On Fairy-Stories, Part Two

J.R.R. Tolkien was often criticized by his contemporaries for “dabbling in fantasy,” considered to be a plaything for children and nothing else. In his essay On Fairy-Stories, Tolkien addresses this criticism head-on:

To many, Fantasy, this sub-creative art which plays strange tricks with the world and all that is in it, combining nouns and redistributing adjectives, has seemed suspect, if not illegitimate. To some it has seemed at least a childish folly, a thing only for peoples or for persons in their youth. As for its legitimacy I will say no more than to quote a brief passage from a letter I once wrote to a man who described myth and fairy-story as “lies”…

“Dear Sir,” I said—Although now long estranged,

Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.

Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned,

and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned:

Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light

through whom is splintered from a single White

to many hues, and endlessly combined

in living shapes that move from mind to mind.

Though all the crannies of the world we filled

with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build

Gods and their houses out of dark and light,

and sowed the seed of dragons—'twas our right

(used or misused). That right has not decayed:

we make still by the law in which we're made.”

Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make. If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts or evidence), then Fantasy would languish until they were cured. If they ever get into that state (it would not seem at all impossible), Fantasy will perish, and become Morbid Delusion.

For creative Fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it… If men really could not distinguish between frogs and men, fairy-stories about frog-kings would not have arisen.

In short, Tolkien points out that creativity flourishes on a foundation of truth and logic. Artists and storytellers accept the laws of the natural world before bending them, and this bending is the most natural thing in the world. In creating fantasy, a storyteller helps readers see the world through the eyes Faërie, vivifying the natural by the supernatural. The best fantasy clarifies the world instead of obscuring it, and Magic is a complement to Reason.

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