#104 Tues (10/4/22) - On Fairy Stories by JRR Tolkien

 On Fairy Stories, J.R.R.Tolkien

I would also exclude, or rule out
of order, any story that uses the machinery of Dream, the dreaming
of actual human sleep, to explain the apparent occurrence of its
marvels. At the least, even if the reported dream was in other
respects in itself a fairy-story, I would condemn the whole as
gravely defective: like a good picture in a disfiguring frame. It is
true that Dream is not unconnected with Faerie. In dreams
strange powers of the mind may be unlocked. In some of them a
man may for a space wield the power of Faerie, that power which,
even as it conceives the story, causes it to take living form and
colour before the eyes. A real dream may indeed sometimes be a
fairy-story of almost elvish ease and skill - while it is being
dreamed. But if a waking writer tells you that his tale is only a
thing imagined in his sleep, he cheats deliberately the primal
desire at the heart of Faerie: the realisation, independent of the
conceiving mind, of imagined wonder. It is often reported of
fairies (truly or lyingly, I do not know) that they are workers of
illusion, that they are cheaters of men by ‘fantasy’ ; but that is
quite another matter. That is their affair. Such trickeries happen,
at any rate, inside tales in which the fairies are not themselves
illusions; behind the fantasy real wills and powers exist, in
dependent of the minds and purposes of men.
It is at any rate essential to a genuine fairy-story, as distinct
from the employment of this form for lesser or debased purposes,
that it should be presented as ‘true5. The meaning o f ‘true5 in this
connection I will consider in a moment. But since the fairy-story
deals with ‘marvels5, it cannot tolerate any frame or machinery
suggesting that the whole story in which they occur is a figment
or illusion. The tale itself may, of course, be so good that one can
ignore the frame. Or it may be successful and amusing as a
dream-story. So are Lewis Carroll5s Alice stories, with their
dream-frame and dream-transitions. For this (and other reasons)
they are not fairy-stories.
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The history of fairy-stories is probably
more complex than the physical history of the human race, and as
complex as the history of human language.
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Max Muller’s view of mythology as a
‘disease of language’ can be abandoned without regret. Mythology
is not a disease at all, though it may like all human things become
diseased. You might as well say that thinking is a disease of the mind.
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