Tales from the Perilous Realm: Roverandom and Other Classic Faery Stories

These themes become stronger in Tolkien’s last published story, Smith of Wootton Major. This began with a request from a publisher, in 1964, that Tolkien should write a preface to a new illustrated edition of the story “The Golden Key”, by the Victorian author George MacDonald. (Tolkien had praised the story in his essay “On Fairy-Stories” nearly twenty years before.) Tolkien agreed, began work on the preface, and got a few pages into it when he started to illustrate his argument about the unexpected power of Faërie with a story about a cook trying to bake a cake for a children’s party. But at that point he broke off the preface, which was never resumed, and wrote the story instead. A developed version was read to a large audience in Oxford on 28 October 1966, and the story was published the following year.

Its title is almost aggressively plain, even more so than Farmer Giles of Ham, and Tolkien himself noted that it sounded like an old-fashioned school story. The name “Wootton”, however, though perfectly ordinary in England, has a meaning, as all names once did. It means “the town in the wood”, and the second sentence confirms that it was “deep in the trees”. Woods and forests were important for Tolkien, recurring from Mirkwood to Fangorn, and one of their recurrent (and realistic) features is that in them people lose their bearings and their way. One feels this is true of the inhabitants of Wootton Major, or many of them: a bit smug, easily satisfied, concerned above all with food and drink—not entirely bad qualities, but limited. To this Smith is an exception. At the children’s party which the village holds every twenty-four years he swallows a star, and this star is his passport into Faërie (or Faery, as Tolkien spells it here). The story follows Smith’s life, recounting some of his visions and experiences in Faërie, but also takes us through repeated festivals till the time when Smith has to give up the star, and allow it to be baked into a cake for some other child to succeed him. Smith knows when he leaves Faërie for the last time that “his way now led back to bereavement”. He is in the same position, if with more acceptance, as the narrator of “The Sea-bell”. The story is “a farewell to Fairyland”.

This does not mean that Smith has been a failure. His passport to the Other World has made him a better person in this one, and his life has done something to weaken what Tolkien called, in a commentary on his own story, “the iron ring of the familiar” and the “adamantine ring of belief”, in Wootton, that everything worth knowing is known already. The star is also passed on, in an unexpected way, and will continue to be. Nevertheless the power of the banal remains strong, and the main conflict in the story lies between Alf—an emissary from Faërie into the real world, as Smith is a visitor in the opposite direction—and his predecessor as Master Cook to the village, whose name is Nokes. Nokes sums up much of what Tolkien disliked in real life. It is sad that he has such a limited idea himself of Faërie, of whatever lies beyond the humdrum world of the village deep among the trees, but it is inexcusable that he denies that there can be any more imaginative one, and tries to keep the children down to his own level. Sweet and sticky is his idea of a cake, insipidly pretty is his idea of fairies. Against this stand Smith’s visions of the grim elf-warriors returning from battles on the Dark Marches, of the King’s Tree, the wild Wind and the weeping birch, the elf-maidens dancing. Nokes is daunted in the end by his apprentice Alf, revealed as the King of Faërie, but he never changes his mind. He gets the last word in the story, most of the inhabitants of Wootton are happy to see Alf go, and the star passes out of Smith’s family and into Nokes’s. If Smith and Alf and Faërie have had an effect, it will take a while to show. But that may be just the way things are.

The way they are in this world, that is. In “Leaf by Niggle” Tolkien presents his vision of a world elsewhere, one with room in it for Middle-earth and Faërie and all other hearts’ desires as well. Nevertheless, although it presents a “divine comedy” and ends with world-shaking laughter, the story began in fear. Tolkien reported in more than one letter that the whole story came to him in a dream and that he wrote it down immediately, at some time (reports vary) between 1939 and 1942. This is the more plausible in that it is so obvious what kind of a dream it was: an anxiety-dream, of the kind we all get. Students with an exam to take dream that they have overslept and missed it, academics due to make a presentation dream they have arrived on the podium with nothing to read and nothing in their heads, and the fear at the heart of “Leaf by Niggle” is clearly that of never getting finished. Niggle knows he has a deadline—it is obviously death, the journey we all have to take—he has a painting he desperately wants to finish, but he puts things off and puts things off, and when he finally buckles down to it, first there is a call on his time he cannot refuse, and then he gets sick, and then an Inspector turns up and condemns his painting as scrap, and as he starts to contest this the Driver turns up and tells him he must leave now with no more than he can snatch up. He leaves even that little bag on the train, and when he turns back for it, the train has gone. This kind of one-thing-after-another dream is all too familiar. The motive for it is also easy to imagine, in Tolkien’s case. By 1940 he had been working on his “Silmarillion” mythology for more than twenty years, and none of it had been published except for a scattering of poems and the “spin-off” The Hobbit. He had been writing The Lord of the Rings since Christmas 1937, and it too was going slowly. His study was full of drafts and revisions. One can guess also that, like most professors, he found his many administrative duties a distraction, though Niggle (and perhaps Tolkien) is guiltily aware that he is easily distracted, and not a good manager of his time.

Concentration and time-management are what Niggle has to learn in the Workhouse, which most critics have identified as a version of Purgatory. His reward is to find that in the Other World, dreams come true: there before him is his Tree, better than he had ever painted it and better even than he had imagined it, and beyond it the Forest and the Mountains that he had only begun to imagine. And yet there is room for more improvement, and to make it Niggle has to work with his neighbour Parish, who in the real world had seemed only another distraction. What becomes their joint vision is recognized as therapeutically valuable even by the Voices who judge people’s lives, but even then it is only an introduction to a greater vision mortals can only guess at. But everyone has to start somewhere. As the Fairy Queen says in Smith, “Better a little doll, maybe, than no memory of Faery at all”, and better Faery than no sense of anything beyond the mundane world of everyday.

“Leaf” after all has two endings, one in the Other World and one in the world which Niggle left. The Other World ending is one of joy and laughter, but in the real world hope and memory are crushed. Niggle’s great painting of the Tree was used to patch a hole, one leaf of it went to a museum, but that too was burned down and Niggle was entirely forgotten. The last words ever said about him are “never knew he painted”, and the future seems to belong to people like Councillor Tompkins, with his views on practical education and—remember that this is a story of at latest the early 1940s—the elimination of undesirable elements of Society. If there is a remedy for us, Tolkien says, stressing that Niggle uses the word “quite literally”, it will be “a gift”. Another word for “gift” is “grace”.

“Leaf by Niggle” ends, then, both with what Tolkien in “On Fairy-Stories” calls “dyscatastrophe…sorrow and failure”, and with what he regards as the “highest function” of fairy-story and of evangelium, the “good news” or Gospel beyond it, and that is “eucatastrophe”, the “sudden joyous ‘turn’”, the “sudden and miraculous grace”, which one finds in Grimm, in modern fairy-tale, and supremely in Tolkien’s own “Tales of the Perilous Realm”. In the Middle English poem Sir Orfeo, which Tolkien edited in 1943-4 (in an anonymous pamphlet of which, characteristically, hardly any copies survive), the barons comfort the steward who has just been told his lord is dead, “and telleth him hou it geth, / It is no bot of mannes deth”. That’s the way it goes, they say, there’s no help for it, or as Tolkien rendered the last line in his posthumously-published translation of 1975, “death of man no man can mend”. The barons are compassionate, well-intentioned, and above all sensible: that is the way things go. But the poem proves them wrong, just this once, for Orfeo is alive, and has rescued his queen from captivity in Faërie as well. We find the same “turn” in The Lord of the Rings, as Sam, who has lain down to die on Mount Doom after the destruction of the Ring, wakes to find himself alive, rescued, and faced by the resurrected Gandalf. There is joy in the Perilous Realm, and on its Dark Marches too, all the stronger for the real-life sorrows and losses which it challenges and surmounts.

TOM SHIPPEY

ROVERANDOM

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