Clare's Reviews > On Fairy-Stories
On Fairy-Stories
by
by
As a Tolkien fan, I can say with confidence: this is a bad essay. It's poorly written, poorly structured, and while it isn't wholly wrong, its conclusions are frustratingly incomplete. But for all the clouds, there is a shimmering mithril lining to this essay: its heart is true, and its ending is only the beginning.
The first thing to note about this essay is that it’s extremely wordy. With the Lord of The Rings and accompanying works clocking in at 576,459 words total, brevity was never Tolkien's strong point, but in fiction, what isn't brief is at least beautiful.
Not so here. The tone of this essay sets my teeth on edge. Tolkien writes in the grand, academic voice of an Oxford don -- the kind of tone that prizes cleverness over clarity, winking intellect over earnest engagement. I shouldn't be surprised, I guess, since this essay originally was written to be delivered as part of a lecture series. And Tolkien was an Oxford don, so it might be unfair to condemn the man for speaking the language of his people.
I just don't like it.
A more objective criticism might be that the essay's structure is hopelessly meandering. We start with the Oxford dictionary -- which Tolkien informs us is of little help -- then wend our way through a series of definitions, arrived at primarily through a process of negation: Fairies are not supernatural. Fairies are not necessarily diminutive. Fairy stories are not the same as beast fables. They're also not the same as mythology.
Progress is slow. It's like trying to hack your way to buried treasure without a map, through a wilderness of sentences overgrown with "nots" like choking vines. Tolkien himself interjects "I must turn back," "I have diverged from my proper theme," "let us return to [the topic] above," over and over again, because points are rarely staked firmly before venturing on.
In the end, I'm not sure we ever get a clean definition. Just a constellation of associated terms and genres in which fairy stories sit, aloof, apparently in a world of their own.
This is fine in a sort of Wittgensteinian kind of way, though Tolkien works hard to deny fairy stories' kinship with their closest relatives, and I'm not totally on board with all the lines he draws in the fictional sand.
Regardless, why make all these slight distinctions to begin with? I don't know. It doesn't change my experience as a reader of fairy stories. It doesn't change my perspective as a writer. And I'm not academically inclined enough to care about the minutiae of classification for its own sake. (I say this as someone who actually loves Aristotle... but not reading a blow-by-blow account of how the Dewey decimal system was developed.) In the end, all these pages of definitions just seem like answers without questions, solutions without problems.
I also can't see how this exercise in classification plays any meaningful role in the second section of this essay: an account of why fairy stories exist.
This is the heart of everything, and Tolkien's four reasons for fairy stories' existence and their continued popularity are, for the most part, pretty compelling: Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, and Consolation.
"Fantasy" is self-explanatory, if not totally tautological: humans enjoy reading imaginative works of fiction because imagination is a natural human activity that humans enjoy. That's about it for this point.
"Recovery" is the gift of seeing the world in a new light. To Tolkien, fairy stories are an enriching experience. Their inherent strangeness holds itself in tension with the "real world" bringing about deepened aesthetic appreciation, ultimately allowing readers to go forth into the world in a state of enchantment or grace.
"Escape" is escapism -- the ability to go in the mind to new places. However, rather than frivolous self-indulgence, escapism is a rational response to the objective limitations of the world: it's as rational as a prisoner dreaming of his freedom. For Tolkien, Escape is the very essence of sanity amid the "rawness and ugliness of modern European life."
"Consolation" is closely related to Escape: it's the belief in happy endings. Consolation denies "universal final defeat... giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief." Just as Escape frees us from the ugliness and pain of this world, Consolation frees us from the oppression of fear and death.
And he is right.
Tolkien's four reasons here are true, I believe, but packed into the last fourth of the essay, these points are rushed and understated, garbled and incomplete. Moreover, none of them -- alone or in combination -- are the exclusive province of fairy stories.
I have my own opinions about the value of fairy stories, and my greatest disappointment is that Tolkien seems to be teetering on the precipice of a deep truth... but never takes the plunge.
Unfortunately, I believe the reason why Tolkien never quite gets there is precisely because of his silly definitions and preoccupation with categorization. Fairydom is not beholden to modern literary convention or human logic. It's as old as the tales grandmothers whisper to young brides on their wedding nights. As old as mothers murmuring to nightmare-wakened children in the middle of the night, and grandfathers spinning tales by the light of dying fires. Fairy stories are an oral tradition steeped in shadows. You will always be frustrated in attempts to fence in the fey.
But more importantly, Tolkien's definitions prioritize worldbuilding over storytelling. He elevates worlds themselves over their content: characters, creatures, and the plots that bring them all together.
This may be true for how he, personally, experiences the value of fairy stories. For me, narrative is everything. Let the worlds burn.
The reason narrative looms so large in my experience is actually fairly dark. In my life, I have experienced a good amount of violence and danger, and from my earliest memories, stories were what helped me endure.
One advantage of growing up in a high-crime area – of experiencing first-hand burglary and robbery, threats and harassment, violent assaults and sexual assaults, of knowing people stabbed, beaten, shot, and murdered – is that my lived experience might be more in line with what humans have historically endured. Women in particular.
Being sheltered from violence, malnutrition, starvation, and exposure is extremely new to the human experience. So when we consider fairy stories – an old, old genre that drifts and mutates, imperceptibly, into folktale and mythology – we need to consider the everyday brutality of the context.
Yet, when Tolkien discusses history, he paints it with idealism, if not outright romanticism: he believes in a soft, pastoral past in which humans lived simpler lives more in harmony with the "real world" of nature than with the world of artificial constructs, like dehumanizing factories and cities. His past is one of noble savages, fair maidens, humble farmers, and glorious kings.
I hesitate to contradict a man who served in one world war, then saw his son off to war in a second. But empirically, as modernity has advanced, fewer and fewer humans have experienced violence or met untimely ends. Even with the wars.
And enduring violence and nature's wrath takes more than idle dreams of mystical realms or abstract aesthetic appreciation of novelty. It takes narrative. It takes cohesive plotlines in which heroes triumph over unimaginable evil by means of extraordinary, preternatural power.
Take that narrative – in all of its wild, absurd, impossible glory – and place it, like a framework, onto your own life.
Use it to feel strong.
Use it to feel powerful.
Use it to bring meaning to meaningless horror.
Use it to envision a path forward through darkness.
The importance of narrative – and of fantastical narrative in particular – is gaining recognition, not only in a literary context, but in a psychological one. These days, therapists might prescribe video games, comic books, or DnD, all because of their fantastical narrative power.
I just happened to stumble on this mechanism as a kid, dreaming of myself as Alanna of Trebond, holding my own against bigger, stronger boys. Envisioning myself as Artemis, running free and happy through the forest… brutally killing any man who dares gaze upon her.
Or seeing myself as Aragorn, tirelessly pursuing Orcs to save Merry and Pippin and fighting to save all of Middle-earth.
It’s surprising that Tolkien doesn’t explicitly recognize the power of narrative in this essay, when his stories are the very kind that help us find light through darkness. I can’t believe that he wrote Lord of the Rings merely as a fantasy world in which to escape the horrors of World War II, or as a means of idle fascination and aesthetic invigoration. I think Tolkien knows full well the power of narrative, and so the fact that it isn’t listed here – and only dealt with at all in very indirect, glancing ways under “Consolation” – is a tremendous missed opportunity to shed light on our deepest, most human need: to spin stories about ourselves as a pragmatic means of survival.
What is a fairy story? I’m not sure any particular definition matters. Say whatever you want on that front, but know that the fey themselves will elude any definition you give them. But the reason why fairy stories persist is the same reason why fantasy novels continue to be written and Marvel movies are top-grossing films: Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, and Consolation, yes… but also the specificity of a narrative structure that empowers us by presenting possibilities otherwise only glimpsed in dreams, or in madness.
The first thing to note about this essay is that it’s extremely wordy. With the Lord of The Rings and accompanying works clocking in at 576,459 words total, brevity was never Tolkien's strong point, but in fiction, what isn't brief is at least beautiful.
Not so here. The tone of this essay sets my teeth on edge. Tolkien writes in the grand, academic voice of an Oxford don -- the kind of tone that prizes cleverness over clarity, winking intellect over earnest engagement. I shouldn't be surprised, I guess, since this essay originally was written to be delivered as part of a lecture series. And Tolkien was an Oxford don, so it might be unfair to condemn the man for speaking the language of his people.
I just don't like it.
A more objective criticism might be that the essay's structure is hopelessly meandering. We start with the Oxford dictionary -- which Tolkien informs us is of little help -- then wend our way through a series of definitions, arrived at primarily through a process of negation: Fairies are not supernatural. Fairies are not necessarily diminutive. Fairy stories are not the same as beast fables. They're also not the same as mythology.
Progress is slow. It's like trying to hack your way to buried treasure without a map, through a wilderness of sentences overgrown with "nots" like choking vines. Tolkien himself interjects "I must turn back," "I have diverged from my proper theme," "let us return to [the topic] above," over and over again, because points are rarely staked firmly before venturing on.
In the end, I'm not sure we ever get a clean definition. Just a constellation of associated terms and genres in which fairy stories sit, aloof, apparently in a world of their own.
This is fine in a sort of Wittgensteinian kind of way, though Tolkien works hard to deny fairy stories' kinship with their closest relatives, and I'm not totally on board with all the lines he draws in the fictional sand.
Regardless, why make all these slight distinctions to begin with? I don't know. It doesn't change my experience as a reader of fairy stories. It doesn't change my perspective as a writer. And I'm not academically inclined enough to care about the minutiae of classification for its own sake. (I say this as someone who actually loves Aristotle... but not reading a blow-by-blow account of how the Dewey decimal system was developed.) In the end, all these pages of definitions just seem like answers without questions, solutions without problems.
I also can't see how this exercise in classification plays any meaningful role in the second section of this essay: an account of why fairy stories exist.
This is the heart of everything, and Tolkien's four reasons for fairy stories' existence and their continued popularity are, for the most part, pretty compelling: Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, and Consolation.
"Fantasy" is self-explanatory, if not totally tautological: humans enjoy reading imaginative works of fiction because imagination is a natural human activity that humans enjoy. That's about it for this point.
"Recovery" is the gift of seeing the world in a new light. To Tolkien, fairy stories are an enriching experience. Their inherent strangeness holds itself in tension with the "real world" bringing about deepened aesthetic appreciation, ultimately allowing readers to go forth into the world in a state of enchantment or grace.
"Escape" is escapism -- the ability to go in the mind to new places. However, rather than frivolous self-indulgence, escapism is a rational response to the objective limitations of the world: it's as rational as a prisoner dreaming of his freedom. For Tolkien, Escape is the very essence of sanity amid the "rawness and ugliness of modern European life."
"Consolation" is closely related to Escape: it's the belief in happy endings. Consolation denies "universal final defeat... giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief." Just as Escape frees us from the ugliness and pain of this world, Consolation frees us from the oppression of fear and death.
And he is right.
Tolkien's four reasons here are true, I believe, but packed into the last fourth of the essay, these points are rushed and understated, garbled and incomplete. Moreover, none of them -- alone or in combination -- are the exclusive province of fairy stories.
I have my own opinions about the value of fairy stories, and my greatest disappointment is that Tolkien seems to be teetering on the precipice of a deep truth... but never takes the plunge.
Unfortunately, I believe the reason why Tolkien never quite gets there is precisely because of his silly definitions and preoccupation with categorization. Fairydom is not beholden to modern literary convention or human logic. It's as old as the tales grandmothers whisper to young brides on their wedding nights. As old as mothers murmuring to nightmare-wakened children in the middle of the night, and grandfathers spinning tales by the light of dying fires. Fairy stories are an oral tradition steeped in shadows. You will always be frustrated in attempts to fence in the fey.
But more importantly, Tolkien's definitions prioritize worldbuilding over storytelling. He elevates worlds themselves over their content: characters, creatures, and the plots that bring them all together.
This may be true for how he, personally, experiences the value of fairy stories. For me, narrative is everything. Let the worlds burn.
The reason narrative looms so large in my experience is actually fairly dark. In my life, I have experienced a good amount of violence and danger, and from my earliest memories, stories were what helped me endure.
One advantage of growing up in a high-crime area – of experiencing first-hand burglary and robbery, threats and harassment, violent assaults and sexual assaults, of knowing people stabbed, beaten, shot, and murdered – is that my lived experience might be more in line with what humans have historically endured. Women in particular.
Being sheltered from violence, malnutrition, starvation, and exposure is extremely new to the human experience. So when we consider fairy stories – an old, old genre that drifts and mutates, imperceptibly, into folktale and mythology – we need to consider the everyday brutality of the context.
Yet, when Tolkien discusses history, he paints it with idealism, if not outright romanticism: he believes in a soft, pastoral past in which humans lived simpler lives more in harmony with the "real world" of nature than with the world of artificial constructs, like dehumanizing factories and cities. His past is one of noble savages, fair maidens, humble farmers, and glorious kings.
I hesitate to contradict a man who served in one world war, then saw his son off to war in a second. But empirically, as modernity has advanced, fewer and fewer humans have experienced violence or met untimely ends. Even with the wars.
And enduring violence and nature's wrath takes more than idle dreams of mystical realms or abstract aesthetic appreciation of novelty. It takes narrative. It takes cohesive plotlines in which heroes triumph over unimaginable evil by means of extraordinary, preternatural power.
Take that narrative – in all of its wild, absurd, impossible glory – and place it, like a framework, onto your own life.
Use it to feel strong.
Use it to feel powerful.
Use it to bring meaning to meaningless horror.
Use it to envision a path forward through darkness.
The importance of narrative – and of fantastical narrative in particular – is gaining recognition, not only in a literary context, but in a psychological one. These days, therapists might prescribe video games, comic books, or DnD, all because of their fantastical narrative power.
I just happened to stumble on this mechanism as a kid, dreaming of myself as Alanna of Trebond, holding my own against bigger, stronger boys. Envisioning myself as Artemis, running free and happy through the forest… brutally killing any man who dares gaze upon her.
Or seeing myself as Aragorn, tirelessly pursuing Orcs to save Merry and Pippin and fighting to save all of Middle-earth.
It’s surprising that Tolkien doesn’t explicitly recognize the power of narrative in this essay, when his stories are the very kind that help us find light through darkness. I can’t believe that he wrote Lord of the Rings merely as a fantasy world in which to escape the horrors of World War II, or as a means of idle fascination and aesthetic invigoration. I think Tolkien knows full well the power of narrative, and so the fact that it isn’t listed here – and only dealt with at all in very indirect, glancing ways under “Consolation” – is a tremendous missed opportunity to shed light on our deepest, most human need: to spin stories about ourselves as a pragmatic means of survival.
What is a fairy story? I’m not sure any particular definition matters. Say whatever you want on that front, but know that the fey themselves will elude any definition you give them. But the reason why fairy stories persist is the same reason why fantasy novels continue to be written and Marvel movies are top-grossing films: Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, and Consolation, yes… but also the specificity of a narrative structure that empowers us by presenting possibilities otherwise only glimpsed in dreams, or in madness.
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Reading Progress
January 31, 2022
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January 31, 2022
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February 1, 2022
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February 1, 2022
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"I'm concerned that Tolkien is off to entirely the wrong start. He's chronicling use of the term "fairy" and "fairy-story," tracing their use in written English and works of literature to try to home in on an academic definition. But fairies come from an oral tradition, not hitting "literature" until Tudor times, long, long after their origins. If he doesn't address this, he's going to miss the point entirely."
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February 3, 2022
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