Tolkien's "On Fairy-Stories" (I)

Since completing my five-part series on the cosmology of Middle-Earth, I've read more than enough "bonus Tolkien" (volumes 1-5 of The History of Middle Earth) that I'm going to have to work out how to distil it all into an appendix post. This is not an easy task, at least not if I want it to be short enough that I can finish writing it and other people can finish reading it.

Currently I'm in a protracted break from The History, but I couldn't resist reading Tolkien's 1947 essay On Fairy-Stories. Originally delivered as a lecture in 1939, this is a wide-ranging essay which I think is a must-read for fans of the genre. While there are parts I vehemently disagree with, in the main I found it extremely insightful : with impacts for literature, creativity, and even on occasion critical thinking, that extend well beyond its titular remit. Needless to say, the prose is also simply beautiful and it's almost worth reading for that alone.

As usual here, I'm going to present the most interesting major themes from the essay, rewording and rearranging them for my own purposes.

What a fairy story is – and what it isn't

You might remember my attempt to define and distinguish fantasy and science fiction. Fantasy, I hold, is a story about a modification to the way the world works that is expressly forbidden by the known laws of physics. The less consistent the modification with the attributes of the real world, the more fantastical the tale. In particular in the sub-genre of mythology this often involves mind shaping matter – on scales from the mundane to the magnificent. Taken to extremes, fantasy and myth explore everything as the acts of unfathomable, capricious deities; mountains are not formed by geological processes but result purely from the whims of the gods. 

Thórr has (as far as our late records go) a very marked character, or personality, which cannot be found in thunder or in lightning, even though some details can, as it were, be related to these natural phenomena : for instance, his red beard, his loud voice and violent temper, his blundering and smashing strength... If we could go backwards in time, the fairy-story might be found to change in details, or to give way to other tales. But there would always be a “fairy-tale” as long as there was any Thórr. When the fairy-tale ceased, there would be just thunder, which no human ear had yet heard.

Such stories are not necessarily self-inconsistent, but neither do they do necessarily posit that there is some alternative set of "rules" which must be obeyed. Instead they retain consistency but within an entirely different paradigm that rejects physical laws altogether. There may or may not be mental laws to such worlds, but a rock is never compelled to fall under gravity or a planet remain in its orbit. The very basis of the system is utterly, profoundly different. It is not so much that the deities have some special physical "powers" beyond the wit of mortal man, but that things work in a fundamentally nonlocal, even perhaps non-causal way.

Science fiction, on the other hand, takes the opposite approach. It can modify the known laws or even replace them, but they work in a qualitatively similar, rigorous, mathematical way to those we actually experience*. There is a similarity and sometimes an intersection with fantasy (they are not mutually exclusive**) in that both concern modifications to the operation of the world. Both, at their core, ask the speculative question, "what if... ?". Good examples in both genres tell tales which could not be told without these modifications; lazier examples use spaceships and monsters as little more than window-dressing.

* If you insist that the laws of science and mathematics are purely descriptive and not "real" in a stricter sense, then you might prefer to say that the rules of the highest fantasies cannot be described mathematically.
** The extremely strict rules governing magic in Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicles comes to mind here.

Tolkien's essay, I think, by and large agrees with this. To lightly mix some relevant quotes :

Fairy-stories are not in normal English usage stories about fairies or elves, but stories about Fairy, that is Faërie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being. The definition of a fairy-story — what it is, or what it should be — does not, then, depend on any definition or historical account of elf or fairy, but upon the nature of Faërie: the Perilous Realm itself, and the air that blows in that country. I will not attempt to define that, nor to describe it directly. It cannot be done. Faërie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible. 

Faërie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.

The stories are about this different reality, a different way of imagining the world. Tolkien's genius was to develop this in breathtaking, convincing detail. He says that far from relying on suspension of disbelief, a good fairy story must do exactly the opposite. It must convince the reader, body and soul, that the world described is if not actually real then at least plausible, and that the different setting is crucial :

It is precisely the colouring, the atmosphere, the unclassifiable individual details of a story, and above all the general purport that informs with life the undissected bones of the plot, that really count... What happens is that the storymaker proves a successful “sub-creator.” He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. 

I briefly interject only to point out that while a fantasy world may well have its own laws, even inviolable ones, these must be of a wholly different order to those of science fiction. Tolkien continues :

If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay*, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is [only] a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed.

* "Seriously, it gets good at episode 5 !"

Rather amusingly he then describes cricket as similarly inducing this state of suspending belief and enchantment ! But if this is a substitute for "true" belief the sentiment seems clear that it is a poor one. 

I believe it was Arthur C. Clarke who said something to the effect that fantasy is how we wish the world to be, whereas science fiction deals with possibilities that we might not always enjoy if they were ever realised. There's a strong aspect of this here too. Fairy tales have a simplicity which is very appealing :

In Faërie one can indeed conceive of an ogre who possesses a castle hideous as a nightmare (for the evil of the ogre wills it so), but one cannot conceive of a house built with a good purpose — an inn, a hostel for travellers, the hall of a virtuous and noble king — that is yet sickeningly ugly. 

The apparent simplicity is deceptive, but necessary – allowing that "fairy" is only a sub-genre of the more general fantasy; not all myths count as fairy. Tolkien lists many examples of fantasy tales that are not fairy : "beast-fables" where animals play the roles of humans, "traveller's tales" such as those of Gulliver (primarily satirical in nature), and those of the "it was all a dream variety". He doesn't disparage any of these*, indeed lavishing high praise on Gulliver, he only notes that that they're simply not fairy tales. You certainly can have good people with "sickeningly ugly" houses in other genres !**

* While I think "it was all a dream" is one of the most boring and lazy literary excuses for retcons that one can employ, stories which are from the outset about dreams – like The Sandman, Inception, The Matrix and the like – are obviously perfectly respectable. Tolkien also notes there is an overlap with the dreamlike quality of fairy stories, but stressed that the author of these must still try to convince the reader that they are "true" or they have no worth.

** I really like how in most Victorian science-fiction, the vehicles – the Nautilus, the Time Machine, Verne's lunar orbiter – all tend to be described as positively delightful places to be in themselves. The modern tendency is to make the protagonists suffer for the sake of it; Victorian authors were perhaps more optimistic, but also set themselves a greater challenge by avoiding the narratively unnecessary bleakness porn. They didn't make their characters suffer needlessly.

Tolkien doesn't eliminate or discourage the possibility of mixed genres. But one key, essential quality of a fairy story, he says, is the happily ever after : 

Or to take the extreme case of Red Riding Hood : it is of merely secondary interest that the retold versions of this story, in which the little girl is saved by wood-cutters, is directly derived from Perrault's story in which she was eaten by the wolf. The really important thing is that the later version has a happy ending (more or less, and if we do not mourn the grandmother overmuch), and that Perrault's version had not. 

Elsewhere he laments that fairy tales have been allowed to fall into childish silliness, and that the "real" elves were magnificent, heroic figures not at all resembling Tinkerbell, and similarly deals harshly with those who would sanitise and censor what were originally some rather dark and disturbing tales. It is, I suppose, all about the ending : terrible things may well be allowed along the way, and though perhaps not everything is remedied at the end, enough must be resolved satisfactorily enough that the reader accepts the outcome as for the best. I shall return to this in its proper place in part two.

Why adults think fairy stories are silly

For now this is a good moment to introduce the importance of fairy stories to adults. Not those who read them as anthropological "curios", however legitimate that study, but those who read them "as tales", who appreciate their literary qualities. The obvious issue here, which Tolkien attacks head-on, is that such things are so widely regarded as simple, frivolous, idle playthings for children, and aren't often held up as serious literature.

I'm going to quote Tolkien a little out of context here. What he describes as a mistaken origin of the stories, I think this works extremely well for describing their sociological evolution :

At one time it was a dominant view that all such matter was derived from “nature-myths.” The Olympians were personifications of the sun, of dawn, of night, and so on, and all the stories told about them were originally myths (allegories would have been a better word) of the greater elemental changes and processes of nature. Epic, heroic legend, saga, then localized these stories in real places and humanized them by attributing them to ancestral heroes, mightier than men and yet already men. And finally these legends, dwindling down, became folk-tales, Märchen, fairy-stories — nursery-tales.

Yet I suspect that this flower-and-butterfly minuteness was also a product of “rationalisation,” which transformed the glamour of Elfland into mere finesse, and invisibility into a fragility that could hide in a cowslip or shrink behind a blade of grass.

In various places he describes this process of the shrinking and fading of the Fae as a long but inexorable process within his own creation of Middle Earth, and this key word "rationalisation" fits beautifully : the fantastical, magical elements of his creation markedly receding over time, giving way to a far more ordinary world in which the magical elements are used ever-more sparingly. Here, he suggests how the tales have been allowed to fall into abject silliness by neglect, ending at last in genuinely silly stories which might entertain idiots and children* but don't offer much to the serious, sophisticated reader. Small wonder they aren't treated as proper literature when they have degenerated so far from their noble origins.

* I am being unfair. Tolkien actually has some strong Views about treating children as stupid.

So would a beautiful table, a good picture, or a useful machine (such as a microscope), be defaced or broken, if it were left long unregarded in a schoolroom. Fairy-stories banished in this way, cut off from a full adult art, would in the end be ruined; indeed in so far as they have been so banished, they have been ruined.

The old stories are mollified or bowdlerized, instead of being reserved; the imitations are often merely silly, Pigwig-genry without even the intrigue; or patronizing; or (deadliest of all) covertly sniggering, with an eye on the other grown-ups present.

Clearly the "modern" tendency of well-intentioned idiots to tinker with the original works, often grim and dark and bloody in the case of fairy stories, is nothing new. But the mistake, of course, is then to assume that because a story contains pixies and dragons it therefore must be silly and worthless. And Tolkien only partly lays the blame on the genuine poor quality into which the tales have fallen. In other respects, it's firmly the fault of the audience who should know better. Again to lightly re-arrange some quotes :

Fantasy, of course, starts out with an advantage : arresting strangeness. But that advantage has been turned against it, and has contributed to its disrepute. Many people dislike being “arrested.” They dislike any meddling with the Primary World, or such small glimpses of it as are familiar to them. They, therefore, stupidly and even maliciously confound Fantasy with Dreaming, in which there is no Art; and with mental disorders, in which there is not even control: with delusion and hallucination.

But the error or malice, engendered by disquiet and consequent dislike, is not the only cause of this confusion. Fantasy has also an essential drawback : it is difficult to achieve. Fantasy may be, as I think, not less but more sub-creative; but at any rate it is found in practice that “the inner consistency of reality” is more difficult to produce, the more unlike are the images and the rearrangements of primary material to the actual arrangements of the Primary World.

That the images are of things not in the primary world (if that indeed is possible) is a virtue, not a vice. Fantasy (in this sense) is, I think, not a lower but a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent.

To create a world so very different from our own, and to describe it so convincingly that the reader really believes in it, is a formidable technical challenge. Even writing a good story set in our own world is problematic enough, but start to insist that the whole of the narrative reality functions differently and you've got yourself a much bigger problem. What Tolkien labels as the "bastard form" of pantomime, "buffoonery"... this is easy. But serious fantasy is hard, and by extension, rare. 

(I will add two minor caveats. First, I think he goes too far – much too far ! – in poo-poohing the witches in Macbeth. Second, that the highest quality works are the least common is true of pretty much everything.)

Adults tend to avoid fantasy, then, partly because it's often badly done and partly from an unfair bias against, of even fear of, the unknown. They look to such petty concerns as character development because it's easier to both understand and to portray. In Tolkien's day this was even more true, since technical limitations would have made it impossible to create a convincing dragon or monster in the theatre or on screen. It was damn difficult even in a book, but in other media nigh-on impossible.

If you prefer Drama to Literature (as many literary critics plainly do), or form your critical theories primarily from dramatic critics, or even from Drama, you are apt to misunderstand pure story-making, and to constrain it to the limitations of stage-plays. You are, for instance, likely to prefer characters, even the basest and dullest, to things. Very little about trees as trees can be got into a play.

I'm sorely tempted to write a post entitled "Against Character Development", not because there's really anything wrong with it, but because people are still obsessed with it as the be-all and end-all of stories. Sod that. Far more difficult, more interesting, and more rewarding to explore in a story is the speculative, what-if aspect. Realistic, interesting characters, difficult though they may be, are child's play compared to examining the very conception of reality. It is that, I suggest, which should be the primary aim of the fantasist – to construct a new world view, and not to muck about more than necessary with petty frivolities like whether so-and-so should fall in love with whatshisname or whether they should succumb to unbearable ennui.

Why adults should read fairy stories

And that's one of my chief delights in Tolkien's fantasy, the ability to surrender my own world view and temporarily embrace one which is paradigmatically different. One can do this with philosophical tracts as well, but fiction comes with additional powers not found in explicit essays and treaties. Fiction allows a very much fuller exploration of all the consequences of the suggested alterations to the world, almost like running a simulation, in conjuring vivid mental images and the lived experiences of its characters. Even when it fails, when we have to enter the dreaded "suspension of disbelief", it offers insight into psychology of both author and reader – the question as to why we disagree on a particular point is often fascinating in revealing our different perspectives. Lastly, character development I will begrudgingly admit does matter, offering the power to move the reader in a way that a point-by-point examination of the possible consequences has no chance of ever approaching.

(I will however retain my snobbish hat against character development and still pronounce this need to engage with the emotions of the reader as somewhat base, but only because I think the literati types have for so long done the opposite. I am being somewhat tongue-in-cheek here.)

Tolkien appreciates that fantasy helps us engage with critical thinking and reasoning, but that deserves its own section. He lists three other positive benefits of the genre : recovery, escape, and consolation. All three are closely connected.

"Escapism" is surely the most common charge used as an attempted criticism of the genre. The idea being, I suppose, that readers are simply indulging in things of no value and having no bearing on the real world. Tolkien disparages this attitude as confusing escape with desertion :

Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison*, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter... they would seem to prefer the acquiescence of the “quisling” to the resistance of the patriot. To such thinking you have only to say “the land you loved is doomed” to excuse any treachery, indeed to glorify it.

* I shall assume he means "unjustly" here, otherwise it feels a bit strange to imply that prisoners should try to escape ! 

For Tolkien large parts of the world are dark and cruel, they are things you should escape from rather than engaging with. As a veteran of the Somme and having lived through WWII, we can hardly deny him this. The need to escape, to think of better, more worthy things than one's own four grim walls, is closely tied to recovery and consolation. A potent reminder in terms of the suffering Tolkien himself endured is briefly examined here.

On the notion of the world being "less real", there's an aspect to this which I both strongly agree and disagree with. Tolkien lambasts the notion that things like motor-cars and electric lights are especially "real", and I fully endorse the sentiment (but not the specifics, which I leave to part two). Our little corner of the cosmos has no claim on any special privilege whatsoever, except in regard to ourselves. Conversely, stories set on other worlds have every claim to validity and the optimistic element is (for me at least) far more inspiring than making things depressing for its own sake* – without in the least bit denying the value of unhappier tragedies. Both have their proper place. 

* Indeed, you can't be said to "escape" if you transport yourself to a worse place ! You can get yourself out of your own perspective, but that's not really the same thing.

And of course, these accusations of fantasy being "not real", by which I think people mean "not relevant to me personally", are extremely similar to those thrown at all blue-skies research, usually by small-minded imbeciles. Would that we could rid ourselves of such petty fools.

Now of course, one may argue far more legitimately, "but this way the world physically operates is just of no interest to me personally", and while we might then pity such fools, we could accept it. Bafflingly, not everyone is thrilled about the prospects of understanding galaxy evolution. Very well, that's their loss. But then we ought to enter in effect into a kind of contract : I promise not to disparage your obsession with your make-believe sports team if you promise to allow me my magic rings and enchanted lands. 

Conclusions

I think of fantasy and science fiction as being two halves of the same coin, both concerned primarily with how the world can or should work. Fairy stories are certainly "escapist" in that they have happily-ever-afters, but this is not true of fantasy in general : and neither happy endings nor escapism are damaging in themselves. It is true that adults have allowed fairy stories to become silly and immature, but this does not speak against the nature of the genre, only its authors.

Why has this happened ? Is it because children have some innate preference for this sort of thing ? Are they innately more curious about the mundane, unimportant characteristics of the world and less interested with "higher" matters of the accurate portrayal of character interactions ? I certainly don't think so, and neither did Tolkien. It's literary snobbery and nothing else. 

Nor is fantasy mutually exclusive with other genres; a fantasy enthusiast is not by any means unconcerned with psychology but can in fact be sometimes all the more so. "History often resembles 'Myth,'", said Tolkien, "because they are both ultimately of the same stuff." That is, stories. What better way, then, to consider psychology and sociology but by exploring different circumstances in which people find themselves ? What better way to consider the human condition ?

Next time I'll look further at how examining the details of fantasy helps us remain connected with, not separated from, reality, how it helps us to think critically and why this is important for children. I'll also look at Tolkien's complicated views on science fiction and technology and his putative "highest function" of fairy tales, the under-appreciated eucatastrophe.