My personal interpretation of Fairy Stories, as opposed to generic fantasy stories, finds the former using fantasy elements yet deeply rooted in history, traditions, and folklore within a specific geographical region
That makes sense. If I were to try to separate our modern terms of "fantasy stories" and "fairy-stories," then I'd probably start with a similar sort of definition. But of course, definitions are hard and exceptions make life difficult. If someone were to re-tell the story of King Arthur (as many do), does that count as a fairy-story? And how does one objectively define "deeply" rooted? Surely audiences and authors might disagree... I'm not demanding answers, just circling the question since I've been pondering this for weeks now.... What do you think?
Great essay, Eric! Really enjoyed this one. I’m curious—you only speak on secondary-world fantasy, and I wonder why that is? Is this telling of Tolkien’s view of what constitutes faerie stories (AKA fantasy) to him? I know he wrote a translation of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” so does he just consider Arthurian Britain to be a secondary world?
He seems to place imaginative stories in something akin to the Islamic concept of al-Ghayb (the Unseen) but almost gatekeeps what truly exists in this other realm, which I find very interesting. There’s a lot of dialogue around Tolkien’s fantasy being elevated because it feels true, but it’s entirely subjective as to what stories ring true to their audiences.
Not antagonizing you or Tolkien! I just find his perspective on the genre very limiting. I enjoy his notion of ‘faerie’ as an extension of his immersive worldbuilding but am increasingly at odds with it as a framework or directive for the future of the genre (which you yourself eloquently address early in the essay).
Anyway, some rambling thoughts here but I’d love to hear yours! Again, great essay!
Thanks for reading, Keyon. I'm glad you chimed in. Do you mean that you think his definition of Faerie itself is too limiting, because it must be "high fantasy," and separate from Earth? Or are you speaking more about Tolkien's underlying worldview? If the former, that's a misreading of what he means, and I tried (perhaps unsuccessfully) to clear that up in the footnote #2.
If this helps: Tolkien definitely considers King Arthur and related stories/myths like Gawain to be solidly in the category of fairy-stories. He even labels Arthur as the King of Faerie (Faerie being his catch-all term for the Secondary World(s)). For Tolkien, real-life people and places can get added to the "Soup" of Faerie that I mentioned in the section on myth; so you can have fairy-stories that involved real-life figures, albeit in a new, semi-fictional or mythological forms. Tolkien mentions Britain and Denmark from Arthurian legends and Beowulf respectively, and says both are in the "Cauldron" and thus count as "Faerie," and Secondary World whenever they are treated as a part of the magical setting. On this topic, at least, I don't think Tolkien is nearly so prescriptive as some of his critics think he is. Though to be honest I'm not sure if that's your objection.
If you don't mind me referring to your own work, Keyon: because there's visible magic in your settings and because you draw from the "cauldron" of ancient Iranian myth, it very much counts as Faerie (a Secondary World) even through it is also literally Iran/Persia as known in our real, Primary World.
As for truth and the subjective experiences of audiences, I think that's a topic that rapidly draws itself into philosophy (esp. epistemology). Tolkien certainly did not believe truth was subjective, but as it relates to his idea of Fantasy, he says that Fantasy could be turned to "evil." Now, even if you disagree with *his* idea of truth or *his* ideas of good and evil, the fact that he says that means he thinks Fantasy (e.g. worldbuilding, Faerie, immersion) could still serve ideas that were different than his own ideas of truth. Meaning, Fantasy doesn't need to lock itself into his Roman Catholic, Anglo-Christian worldview in order to be immersive and operative.
For instance, we know Tolkien has strong objections to both Narnia and Dune, both primarily on philosophical grounds. But that does not mean Tolkien's ideas about Faerie and Fantasy cannot be applied effectively to those stories. And of course, we have a lot more to explore about this essay, and I'll be chewing on this as we go....
Thanks for such a thoughtful and thought provoking response! Your clarifications have made me realize that my objections are more directed at some of the online discourse I find around Tolkien, rather than anything within his essay or your piece here. I'm happy to hear that he was less prescriptive than I had understood. I'm so excited to read the next part! I always appreciate your point of view, Eric!
When I was uncovering my notes in Ar’rin there is a piece of paper that was used to be an item card for a magic staff (4E, iykyk) but across in black ink is scrawled “Tolkien Derivative.” I keep the paper close to my desk now. It’s like a compass or a lodestone. That’s where I am aiming.
I look at this somewhat differently. Rather than saying that when Tolkien said fairy story we should read fantasy and then when he said fantasy we should read worldbuilding (and acknowledging your caveats on the latter point), I would say the fairytales and fantasy are two distinct genres, and that while Lord of the Rings birthed the fantasy genre, it does not actually belong to it. It is a fairytale.
Of course, Tolkien was not setting out to make this distinction. Fantasy in its modern form did not exist then. He was setting out to defend fairytales against the disdain of realist critics. But this distinction is important nonetheless.
LOTR is really a hybrid of several things, including fairytales, mythology, and the adventure story, a genre of much more consequence then than it is now when air travel means no one goes on a voyage or a march anymore. It is hugely influenced by the Arthurian cycle and functions as a kind of anti-grail story, with its own Arthur and Merlin. But at its very heart, it is a fairytale. Which is to say, at its very heart, it is about virtue and the cost of virtue.
Modern fantasy, I would suggest, took LOTR, stripped out the fairytale elements, and hybridized it with science fiction. The result was to replace virtue with competence at the heart of fantasy. Competence has always been the heart of science fiction. It has become the heart of fantasy also, with highly defined magic systems and schools of wizardry.
Arthur did not establish the round table to teach knights to be more competent fighters, but to be more virtuous knights. Lancelot, the most competent, failed most grievously in virtue. (Boromir is Lancelot.) Sir Gawain survives the Green Knight's challenge not by prowess at arms but by heroic chastity. The round table was always about virtue. So is LOTR, where the mighty, the competent, are not to be trusted with the ring. The only chance is to entrust it to the most humble. It is Frodo's virtue in sparing Gollum that permits the eucatastropic ending that saves the day. Even so, Frodo is immolated by the experience and cannot remain in Middle Earth. It is not merely socially compliant virtue that matters in fairytales, but the high romantic virtue that can sometimes consume those who attain it.
The landscape of faerie is thus fundamentally moral. And thus the physical aspects of faerie, though important, bend to its moral architecture. Which is why Tolkien is right that you can't film fairytales. When you try they turn into fantasies. The Penvensie children are fairytale children, as became obvious when they attempted to film The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe. You can't start with a child old enough to be as sophisticated as Lucy and then give her three older siblings and have them still all be children. Or, rather, you can't in a movie, so you have to make Susan and Peter teenagers. But you can in a fairy story. E. Nesbit did it with five and even eight.
To further illustrate why you can't film a fairytale, consider this passage from Alan Garner's The Moon of Gomrath:
"But as his head cleared, Colin heard another sound, so beautiful that he never found rest again; the sound of a horn, like the moon on snow, and another answered it from the limits of the sky. ... Now the cloud raced over the ground, breaking into separate glories that whisped and sharpened to skeins of starlight, and were horsemen, and at their head was majesty, crowned with antlers, like the sun."
You can, as Tolkien says, imagine that, but you cannot picture it. You cannot reduce it to images on a screen. You can imagine, but cannot make, a sound so beautiful that you will never know rest again; you can imagine, but not hear, a sound like the moon on snow. This is faerie. It is the landscape of the soul. It is not fantasy and it cannot be filmed.
My personal interpretation of Fairy Stories, as opposed to generic fantasy stories, finds the former using fantasy elements yet deeply rooted in history, traditions, and folklore within a specific geographical region
That makes sense. If I were to try to separate our modern terms of "fantasy stories" and "fairy-stories," then I'd probably start with a similar sort of definition. But of course, definitions are hard and exceptions make life difficult. If someone were to re-tell the story of King Arthur (as many do), does that count as a fairy-story? And how does one objectively define "deeply" rooted? Surely audiences and authors might disagree... I'm not demanding answers, just circling the question since I've been pondering this for weeks now.... What do you think?
I'll further explain: a fantasy story is set in a completely fictional world with no points of reference or connections to this world and/or cultures.
Fairly Stories (Ronald the Knight; King Arthur; Sigurd) are still fantasy stories but rooted to real historical and geographical roots.
Great essay, Eric! Really enjoyed this one. I’m curious—you only speak on secondary-world fantasy, and I wonder why that is? Is this telling of Tolkien’s view of what constitutes faerie stories (AKA fantasy) to him? I know he wrote a translation of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” so does he just consider Arthurian Britain to be a secondary world?
He seems to place imaginative stories in something akin to the Islamic concept of al-Ghayb (the Unseen) but almost gatekeeps what truly exists in this other realm, which I find very interesting. There’s a lot of dialogue around Tolkien’s fantasy being elevated because it feels true, but it’s entirely subjective as to what stories ring true to their audiences.
Not antagonizing you or Tolkien! I just find his perspective on the genre very limiting. I enjoy his notion of ‘faerie’ as an extension of his immersive worldbuilding but am increasingly at odds with it as a framework or directive for the future of the genre (which you yourself eloquently address early in the essay).
Anyway, some rambling thoughts here but I’d love to hear yours! Again, great essay!
Thanks for reading, Keyon. I'm glad you chimed in. Do you mean that you think his definition of Faerie itself is too limiting, because it must be "high fantasy," and separate from Earth? Or are you speaking more about Tolkien's underlying worldview? If the former, that's a misreading of what he means, and I tried (perhaps unsuccessfully) to clear that up in the footnote #2.
If this helps: Tolkien definitely considers King Arthur and related stories/myths like Gawain to be solidly in the category of fairy-stories. He even labels Arthur as the King of Faerie (Faerie being his catch-all term for the Secondary World(s)). For Tolkien, real-life people and places can get added to the "Soup" of Faerie that I mentioned in the section on myth; so you can have fairy-stories that involved real-life figures, albeit in a new, semi-fictional or mythological forms. Tolkien mentions Britain and Denmark from Arthurian legends and Beowulf respectively, and says both are in the "Cauldron" and thus count as "Faerie," and Secondary World whenever they are treated as a part of the magical setting. On this topic, at least, I don't think Tolkien is nearly so prescriptive as some of his critics think he is. Though to be honest I'm not sure if that's your objection.
If you don't mind me referring to your own work, Keyon: because there's visible magic in your settings and because you draw from the "cauldron" of ancient Iranian myth, it very much counts as Faerie (a Secondary World) even through it is also literally Iran/Persia as known in our real, Primary World.
As for truth and the subjective experiences of audiences, I think that's a topic that rapidly draws itself into philosophy (esp. epistemology). Tolkien certainly did not believe truth was subjective, but as it relates to his idea of Fantasy, he says that Fantasy could be turned to "evil." Now, even if you disagree with *his* idea of truth or *his* ideas of good and evil, the fact that he says that means he thinks Fantasy (e.g. worldbuilding, Faerie, immersion) could still serve ideas that were different than his own ideas of truth. Meaning, Fantasy doesn't need to lock itself into his Roman Catholic, Anglo-Christian worldview in order to be immersive and operative.
For instance, we know Tolkien has strong objections to both Narnia and Dune, both primarily on philosophical grounds. But that does not mean Tolkien's ideas about Faerie and Fantasy cannot be applied effectively to those stories. And of course, we have a lot more to explore about this essay, and I'll be chewing on this as we go....
Thanks for such a thoughtful and thought provoking response! Your clarifications have made me realize that my objections are more directed at some of the online discourse I find around Tolkien, rather than anything within his essay or your piece here. I'm happy to hear that he was less prescriptive than I had understood. I'm so excited to read the next part! I always appreciate your point of view, Eric!
When I was uncovering my notes in Ar’rin there is a piece of paper that was used to be an item card for a magic staff (4E, iykyk) but across in black ink is scrawled “Tolkien Derivative.” I keep the paper close to my desk now. It’s like a compass or a lodestone. That’s where I am aiming.
Looking forward to all the parts of this.
I look at this somewhat differently. Rather than saying that when Tolkien said fairy story we should read fantasy and then when he said fantasy we should read worldbuilding (and acknowledging your caveats on the latter point), I would say the fairytales and fantasy are two distinct genres, and that while Lord of the Rings birthed the fantasy genre, it does not actually belong to it. It is a fairytale.
Of course, Tolkien was not setting out to make this distinction. Fantasy in its modern form did not exist then. He was setting out to defend fairytales against the disdain of realist critics. But this distinction is important nonetheless.
LOTR is really a hybrid of several things, including fairytales, mythology, and the adventure story, a genre of much more consequence then than it is now when air travel means no one goes on a voyage or a march anymore. It is hugely influenced by the Arthurian cycle and functions as a kind of anti-grail story, with its own Arthur and Merlin. But at its very heart, it is a fairytale. Which is to say, at its very heart, it is about virtue and the cost of virtue.
Modern fantasy, I would suggest, took LOTR, stripped out the fairytale elements, and hybridized it with science fiction. The result was to replace virtue with competence at the heart of fantasy. Competence has always been the heart of science fiction. It has become the heart of fantasy also, with highly defined magic systems and schools of wizardry.
Arthur did not establish the round table to teach knights to be more competent fighters, but to be more virtuous knights. Lancelot, the most competent, failed most grievously in virtue. (Boromir is Lancelot.) Sir Gawain survives the Green Knight's challenge not by prowess at arms but by heroic chastity. The round table was always about virtue. So is LOTR, where the mighty, the competent, are not to be trusted with the ring. The only chance is to entrust it to the most humble. It is Frodo's virtue in sparing Gollum that permits the eucatastropic ending that saves the day. Even so, Frodo is immolated by the experience and cannot remain in Middle Earth. It is not merely socially compliant virtue that matters in fairytales, but the high romantic virtue that can sometimes consume those who attain it.
The landscape of faerie is thus fundamentally moral. And thus the physical aspects of faerie, though important, bend to its moral architecture. Which is why Tolkien is right that you can't film fairytales. When you try they turn into fantasies. The Penvensie children are fairytale children, as became obvious when they attempted to film The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe. You can't start with a child old enough to be as sophisticated as Lucy and then give her three older siblings and have them still all be children. Or, rather, you can't in a movie, so you have to make Susan and Peter teenagers. But you can in a fairy story. E. Nesbit did it with five and even eight.
To further illustrate why you can't film a fairytale, consider this passage from Alan Garner's The Moon of Gomrath:
"But as his head cleared, Colin heard another sound, so beautiful that he never found rest again; the sound of a horn, like the moon on snow, and another answered it from the limits of the sky. ... Now the cloud raced over the ground, breaking into separate glories that whisped and sharpened to skeins of starlight, and were horsemen, and at their head was majesty, crowned with antlers, like the sun."
You can, as Tolkien says, imagine that, but you cannot picture it. You cannot reduce it to images on a screen. You can imagine, but cannot make, a sound so beautiful that you will never know rest again; you can imagine, but not hear, a sound like the moon on snow. This is faerie. It is the landscape of the soul. It is not fantasy and it cannot be filmed.