ON FAIRY-STORIES
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Why HN recommends it
Tolkien's essay on his view of fantasy and myth. It is short, and it offers a window into his thinking on why and how he wrote fairy stories, useful for anyone studying his work.
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…back to his religion. But you could say the same thing about his experience fighting in WWI, for example. I highly doubt there were any intentional references or parallels. I recommend reading his essay On Fairy-stories to get a window into the role he sees fantasy as having. Interestingly he does tie it in with his faith at a meta-level: he sees it as a sub-creation within the larger creation; himself a sub-creator.…
on “Amazon’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ series will cost at least $465M for first season” ↗…people with an unabashed, unhesitating passion for art. > Maybe JRR Tolkien just wanted to write a great story! Maybe it's a secret code of the Illuminati. The evidence says strongly otherwise: read On Fairy-stories by Tolkien [1], which is pretty short, absolutely stunning, and where he lays out much of his approach to art. Tolkien was also an all-time leading scholar of Old English (Anglo-Saxon) - arguably as important…
on “Long-standing literary magazines are struggling to stay afloat” ↗…doesn't match what I've read Tolkien saying. Tolkien knew exactly what he was doing, was a leading scholar in the field of myth, and thought very deeply about it. If you want to understand, read his essay On Fairy-stories. > no good postmodernist would object to modern readers finding meanings in literature that weren't consciously in the author's mind. What does that means specifically? Who are you referring to? What…
on “W. H. Auden’s 1954 review of The Fellowship of the Ring” ↗JRR Tolkien knew Lang's work very well and Tolkien's essay On Fairy-stories was originally presented, in an earlier version, as the (annual?) Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of Saint Andrews in 1939. The essay is not only an incredible work itself, but has quite a bit…
on “The Call of the Weird” ↗…including 'fairy tales'; and he was a devout Catholic. How could he write (and study) such ungodly material? He wrestles with the question multiple times, but if you are interested, I strongly recommend On Fairy-stories, an essay based on a lecture. It covers far more ground than this question, but it's worth reading anyway. I'll append a spoiler below. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .…
on “Can LLMs accurately recall the Bible?” ↗After reading "On Fairy-Stories" by Tolkien I recommend listening to this class by the Tolkien Professor: http://tolkienprofessor.com/wp/lectures/courses/the-undergra...
on “The Irresistible Psychology of Fairy Tales” ↗Since it's the best source on Tolkien's view of his stories, let me recommend his "On Fairy Stories" for those who have not read it: http://idiom.ucsd.edu/~bakovic/tolkien/fairy_stories.pdf
on “The Fantastic World of Professor Tolkien (1956)” ↗Tolkien's lecture/essay from 1939 (ominous!), "On Fairy Stories", remains a delight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Fairy-Stories
on “Two Books Plumb the Hidden Depths of the Fairy Tale” ↗…original myths in their original ancient languages. There is plenty of scholarly work describing his sources, and he wrote his own essay on it, though it's more conceptual than about primary sources: On Fairy-stories.
on “When Orcs Were Real” ↗…attempts in the Hobbit to talk down to children and condemned all such approaches, including versions of old tales that removed the unseemly parts. There is an entire section on the topic in his essay, On Fairy Stories. Let us not divide the human race into Eloi and Morlocks: pretty children - 'elves' as the eighteenth century often idiotically called them - with their fairytales (carefully pruned), and dark Morlocks…
on “The first fairy stories were never intended for children” ↗…in the '90s). The attitude adopted by much of the r.a.b.t community was a deliberate echo of Tolkien's own: we treated Middle-earth as an independent "sub-created" world (to use Tolkien's term from "On Fairy Stories") which ought to have "the inner consistency of reality". In such a vast imagined history, there are obviously huge gaps in our knowledge where Tolkien never told us what happened or why. But in a few…
on “Could the eagles have flown Frodo into Mordor? (2000)” ↗…denies (in the face of such evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelism, giving a fleeting glimpse of joy; joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories", 1939 “It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy?…
on “Hopepunk, optimism, purity, and futures of hard work” ↗…suspend your disbelief as needed is a great challenge, but an important one. Tolkien (along with C.S. Lewis), a vocal anti-modernist, had interesting thoughts on this subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Fairy-Stories "Tolkien suggests that fairy stories allow the reader to review his own world from the "perspective" of a different world. Tolkien calls this "recovery", in the sense that one's unquestioned assumptions…
on “Why We Dominate the Earth” ↗…how the storyteller makes that thing "fit" into the story. Edit: I have some company in my view: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief: > J. R. R. Tolkien challenged this concept in "On Fairy-Stories", choosing instead the paradigm of secondary belief based on inner consistency of reality: in order for the narrative to work, the reader must believe that what they read is true within the secondary…
on “Why Fantasy Avoids Gunpowder” ↗