Is this even a fantasy tale?
One more chapter, no more magic.
This is getting ridiculous. Or tiresome.
Compare this tale to how Professor Tolkien arranged The Hobbit. From the very first paragraph he introduces us to a ‘hobbit,’ a small creature with its own homely magic of disappearing in a lane whenever a Big Folk clumsy oaf like you or me blunders along. (This talent Tolkien promptly forgets, although later in the tale it is formalized when Bilbo finds the Ring.)
Another page and Tolkien gives us a wizard (Gandalf) who quarrels with Bilbo and then puts a spell upon his door. Then along come a dozen dwarfs to invite themselves to a feast at Bilbo’s expense. Even though the dwarfs seem to have no magical powers or talismans, they are themselves creatures of folklore, and whenever we find them in a tale, we know we are wandering through fairyland. The dwarfs propose robbing a dragon of its gold. Dragons of course are even more magical creatures than dwarfs.
The wizard goes along with the band, and they encounter all sorts of magical creatures along the way. Without checking, I would venture to say that there is not a single chapter in the book that has no magic. Indeed, and properly I would say, the magical incidence (or ‘intensity’ or ‘density’ if you will) increases as the book goes on. Bilbo and the dwarfs encounter more and more strange creatures, and the only Man they meet turns out to be a wolf-shifter who can talk to his magical animals. Only at the very end, do Men appear, and they are no more than Men as we find them, except that their leader has a bow and an arrow that are lucky at the very least (and in fairyland luck is a kind of magic) and magical at best, for it brings down the dragon. And how does Bard the bowman know where to aim? A crow tells him, a crow that has overheard Bilbo and the dwarfs talking.
It is true (and a weakness of the tale) that Tolkien’s elves are not very elvish, and hardly seem more magical than Men. No more his dwarfs. And yet as noted, merely by virtue of being called ‘elf’ and ‘dwarf’ the creatures are of Faëry and out of the folklore of our bedtime tales, and enchanted enough to satisfy most children.
Modern talesmen, steeped in reason and the mundane existence of cars and smog and tubes and computers and television, seem on the whole to have lost their sense of wonder. They grasp for it, as we see by the mere fact that Bardelys and his fellows even attempt to tell tales of fantasy at all. And yet it is like a foreign tongue to them that they speak but haltingly, it chafes at them, and their normal tendency is to revert to banal mundane matters, and at best tell us tales of boyish adventure.
(Composed on keyboard Sunday 9 November 2008)
