Entering Faerie

 From a very young age I was obsessed with fairies. I'm sorry, you didn't read that right the first time. Obsessed. I was as obsessed with fairies then as I am with writing now. (For those who know me well, they may be thinking as they read this that that's impossible.) So, like all literate, obsessed people, I read everything I could about fairies. I only started to suspect the stories weren't true when I realized how different the fairies in J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan were from Cecily Mary Barker's flower fairies. (You should totally look up Cecily Mary Barker if you or a loved one are obsessed with fairies.) I never, however, suspected that fairies themselves weren't real, or at least, I never suspected they were incapable of being real. (That is the difference between believing in fairies and believing in the possibility of fairies.)

Then, this year, I read JRR Tolkien's long essay "On Fairy Stories." BAM. I understood my childhood obsession flawlessly. I was obsessed with fairies because I longed for Faerie, their world.

Please, dear reader. Go read Tree and Leaf, a collection of works by Tolkien. It includes "On Fairy Stories," "Mythopoeia," and "Leaf by Niggle." The first is academic, but it is also as earthy as Tolkien's fiction, and you can hear him speaking to you the whole time, even if it is imposingly long. The second is a poem. It is long but not imposingly long, and anyone who loves poetry or Creation (which may be one and the same) will enjoy it immensely. The third is a short-ish story about a struggling artist named Niggle, who loved to paint leaves but tended to neglect practical duties. All three works will show you much about Faerie, if not about fairies, and it has to be all three, not just one or two, because they all speak to and about each other.

(A Note to Those Who are Not Giant Tolkien Nerds: I am not a giant Tolkien nerd, either. I enjoyed The Hobbit but not The Lord of the Rings. The only reason I read Tree and Leaf in the first place was for a literature class. I know that Tolkien sounds intimidating. It isn’t as bad as you think; mostly The Lord of the Rings is so intimidating because it’s high fantasy and Tolkien was having fun with language. Forgive him; you know what it’s like to write a story.)

(A Note to Those Who ARE Giant Tolkien Nerds: sorry and please don’t stab me to death. You know who you are, Puck.)