Weird Studies/Fairy Stories (Tolkien)
16 Jan 2026 - 24 Jan 2026
- the reality of the imaginal.
- I am rather tired of this idea. I mean, I agree with it, but want to drive this insight to the next level. Real how?
- The fundamental role of story.
- archetypes and their nature, often misunderstood (didn't quite follow). They are kind of like Platonic forms I think?
- JFM has an review From Nowhere: Artists, Writers, and the Precognitive Imagination of Eric Wargo's book
For Jung, synchronicity did not, strictly speaking, serve an explanatory function—if iit did, it would not be “acausal.” “[S]ynchronistic phenomena,” he wrote, “cannot in principle be associated with any conceptions of causality” (Jung, 1969, p. 30; my emphasis). What he sought were qualitative grounds for distinguishing meaningful coincidences from meaningless ones
- I have to say this makes zero sense to me.
- JFM hates block universe, no surprise.
- A bit about human essence and variability. I agree with them that humans aren't infinitely malleable (an anti-postmodernist trope, but does anybody actually believe that) but wonder how a Buddhist (PF) is so enamored of essences. Maybe I should ask.
The Tolkien Essay
- On Fairy-Stories
Supernatural is a dangerous and difficult word in any of its senses, looser or stricter. But to fairies it can hardly be applied, unless super is taken merely as a superlative prefix. For it is man who is, in contrast to fairies, supematural (and often of diminutive stature); whereas they are natural, far more natural than he. Such is their doom.
when the magic land of Hy Breasail in the West had become the mere Brazils, the land of red-dye-wood
for 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...Most good 'fairy-stories' are about the aventures of men in the Perilous Realm or upon its shadowy marches.
Faërie itself may perhaps most nearly be translated by Magic2-but it is magic of a peculiar mood and power, at the furthest pole from the vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific, magician.
- Rules out Gulliver, Munchausen, dream-based stories, beast-fables