The Land of Fairies of J. R. R. Tolkien

Faërie as the “middle earth” between the realm of senses and the realm of Ideas

Abstract

This article investigates J.R.R. Tolkien's essay "On Fairy-Stories" with the aim of outlining a hermeneutics for the metaphor of "Faërie," the Elfland, always in dialogue with the philosophical tradition of ancient Greece, specifically with Plato's "Republic" and Aristotle's "De Anima" and "Poetics."; and Aquina’s “Suma Theologica”. The historical context of early 20th-century England and J.R.R. Tolkien's biography endorse this author's belonging to a Catholic religious and philosophical tradition that reclaimed so-called realistic philosophy as the foundation for understanding the world. From this theoretical-methodological approach, we find a dual significance for Faërie, firstly, in a more Platonic inspiration, as the intermediary reality between the sensible dimension perceived by human senses and the intelligible dimension consisting of the ideas that inform material things. In a second interpretation, with a more Aristotelian hue, the metaphor of the Elfland can be understood as the matrix of combinatory possibilities through the language of forms originating from the perception of reality by the human mind, with Faërie being constituted by imagination or fantasy, the capacity of humans to form images from memory, which serves as the basis for the abstraction of universal forms.