In my last post, I talked about the (dis)similarities between science and magic, and ended on a cliffhanger of sorts: what do we do of the supernatural?
To some, the word may have an intuitive meaning similar to magic. Both, in the common sense, are almost — but not quite — synonyms, referring to things that are impossible in the ordinary world.
Liv Tyler as Arwen Undómiel in The Return of the King
But even in the popular sense, they are not interchangeable. Magic brings to mind fairies, invisibility cloaks, flying carpets, and white-bearded men with pointy hats. Supernatural suggests miracles, ghosts, premonitions, God(s), angels and demons. If you told a twenty-first century man his house is haunted by either elves or a ghost, he may laugh equally at both — by daylight. But the ghost is more likely to make him look around at night, making sure the noise he heard really was just the wind.1
Magic, as established in the last post, is not a breach in Nature, but an aspect or quality of it. Elves, goblins, and giants — all the members of Fäerie, the Longaevi, the Pooka — are natural, much more natural, more wild and terrestrial, than you and I.
Supernatural, on the other hand, is not just fantastical, but otherworldly. Whatever be the law that commands the natural universe (real or fictional), the supernatural is alien to, or above, it. It is not anti-natural, like a perversion. Many would say, in fact, that it is meta-natural, more “natural” than Nature: more real, more harmonious, more self-sufficient.
This distinction leads to an interesting conclusion. We might say truly that elves are fantastical and men are mundane. But it is equally true that elves are natural — literally “of this world” — and men are supernatural. We, not they, have a soul which departs after death and a special relation with God.
For some time I have been quoting a passage of Tolkien which I believe sums it up. Unfortunately, I was unable to find such passage, and thus must conclude I made it up, half by misremembering, half by mixing it up with other texts2:
Modern people believe that elves are supernatural beings living hidden in our world, when the precise contrary is true.
The Dilemma of Writing Elves
This is all and good in theory. Reality, as always, is more complicated. For one, the line between the Fair Folk and “daemons” (spirits, or straight-up demons) was not always clear throughout history. One of the (many) explanations of the medievals was that Fairies were intermediary beings between humans and angels3 — so they would be more, not less, supernatural than Men. Secondly, some theological or philosophical systems may make awkward (not necessarily impossible) for creatures without soul — as we presume purely natural beings must be — to have reason and sentience.
But this we may leave to historians and philosophers. I am concerned with literature. And the imaginative effect of elves is that they are Nature: at the same time ancient and perennially young, eternal Other of Men.
This, however, creates a problem for an author wishing to build a story.
Elves can only preserve this otherness when seen from outside — that is, only in stories whose protagonists are humans. If we bring elves to the frontstage, if we make them protagonists of the tale, we necessarily make them almost human. And, with this, the author risks loosing precisely the “other” character that was so attractive to him.
Humans tell human stories. That is a law not even J. R. R. Tolkien can escape from. In The Silmarillion, he put elves as protagonists, and with it he sacrificed part of their elvishness. So, how to differentiate elves and men?
Tolkien himself answers it, in one of his letters:
The Elves represent, as it were, the artistic, aesthetic, and purely scientific aspects of the Humane nature raised to a higher level than is actually seen in Men. That is: they have a devoted love of the physical world, and a desire to observe and understand it for its own sake and as ‘other’ — sc. as a reality derived from God in the same degree as themselves — not as material for use or as a power-platform. […] But the Elvish weakness is in these terms naturally to regret the past, and to become unwilling to face change: as if a man were to hate a very long book still going on, and wished to settle down in a favourite chapter. Hence they fell in a measure to Sauron’s deceits: they desired some ‘power’ over things as they are (which is quite distinct from art), to make their particular will to preservation effective: to arrest change, and keep things always fresh and fair.
“The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien”, Letter 181
Differently from the elves of tradition, the quendi are not natural. They are a direct act of Ilúvatar as much as the atani, the Men. Both the quendi and the atani represent things that, in our world, are characteristics of mankind. The atani fear death and try to extend life at any cost — like the lords of Númenor that were seduced with promises of immortality and became Nazgûl. The quendi, on the other hand, fear not death but fading. Their fall, therefore, comes from the corruption of this desire. Sauron promised to Men that the Nine would save them from death; and he promised to the Elves that the Three would reverse the end of the elder days.
Tolkien’s elves take a single face of human nature and expand it to its logical extreme. Thus they get to be both close enough to be protagonists of the tales, and alien enough to induce fear and awe. Other renditions of the Fair Folk may have made them more numious or mysterious. But overall, like the overgrown hobbit he was, Tolkien gets to have his cake and eat it.
In past ages, and in some places today, the position of the elf and the ghost might be reversed. C. S. Lewis tells in The Discarted Image:
Nor has this dread [the fear of fairies] ever since quite disappeared except where belief in the Fairies has also done so. I have myself stayed at a lonely place in Ireland which was said to be haunted both by a ghost and by the (euphemistically so called) ‘good people’. But I was given to understand it was the fairies rather than the ghost that induce my neighbours to give it such a wide berth at night.
Chapter VI: “The Longaevi”
To the best of my knowledge, the passage I am misremembering is this one:
Supernatural is a dangerous and difficult word in any of its senses, looser or stricter. But to fairies it can hardly be applied, unless super is taken merely as a superlative prefix. For it is man who is, in contrast to fairies, supernatural (and often of diminutive stature); whereas they are natural, far more natural than he. Such is their doom. The road to fairyland is not the road to Heaven; nor even to Hell, I believe, though some have held that it may lead thither indirectly by the Devil's tithe.
“On Fairy-Stories”, J. R. R. Tolkien
“The Discarted Image”, C. S. Lewis, Chapter VI: “The Longaevi”