2.1 'Fairy' or 'Folk' Tale?

2.1.a The World of Faërie

When reading the essay "On Faërie-Stories", one must be aware of the concepts Tolkien exposes concerning imaginary worlds. It is remarkable how Tolkien establiishes a distinction between fairy-tales and a story from the Fäerie world, a fairy-story. Commonly, a fairy-tale is known to be a short story with a happy ending, mostly told to a child before sleeping and containing a moral lesson revealed at the end. That is what Tolkien thought about the pre-conceived limitation of fairy-stories to folk-tales for children:

Actually, the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the 'nursery', as shabby as old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the playroom, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused.

Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics, 130

The limitation also led Tolkien to consider the concept of fairy-tale within English culture. For him, as it can be seen, it was a problem of content and the inter-textual relationships derived from it, that is to say, what was inside a fairy-tale to be considered as so and by which means was each fairy-tale related to others from the same sub-genre:

I said the sense 'stories about fairies' was too narrow. It is too narrow, even if we reject the diminutive size, for fairy-stories are not in normal English usage stories about fairies or elves, but stories about 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.

Stories that are actually concerned primarily with 'fairies', that is with creatures that might also in modern English be called 'elves', are relatively rare, and as a rule not very interesting. Most good 'fairy-stories' are about the aventures of men in the Perilous Realm or upon its shadowy marches.

Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics, 113

For the moment I will say only this: a 'fairy-story' is one which touches on or uses Faërie, whatever its own main purpose may be: satire, adventure, morality, fantasy.

Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics, 114

There are two key-words for Tolkien's understanding of fairy-tales: 'elves' and the 'Perilous Realm'. Regarding 'elves', in addition to the knwon adversion he felt for those from MacDonald or Shakespeare, Tolkien is of course thinking of Hans Christian Andersen tiny flying-creatures such as those in The Elf of the Rose or The Elfin Hill. Solving a question about orcs a schoolboy had made him in a letter, Tolkien gave by extension an opinion on the concept of elves in English literature up to his days, regretting their use:

Your preference of goblins to orcs involves a large question and a matter of taste, and perhaps historical pedantry on my part. Personally I prefer Orcs (since these creatures are not "goblins", not even the goblins of George MacDonald, which they do to some extent resemble). Also I now deeply regret having used Elves, though this is a word in ancestry and original meaning suitably enough. But the disastrous debasement of this word, in which Shakespeare played an unforgettable part, has really overloaded it with regrettable tones, which are too much to overcome.

Tolkien & Carpenter, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 185

All those elves are butterfly-sized creatures who spend the whole day lazing on the top of flowers or having parties all night long, completely unnoticeable to humans. They are perfect in shape, fateless, careless, and safe from the real world they hardly interacted with, just like Tolkien said 'as a rule not very interesting'. A self-explanatoy example can be found at the opening paragraph of Andersen's The Elf of the Rose:

In the midst of a garden grew a rose-tree, in full blossom, and in the prettiest of all the roses lived an elf. He was such a little wee thing, that no human eye could see him. Behind each leaf of the rose he had a sleeping chamber. He was as well formed and as beautiful as a little child could be, and had wings that reached from his shoulders to his feet. Oh, what sweet fragrance there was in his chambers! and how clean and beautiful were the walls! for they were the blushing leaves of the rose.

During the whole day he enjoyed himself in the warm sunshine, flew from flower to flower, and danced on the wings of the flying butterflies.

What makes fairy-stories interesting, then, for the creator of hobbits? The interaction of actual creatures, namely men, with the unknown side of fantasy, the Perilous Realm, a world where they haven't got full conscious/rational control, where THEY ARE NOT able to rationally explain what they see and so offers the possibility for them to be amazed by magic miracles and natural wonders at their purest level.

According to Tolkien's words in The Monsters and The Critics, we can figure out that a fairy-story is mainly a fiction within the realm of Faërie, containing and developing a cosmology (history, geography, cultures, peoples) of its own. A perfect-fit definition for The Lord of the Rings, as The Hobbit lacked of the cosmologic maturity the former gained. In fact, The Hobbit can be read as a complete open-closed tale with no additional or external references at all: Central and Western European readers are culturally familiar with either dwarves, dragons, wizards and dark caves. And the story is that of a quest, entirely focused on the deeds of thirteen fixed characters, unlike The Lord of the Rings, in which the reader is constantly re-taking independent episodes which interrupt between each other due to the separate paths that the characters follow.

I think The Lord of the Rings is in itself a good deal better than The Hobbit, but it may not prove a very fit sequel. It is more grown up - but the audience for which The Hobbit was written has done that also.

Tolkien & Carpenter, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 42

2.1.b Folk Tales

The term 'folk-tale' is misleading; its very tone of depreciation begs the question. Folk-tales in being, as told - for the 'typical folk-tale', of course, is merely an abstract conception of research nowhere existing - do often contain elements that are thin and cheap, with little even potential virtue; but they also contain much that is far more powerful, and that cannot be sharply separated from myth, being derived from it, or capable in poetic hands to turn into it: that is of becoming largely significant - as a whole, accepted unanalysed. The significance of a myth is not easily to be pinned on paper by analytical reasoning. It is at its best when it is presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit what his theme portends; who presents it incarnate in the world of history and geography as our poet has done. Its defender is thus at a disadvantage: unless he is careful, and speaks in parables, he will kill what he is studying by vivisection, and he will be left with a formal or mechanical allegory, and, what is more, probably with one that will not work.

Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics, 15

The misconsideration to folk-tales, the creation of myth and accurate literary criticism all in one. As we can notice in the quote above, the reason why Tolkien was so reluctant to be approached scientifically (as well as from foreign disciplines) is no less than his opinion on proper literary criticism. A myth is felt within a story, slightly alluded to, but never explicit. The way he approached literary criticism is the exact way he expected criticism to approach him. No allegory, no hidden meanings, just an incarnation of myth with its own context, a blend of adaptation as well as renovation whose origin is not a myth, but its essence, the reason, the feeling it was created to express. So the result would be a new myth, NOT a COPY, containing the essence of the same cultural references.
All the critics who didn't read about Tolkien's approaches to literary criticism, or all those considering them 'too personal', could easily accuse his works of being puzzling, incomplete, superficial or even void, for any scientific approach would soon find no material evidence or reference in a 'so-lirically-emotional' text. Analytical measuring had nothing to do with Tolkien. Art for Art's sake, 'a poet who feels rather than makes explicit' turns out to be an uncomfortable leit motiv for some serious literary critics. But how unfortunate if the author itself gave his own valid, 'based-in-fact' tools for investigation and everyone turned their eyes away from them and uncredited him for he didn't adjust to traditional methods!
Though too innovative and subjective to traditionalist critics, Tolkien was not far off as a linguist from Saussure when approaching myth. Considering myth as a sign, it would contain a meaning as well as a signifier (originally, a marvellous fact and its materialization into an oral text). When speakers get used to ruled associations between meaning and signifier, any modification in that associations becomes an exception, but also enters a classification of its own and becomes ruled. Tolkien defended a somehow more free but NOT illogical association when reinventing myth, broadening the spectre/range of signifiers for a same meaning. Tolkien wanted to keep what myths wanted to say, but under a different shape, through a different story. He rejected allegory for it inevitably contained a part of the original signifier which could be taken as a whole, and turn the myth into a too obvious/recognizable sign.