I have longed to write a book on what I feel the importance of all four of these traits is and how they are connected. Sadly I lack the time. So here I begin my blog of what all of this so very importantly means.
Many of you are probably familiar with fairy tales and the versions presented by Disney and in story books. Those fairy tales are full of magic and miraculous happenings. This is not the end of faerie it is not even the surface. Many tales written reveal much more. "The Faerie Queen" by Sir Edwin Spencer is a wonderful classic example. There is a deep wonder revealed. The tale itself is a journey, you cannot predict the ending...in fact the ending almost is a minor feature to the breadth and glory of the tale. The world of Faerie is terribly treacherous and so beautiful. The trait of Faerie is that if it loses its treachery it looses its beauty. Much later this is presented the many stories of George McDonald. His stories of "Phantasies" and "Lilith" are also excellent portrayals of Faerie. You feel in the tale as if you are standing on the brink of something so breathless and vast that you feel guilty of your own flawed mortality. For Faerie is and always will be the land of immortals until we are immortal we will not belong.
I do not pretend to be an expert on this subject though, I am merely well read in its field. There are several who have studied it much more than I. J.R.R. Tolkien has written an essay on the subject called "Tree and Leaf." It contains an essay and most importantly a short story. The short story is called "Leaf by Niggle" and it precisely portrays the Land of Faerie. If you seek a scholastic study on the subject he is the author I would recommend.
There is one expansion on his ideas that he did not say that I wish to make. Professor Tolkien makes the distinction that the story is not real because your ideas of belief are suspended, but because it operates in a world with its own rules and follows them. As long as it follows its own rules you will believe. I feel that it is greater still. If the spell is so easily broken by not following an unspoken rule then how do we see the world of faerie beyond the fairy tales? Wouldn't the spell be broken, and therefore we lose our glimpse of what Faerie is? Yet it remains after Cinderella's third ball and lingers in our minds.
Now we have a couple options. Faerie is imaginary and exists only in tales as a tool for concealing good or evil. Now if it is concealing evil we have a very big problem on our hands, but I think this is not the case. I have never heard of a real man who was evil who proclaimed the words of any of these fairy tales. I have heard good men amuse and delight with them, some very successfully like Walt Disney. But even the good in the fairy tales is not really the whole point or the bones of the tale. The bones lie in the fact that something in the story is alive on its own. We don't write good into a fairy tale, it exists because it must. We don't write evil into a tale, it exists on its own. We cannot force faerie to be one way or another. It exists in the head of every man as a specific thing that is true for all. Faerie is real.
If you wish to study on your own here is a recommended reading list from easy to difficult.
Grimm's Fairy Tales
Hans Christian Anderson Fairy Tales
The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Phantasies by George McDonald
Lilith by George McDonald
The Back of the North Wind by George McDonald
The Faerie Queen by Sir Edwin Spencer
The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
Non Fiction
Of Other Worlds by CSLewis
Tree and Leaf by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim
A Question of Time by Verlyn Flieger
Orthodoxy by Chresterton
Just remember this is a starting point many of these tales are a gradual reading. You may read a while, put it down for a month or two and come back to it. Faerie is not easy but it is miraculous to behold. You also may discover one book leads to another that I have not listed, that is the way it should be, a natural discovery of a natural thing.
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