The Land of Fairies of J. R. R. Tolkien: Faërie as the “middle earth” between the world of senses and the world of Ideas

This article delves into J. R. R. Tolkien's essay "On Fairy-Stories" with the aim of outlining a giving hermeneutics for the metaphor of "Faërie," the Elfland, in dialogue with the philosophical tradition of Ancient Greece – specially with Plato's "Republic" and Aristotle's "De Anima" and "Poetics", and also the medieval reference of Aquinas’ “Summa Theologica”. The historical context of early 20th-century England and J. R. R. Tolkien's biography assure that he belonged to a Catholic religious and philosophical tradition that claimed the so-called realistic philosophy as the foundation for understanding the world. From this theoretical-methodological approach, one finds a dual significance for Faërie: firstly, in a more Platonic inspiration, as the intermediary reality between the sensible dimension perceived by human senses and the intelligible dimension consisting of the ideas that inform material things. In a second interpretation, with a more Aristotelian and Thomistic hue, the metaphor of the Elfland can also be understood as the matrix of combinatory possibilities through the language of forms originating from the perception of reality by the human mind, Faërie being constituted by imagination or fantasy, the capacity of humans to form images from memory, which serves as the basis for the abstraction of universal forms.