In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Tertiary Worlds
  • Joseph Cary (bio)
Jabberwocky: The Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society. Published four times yearly by the Society. Subscription rate (as of winter 1972) $6. 00 per year. All correspondence to: The Secretary, The Lewis Carroll Society, Room 16, South Block, The County Hall, London, S. E. 1. 7PB.
The Baum Bugle. Published three times yearly by the International Wizard of Oz Club, Inc. Subscription, including Club membership, $2. 50 per year. All correspondence to: Fred M. Meyer, 220 North Eleventh Street, Escanaba, Michigan.

"The natural world has its laws, and no man must interfere with them in the way of presentment any more than in the way of use; but they themselves may suggest laws of other kinds, and man may, if he pleases, invent a little world of his own, with its own laws . . . " Thus George MacDonald in the course of an essay on "The Fantastic Imagination. " Clearly Professor Tolkien had this essay in mind when he came in 1938 (in "On Fairy-Stories") to make his own discrimination between Primary and Secondary Worlds.

The Primary World is the one we can't help inhabiting—the given, objective world, study of scientist and historian, that exists whether we do or will or not. The Secondary World is that ideal one willed or imagined or (anyhow) fabricated by what Tolkien calls—with a deferential bow to God—the "sub-creator," i.e. the poet or storyteller. His master MacDonald felt that man "pleases" to make a little world because "there is that in him which delights in calling up new forms —which is the nearest, perhaps, he can come to creation." Tolkien more plaintively stresses the agency of sorrow and longing in such a making; he views the Secondary World as a sort of counterpointing of the Primary in terms of compensation or consolation, rectification or attempted escape. For both men the invented world must be predicated upon an harmonious system of laws. When these laws are forgotten or flouted credibility gapes and the structure collapses. "Suppose," says MacDonald, "the gracious creatures of some childlike region of Fairyland talking either cockney or Gascon!" Enough said perhaps.

As one just returned from browsing through recent issues of Jabberwocky and The Baum Bugle I can offer a corollary: the sign of a thriving Secondary World lies in its ability to breed and maintain a Tertiary. A Tertiary World is an enclave or more or less secret society existing in the heart of the Primary World and composed of real Primates who have, in Frost's phrase, "taken an immortal wound" from a specific Secondary World. Your true Tertiate is loyalist to, scholar and curator and professor of, the Secondary World that, like a bolt from the blue, hit him; he seeks out and writes for his fellows. Unlike Don Quixote the Tertiate is under no illusions as to the Primariness of the object of his cult. His passion is purely platonic and he cannot be doublecrossed by reality. Sharp-eyed, [End Page 213] he is a strict constructionist and is not at all amused at what he conceives to be liberties taken with the Secondary World of his calling. Traditionally Tertiates have been professional people (professors, colonels, bishops and the like) though this is less certain today. Usually they are over thirty and looking forward to retirement. They keep a certain distance and their humor is likely to strike an outsider as "donnish." They publish journals.

Jabberwocky is the organ of British Tertiates devoted to the Secondary Worlds (chiefly Wonder- and Looking-Glass Lands—I think I noted a coolness about the phantasmagoria of the Sylvie and Bruno stories) of Lewis Carroll. It is small and purple, with a reproduction of Tenniel's White Knight on the cover. It offers reviews of theatricals based on the canon (one seated an audience of 200 "placed on a turntable which was turned by hand with the assistance of Boy Scouts and their fathers"), of books about either Carroll or his Worlds (the Norton Alice comes off well, Robert Phillips' Aspects of Alice gets a rather frigid Tertiate stare), much bibliographical and bibliophile material, manic lists of things like Alice imitations and...

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