he came close to outright
repudiation of intentional Christian reference:
You don’t have to be Christian to believe that somebody
has to die to save something. As a matter of fact, December
25th occurred strictly by accident, and I left it in to show
that this was not a Christian myth anyhow. It was a purely
unimportant date, and I thought, Well there it is, just an
accident.” (Resnik 43)
Note that he does not say sacrifice is not Christian, just that it doesn’t
have to be, and the “accident” of December 25 as the Fellowship’s
departure date from Rivendell was “left in” to show difference from,
not correspondence to, Christianity. He echoed this in a letter to
Houghton Mifflin, writing that, “the ‘Third Age’ was not a Christian
world” but “a monotheistic world of ‘natural theology’” (Letters 220),
and in one to W. H. Auden, writing, “I don’t feel under any obligation
to make my story fit with formalized Christian theology, though I actu-
ally intended it to be consonant with Christian thought and belief”
(Letters 355). It scarcely needs pointing out that the phrases “funda-
mentally religious,” “consonant with,” and “strictly by accident” show a
wide spectrum of positions.
While such yes-but-not-yes tactics can be perplexing, we may give
Tolkien credit for negotiating his way across the minefield of public
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opinion, addressing a variety of readers—many of them complete

strangers—without alienating any of them. But where between them
does Tolkien situate himself? The answer is, he doesn’t. To arrive at his
undeclared position we must read between the lines and watch the lan-
guage carefully as it jumps from “fatal” to “fundamentally religious,” from
“I know what you mean” to “but actually.” It seems clear that at one level
he simply wanted his book to be taken on its own terms as an original
creation, not predicated on or tethered to a real-world mythos. He had a
model in the Beowulf poet, who, he said, was a Christian “creating . . . the
illusion of surveying a past, pagan but noble and fraught with a deep sig-
nificance” (M&C 27). While this is probably what he meant when he said
the Third Age was not a Christian world, at a deeper level he was in sym-
pathy with both codes, being devoutly Christian but with a deep-seated
yearning for the old pagan heroic culture Christianity had replaced.
There is one instance where Tolkien actually defended a heterodox
aspect of his Secondary World rather than curtsey to his orthodox
opponent’s position. Peter Hastings, manager of the Newman Book-
shop in Oxford, took exception to the reincarnation of Tolkien’s Elves.
Since Church doctrine teaches resurrection in the body, the notion
of one soul inhabiting more than one body was unorthodox to say
the least. Hastings suggested that Tolkien might have “overstepped the
mark in metaphysical matters,” and gone “beyond the position of a
sub-creator” (Letters 187). Tolkien’s reply was (for once) unequivocal
and un-evasive.
I do not see how . . . any theologian or philosopher, unless
very much better informed about the relation of spirit and
body than I believe anyone to be, could deny the possibility
of re-incarnation as a mode of existence, prescribed for
certain kinds of rational incarnate creatures. (Letters 189)
Such heresy might well have sparked disagreement, if not doctrinal
outrage, which may be why Tolkien never sent the letter. His note says,
“It seemed to be taking myself too importantly” (196), but he may also
have wanted to avoid a theological argument with Hastings.
I suggest he didn’t want a theological argument with anyone and so
expressed his more adventurous views with caution and ultimately kept
them to himself, and to his fiction. He certainly espoused orthodox
Catholicism, but his letters and his fiction show an imagination tran-
scending Christianity without disagreeing with it. Elvish reincarna-
tion remained a staple of his mythos, even in such late writings as the
appendices to the “Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth,” where he insisted
that the reincarnation of the Elves “seems an essential element in the
tales” (Morgoth 363).
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Elves and Faërie

Elvish reincarnation marks the intersection of the issue of Christianity
in Tolkien’s fiction with his more theoretical treatment of elves and
their place in his thought and work. Here the same yes-but-not-yes
dynamic is in play with the difference that Tolkien’s correspondents
are not actual people but hypothetical naysayers whose arguments he
imagines. It seems obvious that he was torn between his desire for the
reality of elves as supernatural companions to humanity and his fear
of ridicule if he expressed it. The paragraphs in the Waldman letter
describing his mythology are introduced by “Do not laugh!” and con-
cluded with “Absurd.” The early pages of the letter vacillate between
eagerness to share a cherished enthusiasm and apology for its naiveté:
“my crest has long since fallen,” “such an overweening purpose” (Let-
ters 144–45). He once told an interviewer á propos The Hobbit, “If I
hadn’t done that [said it was written for children] people would have
thought I was loony” (“J.R.R. Tolkien”).
His adjective recalls the title of his poem, “Looney,” published in
1934 in which an unnamed speaker, asked where he has been and
what he has seen, tells of his trip to fairyland and return to an uncom-
prehending world. “To myself I must talk, for seldom they speak, men
that I meet” (“Looney” 340). When the publication date of The Lord of
the Rings approached, Tolkien told Robert Murray, “it will be impos-
sible not to mind what is said . . . I have given my heart to be shot
at” (Bio 218). He dreaded the kind of response which in fact he got
from such leading lights as Edmund Wilson, whose 1956 review of The
Lord of the Rings in The Nation, “Oo Those Awful Orcs!” gave a voice to
the unspeaking “men that I meet” of “Looney.” In 1962, Tolkien pub-
lished a rewritten version of “Looney” as “The Sea-Bell,” removing the
opening questions and the words “must” and “seldom” from the final
couplet to make the speaker’s isolation total. (ATB 57, 60)
In “On Fairy-stories” he had confronted the same issue more pro-
saically, with Tolkien himself standing in for Looney and a presumed
academic audience replacing the “men that [he] meets.” Anticipating
a skeptical reception, Tolkien tries in the essay as in his letters to have
it both ways, on the one hand treating elves as real beings independent
of humanity, and on the other saying that they are products of human
imagination. The overwhelming impression is very much like that
of the “Looney” poem—that he is talking to himself. In the essay he
declares, “if elves are true and really exist independently of our tales
about them, then this also is certainly true, elves are not primarily con-
cerned with us, nor we with them” (OFS 32). But he then sidesteps in a
footnote: “This is true, even if they [elves] are only creations of Man’s
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mind, ‘true’ only as reflecting in a particular way one of Man’s visions

of Truth” (OFS 32). A few pages further on, he uses the same side-step,
saying, “it is from [elves] that we may learn what is the central desire
and aspiration of human Fantasy—even if the elves are, all the more so
in so far as they are, only a product of Fantasy itself” (OFS 64).
Earlier drafts show him struggling to articulate the same ideas. In
Manuscript B he wrote, “I will tell you what I think . . . If fairies really
exist—independently of Man—then very few of our ‘Fairy-stories’ have
any relation to them. . . . They are a quite separate creation living in
another mode” (OFS 254), which is exactly the situation in “Looney,”
where the voyager senses the presence of the fairy inhabitants but
cannot connect with them. Yet some pages later in the same draft he
raises the question, “whether faierie exists independent of man, or
whether it is creation” (OFS 268). This is not unlike the either-or “con-
sciously Catholic” versus “little conscious intention” of his statements
to Murray and Auden. Either elves are a separate creation (meaning
they have a real existence) or elves are made from human desire for
sub-creative art (meaning they don’t). Can they be both? We learn
from them even if they are only creation. That is to say, even if we make
them up.
If Tolkien is saying we learn from our own creativity, he could say it
more simply. He doesn’t. Instead he says, “I will tell you what I think.”
And he does. The following “if . . . then” argument echoing “if elves are
true” in the published essay, is what he thinks. The “you” he is talking
to is the uncomprehending men that Looney meets at the end of that
poem. For this motif of “if elves are true” recurs so persistently that it
is hard not to conclude that at some level Tolkien wanted to believe in
elves and allowed himself to argue for their real existence. Otherwise,
why is the trueness of elves or faërie even an issue? Nothing in the essay
or the draft requires such belief to undergird the argument. In both if
would surely be easier, and certainly safer, simply to write about elves
as imaginary beings or literary conventions. He would then be free to
say anything he liked without risking mockery or dismissal.
Ambivalence about elves/fairies is matched by ambivalence about
fairyland. While the essay begins by declaring that, “Faërie is a per-
ilous land,” it is safe to assume that most readers take this as a figure of
speech, assuming that Tolkien is not talking about a “real” place, but
about, as he says a few lines later, “the realm of fairy-story”—that is to
say, imagination. And though much of the ensuing discussion centers
on the nature of Faërie, the “realm or state in which fairies have their
being,” nothing in these opening pages says fairies are real or Faërie is
actual. Superficially he bowed to conventional skepticism, but on Folio
18 of Manuscript B he wrote,
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What is this faierie? It reposes (for us now) in a view that

the normal world, tangible visible audible, is only an ap-
pearance. Behind it is a reservoir of power which is mani-
fested in these forms. If we can drive a well down to this
reservoir, we shall tap a power that can not only change the
visible forms of things already existent, but spout up with
a boundless wealth forms of things never before known—
potential but unrealized. (OFS 270)
This suggests that at a deeper level he believed in the reality of what he
described. The concept of the “normal world” as “only an appearance”
posits a paranormal Otherworld behind the appearance, a world with
“a reservoir of power” to change existing forms and create new ones.
But the published essay declares more cautiously that the Reality of
elves and men is “the same, if differently valued and perceived”(OFS
63), which seems to say it’s all in how you look at it.
Faërian Drama
The most provocative passage in the essay introduces the term Faërian
Drama, a phrase that occurs in only three instances I have found in
Tolkien’s published writings, once in the published essay, once in the
Manuscript B draft of the essay, and once, more obliquely, as “Elvish
drama” in Part One of The Notion Club Papers. The paragraph in the
published essay is both the most revealing and the most puzzling of all
Tolkien’s statements on the subject. Here he writes that,
“Faërian Drama”—those plays which according to abun-
dant records the elves have often presented to men—can
produce Fantasy with a realism and immediacy beyond the
compass of any human mechanism. As a result their usual
effect (upon a man) is to go beyond Secondary Belief. It
you are present at a Faërian drama you yourself are, or
think that you are, bodily inside its Secondary World. The
experience may be very similar to dreaming. . . . But in
Faërian drama you are in a dream that some other mind is
weaving, and the knowledge of that alarming fact may slip
from your grasp. To experience directly a Secondary World:
the potion is too strong, and you give to it Primary Belief,
however marvelous the events. You are deluded—whether
that is the intention of the elves . . . is another question.
They . . . are not themselves deluded. This is for them a
form of Art, and distinct from Wizardry or Magic, properly
so called. They do not live in it, though they can, perhaps,
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afford to spend more time at it than human artists can.

The Primary World, Reality, of elves and men is the same,
if differently valued and perceived. (OFS 63)
Like Bottom awaking from his enchantment in A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, Tolkien is trying to describe the indescribable.
“I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the
wit of man to say what dream it was. . . . The eye of man
hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand
is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to
report what my dream was. . . . it shall be called Bottom’s
Dream, because it hath no bottom.” (Act IV, scene i)
Unlike Bottom, Tolkien expects the reader to understand or at least
to recognize the experience he is talking about. It is a safe bet that not
all readers do. Few will even ask the question “what exactly is a Faërian
Drama?” and fewer still will wonder what “abundant records” recount
their presentation to men.
I will tell you what I think. A Faërian Drama is a fantastic, illusory
performance put on by fairies/elves for a specific audience—human
beings. It is a kind of waking dream. Tolkien’s statement, “You are in
a dream some other mind is weaving,” is very like the statement made
in David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus by the medium, Backhouse, “a
fast-rising star in the psychic world,” who says, “I dream with open
eyes . . . and others see my dreams” (Arcturus 15–16). Tolkien had read
A Voyage to Arcturus (Letters 34). To dream with open eyes is to be in a
trance state. Although Tolkien says, “you are deluded,” I am loth to
call it “hallucination,” since that word is strongly negative and implies
a pathology, which is undercut by his mention of “abundant records.”
But what are these abundant records to which he refers? He does not
mention any,4 so again, I will tell you what I think. The “records” are
those stories, ballads, lays of mortals in the fairy land like the Middle
English story of Sir Orfeo who goes into fairyland to win back his
wife, the ballad of Thomas Rymer, beguiled by the Queen of fairyland
to spend seven years in her kingdom, the aforementioned dream of
Bottom the Weaver enchanted by Puck in Shakespeare’s play. Indeed,
the multiple enchantments of the pairs of lovers, and Bottom, and
Titania herself, are a Faërian Drama. A more modern example would
be Keats’s knight at arms enthralled by “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.”
Faërian Dramas are half real half visionary experiences enshrined in
literature.
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The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven.
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act
V, scene 1)
Although the term is never used within his fiction, Tolkien cre-
ates more than one Faërian Drama. The feasting Wood Elves in Mirk-
wood—a faërie realm if ever there was one—who appear and disap-
pear so tantalizingly in The Hobbit are clearly staging a Faërian Drama
for Bilbo and the Dwarves, one into which Thorin Oakenshield “fell
like a stone enchanted” as he stepped into their midst (H 138-151).
The tone of the narrative is light-hearted, and the description of the
episode is playful, but the enchantment is clear. Frodo apparently
experiences a Faërian Drama when he hears elven singing in the Hall
of Fire at Rivendell.
. . . visions of far lands and bright things that he had never
yet imagined opened out before him; and the firelit hall
became like a golden mist above seas of foam that sighed
upon the margins of the world. Then the enchantment be-
came more and more dreamlike, until he felt that an end-
less river of swelling gold and silver was flowing over him.
. . . Swiftly he sank under its shining weight into a deep
realm of sleep. (FR, II, ii, 245–46)
Something like this happens to Ramer in The Notion Club Papers where
he describes “dream-storywriting. For it is not, of course, writing, but
a sort of realized drama,” to which another character, Jeremy, replies,
“Elvish Drama,” but is shouted down before he can proceed (Sauron
193).
Christopher Tolkien’s note on this is of interest here:
# 43 Elvish Drama. In [MS] A it is Ramer himself who speaks
of “elf-drama” (“it is not writing but elf-drama”), and again
in [MS] B, which has:
“. . . For it is not of course writing, but a sort of realized dra-
ma. The Elvish Drama that Lewis speaks of somewhere.”
“Not Lewis,” said Jeremy. “It comes in one of those essays
of the circle, but it was by one of the minor members.”
(Sauron 216)
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Elvish Drama and Faërian Drama are interchangeable terms. Jere-

my’s attribution of the phrase to “one of the minor members,” and the
noisy reaction of the Notion Club seem references to those Inklings
meetings where, according to Christopher Tolkien, a reading of The
Lord of the Rings “would begin with Hugo lying on the couch and lolling
and shouting and saying ‘Oh, God, no more elves!’” (quoted in A Film
Portrait of J.R.R. Tolkien). An inside joke. Yet the passage is also a way
to say something without saying it. The fictive voices of Ramer and
Jeremy as well as that of Guildford, the Club’s recorder, stand between
Tolkien and Elvish Drama in The Notion Club Papers, whereas in the
essay nothing stands between him and the “strong potion” that invites
primary belief.
Frodo’s “visions of things . . . never yet imagined” recalls Manuscript
B’s “things never before known that spout up.” A passage in Manu-
script B uses the term and comes close to Frodo’s experience.
The real desire is not to enter these lands . . . as a natural
denizen (as a knight, say, armed with a sword and cour-
age adequate to this world) but to see them in action and
being as we see our objective world—with the mind free
from the limited body: a Faërian Drama. (OFS 294; Bodle-
ian Tolkien MS 14, Folio 36)
Seeing a Faërian Drama “in action and being” means as an observer
“with the mind free from the limited body,” not a participant but an
audience, as at a play. Certainly this is what happens to Frodo in the
Hall of Fire. It is what happens to Looney in the faërie land, as the
poem’s opening questions, “Where have you been? What have you
seen?” make clear.
The vividness of Frodo’s and Looney’s and Ramer’s experience in
the fiction is matched in the essay by Tolkien’s grammar. The verbs are
in the present indicative, not the conditional mood: “You are deluded,”
not “you would be deluded.” “You are [not would be] in a dream,” “you
give [not would give] to it Primary Belief.” Then he muddies the water
by adding that “whether that [delusion, dream] is the intention of the
elves (always or at any time) is another question,” and muddies it fur-
ther when he adds that, “they at any rate are not themselves deluded.
This is for them a form of Art, and distinct from Wizardry or Magic,
properly so called.”
So what does this really mean? In the case of Frodo, the Elvish song
may be enchanting (or deluding) him, although this seems more a
by-product of Art than its intention. In the case of Looney, the voyage
and the enchantment are hallucinatory and uncommunicable. In the
case of Ramer, the delusion (or dream) seems to be entirely within
160
himself. The passage from “On Fairy-stories” is so vivid and intense

it is hard not to imagine it had its origin in Tolkien’s personal expe-
rience of an altered state, whether trance or daydream or hallucina-
tion, a transportation to an other world the experience of which was
actual, whether its reality was or not. And then he adds the puzzling
concluding sentence: “The Primary World, Reality, of elves and men is
the same, if differently valued and perceived”(OFS 63). But what does
this really mean?
Without knowing the question, Tolkien’s collaborator, and former
student Simone D’Ardenne offered an answer in her essay “The Man
and the Scholar,”
I said to him once: “You broke the veil, didn’t you, and
passed through?” which in fact he did and which he read-
ily admitted. No wonder, therefore that he could recapture
the language of the fairies. . . . Tolkien belonged to that
very rare class of linguists, now becoming extinct, who like
the Grimm brothers could understand and recapture the
glamour of “the word.” (Salu & Farrell 34–35)
To break the veil and pass through is “to see . . . in action and being as
we see our objective world—with the mind free from the limited body:
a Faërian Drama.” This is what happens to Frodo, who sees “visions of
bright things.” This is what happens to Looney, who hears song but
sees no singers and even more to the speaker in “The Sea-bell,” who
cries, “Why do you hide?” “Answer my call!” “Show me a face!” And
finally concludes, “I have lost myself” (ATB 59). This is what happens
to Ramer, who sees “realised drama.”
D’Ardenne’s phrase glamour of the word may be the key. The OED
defines glamour as, “magic, enchantment, spell.” It is a Scottish variant
of grammar, OED grimoire altered from Fr. grammaire, M-E grammar “let-
ters” from I-E gerebh- “to scratch” [Cp. graffiti, graphite, telegraph]. The
“glamour of ‘the word’” would then be its power to alter perception,
to “break through” the veil separating realities and reveal the connec-
tions between them.5 I suggest that this is what Tolkien meant when
he said that the Reality of elves and men was the same, if differently
valued and perceived. Does that mean he actually believed in fairies?
One passage in Manuscript B suggests strongly that he did. Here, as
with his unsent letter to Hastings, in the private company of only his
pen and paper, Tolkien seems to have allowed himself the luxury of
writing what he really thought. I quote the passage, edited for brevity
but with sense intact. It begins with the familiar “if” motif, but the
ensuing discussion shows Tolkien transcending the hypothetical to
speak out of his deepest meditation.
161
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If fairies exist. . . . They are a quite separate creation living

in another mode. . . . For lack of a better word they may
be called spirits, daemons, inherent powers of the created
world . . . subject to Moral Law, capable of good and evil.
. . . They are in fact non-incarnate minds (or souls) of a
stature and even nature more near to that of Man . . . than
any other rational creatures, known or guessed by us. They
can take form at will, or they could do so: they have or had
a choice.
Thus a tree-fairy (or dryad) is, or was a minor spirit in the
process of creation who aided as “agent” in the making ef-
fective 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), immor-
tal while the world (and trees) last—never to escape, until
the End. It is a dreadful Doom (to human minds if they
are wise) in exchange for 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. (OFS 254–55)
This passage is remarkable in its openness to ideas conventionally dis-
missed, even ridiculed by skeptics. It shows Tolkien thinking outside
the limits of ordinary human perception and open to the supernat-
ural extension of Creation beyond the visible world. Plato would have
understood this passage, as would Augustine. Patrick Curry would
approve. It is foreign to the everyday, rational mid-twentieth century
culture in which Tolkien lived and wrote, but not beyond the scope of
Christian mysticism, though his choice of a dryad rather than an angel
suggests a non-Christian perspective. It is no wonder that he did not
publish the passage. The wonder is that he wrote it.
Conclusion
But, you may ask, what difference does it make that Tolkien trimmed his
sails to meet winds from different directions? He wouldn’t be the first
to do so, and with or without them, there is still The Lord of the Rings in
all its richness and multivalent texture, a book from which readers have
been taking what they want and need for sixty years and show no signs
of stopping. I propose that it does make a difference, for the trimming
reveals a deep ambivalence in the man that produced a creative tension
in his fiction. He was neither the Christian mythmaker that some would
162
like, nor the literary spokesman for a neo-pagan world that others would
make him. He was a more complex individual than critics on either side
have been willing to acknowledge, a man deeply conflicted, balancing
faith against experience and orthodoxy against an inner perception that
broke the veil and reached the other side of the visible world.
All these statements, in the letters and in the essay, are voices in a
conversation that continued over many years in Tolkien’s own mind as
well as on paper, a conversation in which, as Shippey observes, Tolkien
was “hovering around some central point on which he dared not or
could not land” (57). It was a conversation that tried to harmonize
his work’s originality and his own imagination with Christian ortho-
doxy, and to situate his often unorthodox views within the narrower
confines of his religion without abandoning either. It seems clear that
he also anticipated the ridicule and scorn of literary lions and anti-
romantics who dominated the literary landscape in the time in which
he wrote and for long after. Not just Hugo Dyson, who tired of elves,
but Edmund Wilson, who willfully misunderstood what Tolkien was
trying to do, and Germaine Greer, writing in W: The Waterstone’s Maga-
zine in 1997 that “it has been my nightmare that Tolkien would turn
out to be the most influential writer of the twentieth century. The bad
dream has materialized” who shot at his heart long after he was dead.
Conflict about elements so central to his life and work recalls Hum-
phrey Carpenter’s statement that he was “a man of antitheses” (Bio
95). Since Carpenter is the only one beside Christopher Tolkien to
have read Tolkien’s diaries, we should pay attention to his words. The
diaries, says Carpenter, reflected Tolkien’s “second side,” his “deep
uncertainty,” his “black moods,” and feelings of hopelessness and
despair, both for himself and the world (129). Yet the antithesis that
Carpenter saw provided that “five minutes later in the company of a
friend he would forget his black gloom and be in the best of humour”
(129). This is not surprising. To savor fully the joys in human life one
must know what it is to be without them; contrast deepens perception
and sharpens appreciation. Tolkien put it another way when he wrote
to his son Michael, “You have to understand the good in things, to
detect the real evil” (Letters 55).
To be a man of antitheses is not necessarily a bad thing, and to
contain paradox without resolving it is the mark of an inclusive mind.
Uncertainty leaves room for flexibility, while its opposite, single-mind-
edness, can mean consistency but also intransigence. As the epigraph
to this essay states, “A coherent personality aspires, like a work of art, to
contain its conflicts without resolving them dogmatically” (Thurman
xvi). Tolkien’s personality allowed him to contain his conflicts without
resolving them. This was an advantage, not a defect. Conceding yet
163
Verlyn Flieger
contesting, he found a way to maintain a public balance between alter-

natives without compromising his private opinions.
His Catholic faith was central to his life, but at a level beyond
doctrine he also believed in fairies, and might have, like Frodo and
Looney and Ramer, had direct experience of the “strong potion” of
Faërian Drama. The conflict between faith and imagination fueled his
art, creating the “complex, rather bitter, and very terrifying romance”
that is The Lord of the Rings (Letters 136). Resolving that conflict might
have removed the bitterness and the terror, but it would also have
removed the power and tension of a story whose virtue is its indetermi-
nacy, a story in which Frodo can be both guilty and innocent, in which
Boromir is both admirable and culpable, and Sam is both beneficent
and destructive. We see Eowyn at her best when she has the courage of
her desire to be a warrior-maiden but also when she is strong enough
to let go of it. Is it Gandalf or Saruman who silently appears at the edge
of Fangorn Forest to the Three Hunters Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli,
and then just as silently disappears? Gandalf says they certainly did not
see him, so it must have been Saruman. But the horses neigh joyfully,
for the Three Hunters the mystery is unsolved, and it seems clear that
ambiguity is what Tolkien intended.
But why? What did he really mean? What purpose would be served
by deliberately conflating or confusing Gandalf and Saruman? I sug-
gest it is the idea, so much a part of Tolkien’s worldview and his story,
that good and evil are two sides of the same coin, and that it is all too
easy to mistake one for the other—in either direction. Gandalf agrees
when he says, “Indeed, I am Saruman, one might almost say, Saruman
as he should have been” (TT, III, v, 98), to which the corollary is his gal-
vanic refusal when Frodo offers him the Ring. “Do not tempt me! For
I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord himself” (FR, I, ii, 71). The
Lord of the Rings is not a story about good and evil but a story about how
good can become evil, a story whose strength lies in the tension cre-
ated by deliberately unresolved situations and conflicts. Leaving such
conflicts unresolved allowed their author to tap into that “reservoir of
power” below the visible world. It enabled him to “not only change the
visible forms of things already existent, but spout up with a boundless
wealth forms of things never before known.”
Notes
1. S‌ ecrets of the Flesh (xvi).

2. And even here his position is somewhat suspect, for his own note
to this statement to Auden says, “take the Ents for instance. I did
164
not consciously invent them at all” (Letters 211), whereas Christo-

pher Tolkien’s examination of the relevant material in The Return
of the Shadow and The Treason of Isengard makes it clear that at least
enough revision went on to change Treebeard from his original
character as Treebeard the Giant to Treebeard the Ent, and from
bad guy on the side of Sauron to good guy on nobody’s side but
the trees.’
3. He may also have had in mind the explicit Christian content of C.
S. Lewis’s children’s fantasy The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,
published just a year before, which he disliked.
4. The only play mentioned, and relegated to a note at that, is J. M.
Barrie’s Mary Rose, a play not presented by elves to men but by
men to other men, though it does deal with elven-human interac-
tion. The note is important, however, as a clue to those “abundant
records” now described as, “stories telling how men and women
have disappeared and spent years among the fairies, without notic-
ing the passage of time, or appearing to grow older” (OFS 82). He
adds, that, “Many of the short folk-lore accounts of such incidents
purport to be just pieces of ‘evidence’ about fairies, items in an
agelong accumulation of ‘lore’ concerning them and the modes
of their existence” (OFS 83). These I take to mean collections of
folk and fairy lore such as The Denham Tracts, Thomas Keightley’s
The Fairy Mythology, John Rhys’s Celtic Folklore, and MacDougall and
Calder’s Folktales and Fairy Lore in Gaelic and English.
There exist more literary, or mythic, examples as well, for in-
stance the Irish tale type called echtrai—otherworld journeys, such
as Connla’s journey to Tír na mBeo, the Land of the Living in Ech-
tra Connla. A related type is the imramma, voyage narratives such
as the Voyage of Bran or the Journey of Mael Diun. Tolkien was
familiar with these genres, in fact he wrote an imram himself, based
on the Navigatio Sancti Brendani, included in Part Two of The Notion
Club Papers as “The Death of St. Brendan,” and there attributed to
Tolkien’s fictive character Frankley.
5. For more on this matter see Shippey’s excellent discussion of glam-
our (The Road to Middle-earth, 58–62).
Works Cited
A Film Portrait of J.R.R. Tolkien, Landseer Film and Television Produc-

tions, 1996.
165
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Carpenter, Humphrey. Tolkien: A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin,

1977.
Curry, Patrick. Defending Middle-earth. Edinburgh: Floris Books, 1997.
D’Ardenne, Simone. “The Man and the Scholar” in Tolkien: Scholar and
Storyteller, ed. Mary Salu and Robert T. Farrell. Ithaca: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1979. 33–37.
Drout, Michael D. C. “Towards a better Tolkien criticism” in Reading
The Lord of the Rings,ed. Robert Eaglestone. London: Continu-
um, 2005. 15–28.
Greer, Germaine. W: The Waterstone’s Magazine Winter/Spring 1997.
“J.R.R. Tolkien Dead at 81; Wrote ‘The Lord of the Rings.’” New York
Times, Sept. 3, 1973.
Lindsay, David. A Voyage to Arcturus. London: Gollancz, 1946.
Pearce, Joseph. Tolkien: Man and Myth. London: HarperCollins, 1998.
Resnik, Henry. “An Interview With Tolkien.” Niekas 18 (Late Spring
1967): 37–47.
Scull, Christina, and Wayne G. Hammond. The J.R.R. Tolkien Compan-
ion & Guide. Vol. 2, Reader’s Guide. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Com-
pany, 2006.
Shippey, Tom. The Road to Middle-earth. Revised Edition. London:
HarperCollins, 2005.
Thurman, Judith, Secrets of the Flesh. New York: Knopf, 1999.
Tolkien, J.R.R. “Looney,” The Oxford Magazine, 18 January 1934, 340.
Wilson, Edmund. “Oo! those awful orcs!” The Nation. 14 April 1956.
312–13.
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But What Did He Really Mean?

“A coherent personality aspires, like a work of art, to con-

works (21). Hoping to find broader avenues of meaning, I have divided

my discussion into three sections, the first on the question of inten-

cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults

me more clearly some things about my work” (Letters 172). To reply

The Galadriel-Mary equation was a popular one with readers. A

opinion, addressing a variety of readers—many of them complete

Elves and Faërie

mind, ‘true’ only as reflecting in a particular way one of Man’s visions

What is this faierie? It reposes (for us now) in a view that

afford to spend more time at it than human artists can.

The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,

Elvish Drama and Faërian Drama are interchangeable terms. Jere-

himself. The passage from “On Fairy-stories” is so vivid and intense

If fairies exist. . . . They are a quite separate creation living

contesting, he found a way to maintain a public balance between alter-

1. S‌ ecrets of the Flesh (xvi).

not consciously invent them at all” (Letters 211), whereas Christo-

A Film Portrait of J.R.R. Tolkien, Landseer Film and Television Produc-

Carpenter, Humphrey. Tolkien: A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin,

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