On Fairy Stories
Tolkien, JRR . "On Fairy Stories." A Tolkien Miscellany, The J.R.R. Tolkien Copyright Trust, SFBC in arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002, 97-138.
J.R.R Tolkien is considered the father of modern fantasy, his books The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings created the genre and remain the standard to which all other fantasy is compared. It can be easy to take Fantasy for granted as a legitimate genre for adult literature but considering the literary landscape Tolkien was in while he worked on The Lord of the Rings helped me appreciate what a feat it must have been to craft his expansive world. “On Fairy Stories” gives a glimpse of the intellectual and cultural difficulties he must have been facing, and the lack of respect The Lord of the Rings must have gotten before it was published. The beginning of the essay defines what a true “fairy story” is, and speaks to their importance in cultural development. He goes on to argue that they should not be relegated to the nursery but are a taste that adults are allowed to share, though entering into them requires humility and imagination.
He defends the humble fairy story even further by arguing against the critics of the genre’s tendency to write it off as “escapist.” Tolkien does not consider this type of escapism as a bad thing, he actually elevates this escapism by arguing that it both relieves the human soul and creates desire: the desire of the sub-creator to be creative, the desire of an earth dwelling creature to be connected to his world, and the deep desire to escape death and experience a happy ending. To Tolkien, the offer of escape that the Fairy Story gives is not an escape of ignorance or running away, but an antidote to modernism and human ego. Out of this argument he further develops his idea by touching on the importance of the Eucatastrophe, the turning point in every fairy story (Tolkien’s argued that a story is not a fairy-story without it), where all is set to right. A moment that brings a person incredible joy, not because it is an escape from reality, but because it reveals reality. Tolkien speaks of the resurrection as the great eucatastrophe that didn’t only happen in the mythic world of Faerie, but came into our reality and became history. In this way, when we - the sub-creators - make our own little worlds with their own eucatastrophes we are satisfying the deepest longing of our own souls for escape from the hurting world while we increase our desire for the Kingdom of God. In “On Fairy Stories'' Tolkien creates a beautiful argument for Christian involvement in the arts, and puts into words the power that storytelling has to reflect the gospels.