In the sixties, as Tolkien’s hobbit and elves set sail across the wide Atlantic, I was a child growing up in an American working class family. My stepfather was a truck driver, often unemployed, usually drunk; my mother held the family together working two, or three, or even four jobs at once, all of them underpaid, demoralizing, and exhausting. Our small household was not unique, for this was the industrial Northeast where the steel works and the factories that had sustained the previous generations were now all closing down, one after another, and moving south. Another thing that was not unique was the daily violence in our home — violence that broke bones, left scars, and sent us children to the hospital where jaded, overworked doctors (in those days before child abuse reporting laws) stitched and plastered and bandaged us up and sent us back home again. There was nothing remarkable in this. Neighborhood kids sported black eyes too; their fathers were also out of work. That these men were angry was something we all knew. That they were frightened is something I only later understood. My stepfather had nothing out in the world, but at home he could still rule as king, and the one measure of manhood that he had left lay in his fists. My brothers and I didn’t need Hitler’s bombs to understand how Sauron came to be; we didn’t need the Third Reich to make us feel as helpless as hobbits.

It wasn’t until I turned fourteen that I discovered Tolkien’s books. I began The Fellowship of the Ring on the school bus sometime during that year, reading with pure amazement as Middle–earth opened up before me. Culture, back then, came largely from the radio and the television, where The Brady Bunch strained credulity far more than any fairy–story. But here, here, in this fantasy book I found reality, and truth — for ours was a childhood in which good and evil were not abstract concepts. Here, the mortal battle between the two had become a tangible thing. Darkness spread over Middle–earth, corrupting everything it touched, and yet our hero persevered with the aid of the greatest magics of all: the loyalty of his friends and the courage of a noble heart. I read Tolkien’s great trilogy in one gulp and was profoundly changed .&nbsp. . not, I have to add, because those books truly satisfied me. What they did was to reawaken my taste for magic, my old desire for dragons. But even then, in the years before I quite understood what feminism was, I saw that there was no place for me, a girl, on Frodo’s quest. Tolkien woke a longing in me . . . and then it was to other books I turned — to Mervyn Peake, E. R. Eddison, Lord Dunsany, and William Morris, searching through those magical kingdoms for a country where I could live.

Some months after The Lord of the Rings, I discovered Tolkien’s Leaf by Niggle, a volume containing the expanded text of his essay “On Fairy– Stories.” How, now, can I possibly convey the elation this slender book gave me? To understand, perhaps I must set the scene a bit more clearly. Picture a girl, rather small, quite bruised, frail of health and preternaturally quiet. Nights, at that particular time, when going home was problematic, I often spent in a secret nest I’d made (unbeknownst to anyone except a sympathetic janitor) in a hidden corner of the prop room behind my school’s auditorium stage. Terror and exhaustion have never been known as aids to education, and so it was with laborious effort that I made my way through Tolkien’s prose, my critical facilities strained to their limit by this Oxford scholar. I didn’t understand all of it, not then. But I knew, somehow, this essay was for me. “It was in fairy–stories,” Tolkien said, “that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.” Yes, yes, yes, I murmured, excited now, for I’d felt that too. And this: “I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighborhood  . . . .But the world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever the cost of peril.” And especially this: ” . . . it is one of the lessons of fairy–stories (if we can speak of the lessons of things that do not lecture) that on callow, lumpish, and selfish youth peril, sorrow, and the shadow of death can bestow dignity, and even sometimes wisdom.”

The thing that I took away from this essay, imperfectly as I understood it then, was that fairy tales had once been so much more than Disney cartoons. So I went back to the fairy tale book that had been my favorite as a young child: The Golden Book of Fairy Tales, translated from the French by Marie Ponsot and exquisitely, deliciously illustrated by Adrienne Ségur. And here it was that I found at last the country that I could settle in, the water that would quench my thirst and the food that would quell the ache in my belly. For I had been very fortunate as a child — this was no bowdlerized collection. These tales, largely taken from the Russian and French, had been shortened for young readers but not simplified. Tolkien himself had never enjoyed the French tales of D’Aulnoy and Perrault, but I found in their rococo imagery exactly what I’d been looking for: intimate stories that spoke, in a coded language, of personal transformation. These were tales of children abandoned in woods; of daughters poisoned by their mothers’ hands; of sons forced to betray their siblings; of men and women struck down by wolves or imprisoned in windowless towers. I read of the girl who dared not speak if she wanted to save her swan–brothers from harm; I read, heart pounding, of Donkeyskin, whose own father desired to bed her. The tales that affected me the most were variations on one archetypal theme: a young person beset by grave difficulties sets off, alone, through the deep, dark woods, armed only with quick wits, clear site, persistence, courage, and compassion. It is by these virtues we identify the heroes; it is with these tools that they make their way. Without these tools, no magic can save them. They are at the mercy of the wolf and wicked witch.

On Tolkien and Fairy Stories by Terri Windling