SOURCE: "A Long Day's Dying: The Elves of J. R. R. Tolkien and Sylvia Townsend Warner," in Death and the Serpent: Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Carl B. Yoke and Donald M. Hassler, Greenwood Press, 1985, pp. 57-70.

Among the folklore traditions on the origin of elves is the notion that they are the lost children of Adam and Lilith, born before the fall in Eden and therefore exempt from the punishment of death, but born as well outside the framework of redemption and therefore also disenfranchised from the promise of a life beyond the end of the world. One paradox of the "fortunate fall" for human beings is that while the penalty for original sin is heavy, the unanticipated gift of a second life is a measure of the extraordinary bounty of the Creator towards his creatures. But for the elves this paradox is less happy. Their imaginative appeal for both folk audiences and sophisticated readers has always been connected with their apparent superiority to the contingencies of the world, their freedom from human responsibility and human sorrow. In their enviable longevity the elves are emblems of what human beings feel they have lost—life without interruption, life unlimited. In his catalogue of elfin antiquities in The Faerie Queene, Spenser supposes the fairies to be the creation of Prometheus, and he names the first of their race "Elf, to weet, / 'Quick.'" Spenser's imaginary etymology calls to mind the opposition between the quick and the dead and invites nostalgia for a prelapsarian version of ourselves, a species noble, perpetually young, quick with life.

And yet the elves, spared the human penance of mortality, are not quite immortal. They are simply long-lived, bounded by the limits of created nature. They belong to the world, to its mutability, its finitude, its ultimate decay and end. Because elves are superhuman but not supernatural, their long life is also a protracted dying. What Milton's Adam foresaw for himself and Eve after their fall has even sharper pertinence for the elves. In his moment of deepest despair in Paradise Lost, Adam interprets God's suspension of the immediate sentence of death not as an act of mercy but as an excruciation:

 no sudden, but a slow-pac't evil,
A long day's dying to augment our pain.

There is an antidote for Adam's despair. Under the instruction of the angel Michael he learns that his pain will be productive and that death will lead to transfiguration. In the words of Milton's God:

 so Death becomes
His final remedy, and after Life
Tri'd in sharp tribulation, and refin'd
By Faith and faithful works, to second Life,
Wak't in the renovation of the just,
Resigns him up with Heav'n and Earth renew'd.

The elves, however, find neither remedy nor consolation for their slow-paced dying. Because their nature is more than human while their destiny remains less than human, they are at once the richest embodiment and the most profound critique of the human fantasy of longevity. The elves give the ancient cautionary maxim of momento mori (Remember that you must die) a renewed claim on our imaginations.

Of the many literary treatments of the elves, few since Spenser's have made them anything more than decorative aids to the establishment of fantastic "atmosphere." Still fewer writers have invested their elves with the psychological complexity that would reveal them as paradoxical reflections of the human wish for immortality. The notable twentieth-century exceptions are J. R. R. Tolkien and Sylvia Townsend Warner. From different perspectives and motives and with quite different kinds of sympathy, Tolkien's Silmarillion and Warner's Kingdoms of Elfin explore and amplify the paradoxes implied in the human attraction toward elves.

Tolkien and Warner make an unlikely pair. It is doubtful that either knew the other's work, although they were almost exact contemporaries. Their temperaments and literary sensibilities were so opposite—he melancholic and tardy, she nimble and social; he Catholic and pious, she latitudinarian and worldly; he with a taste for the austere myths of the North, she drawn to Shelley and Proust—that it is hard to imagine them approving either the form or the motive for each other's fantastic fiction. And there may have been an even sturdier obstacle to sympathy. Dustjacket photographs of the elderly Tolkien are so familiar that it is easy to forget that his history of the elves is the product of his youth. While his desire to perfect The Silmarillion lasted sixty years as his rewriting became habitual and finally self-defeating, the nature of his elves was fashioned and fixed when Tolkien was in his twenties. They are endowed with the seriousness with which youth takes its inventions, and the author clung to that youthful vision even as he aged through its revisions.

Warner's elfins, conceived the year before Tolkien's death, are a different matter altogether. Even their name suggests an ironic amusement Tolkien would not have permitted himself. Kingdoms of Elfin collects stories that belong to old ages. When she began writing them for the New Yorker, Warner was in her eighties, and they have that freedom from gravity which is one of the privileges of age. Warner drafted her stories quickly, assuredly, and with an aesthetic detachment so clinical and comic that there is no mistaking that her point of view is resolutely human. The cockeyed charm of her sophisticated elfins, who are always self-absorbed and snobbish, often daffy, rarely heroic, makes a revealing contrast with the grave dignity and sorrow of Tolkien's prehistoric elves.

Perhaps the issue of elven longevity was bound to be perceived differently from the vantages of youth and age. The young Tolkien—for whom there would never be enough time to compose and finish his stories—must have felt the pull of longevity as an irresistible fantasy, even as his Catholicism pulled him another way toward resignation to mortality and the hope for immortality. . . .

Warner seems hardly ambivalent at all about her elfins, probably because she was as nearly free as one can be from ambivalence about her own mortality. She can be ironic about elfin longevity because she had accepted her own brevity. In a letter of condolence written just before her eighty-second birthday, she acknowledged her good luck in having gotten a slightly larger than usual measure of life. Though moved by the suffering of others, she is self-possessed about her own approaching death; her protests are political, not personal. The tone here is a lovely combination of sympathetic understanding, acquiescence, and celebration—as good an introduction to Kingdoms of Elfin as one could wish:

What is man's chief end? Death, I suppose, since we practice for it every night. I understand your resentment at the death of people you love. I feel even angrier at the death of those who are cut short; . . . even more for the young who go down into the pit in battles of the Somme. That is intolerable. I was brought up to think it a sin to waste bread, and I have lived all my life in a world that wastes life. When you shall hear the sudden surly bell, don't, I beg you, be angry on my behalf. Remember all the nets that didn't catch me, all the lies that didn't trap me, all the tar-babies I didn't get stuck on.

Out of two such different experiences of mortality as Tolkien's and Warner's, it is not remarkable to discover two markedly distinctive attitudes towards elves and elfins.

What Tolkien discovered in shaping the chronicles of the elves is that to desire the abolition of death is to desire something inhuman. His elves are, to be sure, images of a wishful humanity, the human spirit in an exalted condition. But in their inability to die, they are also sadly inhuman. Their paradoxical condition is to be something like angelic zombies. They may suffer and mourn, but not die; they may know pain but not release. They are inconsolable.

Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote the stories set in Elfhame on borrowed time, as a passage in "Winged Creatures" makes beautifully clear:

The measure of our mortal days is more or less threescore and ten. The lover cries out for a moment to be eternal, the astronomer would like to see a comet over again, but he knows this is foolish, as the lover knows his mistress will outlive her lustrous eyes and die round about the time he does. Our years, long or short, are told on the same plainfaced dial.

During the years of writing Kingdoms of Elfin, mortality was very much on Warner's mind, not just because of her advanced years but because of an immediate experience of loss. A few years before she started exploring the elfin kingdoms, her lifelong, intimate companion Valentine Ackland died. "I am in a new country and she is the compass I travel by," Warner wrote on the evening when Valentine's coffin was taken from the house [Letters]. In succeeding months she found herself bored, deprived, in pain, but not disabled. She discovered a way, as did Tolkien, of transmuting experience through the distancing mode of fantasy. Her "new country" she named Elfhame.

The elfin stories run hot and cold: they are eagerly detailed studies of elfin anthropology (a paradoxical but appropriate term), but they are also aloof, even cruel, taxonomies of elfin psychology and morality. The elfins are elegant, cultivated, shrewd—but petulant, selfish, blasé, too. The author scrutinizes them with a mixture of indulgence and genial contempt. Warner's correspondence about these stories while they were in draft tells a lot about their motives. Enclosing a copy of "The Five Black Swans" to Marchette and Joy Chute, she writes, "Oh, how I long to give it learned footnotes, and references. There is such heartless happiness in scholarship." Later, she sends three new stories to Ian Parsons: "All in Warner's late manner. .. . I myself enjoy them passionately. It is such a relief to escape from the human heart which I was growing rather too familiar with." To Bea Howe she confesses a fantasy that she would like being reincarnated as an astronomer: "Writing about Elfins is the nearest I can get to the abstract, but astronomy would be abstracteder. It would be a form of thinking, with intensity, about nothing." Answering some questions from David Garnett, she speculates that her elfins rarely fall in love because "longevity keeps them cool-blooded." And she dreams of a second installment: "I am still finding out more about them. If I am spared, I may do another volume. There are three stories already—and a heavenly amount of research involved." Passionate enjoyment of cold-blooded creatures, escape from the human to the abstract, the heartless delights of research, intense thinking about nothing, the picture that emerges is marvelously honest and revealing. The fantasies of Kingdoms of Elfin are valedictory and therapeutic: an imaginative taming of the grief that has been and a serene preparation for the death that is to be.

"The One and the Other," the initial story of changelings, is typical of the mood and manner of Kingdoms of Elfin. The one is a human baby stolen from a baker's wife and transported to Elfhame where its blood is exchanged for elfin ichor to lengthen its life; the child is named Tiffany and brought up in the royal court as a plaything of the elfins. The other is the elfin child who, its wings extirpated and its ichor diluted with an elixir of mortality, is left for the baker's wife to rear. He is reluctantly christened Adam by a dubious minister who suspects the curiously placid infant to be an elfin, "a soulless being between Heaven and Hell and of no interest to either." In Elfhame Tiffany grows up to become the Queen's gigolo and has little else to do but join in the sterile routines, the endless games of billiards and golf, the rituals of etiquette that comprise the daily round of aristocratic life in elfindom. When at last his hair begins to gray—the emblem of a mortality that transfusions of ichor cannot wash out—he ceases to amuse his hosts and is expelled from Elfhame to spend his declining years in the mortal world.

Meanwhile, Adam grows up thinking himself human but tormented by passions he cannot understand. In particular, he is morbidly fascinated with dying; he studies epitaphs, practices dissection on animals, even fancies himself the Angel of Death after hearing a sermon on the text, "For as in Adam all die." When he attends a Rosicrucian lecture on the magnetic air that supposedly makes sylphs immortal, he defines his special vocation: "He was a compendium of deaths. Death, then, must be his proper study. To understand death, he must approach it through its opposite: the incapacity to die. He must catch a fairy, draw blood from it, identify that special element of magnetic air." Here Warner discloses what is probably her governing motive for the elfin stories: to come to terms with death by exploring its alternative.

"The One and the Other" culminates in a meeting of the opposites. On a walking tour of Scotland, Adam stops at an inn where the aged Tiffany, ill and delirious, shouts during the night of his longing to return to Elfhame. Guessing, wrongly, that Tiffany is an elfin traveling incognito, Adam slips into Tiffany's bedroom and, as the old man raves quietly in his fever, bleeds him. To his chagrin, chemical analysis yields no trace of magnetism. But Adam has bungled the phlebotomy, and as he hunches over the test tubes pondering the scientific problem, Tiffany slowly bleeds to death in his bed. Adam is sorry to conclude that his experiment was based on a mistaken premise, though he feels nothing for his victim: "So the poor wretch was not a fairy; and the bedding would have to be paid for. But if the body could be got to the anatomists in Edinburgh, thought Adam, taking heart again, I shall about break even." In his final acts and words Adam displays the real ethos of the elfins, which Warner elaborates in the succeeding tales. Adam has all the carelessness, the ethical obtuseness, the immunity to sympathy that make her elfins seem so utterly other. For Adam, as for all Warner's elfins, death is an intellectual dilemma, intriguing at a distance, distasteful close up, but never touching. That elfins are inhuman is expected; that they should be inhumane is chilling. Warner's sympathies do not lie with the elfin temperament, but in understanding elfins as human opposites she invites a richer appreciation for, a deeper contentment with the human condition.

Throughout Kingdoms of Elfin the Swiftian tone Warner liked to claim is more evident in her depiction of elfin societies than in her occasional arch glimpses into human institutions. This is not to depreciate her sharp eye for human folly; on clergymen, scholars, and other kinds of mountebanks she can be mercilessly amusing. But it is her Park Avenue elfins (inevitably, one imagines these elfins subscribing to the New Yorker to read about themselves) whom Warner finds insufferable, precisely because they do not suffer enough. The only elfins she is drawn to are those who find the enforced gaiety and complacency of Elfhame unbearable: the elfin heretics, exiles, dissidents, misfits, eccentrics, visionaries, and kooks who are always the memorable characters in each story.

There is, for instance, in "Castor and Pollux" an apostate elfin named Hamlet who causes scandal by founding a "Society for Unregulated Speculation" in which he enjoys taking the affirmative on such subversive propositions as "That Mortals Are More Interesting Than Elfins" and, more damagingly, "That Elfins Are Not Interesting." In one of her most delicate fictions, "Elphenor and Weasel," Warner has an elfin choose to remain among humans because he finds that mortality is more interesting than longevity: "Mortals packed more variety into their brief lives—perhaps because they knew them to be brief. There was always something going on and being taken seriously." Most impressive and hilarious, there is the titular character in "The Late Sir Glamie." Following a suitably lengthened and distinguished life, the elfin Sir Glamie has the bad taste to keep materializing after his death, thereby affronting the most cherished elfin belief: that they do not have souls.

While the elfins consider the human faith in an afterlife a vulgar but understandable superstition, given our wretched condition, Sir Glamie's posthumous career embarrasses them. He keeps reappearing unpredictably—at one time lurking in a chandelier during spring cleaning, at other times inhabiting corridors and causing soufflés to collapse—and reviving old questions among the elfins about whether homo sapiens is, after all, a race apart or a race akin. They try hard to pretend not to notice the apparition, but Sir Glamie makes himself a nuisance to both the etiquette and metaphysics of the elfins. "Most painful of all was the threat to the calm negation on which all Elfindom reposes," Warner explains. If Sir Glamie's ghost is acknowledged, "fear of an awaiting life after death would rush in, and Elfins sink to the level of mortals."

Warner loves inflicting discomfort on her elfins, for their calmness proceeds from a different source than her own. Her ability to contemplate death with nearly impersonal detachment comes from looking at the experience headon, neither minimizing nor sentimentalizing it. The elfins have only negative composure, achieved by averting their eyes. Warner's creatures are too passionless and trivial to be convincing sinners or to bear the weight of the ethical and epic struggles Tolkien imposes on his elves. They also differ from Tolkien's elves in that they do not have even a qualified immortality; although they last longer than we do, they do not endure until the world's end. With a life span of a millennium or so, Warner's elfins feel immensely superior to human beings. Their longevity does not fill them with the burdensome regret of the elves of The Silmarillion, but it does make them vain and selfsatisfied—and a little frightened, for they construct a variety of distractions and taboos designed to prevent them from thinking much about their own deaths.

One elfin taboo that must have given Warner mischievous pleasure in describing is their "particular reprobation of demonstrable old age." Elfins who succumb to the sudden physical decline that precedes their death are expected to retire discreetly "rather than affront society with the spectacle of their decay." The elfin horror of aging provokes some of the most inspired silliness in Kingdoms of Elfin, Warner, after all, undertook the research for her biography of T. H. White in her seventies, began her elfin stories in her eighties, and delighted in making a spectacle of her old age. If there is any one of her dissidents who comes close to being Warner's persona, it must be the ancient Queen Alionde in "Winged Creatures," who discomfits her courtiers by violating the prescription for elderly elfins. I know no reason to believe that Warner ever concealed her exact age or smelled bad or glowed in the dark, but in every other respect this splendidly declarative description sounds like a self-portrait and a manifesto:

Queen Alionde had felt no call to go into retirement. She brandished her old age and insisted on having it acknowledged. No one knew how old she was. There had been confidential bowerwomen, Chancellors sworn to secrecy who knew, but they were long since dead. Her faculties remained in her like rats in a ruin. She never slept. She spoke the language of a forgotten epoch, mingling extreme salacity with lofty euphemisms and punctilios of grammar. She was long past being comical, and smelled like bad haddock. Some said she was phosphorescent in the dark. She found life highly entertaining.

Unlike Tolkien's elves, this one disdains consolation. Alionde flaunts her age and enjoys her mortality with thoroughly human, Warneresque élan. Warner's elfins become attractive only when they adopt human poses, mortal longings, mundane heresies. The paradox here is that these opposites attract us at the very moments when, peering closely, we catch glimpses of ourselves.

A few final words by way of postscript, eulogy, epitaph. There may be significance in this symmetry: while Warner dreamed of larding her elfin stories with learned footnotes, in fact she just kept on writing them with apparent effortlessness, with neither notes nor introductions nor any external proppings. While Tolkien dreamed of perfecting his imaginary history of the elves, he could never relinquish his passion for annotation long enough to finish the story. Warner could let go; Tolkien could not. Their attitudes toward mortality seem somehow bound up in their habits of composition. Tolkien's biographer [Humphrey Carpenter] has suggested that he could not allow his fiction to be completed because he was unable to bear the prospect of having no creation left to do. One might go further and propose that Tolkien's fictional world, even more emphatically than his elves, needed a measure of indeterminacy; its unfinished state was a way of bridging personal mortality with the spiritual immortality he hoped for. One may certainly read "Leaf by Niggle"—the story that more than any other is Tolkien's authentic spiritual autobiography—as an apologia for the value of unfinished books and lives. The niggling artist, in the fiction, never finishes his big picture, but he finds himself at last achieving heaven painfully after passing through the purgatorial workhouse. And the landscape of heaven becomes the incomplete painting on which Niggle can lavish his painstaking attention eternally.

For Warner, too, work was heavenly, but without a hint of the penitential and purgatorial dilemma that divided Tolkien. She liked finishing things and she celebrated endings. Her biography has not yet been written, but her published letters are full of the satisfactions of a writer who regularly dispatches yet another completed piece of work to the New Yorker. Her life looks like a tapestry of endings and fresh starts. Not all the endings are happy, but each of them is to be acknowledged, pronounced true, embraced, and then surrendered to the adventure of a new beginning. Warner was much more tentative than Tolkien about spiritual immortality and therefore more content with her personal mortality. One token of Tolkien's discontent is the one-word epitaph he chose to have inscribed on his gravestone: Beren. It is the name of the unique human hero in The Silmarillion who returns from death. Tolkien worried whether people would think it a sentimental inscription; for me, the sentiment implied is protest. The only appropriate epitaph for Warner is very different in spirit and sentiment. It is the one she composed for an old drunken lady, a neighbor of hers, whose impulsiveness and worldliness Warner relished: "If there is a heaven, I am sure she went there like a cork from a champagne bottle."