Offering: March 16, 2025
The detachable heart & other motifs in the Perilous Realm
I’m watching Lord of the Rings for the first time, and thinking about myths and fairytales for what feels like the thousandth. I’ve been revisiting J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay “On fairy-stories” which I skimmed years ago, but never read closely. At the start of the essay, Tolkien identifies himself as a non-expert on fairy-stories, noting that while he’s been fortunate to wander plenty in fairyland, he lacks the qualifications to speak authoritatively on the topic.
But he also says that regardless of one’s expertise, what’s most important about fairytales is notoriously hard to nail down. “Fairy gold too often turns to withered leaves when it is brought away,” he writes. Taking into account all his shortcomings, he hopes nonetheless that readers will “receive my withered leaves, as a token that my hand at least once held a little of the gold.”
Fairy stories for Tolkien are not only tales about fairies or elves. Fairy stories are tales about Fairie, “the realm or state in which fairies have their being.” This is a realm that “holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men when we are enchanted.” I love the idea that we’re in the realm of the fairie when we are enchanted. I think we’re enchanted a lot more than we realize, and have been thinking especially about enchantment and falling in love.
What makes something a fairy tale isn’t dependent on whether or not it involves elves or fairies but rather on its dealings with what Tolkien calls “the Perilous Realm itself, and the air that blows in that country.” He doesn’t attempt to define or even describe the Perilous Realm because for him, a scholar of language, “Faerie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible.”
Tolkien, who was also a scholar of language, does take one crack at translating Fairie directly as “magic.” But he makes sure to add that it is a particular sort of magic, “of a peculiar mood and power.” And if there is any fun to be made in a fairytale—and there often is—he asserts that the magic itself is strictly off-limits, not to be poked fun at in the tales. The magic in fairy-stories must be “neither laughed at nor explained away.”
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If you’ve been reading for long, you know that I’ve been working with poet and novelist James Stephens’ telling of Tuan Mac Cairill for years and in greater depth recently. Legend has it that Tuan was among the first human settlers on Ireland. When a disease killed everyone in his village, he was the only survivor. After twenty years without human contact, Tuan saw ships coming in from a distance. Without thinking, he wove dreams around each one of the passengers1—of futures and stories and hunting trips and shared meals—and made his way toward the beach, where he’d greet them. But a storm quickly rolled in, and all the ships wrecked. And with the thousand possibilities that went down that day, Tuan’s sense of self shattered so severely that he went to sleep wailing and woke up a stag. And so began his process of living and dying. As stag, boar, hawk, salmon, and finally again as a boy.
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Stephens’ telling of Tuan Mac Cairill is in his collection called Irish Fairy Tales. I’ve often wondered why Stephens called the stories fairy and not folk but indeed, Tuan counts as fairy tale by Tolkien’s standards. It doesn’t concern fairies directly, but it does deal with the “Perilous Realm.” In this case, the Perilous Realm is the realm of significant losses. Per Tolkien’s criteria magic abounds in the story, but is never made fun of.
Tolkien thought fairy stories dealt with “primordial” human yearnings, among which he said included the desire “to survey the depths of space and time” and “to hold communion with other living things.” He also thought there was a human desire to understand languages of more-than-human beings, and that the true purpose of Fairie had something to do with this longing.
By these counts Tuan’s is a fairy-story, for sure. In his multiple lives as stag, boar, hawk and salmon, he experiences supernormal depths of space and time. He gets to live longer than one average life through a self that's dispersed across multiple bodies on all different terrains; land, air, and sea. As he’s born into new bodies and new situations, he also learns to commune across species. Each time he loses, he’s tasked with re-learning the world from a new vantage point.
And while I can’t speak for others of course, Tuan’s tale fulfills my own longing for what Tolkien describes as an essential desire that fairy-stories also appeal to, for “the realization, independent of the conceiving mind, of imagined wonder.” I encountered this story first in the spring of 2020, and I haven’t stopped wondering about it since. It’s a sort of insatiable wonder, without being frustrating. The more I wonder, the more attention I pay, the more expansive it feels, the more I feel myself held by the story. And through all that, I’m left wondering more.
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