For J.R.R. Tolkien, It Was Always About Writing the Perfect Fairy Tale

"Faerie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible."

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The reading public—most especially the young and young at heart—was thrilled. A wonderfully light and joyous book came out in 1937, centering its story around a creature called a Hobbit who lives in a hole in the ground, loves to eat and rest, and yet somehow (with the help of a human-sized grey wizard) is roped into an amazing adventure with dwarves, goblins, elves, and one mighty dragon. Who wouldn’t be happy with a book like that? Well, its author, for one. J.R.R. Tolkien saw the book as a failed experiment.

Working on the next book, a sort of sequel to the first one, Tolkien thought a lot about an archaic literary genre, one that most readers thought was unsuited for adults: the fairy tale (which he called the fairy-story). A somewhat forgotten genre that Tolkien valued as one of literature’s finest. And that was the main problem with his first book, thought Tolkien; it wasn’t a true fairy tale but a story for young children.

What, he asked himself, is a true fairy tale? By 1939, he was ready to offer an answer.

Photo: Cover of the 1937 first edition, from a drawing by Tolkien

The essay that Tolkien would write, based on a lecture he gave, would be nothing short of the "theoretical basis for his fiction," in the words of Professor Verlyn Flieger. Because, and let’s not get confused, the so-called grandfather of fantasy—as most of us probably think of him, even if we don’t especially care for his work—didn’t set out to establish a new literary genre.

Compared with his other scholarly writings, On Fairy-Stories is lean on philology. It places right up front three questions that will inform the discussion: What are fairy stories? What are their origins? What is their use?

In this short piece, I want to focus mainly on the first question. According to Tolkien's definition, fairy stories are not stories about fairies but stories of humans in Faerie, "the realm or state in which fairies have their being." This answer immediately brings to mind the fantastical origins of the science fiction genre. What are alien encounters if not stories of humans in alien realms, and the coming of the alien to familiar Earth?

Tolkien shunned the word "supernatural" when it comes to Faerie, as this mysterious realm is, in a sense, more natural than we humans can ever be—or at the very least, closer to nature than to our human, all-too-human civilization. But to be sure, it is an order of nature that is unfamiliar to us. Tolkien much preferred the word "Magic." And here we come to his most profound thought about fairy tales:

Faerie 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.

A couple of days ago, I found a copy of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. Just glancing at the list of stories included was enough to conclude that this is not what Tolkien meant by a fairy tale. Most of the stories (great children’s classics though they are) don’t involve the act of being enchanted, of going to a mysterious land, or encountering wondrous creatures near home. Most are what Tolkien calls "beast-fable," where "the animal form is only a mask upon a human face, a device of the satirist or the preacher; in these, we have beast-fable and not fairy-story."

Now, while I think this judgment is too harsh (not just satirists and preachers write beast-fables), and I would add that the mask is also considered amusing to children, I do agree that we need to separate the two forms of fairy-story and beast-fable. When birds or beasts speak in fairy stories, it is often a nod to our human desire to communicate with creatures other than ourselves. This, I think, is part of what the elves represent in The Lord of the Rings—the desire to encounter a creature more spiritual and magical than fallen man (a term Tolkien uses at one point in his essay) is, and perhaps at one time was.

But as Tolkien’s essay brilliantly teaches us, The Lord of the Rings is not a fairy tale simply because it has elves in it—not just because of that. Tolkien’s most famous novel is a fairy-story—perhaps the finest the modern fantasy genre has given us—as a result of the meeting of humans (and their smaller but no less human stand-ins, the hobbits) with the wonders and horrors of Middle-earth, its magic (used for good or for ill), its strange and often dangerous creatures, the epic journey into Faerie, all in the effort to destroy a magical ring that has the power to enslave the world.

Tolkien is an author almost by accident. He once told his son Christopher that The Lord of the Rings was written not because he necessarily had a good story to tell, but as a way to create a world where the greeting in the Elvish language "Elen síla lúmenn' omentielvo" (a star shines on the hour of our meeting) is an accepted greeting. In its best parts, I can well imagine a star shining on the hour of our reading this great work of fiction.

In The Lord of the Rings, we discover with the hobbits the strange world that lies outside the Shire. The hobbits are not magical creatures—Tolkien says as much in the prologue to his great novel—but they allow us to encounter the magical realms with them. To wonder and become enchanted, even while retaining our “normal,” common-sense view of the world. As Pippin says right after he, Sam, and Frodo meet Elves for the first time in their lives (Frodo had just celebrated his 50th birthday!), Elves are great and all, but what about lunch?

And yet, it’s important to remember that old habits (and old definitions) die hard. Just like the publishers who still use the old (and for Tolkien, false) idea of the fairy tale, we can find traces of beast-fables even in The Lord of the Rings. Just before the encounter with the elves in Chapter III of Book One, Frodo, Sam, and Pippin spend their first night outdoors, and a fox passing by wonders to himself:

‘Hobbits!’ he thought. ‘Well, what next? I have heard of strange doings in this land, but I have seldom heard of a hobbit sleeping out of doors under a tree. Three of them! There’s something mighty queer behing this.’ He was quite right, but he never found out any more about it.

While Tolkien did not intentionally set out to create the fantasy genre, his many (perhaps too many) followers would shed those "bad" habits—like unaccountable talking/thinking animals.

The so-called grandfather of fantasy

We usually talk about Tolkien’s mythology or Legendarium (a collection of legends)—and that is understandable. Tolkien himself used these two words interchangeably when discussing his life’s work. What we don’t talk about often enough, however, is the fairy-story, which is how I believe Tolkien thought about his two novels, particularly The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien might have believed that his mythology was the centerpiece of his work, but it’s the novels that are ultimately the entry point for even the most devoted fans. It’s like with James Joyce: no one starts out with Finnegans Wake and then decides to check out Ulysses or Dubliners. Similarly, with Tolkien, The Silmarillion is usually the second or third book a reader is likely to pick up, but only after reading one of the two novels. These novels are not—at least not in Tolkien’s mind—fantasy books (or High Fantasy, a term that didn’t exist when Tolkien published his second great novel in 1954), but rather great and elaborate fairy-stories.

In a letter to Milton Waldman, an editor with the London publisher Collins, Tolkien claimed as much:

Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story—the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendor from the vast backcloths—which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country.

That level of "romantic fairy-story," as Tolkien calls it, is the level of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

And just so that we don’t still confuse the conventional perception of fairy tales with inferior and childish literature, Tolkien ends his essay On Fairy-stories with a dramatic proposal: the New Testament is the most influential fairy tale in history, and probably the most profound of them. But that is another adventure altogether.