Backyard Professor
Member
- Joined
- Nov 22, 2025
- Messages
- 210
I remember first coming across the idea of Faërie in a book called "The Tolkien Reader," in the chapter called "Tree and Leaf." It was a most astonishing concept, and to honor Tolkien and ever keep it in our minds, I wish to say what I enjoyed the most about learning about this.
Tolkien insisted that Faërie is not an escape from reality but a deeper encounter with it. For him, Faërie was not a genre, not childish fancy, and certainly not decorative whimsy. It was an ontological realm — a mode of perceiving the world in its fullest height, depth, and clarity. Faërie is what the world looks like when we recover our sight.
To “believe” in Faërie is not to believe in elves hiding in the hedgerows. It is to believe that the material world is not closed, that meaning is not an illusion, and that beauty is not an accident. Faërie is the conviction that creation is charged with pattern, purpose, peril, and grace — that the universe is more like a story than a machine.
If we lived with that awareness, our moral sense would sharpen. And more important and crucially Our wonder would return. Ordinary acts would regain sacramental weight. Responsibility would no longer be mere obligation but a quest, because each choice moves the tale forward or breaks it. And it doesn't take the magnificent, the big, the grand events to make this possible. It can occur and come to fruition with the samll everyday events. This is one of Tolkien's key themes of it all, it is by the small and insignificant that truth and reality are spread through the world and overcome evil.
Faërie, from Tolkien's mode of thinking actually restores us to enchantment without naivety, hope without denial, truth without cynicism. It makes the world truer by making us truer. This is the same idea that Leonora Leet has in her call for the re-enchantment of our world in her stunning and insightful book "The Universal Kabbalah."
To honor Tolkien is to keep that vision alive:
to look at the world and say, without irony,
“This is not all there is — and what lies beyond calls me upward.”
Tolkien insisted that Faërie is not an escape from reality but a deeper encounter with it. For him, Faërie was not a genre, not childish fancy, and certainly not decorative whimsy. It was an ontological realm — a mode of perceiving the world in its fullest height, depth, and clarity. Faërie is what the world looks like when we recover our sight.
To “believe” in Faërie is not to believe in elves hiding in the hedgerows. It is to believe that the material world is not closed, that meaning is not an illusion, and that beauty is not an accident. Faërie is the conviction that creation is charged with pattern, purpose, peril, and grace — that the universe is more like a story than a machine.
If we lived with that awareness, our moral sense would sharpen. And more important and crucially Our wonder would return. Ordinary acts would regain sacramental weight. Responsibility would no longer be mere obligation but a quest, because each choice moves the tale forward or breaks it. And it doesn't take the magnificent, the big, the grand events to make this possible. It can occur and come to fruition with the samll everyday events. This is one of Tolkien's key themes of it all, it is by the small and insignificant that truth and reality are spread through the world and overcome evil.
Faërie, from Tolkien's mode of thinking actually restores us to enchantment without naivety, hope without denial, truth without cynicism. It makes the world truer by making us truer. This is the same idea that Leonora Leet has in her call for the re-enchantment of our world in her stunning and insightful book "The Universal Kabbalah."
To honor Tolkien is to keep that vision alive:
to look at the world and say, without irony,
“This is not all there is — and what lies beyond calls me upward.”
