How to Create a Modern Mythology
Tolkien was a Successful Charles Perrault
While researching the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns for a book project, I discovered an aspect of Charles Perrault's tales (Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, etc.) I had never considered. Perrault was the main advocate for the Moderns in this dispute among Louis XIV's court intellectuals; he defended the idea that modern civilization, particularly its literature, was superior to that of the Greeks and Romans. Perrault's tales - Mother Goose Tales - were directly part of this quarrel. For Perrault, these tales were a weapon meant to show that modern society could exist without constantly referencing Greco-Roman examples, contrary to what his opponents, the Ancients, believed.
For a 17th-century person, there were two kinds of marvelous stories where supernatural powers intervened in human affairs. On one side were the fables of ancient mythology, told by Homer, Virgil, Ovid, and Apuleius, with their gods, demigods, and heroes. On the other were grandmother's tales, passed down orally through generations or, for some of them, written in what were called romances - medieval vernacular narratives. "Mother Goose," which titled the collection, embodied this tradition. Anatole France said of her:
What is Mother Goose but our ancestor and the ancestor of our ancestors - women of simple hearts and strong arms who completed their daily tasks with humble grandeur and who, dried by age, having like cicadas neither flesh nor blood, still conversed by the hearth, under the smoky beam, telling long tales that made children see a thousand things?1
These traditional fairy tales had an almost national dimension, rooted in French territory, whereas ancient mythology was an external import. Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier de Villandon, Perrault's niece, praised these rooted narratives:
Tale for tale, it seems to me that those of Gallic antiquity are worth about as much as those of Greek antiquity; and fairies are no less entitled to perform wonders than the gods of Fable.
However, this wasn't the common opinion; it was generally accepted that great literature should draw inspiration from ancient myths rather than grandmother's tales, which is why an Ancient like Racine wrote Andromaque or Phedre, not Sleeping Beauty. Fairy tales were relegated to shameful entertainment. Marc Fumaroli notes that in the 17th century, "young boys receiving a humanist Latin education in college would read French chivalric romances in secret from their teachers."2
Perrault's entire ambition, committed to destroying the preeminence of Greeks and Romans and freeing his contemporaries from their inferiority complex, was to prove that the fairy tradition was superior to mythology. Beyond the "Gallic" dimension highlighted by Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier, Perrault emphasized the morality of traditional tales, contrasting it with the indecency of ancient fables:
The Milesian fables so celebrated among the Greeks, which were the delight of Athens and Rome, were no different from the tales in this collection. The story of the Matron of Ephesus is of the same nature as that of Griselda: both are nouvelles, meaning stories of things that could have happened, with nothing that absolutely violates plausibility. Psyche's tale, written by Lucian and Apuleius, is pure fiction and an old wives' tale like that of Donkeyskin. [...] I even maintain that my tales are better told than most ancient stories, [...] if one considers them from the moral perspective.3
Or furthermore:
These Milesian fables are so childish that it does them too much honor to compare them to our tales of Donkeyskin and Mother Goose, or they are so full of filth, like The Golden Ass by Lucian or Apuleius, The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon, and several others that they don't deserve any attention.4
He drew inspiration from both oral tradition and written romances. “Not only was there more invention and wit in our romances than in Homer's, but [...] manners and propriety were much better observed.”5 While morality - Christian morality, of course, for Perrault - had to be defended, it needed to be done elegantly and discreetly: “If one examines these tales well, [...] they all contain very sensible morals, which reveal themselves more or less according to the reader's degree of penetration.”6
Perrault sought to construct a replacement for the mythological source that obsessed the Ancients by demonstrating both the invention that reigned in French oral tradition and its superior morality. But he also sought to improve this tradition. His version of the tales was more structured and grounded in reality. The marvelous appeared only in small touches; it had its own internal coherence and didn't serve solely as a deus ex machina. The tales weren't pure fantasies but "parallel" worlds, as specialist Pierre-Emmanuel Moog indicates: "the marvelous in Perrault's tales isn't synonymous with license to chain together wonders." If there were monsters, they weren't simple frightening beasts: ogres, for example, were "complex and cruel humans, dissimulators, such that they pass relatively unnoticed."7
All of this strongly recalls another literary work inspired by fairy tales - that of J.R.R. Tolkien. The author of The Lord of the Rings, in a completely different context, pursued similar goals to Perrault in creating the tales of Middle-earth:
Recreating tales of national rather than foreign inspiration;
Giving more coherence to the fantastic than traditional tales and turning it into good literature;
Introducing Christian morality without making it too visible.
His most important text in this regard is Letter 131 to Milton Waldman, written in 1951, where Tolkien writes:
But an equally basic passion of mine ab initio was for myth (not allegory!) and for fairy-story, and above all for heroic legend on the brink of fairy-tale and history […]. I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. […] Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing.8
Unlike Perrault and L'Héritier, Tolkien wasn't content with reviving an underestimated tradition, precisely because he found this tradition too poor. But he drew from various sources and his own imagination to recreate this tradition from scratch to meet the same ambition: valorizing local mythology rather than ancient or foreign ones.
For one thing its 'faerie' is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive. For another and more important thing: it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion. For reasons which I will not elaborate, that seems to me fatal. Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary 'real' world.
As with Perrault, Christian morality is present in the background. Tolkien insists more than the French author on the necessity of not making this inspiration apparent, but it is indeed present; in Letter 142 to Robert Murray, he writes that "The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision."9 For both writers, it was important that this framework remain hidden, discrete, non-obvious.
Lastly, we see that his ambition was to avoid extravagance and incoherent fantasy. Tolkien's fantasy is not realistic, but muted, low-key. The wizard Gandalf rarely casts spells; we don't even really know what the famous powers of the One Ring are. Above all, his stories rest on a world whose languages, geography, and history were built with consistency and attention to detail; it's an architecture of unshakeable solidity. The smallest character, the smallest place name in The Lord of the Rings has a logical and justified place in Tolkien's imagined universe.
Of course, this goes much further than what Perrault could achieve with his tales. This is why we can see Tolkien as a successful Perrault. Not that Perrault failed; while he didn't convince his fellow Ancients at the Academy, the tales were very successful and experienced several vogues, notably during the Romantic period, before inspiring the most famous animated films. But he didn't manage to create a true French mythology that would have inspired new authors with the seriousness he expected. Tolkien, on the other hand, created a genre in itself - fantasy - and adaptations of his works have known staggering success. Perrault gave a better showcase to tales, but they remained just tales, without reaching the scope of classical epics and tragedies. Tolkien, undoubtedly because he infused his work with all his own sensibility, seems today to have reached that stage.
Anatole France, Le Livre de mon ami, 1885.
Marc Fumaroli, La Diplomatie de l’esprit, 2001.
Charles Perrault, Griselidis nouvelle. Avec le conte de Peau d'Asne, et celuy des Souhaits ridicules. Third edition, available on Gallica.
Charles Perrault, Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes.
Charles Perrault, Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes.
Charles Perrault, Histoires ou contes du temps passé.
Pierre-Emmanuel Moog, Dans la fabrique des contes de Perrault, 2024.
J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 131 to Milton Waldman.
J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 142 to Robert Murray.