Why ‘One Foot in Fairyland’?

When I was a junior in high school, my history class took a field trip to Graceland Cemetery in Chicago, a large historic graveyard where many notable figures are buried. Next to the grave of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, another headstone caught my eye, not because it was unusually large or fancy—it was fairly modest—but because it included a line of Greek letters. I’ve always been fascinated with languages and writing; I learned the Greek alphabet from a Merriam-Webster collegiate dictionary in first grade. And I saw the letters “φοοτ” and realized immediately that that sequence of letters, that pattern, didn’t correspond to anything in Greek. So I scanned the whole line and read the enciphered message: one phoot in phaerieland.

That line stuck with me, and years later I went back to try to find the plot again—and found it. It belonged to J. Roderick MacArthur, founder of the Bradford Exchange (a marketplace for, and later producer of, collectible ceramic plates) and an influential director of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, in which role he pushed for the creation of the MacArthur Fellowship (popularly known as the “genius grant”). He also formed a foundation of his own, which supports civil rights and civil liberties causes, and helped his son John R. “Rick” MacArthur bail out Harper’s Magazine in 1980.

Sometime after that, I wrote to Rick MacArthur to ask whether he could shed any more light on his father’s choice of epitaph. I’d discovered that the English author Eleanor Farjeon had published a collection of short stories called One Foot in Fairyland in 1938, but in his reply, MacArthur told me that as far as he knew, the line came from G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy:

Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and one foot in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them.

I chose the phrase as the title of this newsletter because, after all, what do we devoted players of tabletop roleplaying games have in common, if not having (at least) one foot in fairyland?