Many tend to think of a "tale" as an account of dubious origins -- a "tattle-tale" or an "old wives' tale." And yet, as in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, a tale can also be a story that tells us as much about the person who relates it as it does about the subject of the story. In a way, any first-person narrative is a tale, especially when the narrator proves to be unreliable. The stories we read to children are also, generally tales; they begin with "Once upon a time" or "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." Tales have a teller, and usually benefit from being read aloud. And anything, it seems, can happen in them: genies from lamps can grant three wishes, a ship can sail for a thousand years, and Death can knock on your door. Tales also aren't interested in people's interior motives, and require no credulity for place or character -- we are told "there was a town," "there was a miller with three sons," or "there was a mountain so high that no-one could see the top of it" -- and we accept these wonders as givens.
We've been telling tales to each other for well over ten thousand years.
The story -- that is, the "short story" -- is a far more recent invention. In stories, life generally resembles the life we're experiencing on a daily basis, though if set in an unfamiliar place, it will be the everyday life of that other location. People in short stories are expected to think and behave in a way we can understand, in which we can discern motives, desires, fears, and doubts. And, although in the special domain of "magical realism" (think Like Water for Chocolate), extraordinary things can happen, psychological "realism" still rules. No castles, no orcs, no boot-wearing cats, and no hobbits, alas, are to be found in literary short fiction.
"Leaf by Niggle," whatever else it is, is certainly a "tale"-- and yet, it's not like other tales. It's not quite a "fairy tale" -- things don't end happily ever after, at least not initially. Most tales don't have neighbors with leaky roofs, or extended periods when their main characters are in a sort of workhouse. Tolkien, who certainly could tell a more direct tale, like The Hobbit, when he wanted to, did so. So his indirect approach must have had a purpose of some kind. And we, as readers, looking about in this tale to figure out what's not being said directly, are in a bit of a "niggle" of our own.
But there's one thing that seems clear -- Niggle is a message of some sort. It seems a bit urgent, as messages go. Perhaps every tale come with such a message -- not a moral or a lesson, or a "meaning" in the big sense -- but a message from one person to another, in the form of a narrative.
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