The story lacks the ‘counsel cold’ that in Tolkien’s later and longer Aotrou and Itroun darkens the mind of the childless lord and makes him deliberately seek out the fay in order to procure a magical potion to aid fertility. Without this complication, the plot of ‘The Corrigan’ II follows the standard fairy tale formula of an innocent mortal’s accidental incursion into the faërie world and its consequences, a plot that, in his essay ‘On Fairy-stories’, Tolkien called ‘Faërian Drama’ and described as ‘those plays which according to abundant records the elves have often presented to men’ (MC
...more
