Separating us from all the good things

Tom Hillman ponders the relationship between humans and Faërie over on his blog. I think he’s right that Tolkien thinks it’s our fëa that doesn’t belong in Faërie. But there’s another conclusion we can draw from the literature that says something Tolkien would have liked a lot less.  It’s not The Fall, or positivism, or statistical analysis, or the industrial revolution that separated us from the Fair Folk.

I’ve mentioned before that, according to Rudyard Kipling, the Protestant Reformation chased the fairies out of England:

This Reformatories tarrified the Pharisees same as the reaper goin’ round a last stand o’ wheat tarrifies rabbits. They packed into the Marsh from all parts, and they says, “Fair or foul, we must flit out o’ this, for Merry England’s done with, an’ we’re reckoned among the Images.” (p.242)

Of course, the Faërie creatures of the Continent had been chased out much earlier. The faun in Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword¹, whom Skafloc meets in his elf foster-father’s lands, says:

The new god whose name I cannot speak was come to Hellas. There was no more place for the old gods and the old beings who haunted the land. (p.21)

The faun is fleeing West, like Tolkien’s elves. But it doesn’t stop in England. I heard a familiar echo when I was reading the introduction to Alan Lomax’s collection of American folk s0ngs.²

With most of the Southern Negro ministers and teachers urging their followers to abandon the old songs, a flood of jazz and of tawdry gospel hymns comes in. A black giant in the Nashville penitentiary resolutely refused to sing an entirely innocuous levee camp work song since he was a Hardshell Baptist and his church regarded such melodies as “Devil’s songs” or “sinful songs.” (p. xxxi)

They never stop! Fortunately, the world is round, so the Fair Folk, and now the Singing Folk, can’t be cornered. They can always keep going west. I recommend Japan, where the anime industry would welcome them.

1. Anderson, Poul. The Broken Sword, Del Rey 1971.
2. Lomax, Alan. American ballads and folk songs. Courier Corporation, 1994.