Tolkien: Faery is Necessary for Your Health

 

"Smith became acquainted with Faery, and some regions of it he knew as well as any mortal can." Through the adventures of Smith (a village smith, as his name suggests, but with a fairy star on his brow) we visit what Tolkien called the "perilous realm" of Faerie. The story Smith of Wooton Major (1967) is the last thing Tolkien published in his lifetime. The shadows hang less heavy than in Tolkien's major work, but we feel terror as well as beauty, as when a fierce angry wind tries to kill Smith but he is preserved by a young birch that stands firm at a terrible price. We feel the pain and longing of the loss of Faery, when the doors are closed to one who has often gone between the worlds. 

In an unpublished essay about Smith of Wooton Major, Tolkien wrote "Faery represents at its weakest a breaking out (at least in mind) from the iron ring of the familiar, still more from the adamantine ring of belief...a constant awareness of the world beyond these rings. More strongly it represents love that is a love and respect for all things, 'inanimate' and 'animate', an unpossessive love of them as 'other'....Things seen in its light will be respected and they will also appear delightful, beautiful, wonderful even glorious. 

"Faery might indeed be said to represent Imagination...This compound of awareness of a limitless world outside our domestic parish, a love (in truth and imagination) for the things in it and a desire for wonder, marvels both perceived and conceived - this Faery is as necessary for the health and complete functioning of the human as is sunlight for physical life."

Source: There is a long excerpt from Tolkien's essay on Smith of Wooton Major in Verlyn Flieger, A Question of Time: J.R.R.Tolkien's Road to Faerie. Kent OH: Kent State University Press, 2001.

Art: "The Shores of Faery" by J.R.TR. Tolkien

The faery of the avocado tree

Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California

The mist from the sea has been burned away by the early sun. I am walking the path through the gardens at Esalen, apple in hand, among red and gold poppies. I pass the pond where a little water snake is swimming, and the easel of an artist who has almost captured bright blue wildflowers.
    At the crest of the gentle slope, I hear a voice singing from inside a tree,

In the avocado tree

That is where you'll find me.

    I look for the source of the lovely song. I see a lithe, olive-skinned girl with long ringlets.
    "Thank you," I call to her. "That is a beautiful kledon to start any day." I explain that a kledon is a sound, sometimes a song or a snatch of conversation, coming out of silence or undifferentiated noise. A most important oracle for the ancient Greeks, and one I value highly.
     "Come into the tree," she invites me.
     I step under the mantle of broad green leaves.
     "Would you like some avocados?"
     "I would love some."      
     She shinnies high up the trunk and out along the branches with simian grace , dropping grenades of green joy around me. 

       Now she is hanging upside down like a fruit bat, singing and inviting me to take all I want. I take only one, but later she finds me on the terrace outside the dining hall and tells me she wants me to take more. She brings me three more green avocados, and lays them on the table next to my black dog. A wonderful start for any day.