ABSTRACT
I feel I should stress that there is no such thing as ‘a Tolkien religion’, as some newspaper journalists eagerly wrote following the publication of Markus Altena Davidsen’s thesis, ostensibly misunderstanding this point and, in one case, even denying ever having received the explanation that I wrote and sent to them. Having said that, we can distinguish three basic approaches in how Ilsaluntë Valion members deal with the subject matter. A common concept shared by all is “Faerie”, which is the term that Tolkien used to denote the particular imaginative realm or ‘creative space’ that he explored and through which the raw material for his books came to him. Note the term “explore” here, as opposed to “making up”, a distinction that he often stressed in his letters and elsewhere. “Faerie” seems to be equivalent to what C.G. Jung calls “the Collective Unconscious” (Jung 1990 [1959]), or Henry Corbin “the Imaginal” (Corbin 1964). We also have in common that accessing this realm is one of the basic elements of what we do in the context of Ilsaluntë Valion.
