PhilPaine.com

The first item, the essay “On Fairy Sto­ries”, is essen­tial read­ing for any­one with a seri­ous inter­est in Tolkien. It makes clear exact­ly what he was doing, and why. It was writ­ten dur­ing the height of the dom­i­nant posi­tion of “real­ism” in lit­er­a­ture, when any­thing even remote­ly imag­i­na­tive was con­sid­ered trash by lit­er­ary peo­ple. Tolkien was par­tic­u­larly annoyed by those who saw fan­tasy, espe­cially the par­tic­u­lar kind of fan­tasy that he called “fairy-sto­ry”, as exclu­sively for chil­dren. He writes:

Among those who still have enough wis­dom not to think fairy sto­ries per­ni­cious, the com­mon opin­ion seems to be that there is a nat­ural con­nex­ion between the minds of chil­dren and fairy-sto­ries, of the same order as the con­nex­ion between children’s bod­ies and milk. I think this is an error; at best an error of false sen­ti­ment, and one that is there­fore most often made by those who, for what­ever pri­vate rea­sons (such as child­less­ness), tend to think of chil­dren as a spe­cial kind of crea­ture, almost a dif­fer­ent race, rather than as nor­mal, if imma­ture, mem­bers of a par­tic­u­lar fam­ily, and of the human fam­ily at large. Actu­ally, the asso­ci­a­tion of chil­dren and fairy-sto­ries is an acci­dent of our domes­tic his­tory. Fairy sto­ries have in the mod­ern world been rel­e­gated to the ‘nurs­ery’, as shab­by or old-fash­ioned fur­ni­ture is rel­e­gated to the play-room, pri­mar­ily because adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused.

Touché. I can still remem­ber when that atti­tude was gospel, when a good sci­ence fic­tion writer like Kurt Von­negut had to vocif­er­ously deny that he wrote SF so he could be tak­en seri­ously, and the ency­clo­pe­dias described H. G. Wells as the author of Tono Bun­gay, Mr. Brit­tling Sees It Through, and, embarrass­ingly, “some sci­en­tific romances”.

con­tents:

14691. [2] (J. R. R. Tolkien) On Fairy Stories
14692. [3] (J. R. R. Tolkien) Leaf by Niggle