He had a determined try in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ three years later. However this is Tolkien’s least successful if most discussed piece of argumentative prose. The main reason for its comparative failure, almost certainly, is its lack of a philological core or kernel; Tolkien was talking to, later writing for, an unspecialised audience, and there is some sign that he tried to ‘talk down’ to them. Repeatedly he plays the trick of pretending that fairies are real – they tell ‘human stories’ instead of ‘fairy stories’, they put on plays for men ‘according to abundant records’, and so on. This comes perilously close to whimsy, the pretence that something not true is true to create an air of comic innocence. However, beneath this, and beneath the very strong sense that Tolkien is ‘counterpunching’ to a whole string of modern theories which he did not like (fairies were small, only children liked fairies, Thórr was a nature-myth, etc. etc.), it is just about possible to make out the bones of an argument, or rather of a conviction.
The conviction is that fantasy is not entirely made up. Tolkien was not prepared to say this in so many words to other people, to sceptics, maybe not to himself. That is why he continually equivocated with words like ‘invention’ and ‘no idle fancy’, and also why a good deal of ‘On Fairy-Stories’ is a plea for the power of literary art; this is dignified with the form ‘Sub-Creation’, and to it are ascribed the continuing power of Grimms’ Fairy-Tales, the (partial) success of Macbeth, the very existence of ‘fantasy’ as an art-form – views Tolkien also expressed through yet another neologism, the word and poem ‘Mythopoeia’, eventually to be published in later editions of the collection Tree and Leaf (London: HarperCollins, 1988). Bobbing continually above the surface of these rational and literary opinions, however, are other, more puzzling statements. By ‘fantasy’ Tolkien declared (with a long haggle over the inadequacies of the OED and S. T. Coleridge), he meant first ‘the Sub-creative Art in itself’, but second ‘a quality of strangeness and wonder in the Expression, derived from the Image’. The last phrase is the critical one, for it implies that the ‘Image’ was there before anyone derived any expression from it at all. The same implication lurks in Tolkien’s own autobiographical statement, à propos of dragons, that ‘Fantasy, the making or glimpsing of Otherworlds, was the heart of the desire of Faërie’. Making up dragons is Art; ‘glimpsing’ them and the worlds they come from is not. Tolkien would not let ‘fantasy’ mean either the one (rational) or the other (mystic) activity, but kept hinting it was both. He does so particularly, through the whole of the essay, with the idea of ‘elves’: these, he insists, may be (1) ‘creations of Man’s mind’, which is what nearly everybody thinks, or (2) true, i.e. they ‘really exist independently of our tales about them’. But (3) the essence of their activity even as ‘creations of Man’s mind’ is that they are also creators, supreme illusionists, capable of luring mortals away, by their beauty, to the ‘elf-hills’ from which they will dazedly emerge centuries later, unaware of the passage of time. They form an image, a true image, of the ‘elvish craft’ of fantasy itself; stories about them are man-made fantasies about independent fantasts.
There is a strong sense of circularity in all these statements, as if Tolkien was hovering around some central point on which he dared not or could not land, and it is easy to dismiss that central point as mere personal delusion. We are back, indeed, with ‘creepiness’, that quality that ‘Goblin Feet’, in one view, thrusts subjectively on to something in reality perfectly ordinary; but which, in another view, stems from something still perfectly real and rational but which Tolkien was much better at detecting than most others. It seems to me that this ‘real centre’ was philological, and that Tolkien could not express it in ordinary literary terms. He came closest to it, in ‘On Fairy-Stories’, when he brushed past the edges of single words, especially spell and evangelium. These two words are related, historically, for the Old English translation of Greek evangelion, ‘good news’, was gód spell, ‘the good story’, now ‘Gospel’. Spell continued to mean, however, ‘a story, something said in formal style’, eventually ‘a formula of power’, a magic spell. The word embodies much of what Tolkien meant by ‘fantasy’, i.e. something unnaturally powerful (magic spell), something literary (a story), something in essence true (Gospel). At the very end of his essay he asserts that the Gospels have the ‘supremely convincing tone’ of Primary Art, of truth – a quality he would also like to assert, but could never hope to prove, of elves and dragons.
There is a better word, though, buried in Tolkien’s remarks, which I can only conclude he decided not to discuss as being too complicated for a non-philological piece; he would have done better to focus on it. This is ‘glamour’. Actually Tolkien may also have been too revolted by the semantic poisonings of modernity to want to discuss the word, for now in common parlance it means overwhelmingly the aura of female sexual attraction, or to be more exact female sexual attraction at a distance – a showbiz word, an advertiser’s word, false and meretricious, taking a part in such nasty compounds as ‘glamour-girl’, ‘glamour-puss’ and even ‘glamour-pants’. The 1972 Supplement to the OED concedes the point and adds the coinages ‘glamourize’, ‘glammed-up’, and even ‘glam’ (a word Tolkien would have especially hated as showing that the old word used in dialect and in Sir Gawain for ‘mirth, merriment’, glam, glaum, was so dead as to be no competitor). The main G volume, published in 1897, however tells a story not much happier. ‘Glamour’, it alleges, is a made-up word, ‘introduced into the literary language by Sir Walter Scott’. What it means is ‘Magic, enchantment, spell; esp. in the phrase to cast the glamour over one’; from this sense has evolved the idea of ‘A magical or fictitious beauty … a delusive or alluring charm’, and so, pretty obviously, the cardboard senses of today. Tolkien would have been more interested in the quotation cited from Scott, which says ‘This species of witchcraft is well known in Scotland as the glamour, or deceptio visus, and was supposed to be a special attribute of the race of Gipsies’. What he knew, and what the OED didn’t, was that exactly this phenomenon was at the centre of Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, which begins with the Gylfaginning or ‘Delusion of Gilfi’, and includes within that the highly prominent and amusing tale of the delusion of Thórr by sjónhverfing = ‘aversion of the sight’ = deceptio visus = ‘glamour’. ‘Glamour’ was then well exemplified in Norse tradition and never mind the gypsies.
Further, the word was evidently by origin a corruption of ‘grammar’, and paralleled in sense by ‘gramarye’ = ‘Occult learning, magic, necromancy’, says the OED, ‘Revived in literary use by Scott’. Cambridge University had indeed preserved for centuries the office of ‘Master of Glomerye’, whose job it was to teach the younger undergraduates Latin. Tolkien must have been amused at the thought of a University official combining instruction in language – his own job – with classes in magic and spell-binding – his own desire. He wrote of the parson in Farmer Giles of Ham (a figure underrated by critics, but having some of the good as well as the bad points