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.
Let me start by thanking you, Mark, for weighing in. It's always a pleasure when a reader takes the time out of their day to engage with one's peace so thoughtfully. (I'll also caveat my response by saying I've written it in fits and starts these last few days as I travel all over the East Coast of the US. It may be incoherent.)
I can appreciate the alternate definitions here, in drawing a solid line of distinction between fairy-stories and fantasy as genres. As you say, Tolkien was not setting out to make any such distinction and the one you make is not one present in "On Fairy-Stories"; however, I don't think it the definitions are self-evident. Tolkien was setting out to do more than merely defend fairy-stories. I argue that he was attempting to expand the possibilities of that 'genre' without revolutionizing it (revolution in the sense of upheaval, or turning over). In his expanded view (and in the view of subsequent generations, myself included), I think modern fantasy stories qualify enough to be in the same category as LOTR, even if most are of significantly lower quality.
So I ultimately disagree that fairy-stories are fundamentally moral, even if I agree the good ones end up there. Above all, I don't know how to falsify your claim that they must be moral, since any apparent fairy-story which has limited moral value could simply be excluded from the argument. So I would want to hear more about why that is necessarily the case. In OFS, Tolkien said that Fantasy (his definition) could certainly be turned to evil ends, which itself seems to contradict some of his own assertions in the same. When it comes to Arthur, everything depends on "which version?" It wasn't until the later "Vulgate" cycle of the Arthuriana that Lancelot was treated so poorly, and of course go back far enough and there isn't any Lancelot at all. The round table was eventually about virtue, but it was also very much about competency. In the stories, as in LOTR, the two are often linked. Yes Gawain succeeds by chastity, but also by great physical bravery. Finding the Grail requires worthiness before God but also a grand adventure. Same within LOTR: in Fangorn, Gandalf even gives a bit of a speech to Gimli, Legolas, and Aragorn about how "dangerous" they are, and essentially extols competency as virtue (well, *a* virtue).
LOTR is a great many things as you say, and its all the more valuable for that! It is not any one thing. It is not merely an anti-grail story; it is not merely a fairy-story, nor merely an adventure or a morality play or a lesson on environmentalism or the horrors of the world wars... It is all these things, while also being the story of a hobbit and a magic ring. Each of these are lenses to understand the meaning-dense story, but to reduce it down to any one of these things is to lose quite a lot of other pieces of meaning. None of these meanings are contradictory, to be clear. I've heard Christian writers ask: "Is there a Christ figure in LOTR?" and the answer, others have said, is that there isn't one, but three. Aragorn is Christ as King (returning to his people to save them from the enemy by passing under the earth and harrowing hell); Gandalf is Christ as prophet (preparing the way for others, plus of course the resurrecting like Christ); Frodo is Christ as Priest, (offering himself as a type of sacrifice against evil and ultimately "ascending" like Christ). But none of them are Aslan; none of them are the summation of Tolkien's idea of the divine; none of them are allegory. They are simultaneously themselves, the Ranger, the Wizard, and the Hobbit, while also giving insight into Tolkien's own religious ideas. To reduce them down to these Christian allegories is to reduce the story of LOTR down into a different thing than it is.
I think it is the same with fairy-stories and fantasy stories. Of course, many of each can be small minded, or reductive, or allegorical, or put to evil ends, like Tolkien suggested; but to me, that is a marker of quality and not definition, because I don't think you can draw a hard line based on morality without it being unfalsifiable and locked into one single worldview.
As for the inability of filming fairy-tales: I don't disagree on any particular point, but I would in fact take it a step further and say this applies to the written word entirely, because of the role of Imagination. You cannot film literature anymore than you can carve music into stone. There are a whole host of other things---present in stories that are not at all fairy-stories---which are fundamentally unfilmable. I see that as a simple restriction on medium; the written word prompts Imagination, but Tolkien makes the additional claim that fairy-stories can only happen within Imagination; it's that latter claim I find unproven, though it has merit.
Thank you for this, which, quite apart from anything else, will help me in preparing my paper for the Catholic Imagination Conference next month.
I don't really see how falsifiability applies to questions of genre. Genre is just a classification scheme, and you can classify literature any way you want. You can classify it into works that mention sandwiches and those that don't. There are no right or wrong ways to classify, only ones that are useful and ones that are not. (Admittedly, the sandwiches based classification would be falsifiable.)
Neither fantasy no fairytales have strict boundary definitions. Indeed, no genre has strict boundary definitions, and every time a new principle of classification is suggested, the boundaries will shift. And, of course, as we have both noted, novels are big messy things and many of them could fall into more than one genre definition. After all, genre is in many ways a matter of reader taste, and readers tastes are compounds of many things. Someone might love LOTR for its Luddism or its environmentalism while having no interest in any other fantasy novel at all.
That said, a useful genre scheme should be founded in something persistent, and in something that can shape interest and taste. The question for me is, why do I like Tolkien and Han Christian Andersen but find Wheel of Time and Game of Thrones so tedious that I cannot read more than a few pages. Also, I wish to give some guidance to fellow Catholic writers we are striving to create a second Catholic Literary Renaissance, and who look to Tolkien for an exemplar. And to them I wish to say, if that is your exemplar, follow the fairytale elements, not the fantasy elements. These are the practical uses I wish to make of this particular distinction, and if it is useful beyond that, I'm happy, but if not, it is still of use to me.
And no, there is no Christ figure in LOTR by any reasonable definition of Christ figure that would not place one or more Christ figures in half the world's adventure stories. I think the cottage industry that has sprung up around trying to find the Gospel in LOTR has reached quite absurd proportions, and not a few absurd conclusions.
But yes, competence is a virtue, though a minor one in itself, since it is largely self serving. It must be combined with charity before it becomes a high virtue placed at the service of the community. But in saying that fairytales are fundamentally moral, I am not saying simply that fairytale characters behave morally, or suggesting that fantasy characters don't. Rather, I think what I am groping towards is something akin to saying that the Natural Law is part of the visible structure of Faerie. If science fiction is founded in the law of nature, and fantasy is founded in a modified law of nature, fairy tales are founded in the Natural Law. And this is why a eucatastrophic ending is fitting in fairytales.
So, I grant your distinction between a marker of quality and a marker of type, but I am proposing it as a marker of type here. In other words, saying that fairytales are fundamentally moral is not at all to say that they are morality tales. Indeed, most morality tales are the very opposite of the type.
I do take your point about filming fairy stories. Stories are not independent of their media and when you try to tell the same story in a different media, it becomes a different story, and this is true of all stories, not just fairy stories. By the same token, though, Tolkien may have been right, but right about all stories, not just fairytales. On the other hand, if we were to accept my (tentative) notion that fairytales are built on the Natural Law, rather than the laws of nature, it does become a question whether one can capture the Natural Law on film.
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?
"The sub-created Secondary World of Fantasy requires two things at once: internal believability and the otherworldliness of Faërie."
Pascal Boyer has a theory that it is precisely this partial violation of expectation that makes fantasy (and religion) memorable.
"Experiments suggest that people best remember stories that include a combination of counterintuitive physical feats (in which characters go through walls or move instantaneously) and plausibly human psychological features (perceptions, thoughts, intentions)."
I loved this and am looking forward to the rest of the series. You even inspired me to download the original text, though if the past is any indicator I’ll not get through all of it.
The point you made near the end about fantasy being dense but not allegory got me thinking. This coupled with the concept that stories say things that cannot be said explicitly, for saying them explicitly is either impossible or somehow too shallow to do them justice, made me wonder if there’s something that happens in really good writing where the author is able to get at something even they themselves don’t fully grasp. Perhaps they have an idea they’re trying to get at, and through their writing prod at its vague edges, and when they’re successful, those proddings reveal things about the idea that the author couldn’t have said outright.
I want to open my comment with deep gratitude to Tolkien for arguing that fairy stories “are one of the highest and more rewarding forms of art” - I’m so grateful to live in an age with easy access to fairy tales and fantasy in all its abundant expressions, though I am admittedly partial to fantasy.
I was impressed by the balance you managed to strike with defining “Fantasy” allowing for the natural tension of creation, art, realism, intuition, “know-ability”, and purpose. I think it’s very easy for our minds to set these things in isolation from each other and to miss the underlying relationships between them.
The - ha, I was going to use the word distillation - uh, the magic of Faerie expressed as the
“1. (revealing) truths which we cannot survey on our own, and
2. to bring us into a shared intimacy with others.” feels like a north star, both for readers and for authors to be guided by. It’s both grounding and expansive.
And I would like to acknowledge Mr. Baker’s assessment of fairy stories and modern fantasy’s hybridization of sci-fi, which I very much enjoyed reading and pondering. I think that at its core competency opens the door to take us back to virtue. The ground is fertile for authors to approach fantasy as a more plot driven adventure that demands competency of the protagonist(s), but it also allows authors to wrestle deeply with what that competence demands of the protag(s) and who they are/become in the pursuit of that competence. Whether that story takes a positive, negative, or flat arc. That is to say, even hybridized, fantasy’s roots in fairy stories still hold strong, it simply needs to be mined by the writer.
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.
Thank you for writing this series! I love “On Fairy Stories,” and I like to read fresh thoughts and perspectives on it.
This topic in particular gets a lot of scrutiny. When I taught a class on fantasy literature, I would start with a survey of sorts—I’d give the students a list of pop culture texts ranging from Harry Potter and LOTR to Stephen King’s IT and Disney’s Cars, and I ask them to rate each from “not fantasy at all” to “quintessentially fantasy.” You would not believe the discussion that came from it! Defining a genre is semantic as well as philosophic, but I always do come back to Tolkien’s definition of fantasy. It seems well supported by other scholars of fantasy literature. I feel you do it some justice here.
Your speculation about what Tolkien might’ve thought about the movies is interesting, and I hadn’t thought about it much—I wonder if he would feel differently about visual mediums as a means of achieving Fantasy if he could see the spectacular things modern cinema can accomplish. Probably not, given his attitude towards language. We have a visual culture these days, so we have our own biases, and I’m not sure he’s actually wrong that Imagination is best done in the mind, inspired by words and not beheld externally. That said, one’s imagination is usually limited to one’s experiences, and presenting new sensory experiences, including new visuals, music, etc., can help the imagination. Even Tolkien would probably concede that a person who’s only seen one kind of tree would have a limited imagination regarding trees. The movies do an excellent job of placing the story in marvelous real world settings that the average person may have never seen before, and in that way, I believe the movies add some interesting considerations to the “prose vs drama” argument. I wonder what Tolkien would think about that.
I love this statement: “Fantasy can help satisfy our longing for Knowledge and Love.” I would add, given his discussion about consolation later, our longing for Hope as well. It’s a nicely simple way to put it. Great discussion about myths, too. There’s something about mythology that makes the heart swell, and only the best fantasy seems to do that these days. Campbell says something similar to your statement above about the power of myth, I believe—that myths (and the Fantasy that descended from them) are life-affirming, that they affirm the value of human dignity, that they promise something beautiful and eternal beyond death and suffering. Tolkien’s soup metaphor is so nice for conveying these ideas while also just feeling the right way. This is the kind of stuff that makes fantasy so powerful. You describe it well.
Also, a funny aside: it cracks me up every time I get to Tolkien’s discussion about how ugly street lamps are—The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was published after this essay, and that cheeky little lamp post in Narnia makes me laugh
Thanks for weighing in with your thoughts! I do still wonder about Tolkien and movies. I think he left the door open when he said that such fantasy wouldn’t be impossible only that he’s never seen it done.
And I never thought about the Narnia lamppost. That’s hilarious!
I took some time to reread OFS before diving into this series (it’s been a decade at least since I read it all the way through) and I want to thank you for such a great summary and analysis of Tolkien’s arguments. It really helps to sort out some of the extraneous material in the essay (his prolonged dismissal of beast fables for ex).
My own poetic opinion of the essay is that Tolkien was like a sea captain, standing on the shore before a long journey, trying to describe the quest he was going on and why it’s important to an audience who had never thought much about even getting on a boat. He had no idea what he was going to find once he set off, let alone what other captains might discover when they took control of the boat named Fantasy, but he did his best to draw a map (ie establish an academic framework) for understanding it before he went. There’s a measure of defensiveness in it (“this is why I spend my free time writing about elves instead of watching cricket”) and a good deal of idealism, and we owe him a lot for expressing the very notion that fantasy is worth pursuing as Art. I won’t go so far as to say I disagree with him in principle, but I think the genre — no, the Art, because I don’t think Tolkien thought of fantasy as a genre — has grown beyond the somewhat limiting boundaries sketched in OFS. (Someone will probably ask me to defend that statement but I don’t think I can yet; it’s more vague instinct at this point. I would need to write my own essay to figure out.) Nevertheless, he provided a strong foundation for future “captains” to build on, and important vocabulary such as Secondary World, Secondary Belief and sub-creator that should continue to impact how we talk about fantasy today.
Once again, thanks for this excellent essay. I look forward to reading the rest of the series.
Hello Eric, this is Keenan from True World, another fan of Tolkien (and Fantasy, in general). I saw that you used the term “epic” in describing your work, which I do as well - mine is more along the lines of Epic Tragedy.
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.
Let me start by thanking you, Mark, for weighing in. It's always a pleasure when a reader takes the time out of their day to engage with one's peace so thoughtfully. (I'll also caveat my response by saying I've written it in fits and starts these last few days as I travel all over the East Coast of the US. It may be incoherent.)
I can appreciate the alternate definitions here, in drawing a solid line of distinction between fairy-stories and fantasy as genres. As you say, Tolkien was not setting out to make any such distinction and the one you make is not one present in "On Fairy-Stories"; however, I don't think it the definitions are self-evident. Tolkien was setting out to do more than merely defend fairy-stories. I argue that he was attempting to expand the possibilities of that 'genre' without revolutionizing it (revolution in the sense of upheaval, or turning over). In his expanded view (and in the view of subsequent generations, myself included), I think modern fantasy stories qualify enough to be in the same category as LOTR, even if most are of significantly lower quality.
So I ultimately disagree that fairy-stories are fundamentally moral, even if I agree the good ones end up there. Above all, I don't know how to falsify your claim that they must be moral, since any apparent fairy-story which has limited moral value could simply be excluded from the argument. So I would want to hear more about why that is necessarily the case. In OFS, Tolkien said that Fantasy (his definition) could certainly be turned to evil ends, which itself seems to contradict some of his own assertions in the same. When it comes to Arthur, everything depends on "which version?" It wasn't until the later "Vulgate" cycle of the Arthuriana that Lancelot was treated so poorly, and of course go back far enough and there isn't any Lancelot at all. The round table was eventually about virtue, but it was also very much about competency. In the stories, as in LOTR, the two are often linked. Yes Gawain succeeds by chastity, but also by great physical bravery. Finding the Grail requires worthiness before God but also a grand adventure. Same within LOTR: in Fangorn, Gandalf even gives a bit of a speech to Gimli, Legolas, and Aragorn about how "dangerous" they are, and essentially extols competency as virtue (well, *a* virtue).
LOTR is a great many things as you say, and its all the more valuable for that! It is not any one thing. It is not merely an anti-grail story; it is not merely a fairy-story, nor merely an adventure or a morality play or a lesson on environmentalism or the horrors of the world wars... It is all these things, while also being the story of a hobbit and a magic ring. Each of these are lenses to understand the meaning-dense story, but to reduce it down to any one of these things is to lose quite a lot of other pieces of meaning. None of these meanings are contradictory, to be clear. I've heard Christian writers ask: "Is there a Christ figure in LOTR?" and the answer, others have said, is that there isn't one, but three. Aragorn is Christ as King (returning to his people to save them from the enemy by passing under the earth and harrowing hell); Gandalf is Christ as prophet (preparing the way for others, plus of course the resurrecting like Christ); Frodo is Christ as Priest, (offering himself as a type of sacrifice against evil and ultimately "ascending" like Christ). But none of them are Aslan; none of them are the summation of Tolkien's idea of the divine; none of them are allegory. They are simultaneously themselves, the Ranger, the Wizard, and the Hobbit, while also giving insight into Tolkien's own religious ideas. To reduce them down to these Christian allegories is to reduce the story of LOTR down into a different thing than it is.
I think it is the same with fairy-stories and fantasy stories. Of course, many of each can be small minded, or reductive, or allegorical, or put to evil ends, like Tolkien suggested; but to me, that is a marker of quality and not definition, because I don't think you can draw a hard line based on morality without it being unfalsifiable and locked into one single worldview.
As for the inability of filming fairy-tales: I don't disagree on any particular point, but I would in fact take it a step further and say this applies to the written word entirely, because of the role of Imagination. You cannot film literature anymore than you can carve music into stone. There are a whole host of other things---present in stories that are not at all fairy-stories---which are fundamentally unfilmable. I see that as a simple restriction on medium; the written word prompts Imagination, but Tolkien makes the additional claim that fairy-stories can only happen within Imagination; it's that latter claim I find unproven, though it has merit.
Thank you for this, which, quite apart from anything else, will help me in preparing my paper for the Catholic Imagination Conference next month.
I don't really see how falsifiability applies to questions of genre. Genre is just a classification scheme, and you can classify literature any way you want. You can classify it into works that mention sandwiches and those that don't. There are no right or wrong ways to classify, only ones that are useful and ones that are not. (Admittedly, the sandwiches based classification would be falsifiable.)
Neither fantasy no fairytales have strict boundary definitions. Indeed, no genre has strict boundary definitions, and every time a new principle of classification is suggested, the boundaries will shift. And, of course, as we have both noted, novels are big messy things and many of them could fall into more than one genre definition. After all, genre is in many ways a matter of reader taste, and readers tastes are compounds of many things. Someone might love LOTR for its Luddism or its environmentalism while having no interest in any other fantasy novel at all.
That said, a useful genre scheme should be founded in something persistent, and in something that can shape interest and taste. The question for me is, why do I like Tolkien and Han Christian Andersen but find Wheel of Time and Game of Thrones so tedious that I cannot read more than a few pages. Also, I wish to give some guidance to fellow Catholic writers we are striving to create a second Catholic Literary Renaissance, and who look to Tolkien for an exemplar. And to them I wish to say, if that is your exemplar, follow the fairytale elements, not the fantasy elements. These are the practical uses I wish to make of this particular distinction, and if it is useful beyond that, I'm happy, but if not, it is still of use to me.
And no, there is no Christ figure in LOTR by any reasonable definition of Christ figure that would not place one or more Christ figures in half the world's adventure stories. I think the cottage industry that has sprung up around trying to find the Gospel in LOTR has reached quite absurd proportions, and not a few absurd conclusions.
But yes, competence is a virtue, though a minor one in itself, since it is largely self serving. It must be combined with charity before it becomes a high virtue placed at the service of the community. But in saying that fairytales are fundamentally moral, I am not saying simply that fairytale characters behave morally, or suggesting that fantasy characters don't. Rather, I think what I am groping towards is something akin to saying that the Natural Law is part of the visible structure of Faerie. If science fiction is founded in the law of nature, and fantasy is founded in a modified law of nature, fairy tales are founded in the Natural Law. And this is why a eucatastrophic ending is fitting in fairytales.
So, I grant your distinction between a marker of quality and a marker of type, but I am proposing it as a marker of type here. In other words, saying that fairytales are fundamentally moral is not at all to say that they are morality tales. Indeed, most morality tales are the very opposite of the type.
I do take your point about filming fairy stories. Stories are not independent of their media and when you try to tell the same story in a different media, it becomes a different story, and this is true of all stories, not just fairy stories. By the same token, though, Tolkien may have been right, but right about all stories, not just fairytales. On the other hand, if we were to accept my (tentative) notion that fairytales are built on the Natural Law, rather than the laws of nature, it does become a question whether one can capture the Natural Law on film.
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.
"The sub-created Secondary World of Fantasy requires two things at once: internal believability and the otherworldliness of Faërie."
Pascal Boyer has a theory that it is precisely this partial violation of expectation that makes fantasy (and religion) memorable.
"Experiments suggest that people best remember stories that include a combination of counterintuitive physical feats (in which characters go through walls or move instantaneously) and plausibly human psychological features (perceptions, thoughts, intentions)."
https://www.nature.com/articles/4551038a
Wow. Tolkiens theory backed up by science?!
I loved this and am looking forward to the rest of the series. You even inspired me to download the original text, though if the past is any indicator I’ll not get through all of it.
The point you made near the end about fantasy being dense but not allegory got me thinking. This coupled with the concept that stories say things that cannot be said explicitly, for saying them explicitly is either impossible or somehow too shallow to do them justice, made me wonder if there’s something that happens in really good writing where the author is able to get at something even they themselves don’t fully grasp. Perhaps they have an idea they’re trying to get at, and through their writing prod at its vague edges, and when they’re successful, those proddings reveal things about the idea that the author couldn’t have said outright.
I want to open my comment with deep gratitude to Tolkien for arguing that fairy stories “are one of the highest and more rewarding forms of art” - I’m so grateful to live in an age with easy access to fairy tales and fantasy in all its abundant expressions, though I am admittedly partial to fantasy.
I was impressed by the balance you managed to strike with defining “Fantasy” allowing for the natural tension of creation, art, realism, intuition, “know-ability”, and purpose. I think it’s very easy for our minds to set these things in isolation from each other and to miss the underlying relationships between them.
The - ha, I was going to use the word distillation - uh, the magic of Faerie expressed as the
“1. (revealing) truths which we cannot survey on our own, and
2. to bring us into a shared intimacy with others.” feels like a north star, both for readers and for authors to be guided by. It’s both grounding and expansive.
And I would like to acknowledge Mr. Baker’s assessment of fairy stories and modern fantasy’s hybridization of sci-fi, which I very much enjoyed reading and pondering. I think that at its core competency opens the door to take us back to virtue. The ground is fertile for authors to approach fantasy as a more plot driven adventure that demands competency of the protagonist(s), but it also allows authors to wrestle deeply with what that competence demands of the protag(s) and who they are/become in the pursuit of that competence. Whether that story takes a positive, negative, or flat arc. That is to say, even hybridized, fantasy’s roots in fairy stories still hold strong, it simply needs to be mined by the writer.
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.
Thank you for writing this series! I love “On Fairy Stories,” and I like to read fresh thoughts and perspectives on it.
This topic in particular gets a lot of scrutiny. When I taught a class on fantasy literature, I would start with a survey of sorts—I’d give the students a list of pop culture texts ranging from Harry Potter and LOTR to Stephen King’s IT and Disney’s Cars, and I ask them to rate each from “not fantasy at all” to “quintessentially fantasy.” You would not believe the discussion that came from it! Defining a genre is semantic as well as philosophic, but I always do come back to Tolkien’s definition of fantasy. It seems well supported by other scholars of fantasy literature. I feel you do it some justice here.
Your speculation about what Tolkien might’ve thought about the movies is interesting, and I hadn’t thought about it much—I wonder if he would feel differently about visual mediums as a means of achieving Fantasy if he could see the spectacular things modern cinema can accomplish. Probably not, given his attitude towards language. We have a visual culture these days, so we have our own biases, and I’m not sure he’s actually wrong that Imagination is best done in the mind, inspired by words and not beheld externally. That said, one’s imagination is usually limited to one’s experiences, and presenting new sensory experiences, including new visuals, music, etc., can help the imagination. Even Tolkien would probably concede that a person who’s only seen one kind of tree would have a limited imagination regarding trees. The movies do an excellent job of placing the story in marvelous real world settings that the average person may have never seen before, and in that way, I believe the movies add some interesting considerations to the “prose vs drama” argument. I wonder what Tolkien would think about that.
I love this statement: “Fantasy can help satisfy our longing for Knowledge and Love.” I would add, given his discussion about consolation later, our longing for Hope as well. It’s a nicely simple way to put it. Great discussion about myths, too. There’s something about mythology that makes the heart swell, and only the best fantasy seems to do that these days. Campbell says something similar to your statement above about the power of myth, I believe—that myths (and the Fantasy that descended from them) are life-affirming, that they affirm the value of human dignity, that they promise something beautiful and eternal beyond death and suffering. Tolkien’s soup metaphor is so nice for conveying these ideas while also just feeling the right way. This is the kind of stuff that makes fantasy so powerful. You describe it well.
I look forward to reading the rest of the series!
Also, a funny aside: it cracks me up every time I get to Tolkien’s discussion about how ugly street lamps are—The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was published after this essay, and that cheeky little lamp post in Narnia makes me laugh
Thanks for weighing in with your thoughts! I do still wonder about Tolkien and movies. I think he left the door open when he said that such fantasy wouldn’t be impossible only that he’s never seen it done.
And I never thought about the Narnia lamppost. That’s hilarious!
I took some time to reread OFS before diving into this series (it’s been a decade at least since I read it all the way through) and I want to thank you for such a great summary and analysis of Tolkien’s arguments. It really helps to sort out some of the extraneous material in the essay (his prolonged dismissal of beast fables for ex).
My own poetic opinion of the essay is that Tolkien was like a sea captain, standing on the shore before a long journey, trying to describe the quest he was going on and why it’s important to an audience who had never thought much about even getting on a boat. He had no idea what he was going to find once he set off, let alone what other captains might discover when they took control of the boat named Fantasy, but he did his best to draw a map (ie establish an academic framework) for understanding it before he went. There’s a measure of defensiveness in it (“this is why I spend my free time writing about elves instead of watching cricket”) and a good deal of idealism, and we owe him a lot for expressing the very notion that fantasy is worth pursuing as Art. I won’t go so far as to say I disagree with him in principle, but I think the genre — no, the Art, because I don’t think Tolkien thought of fantasy as a genre — has grown beyond the somewhat limiting boundaries sketched in OFS. (Someone will probably ask me to defend that statement but I don’t think I can yet; it’s more vague instinct at this point. I would need to write my own essay to figure out.) Nevertheless, he provided a strong foundation for future “captains” to build on, and important vocabulary such as Secondary World, Secondary Belief and sub-creator that should continue to impact how we talk about fantasy today.
Once again, thanks for this excellent essay. I look forward to reading the rest of the series.
This was extremely insightful - I will look out for part ii...
Great to hear it! Part 2 here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/cliffordstumme/p/fantasy-makes-the-real-world-better?r=3ecd72&utm_medium=ios
Hello Eric, this is Keenan from True World, another fan of Tolkien (and Fantasy, in general). I saw that you used the term “epic” in describing your work, which I do as well - mine is more along the lines of Epic Tragedy.
Great article! I actually just purchased "On Fairy-Stories" the other day . . . and then I discover your newsletter on this very topic! 🤔
I hope our series can help enrich your own reading!