Master of Middle Earth (27 page)

Fairies and
childhood candy are forever associated in Nokes' mind. So he covers with
sugar-icing the Great Cake he bakes for the Feast because "that will make
it pretty and fairylike." And he trivializes the whole concept of what a
fairy is by perching on top of the cake to represent the Fairy Queen "a
little doll . . . dressed all in white, with a little wand in her hand ending
in a tinsel star, and
Fairy Queen
written in pink icing round her
feet." Naturally such a man snickers at Alf's solemn assurance that the
fay-star truly comes from Faery. Nokes will pop it into the cake batter with
other gift "trinkets" to be found by the children when they eat their
slices of cake. At the Feast he makes a hoary joke about the trickiness often
attributed to fairies in folklore, telling the youngsters that the cake
contains one present for each of them "if the Fairy Queen plays fair. But
she doesn't always do so: she's a tricky little creature. You ask Mr.
Prentice." When no child finds the fay-star in his slice, Nokes laughingly
suggests that the Queen has magically taken it back to Fairyland, "Not a
nice trick to play, I don't think." As elsewhere noted, against all such
vulgar errors—that elves are tiny, toylike, mischievous, busy with magic tricks
credible only in the nursery—Tolkien protests long and earnestly in "On
Fairy-stories."
²¹
These are the misconceptions, he says, that
blind adult minds to the great range and power of their proper heritage of
creative fantasy.

Despite Nokes, the
King contrives to have the fay-star swallowed by the son of the village
blacksmith. It begins its transforming work on him six months later on his
tenth birthday, when for the first time in his life he really hears the dawn
song of the birds sweeping westward as the sun rises. Tolkien portrays this
experience as not merely an awaking to something new but as a sudden
remembering of something once known but since forgotten. Young Smith exclaims,
"It reminds me of Faery . . . but in Faery the people sing too,"
although he has never been there. He then sings "in strange words that he
seemed to know by heart." Years later, when he brings back three flowers
that chime like bells as a gift from Faery, his son, Ned, who has never been
there either, (and has no star to admit him), finds he remembers them:
"there is a scent in the bells: a scent that reminds me of, reminds me,
well, of something I've forgotten." And the Fairy Queen herself implies to
Smith, when he at last meets her, that the sight of her image on the cake has
given all who saw it a "glimpse," which is a memory, of her country
—and theirs. Tolkien seems Wordsworthian in his belief that recollections of
Faery are among those clouds of glory which the newborn human soul trails into
the world, only too often to be erased or stunted in later life.

As Smith matures
his voice grows "ever more beautiful" until passersby stop to listen
to him sing as he works in the village smithy. This music he has learned from
the elves during the excursions he is beginning to make into their country. His
products at the forge also come to bear their stamp, for as he hammers out all
the usual articles of iron needed by the villagers for daily life they
"had a grace about them, being shapely in their kinds, good to handle and
look at." The traveler in the realms of fantasy, as Tolkien insists in his
doctrine of Recovery, is no mere dreamer but brings back a freshness of vision,
which brightens and beautifies everything he sets his hand to. This beauty is
even more apparent in the ironwork which Smith shapes for pure delight
"into wonderful forms that looked as light and delicate as a spray of
leaves and blossom," yet stern with the strength of iron. The allusion
here to leaf and blossom immediately connects Smith with the Tree that runs
through many of Tolkien's writings, his prime symbol for the subcreative art of
fantasy. Smith is adapting that art to his own particular mediums of song and
metalwork, as Niggle did to painting and as writers do in telling fairy
stories.

How he learns the
art in Faery becomes clear in the description of the visits he often spends
there "looking only at one tree or one flower" in its outer marches.
At a late stage, nearer the heart of the kingdom, he is allowed to discover
"the King's Tree springing up, tower upon tower, into the sky, and its
light was like the sun at noon; and it bore at once leaves and flowers and
fruits uncounted, and not one was the same as any other that grew on the
Tree." Surely this is the Tree of Tales, whose interwoven branches and
foliage represent all story, which Tolkien depicts in "On
Fairy-stories" and which Niggle tries to paint. Smith's quest for it is
the journey of the spirit that precedes art. His success in finding it is the
final vision that validates the art itself.

But Faery in the
present story is more than just a vague terrain from which to derive allegories
about art. Tolkien asks us to accept it as a solidly physical area closely
adjacent to Wootton Major, though the villagers never go there and few of them
are even willing to be told that it exists. It has a life of its own into which
even Smith, with his star glowing brightly on his forehead, ventures at his
peril. Far from being the toyland which Nokes dismisses, it is, he finds, a
region of beauty and terror not altogether hospitable to mortals. Trying to get
around its Outer Mountains, he comes to the Sea of Windless Storm where elven
warriors disembark singing on their return from battles in the Dead Marshes
against the armies of Unlight.
²²
They pass over his prostrate body
as if he were not there. Evidently a mysterious struggle against nameless evils
is taking place inside Faery itself, but among these evils Smith "was as
safe as a mortal can be in that perilous country. The Lesser Evils avoided the
star, and from the Greater Evils he was guarded." Guarded by whom against
what exactly? Tolkien prefers not to say. He intimates only that the issues at
stake are moral, aligning the forces of good against evil. He has always
believed that fairy stories should be inherently moral (thought not didactic),
and his own versions of Faery are always governed by moral laws.
²³

The lesson Smith
learns from observing these wars going on is peculiarly personal. He sees that
"many of the Evils cannot be challenged without weapons of power too great
for any mortal to wield." So impressed is he by the magnitude of the contending
hosts and their weapons and by his own impotence to take any share in the
struggle that he resolves never to make any weapon of war in the village
smithy: . . among all the things that he made it is not remembered that he ever
forged a sword or a spear or an arrow-head." Since the elves continue to
make and use such weapons, though more potently, the logic of Smith's resolve
is not altogether clear. Weapons can still be needed in defense of justice in
the world of Wootton Major. Psychologically, Smith seems to have concluded that
all struggles are basically moral and cannot be settled by swords and spears.
Consequently he will make none as a matter of principle. In any case a powerful
aversion to physical combat is obscurely at work here. One is reminded of Frodo
throwing away his war gear on the plains of Mordor, never to resume it again.

Because of
Tolkien's unvarying idea that the paths of elves and men are sundered, in none
of his fairy lands or elven homes can a mortal man be more than a temporary
guest. Smith is broken-hearted to learn that Faery cannot be his permanent
home. He realizes this when he saves himself from a Wild Wind hunting him by
clinging to a birch tree, which weeps when stripped of its leaves and which
begs him to go back to his own land: "You do not belong here. Go away and
never return!" Presuming to penetrate the Inner Mountains without
invitation to the lucid Vale of Evermorn, he is informed by one of the maidens
dancing there that his star is not "a passport to go wherever he wished."
Much is concealed from him by mists, much is wiped out of his memory after he
has seen it. But Smith is not at home in Wootton Major either, although he has
wife and children there. Only to them and a few others can he confide those
excursions across the border which make up so great a part of his life. He is
cut off from most of the population, since "too many had become like
Nokes" and would have ridiculed him. Such, then, Tolkien seems to say, is
the tragic homelessness of the man who lives and creates fantasy in a
rationalistic age.

Smith meets the
Fairy Queen only twice, but these encounters provide the supreme moments of his
life. On the first occasion he dances with her, not knowing who she is, in the
Vale of Evermorn, and is lifted up to five above himself, as is the subcreator
of secondary worlds of fantasy at the height of his inspiration. Smith sees her
for the second and last time by her express summons on a peak in Faery by
night, surrounded by a host of elven spearmen but herself taller than their
spears. Recognizing the awesome being he faces and comparing her in his mind
with the tawdry image mounted by Nokes on his cake, he is ashamed for mankind.
The Queen laughs and tells him not to be: "Better a little doll, maybe,
than no memory of Faery at all. For some only the glimpse. For some the
awaking." This "glimpse," which is all that most people (as also
in "Leaf by Niggle") ever remember of the enchanted lands, is at
least better than no memory at all. Tasteless vulgarizations of Faery, in spite
of the damage they do in driving away discriminating minds, have their uses for
those who sleep most of their lives away. But in those who can wake up, memory
may be set ablaze by even the most wrong-headed, most unpromising imitations.

The Queen has
given Smith his heart's desire, which is to see her, dance with her, and learn
her thoughts, "some of which gave him joy, and others filled him with
grief," for the greatest of the elves have sorrows and joys, and Faery has
its dark places as well as its light. Now by an inexorable law, which she has
no power to change, he must leave Faery forever. "The time has come. Let
him choose" is the message she gives him to deliver to the unknown King.
Since he must give up the star anyway, it may not strike us as much of a choice
to let him decide whether to surrender it voluntarily. But in any moral
choice—and this is moral—the assent of the chooser's will is all-important.
Often we do what we must, but it makes all the difference whether we agree to
do it or have to be dragged by the heels. Tolkien regards the option offered to
Smith as conferring real freedom, in keeping with his ruling principle that all
moral decisions must be free. When Smith, with dizziness and pain, tears the
star from his brow and returns it to Alf, the King, he is rewarded by being
allowed to name his "heir," the child who is to be fed the star at
the next approaching Twenty-four Feast.

Smith returns to
his house sadly enough but strengthened by the gift given him by the Queen on
parting. This is a comprehensive vision of the primary world of the village
side by side with the secondary world of Faery, and of himself in relation to
both: ". . . he seemed to be both in the World and in Faery, and also
outside them and surveying them, so that at once he was in bereavement, and in
ownership, and in peace." Standing outside the two worlds, he is able to
see that he belongs partly in each and wholly in neither, and to feel for them
taken together a sense both of owning and not owning, which resolves itself
finally into peace. Smith comes back to Wootton Major "a giant" in
spiritual growth, accepting the loss of Faery and ready to take up his domestic
duties and his work at the smithy, which he has neglected of late during his
long journeys away. His bereavement of past wonders is to be compensated for,
especially, by teaching his son the secrets of his art at the forge and much
else he has learned, not "only the working of iron." Yet a residue of
sadness persists. The child who is to get his star will not know that Smith
once owned it, he remarks ruefully. "That's the way with such gifts ... I
have handed it on and come back to hammer and tongs."

By what law was
Smith obliged to leave Faery, never to return? And why? By the law of time, it
seems: "The time has come." The time referred to is Smith's age.
Tolkien very precisely keeps count of the passage of the years during the
story. The boy of nine who first eats the star in his cake at the Twenty-four Feast
that opens the narrative is fifty-seven years old at the second return of the
Feast that closes the story forty-eight years later. Tolkien apparently is
saying that a man can become too old for wanderings in Faery. His powers of
apprehending its marvels and translating them into art decay with age. Younger
people of talent wait to take his place. Not that literally only one writer of
fantasy can hold the field at any given time, of course. But it is fitting for
an established master of the genre as he feels his genius dying to accept an
obligation to withdraw in favor of fresh pens.

Reading
"Smith of Wootton Major" as Tolkien's personal farewell to his art is
tempting, and has at least as good an argument to support it as reading
Shakespeare's
The Tempest
in the same autobiographical light. Is it mere
chance that Tolkien was fifty-seven years old in 1949, when he completed
The
Lord of the Rings?
At that age, and after so arduous an effort he would
have been only human in concluding, either then or at some time in the years
soon after, that his career as a writer of fiction was substantially over. He
was not to know that he would five on for many years longer and resume work on
the still unfinished
Silmarillion.
This is not to say, either, that he
necessarily wrote the Smith story in 1949. He may have, or he may have waited
some years until the autumnal mood was on him again. We do not yet know its
date of composition. As for its late publication in 1967, when Tolkien was
seventy-five, an autobiographical threnodic interpretation would help to
explain why he wanted to keep it private until his closing years.