Are There Fairies in Middle-earth?

Q: Are There Fairies in Middle-earth?

ANSWER: Since a fairy is a supernatural creature, and all creatures in Middle-earth appear to be natural (though some are corrupted), the most strict technical answer to this question is “No”. This question may have been inspired by a passage in The Hobbit, where J.R.R. Tolkien wrote:

…It was often said (in other families) that long ago one of the Took ancestors must have taken a fairy wife. That was, of course, absurd, but certainly there was still something not entirely hobbit-like about them….

This passage may be rooted in the very first written form of the story (denoted by John Rateliff as The Pryftan Fragment) but unfortunately the earliest pages of that manuscript are missing, and what survives only begins immediately after the Dwarves stop singing their song about the storming of Erebor. However, another version of the passage survives in what John denoted The Bladorthin Typescript, where J.R.R. Tolkien wrote:

…It had always been said that long ago some or other of the Tooks had married into a fairy family (goblin family said severer critics); certainly there was something not entirely hobbit-like about them….

The aside about the “goblin” family might be read by some people as positioning goblins opposed to or outside of “fairy folk” but I think the proper reading is of goblins as a sub-group of “fairy folk”. The word “fairy” is derived from fae, fay, which Tolkien had used in The Book of Lost Tales to refer to all sorts of fairy folk of diminutive size. So this passage may be a nod to his earlier writings even though he had by the time he began work on The Hobbit abandoned The Book of Lost Tales and the so-called “mythology for England”. The reference to a rumor of fairy-blood in a Hobbit family may simply be a self-indulgent blending of two fantasies, both of which are now deemed part of Tolkien’s Legendarium.

On the other hand, Tolkien returned to the matter of the Tooks and their alleged fairy connections in a rather clever way when writing The Lord of the Rings. In the Prologue he wrote:

The Fallohides, the least numerous [of the three Hobbit groups], were a northerly branch. They were more friendly with Elves than the other Hobbits were, and had more skill in language and song than in handicrafts; and of old they preferred hunting to tilling. They crossed the mountains north of Rivendell and came down the River Hoarwell. In Eriador they soon mingled with the other kinds that had preceded them, but being somewhat bolder and more adventurous, they were often found as leaders or chieftains among clans of Harfoots or Stoors. Even in Bilbo’s time the strong Fallohidish strain could still be noted among the greater families, such as the Tooks and the Masters of Buckland.

So in the Prologue Tolkien clearly associates the Fallohide families with Elves, which could be a figurative redressing of the narratively-placed rumor in The Hobbit.

This could be a retrofitting of Hobbit gossip to apply strictly to “elves” rather than some other type of fairy creatures (who could not exist in Middle-earth since all other such creatures had not been brought forward into the Middle-earth mythology). And as the oblique insult (suggesting some gossips preferred a goblin connection) was dropped from the published text it seems plain that Tolkien did not wish to associate the Tooks (and other Fallohide families) with evil creatures, even if we could agree for the sake of discussion that Tolkien’s very tall Middle-earth Elves and their nemeses the Orcs/Goblins could still be construed as a sort of “fairy folk”.

Of course, there is the Bombadil angle to consider: Just exactly what is Tom Bombadil? Perhaps he, Goldberry, the River-woman, and other odd characters who don’t fit in with the Ainur and the Children of Iluvatar (Elves, Men and Hobbits, and Dwarves) might be construed as a sort of “fairy folk” for Middle-earth as well. In fact, in early texts Bombadil shared a kinship with Farmer Maggot — which idea might have been an echo of the old rumor concerning fairy blood in the Tooks. But Tolkien ultimately decided there were no Hobbit-other marriages.

Hence, while there are no creatures which in the Middle-earth books published in Tolkien’s lifetime (The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, and The Road Goes Ever On) are identified as “fairies”, the concept is not entirely foreign to the type of gossip Hobbits might have shared about Tooks in the mode Tolkien presented them in their final published traditions. In fact, when he revised the “fairy wife” passage for what John Rateliff denoted as The 1960 Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote:

The chief family in the Shire were the Tooks, whose lands lay across The Water, the small river that ran at the foot of the Hill. Now that is important, for the mother of the hobbit of this tale, Bilbo Baggins, was Belladonna Took, eldest of the three remarkable daughters of the Old Took, head of all the Tooks, and famous for having lived to the age of one hundred and thirty. It was often said (in other families) that the Tooks must have some elvish blood in them: which was of course absurd, but there was undoubtedly some thing queer about them, something not quite hobbitlike, according to the manners of the Shire: an outlandish strain maybe from long ago. Every now and again Tooks would go off on adventures. They disappeared, and the family hushed it up.

So here the reference to a “fairy wife” vanishes completely; although it remained in the 1966 edition (I don’t have a copy available to check, so I could be mistaken), I think Tolkien originally meant to do away with the fairy reference completely. John Rateliff confirms Humphrey Carpenter’s speculation that Tolkien did not have the 1960 manuscript to work from when he made hasty revisions to The Hobbit for the 1966 edition, which was produced solely to protect the copyright for the American edition.

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