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Back to children again and whether they find it easier to suspend disbelief for the story-teller.

Tolkien’s answer is “perhaps”, but that the “potion” of excellent story-telling is not less potent to adults.

It may be argued that it is easier to work the spell with children. Perhaps it is, though I am not sure of this. The appearance that it is so is often, I think, an adult illusion produced by children’s humility, their lack of critical experience and vocabulary, and their voracity (proper to their rapid growth). They like or try to like what is given to them: if they do not like it, they cannot well express their dislike or give reasons for it (and so may conceal it); and they like a great mass of different things indiscriminately, without troubling to analyse the planes of their belief. In any case I doubt if this potion—the enchantment of the effective fairy-story— is really one of the kind that becomes “blunted” by use, less potent after repeated draughts.

-J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories, (Children)

This is one of the keys to Tolkien’s literary philosophy. If you have to “throw the camera a wink” while getting the audience to buy into your fiction, then you’ve broken the spell and are operating on a much lower level.

Here he quotes Andrew Lang, who compiled several large collections of fairy-tale literature. In it, Lang expresses the common belief that only children can appreciate a lot of these stores because they are too gullible and inexperienced to know better. (They haven’t read Richard Dawkins so they don’t know that God, or any other sorts of gods don’t actually exist. Too bad for them, right?)

Tolkien argues that children are a lot smarter than we think and that being able to clearly understand what is “real” (part of the primary world) and what is only “real” in the story (the secondary world) is actually key to them enjoying the story in the first place.

The introduction to the first of the series speaks of “children to whom and for whom they are told.” “They represent,” he says, “the young age of man true to his early loves, and have his unblunted edge of belief, a fresh appetite for marvels.” ” ‘Is it true?’ ” he says, “is the great question children ask.”

I suspect that belief and appetite for marvels are here regarded as identical or as closely related. They are radically different, though the appetite for marvels is not at once or at first differentiated by a growing human mind from its general appetite. It seems fairly clear that Lang was using belief in its ordinary sense: belief that a thing exists or can happen in the real (primary) world. If so, then I fear that Lang’s words, stripped of sentiment, can only imply that the teller of marvellous tales to children must, or may, or at any rate does trade on their credulity, on the lack of experience which makes it less easy for children to distinguish fact from fiction in particular cases, though the distinction in itself is fundamental to the sane human mind, and to fairy-stories.

Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker’s art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called “willing suspension of disbelief.” But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful “sub-creator.” He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.

-J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories, (Children)

You’ll find this idea mentioned often in the ~15 hour making-of commentary to the Lord of the Rings movies. It was a guiding principal in the direction of the entire film: Everything MUST look like it’s real – a piece out of history. We can’t say to the audience, “OK, this next part is kind of silly/fantastic/whatever, just bear with us, OK?” That would break the spell and ruin everything.

Now, obviously they didn’t always accomplish this, but they still managed too remarkably often I think.

In describing a fairy-story which they think adults might possibly read for their own entertainment, reviewers frequently indulge in such waggeries as: “this book is for children from the ages of six to sixty.” But I have never yet seen the puff of a new motor-model that began thus: “this toy will amuse infants from seventeen to seventy”; though that to my mind would be much more appropriate.

-J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories, (Children)

I’ve been trying to dig a bit deeper into Tolkien lately. It seems that every mention of him I find in books and blogs finds him quoting material from a lecture he gave in 1939 titled “On Fairy-Stories”. The outline goes something like:

• What are fairy stories? How are they different from other sorts of stories, drama, and literature? (Hint: It doesn’t have anything to do with whether they have fairies in them or not)
• What is their origin? Where did they come from? How have they evolved? What is the connectio to myth?
• Why are they especially associated with Children? Perhaps they should not be.
• In what ways to they differ and overlap with elements of “Fantasy” literature?
• Are they escapism? Yes, but that’s not actually a bad thing.
• There is joy to be found in them. Joy of the same sort C.S. Lewis speaks of in Surprised by Joy. Why is that? It is tied to Tolkien’s theology of God the creator, mankind his image bearers, and his philosophy of creation and “sub-creation” as he calls it.

Good stuff. I have a lot of passages bookmarked for blogging in the next couple of days.

These are three things I’ve come across in just the past month.

What do these folks have in common?

Philology has been dethroned from the high place it once had in this court of inquiry. Max Muller’s view of mythology as a ‘disease of language’ can be abandoned without regret. Mythology is not a disease at all, though it may like all human things become diseased. You might as well say that thinking is a disease of the mind. It would be more near the truth to say that languages, especially modern European languages, are a disease of mythology.

-J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories: Origins

Mythology first, then language to describe it.

They [evolutionary anthropologists] are obsessed by their evolutionary monomania that every great thing grows from a seed, or something smaller than itself. They seem to forget that every seed comes from a tree, or something larger than itself. Now there is very good ground for guessing that religion did not originally come from some detail that was forgotten, because it was too small to be traced. Much more probably it was an idea that was abandoned because it was too large to be managed.

-G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, Part IV: The Antiquity of Civilization

What was so big that it couldn’t be managed? Chesterton looks up and suggests monotheism. Girard looks down and suggests the centerpiece of civilization: expelling the surrogate victim:

If mimetic disruption comes back, our instinct will tell us to do again what the sacred has done to save us, which is to kill the scapegoat. Therefore it would be the force of substitution of immolating another victim instead of the first. But the relationship of this process with representation is not one that can be defined in a clear-cut way. This process would be one that moves towards representation of the sacred, towards definition of the ritual as ritual and prohibition as prohibition. But this process would already begin prior the representation, you see, because it is directly produced by the experience of the misunderstood scapegoat.

-Rene Girard, Interview with Markus Müller, Anthropoetics II, No. 1 (June 1996)

Sorry about that last quote. Once again. If you haven’t read Girard’s theory, his quotes lead to a lot of head scratching.

When I read not long ago that Girard had tried to use his theory to explain the origin of language, I thought, “Geeesh. Talk about ‘when you have a hammer, everything is a nail'”. Leithart has also complained that Girard tries to explain EVERYTHING with his theory. I thought this was clearly another case of that.

After reading Tolkien and Chesterton though, I’m not so sure. They all see the desire to describe mythology and the sacred as the origin of human language. That’s a big claim

This is an important distinction though. The evolutionary biologist or atheist asserts that language evolved out of a need to survive. Early cave men developed hand-signs so they could tell other cave men where they mammoths were – sort of how bees dance to tell each other where the good flowers are. The first spoken word was probably some form of “food” (or “sex” depending on who you talk to).

See how that makes us just like slightly more advanced animals? How is man in the image of God? What makes him truly different? It is the desire to reach back out to the creator. That is how our language came to be light-years beyond that of any clever dog or ape. Our words are motivated by something deeper.

That is to say, Tolkien, Chesterton, and Girard, while all coming from completely different angles, affirm that the root purpose of language is to talk to God, or at the very least to talk about him. Nothing else.

C.S. Lewis was a commanding intellectual presence. He was kind in his letters to fans and such, but apparently, if you met him in person and tried to engage him a deeper discussion, he would quickly drown you out with his own thoughts on the matter. There were few people that had the gall and intellectual prowess to interrupt him.

In a letter to his son, Tolkien recounts a hilarious meeting of the Inklings:

I reached the Mitre at 8 where I was joined by Charles Williams and the Red Admiral (Havard), resolved to take fuel on board before joining the well-oiled diners in Magdalen (C.S. Lewis and Owen Barfield). Lewis was highly flown, but we were also in good fettle; while Barfield is the only man who can tackle Lewis making him define everything and interrupting his most dogmatic pronouncements with subtle distinguo’s. The result was a most amusing and highly contentious evening, on which (had an outsider eavesdropped) he would have through it a meeting of fell enemies hurling deadly insults before drawing their guns.

On one occasion when the audience had flatly refused tohear Jack discourse on and define ‘Chance’, Jack said: ‘Very well, some other time, but if you die tonight you’ll be cut off knowing a great deal less about Chance than you might have.’ Warnie: ‘That only illustrates what I’ve always said: every cloud has a silver lining.’

-J.R.R. Tolkien in a letter to Christopher Tolkien on 11/24/1944

Concerning Tolkien’s early education:

Mabel soon began to educate her sons, and they could have had not better teacher.

His favourite lessons were those that concerned languages. Early in his Sarehole days his mother introduced him to the rudiments of Latin, and this delighted him. He was just as interested in the sounds and shapes of the words as in their meanings, and she began to realize tht he had a special aptitude for language.

She also tried to interest him in playing the piano, but without success. It seemed rather as if words took the place of music for him, and that he enjoyed listening to them, reading them, and reciting them, almost regardless of what they meant.

-Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, p.30

I’m glad she didn’t make him play piano.

I’m also glad he wasn’t always stuck in school, where he would be required to spend several hours a week playing ball in gym class.

Nothing beats a taylored education that is aware of the child’s deeper interests, if it can be managed.

[Tolkien] shared little of Edith’s delight in the type of person (as C.S. Lewis expressed it) ‘whose general conversation is almost wholly narrative’, and though he found an occasional articulate fellow male among the guests he was sometimes reduced to silent and impotent rage by the feeling of imprisonment.

-Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, p.249

Ever felt this way? You want to talk about something deep or abstract and the only conversations going on concern was narrative: What I had for lunch, what my dog did yesterday, how we visited my brother-in-law last week, etc.

Look at your average Facebook or Twitter feed to find plenty of this.

And of course this is always a big part of our conversation. It’s who we are. But how much more satisfying to take a step back and look at some of the big picture items. Can I get a witness?

I was delighted to find that Tolkien really wanted to have more fun than he was allowed to with cool gimmick maps and paper for his stories.

The Hobbit maps had to be redrawn by him because his originals had incorporated too many colours, and even then his scheme of having the general map as an endpaper and Thror’s map placed within the text of Chapter One was not followed. The publishers had decided that both maps should be used as endpapers, and in consequence his plan to ‘invisible lettering’, which would appear when Thror’s map was held up to the light, had to be abandoned.

-p.185

And later on:

He cared very much that his beloved book should be published as he had intended, but once again many of his designs were modified, frequently through considerations of cost. Among items that were declared to be too expensive were red ink for the ‘fire-letters’ which appear on the Ring, and the halftone colour process that would be necessary to reproduce the facsimile Tolkjien had made of ‘The Book of Mazarbul’, a burnt and tattered volume that (in the story) is found in the Mines of Moria.

He was much saddened by this, for he had spent many hours making this facsimile, copying out the pages in runes and elvish writing, and then deliberately damaging them, burning the edges and smearing the paper with substances that looked like dried blood. All this work was now wasted.

-Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, p.220

You can see a really nice shot of this book and the page in question, which was later given a moment in the spotlight of the first Lord of the Rings movie.

Growing up, my own father would make treasure maps for us on our birthday and then burn the edges to give them an “old pirate map look”. I loved it! Where’s the lighter?

Tolkien made an interesting comment when he tried, early on, to try and explain his new mythology.

He soon came to feel that the composition of occasional poems without a connecting theme was not what he wanted. Early in 1915 he turned back to his original Earendel verses ad began to work their theme into a larger story. He had shown the original Earendel lines to G.B. Smith, who had said that he liked them but asked what they were really about.

Tolkien had replied: ‘I don’t know. I’ll try to find out.’

Not try to invent: try to find out. He did not see himself as an inventor of story buy as a discoverer of legend. And this was really due to his private languages.

-Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, p.83

The language was what was invented, though still based on a deep knowledge of linguistics. Then the mythology came later as a way of explaining how the words developed (and they were already developed). The language poured a huge slab of concrete for him to build his cathederal upon.