Tolkien and the Diminutive Fairies

Everyone knows that Tolkien strongly disagreed with portrayals of elves and fairies as dainty and little, even though he had initially portrayed them that way in verse.  Tolkien famously disavowed his early fairy-poems late in life, apparently going so far as to claim “I wish the unhappy little thing ['Goblin Feet'], representing all that I came (so soon after) to fervently dislike, could be buried for ever" (BoLT I, at p. 32).*  Indeed, Christopher Tolkien asserts confidently that "all the 'elfin' diminutiveness soon disappeared" (id.)

In his class on Tolkien's poetry, however, Corey Olsen discusses some evidence (including Tolkien's apparent acquiescence to a reprint of "Goblin Feet" five years after its initial publication) that casts doubt on just how quickly this distaste came upon him.

One more piece of evidence about Tolkien's early association of fairies with diminutiveness appears in Roverandom (ed. by Scull & Hammond, 1998, at p. 12):

"His size was not changed, but he was no longer a toy.  [...] He need not beg any more, [...] and he could bark – not toy barks, but real sharp little fairy-dog barks equal to his fairy-dog size."

On the very next page, Psamathos comments on his size ("I don't remember ever having seen another little dog that was quite such a little dog"), but readers have already been fully sensitized to the tininess: as a toy dog, Rover is "so small that going downstairs was almost like jumping off walls" (p. 8) and he fits completely in a little boy's trouser-pocket, above a wadded-up handkerchief (p. 9).

Roverandom seems to have been in development between 1925-37; Scull & Hammond suggest it may have been written down as early as December 1927 (xiii) and that the second of three typescripts was likely prepared for submission to his publishers "towards the end of 1936" (xiv-xv).

So it would seem that at least as late as 1936-37, Tolkien was not sufficiently troubled by the association of fairies with tininess so as to alter or remove this passage suggesting a fairy-dog would be minuscule (cf. xxii ["The text that follows is based on the latest version of Roverandom."]).

"Goblin Feet" was first published in December 1915, and "was reprinted as early as 1920" (Scull & Hammond, Reader's Guide, part 1,  2017, at pp. 457-58).


FN* This particular statement is said to have been made in 1971, in what proved to be the antepenultimate year of his life.  He was, by then, commenting on his views half a century earlier.