The Price of Ilúvatar's Gift?

… fairy-stories are not in normal English usage stories about fairies or elves, but stories about Fairy, that is Faërie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being. Faërie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it 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.

(OFS, 32, ¶ 10, emphasis original)

As interesting and lovely as this section of On Fairy-stories is, we seldom note its implication that mortal men are the only parts of creation not by nature a part of the 'realm or state' of Faërie. Enchantment alone brings us within its borders. But when we recall another passage in Tolkien where mortal men are also singled out as unique, the two together become truly fascinating.

‘But to the Atani I will give a new gift’ [said Ilúvatar]. Therefore he willed that the hearts of Men should seek beyond the world and should find no rest therein; but they should have a virtue to shape their life, amid the powers and chances of the world, beyond the Music of the Ainur, which is as fate to all things else; and of their operation everything should be, in form and deed, completed, and the world fulfilled unto the last and smallest.

(S, 41-42, emphasis mine)

So without the benefit of enchantment Men cannot inhabit Faërie, but for all those things and creatures that do, the Music of the Ainur is 'as fate.'  There is thus a dimension to the existence of Arda and everything in it that Men do not ordinarily perceive and in which they have no part. The 'being' of Men is not in Faërie, just as the being of the Elves is not beyond it. The existence of each has an element which the other does not share. Faërie lies parallel to whatever awaits Men 'beyond the world,'

It will be interesting to see where this might lead.

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Works Consulted 

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A. E. Housman, Fragment of a Greek Tragedy

A. E. Housman, by  Francis Dodd

If you're not familiar with Housman's parody of Greek Tragedy, you don't know what you been missing. If you've ever read Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides in the original, this will be an amazing treat.

FRAGMENT OF A GREEK TRAGEDY

by A. E. Housman

                CHORUS:  O suitably-attired-in-leather-boots
          Head of a traveller, wherefore seeking whom
          Whence by what way how purposed art thou come
          To this well-nightingaled vicinity?
          My object in inquiring is to know.
          But if you happen to be deaf and dumb
          And do not understand a word I say,
          Then wave your hand, to signify as much.

                ALCMAEON: I journeyed hither a Boetian road.
                CHORUS: Sailing on horseback, or with feet for oars?
                ALCMAEON: Plying with speed my partnership of legs.
                CHORUS: Beneath a shining or a rainy Zeus?
                ALCMAEON: Mud's sister, not himself, adorns my shoes.
                CHORUS: To learn your name would not displease me much.
                ALCMAEON: Not all that men desire do they obtain.
                CHORUS: Might I then hear at what thy presence shoots.
                ALCMAEON: A shepherd's questioned mouth informed me that--
                CHORUS: What? for I know not yet what you will say.
                ALCMAEON: Nor will you ever, if you interrupt.
                CHORUS: Proceed, and I will hold my speechless tongue.
                ALCMAEON: This house was Eriphyle's, no one else's.
                CHORUS: Nor did he shame his throat with shameful lies.
                ALCMAEON: May I then enter, passing through the door?
                CHORUS: Go chase into the house a lucky foot.
          And, O my son, be, on the one hand, good,
          And do not, on the other hand, be bad;
          For that is very much the safest plan.
                ALCMAEON: I go into the house with heels and speed.

                CHORUS

                         Strophe

          In speculation
          I would not willingly acquire a name
                For ill-digested thought;
                But after pondering much
          To this conclusion I at last have come:
                LIFE IS UNCERTAIN.
                This truth I have written deep
                In my reflective midriff
                On tablets not of wax,
          Nor with a pen did I inscribe it there,
          For many reasons:  LIFE, I say, IS NOT
                A STRANGER TO UNCERTAINTY.
          Not from the flight of omen-yelling fowls
                This fact did I discover,
          Nor did the Delphine tripod bark it out,
                Nor yet Dodona.
          Its native ingenuity sufficed
                My self-taught diaphragm.

                       Antistrophe

                Why should I mention
          The Inachean daughter, loved of Zeus?
                Her whom of old the gods,
                More provident than kind,
          Provided with four hoofs, two horns, one tail,
                A gift not asked for,
                And sent her forth to learn
                The unfamiliar science
                Of how to chew the cud.
          She therefore, all about the Argive fields,
          Went cropping pale green grass and nettle-tops,
                Nor did they disagree with her.
          But yet, howe'er nutritious, such repasts
                I do not hanker after:
          Never may Cypris for her seat select
                My dappled liver!
          Why should I mention Io?  Why indeed?
                I have no notion why.

                      Epode

                But now does my boding heart,
                Unhired, unaccompanied, sing
                A strain not meet for the dance.
                Yes even the palace appears
                To my yoke of circular eyes
                (The right, nor omit I the left)
                Like a slaughterhouse, so to speak,
                Garnished with woolly deaths
                And many sphipwrecks of cows.
          I therefore in a Cissian strain lament:
                And to the rapid
                Loud, linen-tattering thumps upon my chest
                Resounds in concert
          The battering of my unlucky head.

                ERIPHYLE (within): O, I am smitten with a hatchet's jaw;
          And that in deed and not in word alone.
                CHORUS: I thought I heard a sound within the house
          Unlike the voice of one that jumps for joy.
                ERIPHYLE: He splits my skull, not in a friendly way,
          Once more: he purposes to kill me dead.
                CHORUS: I would not be reputed rash, but yet
          I doubt if all be gay within the house.
                ERIPHYLE: O! O! another stroke! that makes the third.
          He stabs me to the heart against my wish.
                CHORUS:  If that be so, thy state of health is poor;
          But thine arithmetic is quite correct.

'And I'll bear no weapon, fair or foul' (RK 6.iii.937-38)

'There, I'll be an orc no more,' he cried, 'and I'll bear no weapon, fair or foul. Let them take me, if they will!' 

Sam did likewise, and put aside his orc-gear; and he took out all the things in his pack. Somehow each of them had become dear to him, if only because he had borne them so far with so much toil. Hardest of all it was to part with his cooking-gear. Tears welled in his eyes at the thought of casting it away.

...

With that he carried all the gear away to one of the many gaping fissures that scored the land and threw them in. The clatter of his precious pans as they fell down into the dark was like a death-knell to his heart.

(RK 6.iii.937-38)

Three quick remarks:

1) As Frodo utters these words, the most powerful weapon in the history of Middle-earth is hanging around his neck. He's heard it described as such by Boromir (FR 2.ii.267) and also, though unwittingly, by Faramir (TT 4.v.671). He has already used it himself to daunt and threaten Gollum (TT 4.i.618; iii.640; vi.687).

2) The words I have omitted contain Frodo's famous 'no taste of food, no feel of water' remarks in which he states that all else but the Ring is fading away for him. So he is keenly and painfully aware of it at all times.

3) Sam is the only one who can throw his precious into the pit, just as he was the only one who could give up the Ring with little or no hesitation (RK 6.i.911-12).

No irony in Tolkien?

In the Realm of Useless Footnotes, Part Two

'I have had v. little time for general reading. I began Moby Dick [footnote] on the weekend when term ended, and thought, despite its obvious defects of rhetoric & un-dramatic dialogue, that I liked it: but somehow I feel no inclination to go on.'

C S Lewis

Letter of 3 April 1930

And yes, the footnote informs us that Moby Dick is indeed Moby Dick, and that its author is Herman Melville.

Is it conceivable that a reader inclined to read Lewis's correspondence would not know that Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick?

But wait. I live in the United States and we have just had a presidential election. The concept of the conceivable has been re-conceived.

Sudden Gleams of Fugitive Association

“No pupils on Monday morning. Spent the whole time till lunch answering letters and setting examination papers. A dull job, rewarded by those sudden gleams of fugitive association that have the habit of starting up only when the intellect is fully engaged on something else.”

C. S. Lewis

Letter of 17 October 1929

He would have a term for it. And it is the perfect term.

This happens to me a lot in the car. An idea comes, which I can only repeat over and over to myself until I get to a traffic light, where I can scrawl it hastily down in my notebook.