Apr. 12th, 2022

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Having blown off some book clubs I had the time to visit one of the unread Tolkien works sitting on my TBR shelves: Tolkien On Fairy-Stories, an essay that I’m pretty sure I read a version of in The Tolkien Reader in college. This however is an “expanded edition, with commentary and notes” and as such is both the essay and a journey through the history and development of the essay. It includes two more-or-less complete older manuscript versions as well as a bunch of additions, cross-outs, etc., making it somewhat repetitive to read cover-to-cover but providing an excellent look into very serious Tolkien nerd shit for the kind of people who want to see how his thought processes developed over the years and decades.

Originally given as a lecture in 1939, On Fairy-Stories has become something of a foundational text in the study of fantastical literature. Some of the essay is dedicated to taxonomizing what constitutes a proper fairy-story versus other kinds of imaginative literature, such as beast-fables, traveler’s tales, and ghost stories. It also most famously defends fairy-stories and fantastical literature in general against its ghettoization as being only for children–and, not unrelatedly, defends children against certain Victorian ideas about their interests and intellect, which Tolkien finds misguided. I’m not going to try to sum up what else it’s about since the full essay is both very dense and very wide-ranging.

I’m a bit under the weather lately so I’m not really up for engaging with Professor Tolkien’s ideas in the way arguments are meant to be engaged, i.e., critically; mostly I just sat back and enjoyed that it was interesting and sounded good and had a number of good dry jokes. It has me thinking I might like to make Andrew Lang’s Colored Fairy Book series my yearlong read for next year–twelve books in twelve months, rather than one really big fat book over the year. But it’s only April and we’ll see how I feel at the end of the year.

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