Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil
        Is gloomy, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring;
        Real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.
        'Imaginary literature,' therefore, is either boring,
        Immoral or a mixture of both.1

So wrote Simone Weil. But J.R.R. Tolkien's evocation of a poignantly real good in his epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings, a good at once new, marvelous and intoxicating, shows that Weil's dictum is not always true, and a look at how Tolkien evokes the good in his fantasy, and at how the good is evoked in the best fantasy, will show that her prejudice about "imaginative literature" is often quite wrong.

In part, Tolkien's good is a "real good" rather than an "imaginary good" because, in the deepest sense, Middle Earth is itself real. Fantasy is not merely fanciful, and the successful fantasist is, in Tolkien's phrase, a "sub-creator" whose world has an inner-consistency.

        (The story-maker) 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. 3

Nonsensical and surreal fantasy can never be considered high fantasy, Tolkien believes; Alice and her Wonderland he finds merely "amusing." (Ibid.,p.14).

But the successful evocation of the good in high fantasy is not only the result of an inner-consistency. Middle Earth and all effective fantastic sub-creation is true not only for itself, but to us as well. In poetic response to a critic who had described the creation of myth and fairy-story as "breathing a lie through silver," Tolkien wrote:

        Dear Sir, Although now long estranged, Man is
        not wholly lost nor wholly changed, Disgraced
        he may be, yet is not de-throned, and keep the
        rags of lordship once he owned: Man, Sub-creator,
        the refracted Light through whom is splintered
        from a single White to many hues, and endlessly
        combined in living shapes that move from mind to mind.

        Though all the crannies of the world we filled
        with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
        Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
        and sowed the seed of dragons--'twas our right
        (used or misused). That right has not decayed:
        we make still by the law in which we're made.
        (Ibid., p.54.)

"We make still by the law in which we're made": the surface of a secondary world may not be factual, but the deeper processes which inform that world are those, too, which inform ours. The myth and symbol with which fantasy works is not untrue, but a reflection in consciousness of deeper, subliminal movements in our psyches.

High fantasy is so satisfying and so well-able to evoke the good because it mirrors our world and, in doing so, accentuates and clarifies its deepest psychological, spiritual and even physical processes. It has sometimes been noted, for instance, that religious worship has no place in Middle Earth, and one critic has even concluded that Middle Earth is "pre-religious."3 But Middle Earth and all the secondary worlds of high fantasy exist beyond the need for religion. Religion points to and claims to mediate for us the deep forces which shape our world; no such mediation is necessary in the clarified secondary world of fantasy where such forces, accentuated in the creative process, turn just beneath the surface. In Middle Earth, mind counts for something and arcs into deep contact with nature and other minds. Prophecy and fate do actually yield the eschaton, while the worth and necessity of human moral effort are affirmed. In Middle Earth all of us can live in clear sight of the forces that make the world, a condition that has even been the goal of religion.
 
 

High fantasy is sweet, indeed, in times like ours which lost their hold on vital myth and its consolation. A numinosity suffuses the secondary creations of the best fantasy that has now been lost to many of us who count ourselves as religious are seldom aware of the extent of our loss. Tolkien observes that:

        Fantasy is made of the Primary World, but a good
        craftsman loves his material, and has a knowledge
        and feeling for clay, stone and wood which only the
        art of making can give. By the forging of Gram
        cold iron was revealed; by the making of Pegasus
        horses were enobled; in the Trees of Sun and Moon
        root and stock, flower and fruit are manifested in
        glory.

        And actually fairy-stories deal largely, or
        (the better ones) mainly, with simple or fundamental
        things, untouched by Fantasy, but these simple things
        are made all the more luminous by their setting. For
        the story-maker who allows himself to be "free with"
        Nature can be her lover not her slave. It was in
        fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of
        the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone,
        and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire;
        bread and wine. (The Tolkien Reader p.59)

Once, we did not need fantasy to remind us of the numinosity of the physical. Even here, though, our world may in fact not be as distant from the secondary world as might at first seem. Everything is faerie is alive, while we are surrounded by "dead matter." But if the tentative findings of parapsychologists are someday given a coherent theoretical underpinning, we may awake to find everything alive in our world, as well. Mind, which in recent experiment seems able to peek around time's corner, will be seen to evoke a response in matter, no longer, inert, will be seen in some sense responsive. Perhaps even the "physical" processes of faerie and Philadelphia may someday prove the same.

Finally, however, Tolkien believes that it is more than fantasy's being true to itself in its inner-consistency, and true to us in its faithful resonance with the deepest processes of our world, which accounts for fantasy being "story-making in its primary and most potent mode." (Ibid., p.49.) It is in its successfull evocation of good, he asserts, that fantasy makes its deepest contact with our world and all worlds.

Good and evil, of course, figure prominenetly in The Lord of the Rings, and noting the clarity with they are drawn, those of Tolkien's critics who would ridicule fantasy as an infantile escape proclaim him "simplistic." All of us, I would guess, have felt the sting of uninformed criticism of our "potty" interest in the fantastic.  Even today I feel the flush of enbarrassment I felt at such criticism whem, more than half a lifetime ago, I sat, a sixteen-year-old, eating dinner with my family and watching television newscast. On came a newswoman who, in imposing tones and with what passed for august reportorial authority in those days, told us of the three certain signs of teen suicide. The first who I have now forgotten, but the third, and in the reporter's opinion the most telling, was a "morbid" interest in fantasy and science fiction. Implicit in the reporter's tone and commentary, and in my parents sidelong glances, was the assumption that any interest in such dangerous stuff was morbid. Whatever my parents thought, they said nothing. Perhaps they knew it to be too late to salvage me, their oldest child, with whom the insidious genre had had its way since his discovery in second grade of Spaceship Under the Apple Tree. Times, certinaly, have changed since I was young, but lest you think they have changed much, try telling your myth-deaf neighbor (or your employer) that you have seen Return of the Jedi six times!

Those of us who live in the afterglow of high fantasy know that there is a reason for the growth of the fantastic in our times, and such prejudice against the fantastic stings because it is so wrong, so at variance with our own experience of the genre. High fantasy is not an escape from a drab world or to the unreal, but an escape to a Real that finds its reflection both in this world and in faerie. Good and evil are inevitably drawn in The Lord of the Rings with great clarity and vigor; it is the nature of the fantastic secondary world to accentuate the processes of the primary world to capture them in its numinous web, and Tolkien believes correctly that the good is indistinguishable from the deepest of those processes. Those who fault Tolkien for his simplistic evocation of good and evil and for his not being "true to life" miss the point of fantasy, and they miss, as well, something that is a deep part, perhaps the best part, of being human.

And to Weil's assertion that fantasy is "immoral," Tolkien would respond that "uncorrupted, (high fantasy) does not seek delusion nor bewitchement and domination; it seeks shared enrichment, partners in making and delight, not slaves." (Ibid., p.53) Fianlly, Tolkien believes, "the eucatastrophic tale," that tale that suddenly ends in good, "is the true form of the fairy tale, and its highest function." (Ibid., p.68.) In the eucatastrophy, the good evoked in high fantasy sparks with the numinous and momentarily opens us to the ground of good.

        The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of
        the happy ending: or more correctly of the good
        catastrophy, the sudden joyous 'turn' (for there
        is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which
        is one of the things which fairy-stores can produce
        supremely well, is not essentially 'escapist,' nor
        'fugitive.' It does not deny the existence of
        dyscatastrophy, of sorrow and failure: the
        possibility of these is necessary to the joy
        of deliverance; it denies universal final defeat
        and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting
        glimpse of Joy. Joy beyond the walls of the
        world, poignant as grief.

        It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the
        higher and more complete kind, that however wild
        its events, however fantastic or terrible the
        adventures, it can give to child or man that
        hears it, when the 'turn' comes, a catch of breath,
        a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed
        accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by
        any form of literary art, and having a peculiar
        quality. The peculiar quality of the 'joy' in
        successful Fantasy can...be explained as a sudden
        glimpse of the underlying reality or truth.
        (Ibid., p.68-71)

Those of us who have experienced the Joy of the eucatastrophy of high fantasy will certainly agree with Shelley that "the great instrument of the moral good is the imagination."4
 
 

NOTES

1) MacDonald, George, The Gold Key, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1967. p.86

2) Tolkien, J.R.R. The Tolkien Reader, Ballantine Books, New York, 1966. p.37.

3) Isaacs, Neil D., and Zimbardo, Rose A., eds, Tolkien and the Critics: Essays of J.R.R. Tolkien's LORD OF THE RINGS, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame & London, 1968. p.89.

4) Le Guin, Ursula, K., The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, Berkeley Books, New York, 1982.