elements have survived because they produce so profound a ‘literary effect’ (p. 33).
Children, he observes, are generally thought to be the natural or most appropriate audience for fairy-stories. But this was not always the case: such tales were once read by adults, and having become ‘old-fashioned’ in our ‘modern lettered world’ (p. 34) were relegated to the nursery. ‘In fact only some children, and some adults, have any special taste’ for fairy-stories; ‘and when they have it, it is not exclusive, nor even necessarily dominant’ (p. 35). Tolkien rejects a suggestion implicit in the introduction by *Andrew Lang to the large paper edition of his Blue Fairy Book (1889), that ‘the teller of marvellous tales to children’ appeals to a supposed desire to believe ‘that a thing exists or can happen in the real (primary) world’, and trades on a child’s ‘lack of experience which makes it less easy … to distinguish fact from fiction’ (p. 36). Instead, ‘what really happens is that the story-maker 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, the art, has failed’ (pp. 36–7).
As for himself as a child, his reactions to stories were not those described by Lang:
Belief depended on the way in which stories were presented to me, by older people, or the authors, or on the inherent tone and quality of the tale. But at no time can I remember that the enjoyment of a story was dependent on belief that such things could happen, or had happened in ‘real life’. Fairy-stories were plainly not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability. If they awakened desire, satisfying it, while often whetting it unbearably, they succeeded …. I never imagined that the dragon was of the same order as the horse …. The dragon had the trade-mark Of Faërie written plain upon him. In whatever world he had his being it was an Other-world. Fantasy, the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds, was the heart of the desire of Faërie. I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighbourhood …. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril. [pp. 39–40]
Some children may like fairy-stories, he argues, not because they are children, but because they are human, and fairy-stories are a natural though not a universal human taste. But ‘if fairy-story as a kind is worth reading at all it is worthy to be written for and read by adults’ (p. 43).
Tolkien finds four particular values and functions in fairy-stories as adult reading. The first is Fantasy, which he uses to describe the successful achievement of ‘the inner consistency of reality’ (p. 44), which commands belief in a Secondary World. To succeed in making such a world demands much labour and skill, and is best achieved by words, not by visible arts such as painting, or by *drama. He contrasts the limitations of the latter with ‘Faërian Drama’ which
can produce Fantasy with a realism and immediacy beyond the compass of any human mechanism. As a result their usual effect (upon a man) is to go beyond Secondary Belief. If you are present at a Faërian drama you yourself are, or think that you are, bodily inside its Secondary World … in a dream that some other mind is weaving, and the knowledge of that alarming fact may slip from your grasp. To experience Directly a Secondary World: the potion is too strong, and you give to it Primary Belief …. [pp. 48–9]
Tolkien defends Fantasy from those who would call it childish folly by quoting from his poem *Mythopoeia an extract in which he declares the right of Man, made in the image of his Creator, to sub-create in turn and fill the world with Elves, Goblins, dragons, and the like. He declares Fantasy to be ‘a natural human activity’ (p. 51), and in no way opposed to Reason.
The second value is *Recovery. Man is heir ‘in enjoyment or in practice of many generations of ancestors in the arts. In this inheritance of wealth there may be a danger of boredom or of anxiety to be original …’ (p. 53). Fairy-story and Fantasy help us to achieve Recovery, because they allow us to look again at things we think we know, see them in a new way, regain a freshness of vision.
*Escape is another important function of fairy-story, but many critics who describe fairy-stories as ‘escapist’ use that term in a derogatory sense, and consider those who read such tales as unable to face ‘real life’. Tolkien argues that such critics ‘are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter’ (p. 56). They consider a tale worthwhile only if it embraces all of the details of modern life: factories, ugly street-lamps, the noise of traffic, the latest and soon obsolete invention. Tolkien points out that a desire to escape from such transitory things to the more enduring is often accompanied by other emotions, ‘Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt’ (p. 56). He remarks sarcastically: ‘How real, how startlingly alive is a factory chimney compared with an elm-tree: poor obsolete thing, insubstantial dream of an escapist!’ (p. 57). There are worse things from which one might want to escape: ‘hunger, thirst, poverty, pain, sorrow, injustice, death’ (p. 60). The ‘oldest and deepest desire’ of all is the Escape from Death, and yet fairy-stories teach the burden of ‘immortality, or rather endless serial living’ (p. 62; see also *Mortality and immortality).
But the most important value offered by fairy-stories is the Consolation of the Happy Ending. Tolkien coins a new word to describe it: *Eucatastrophe, ‘the joy of the happy ending; or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ …. In its fairy-tale – or otherworld – setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dycatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance …’ (p. 62).
In an ‘epilogue’ Tolkien suggests that a work which achieves an ‘inner consistency of reality’ must in some way ‘partake of reality’, and ‘the peculiar quality of the “joy” in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth …. It may be a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world’ (p. 64). Tolkien applies this to the story of Christ: ‘the Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories’, one which ‘has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfilment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s History’ (p. 65).
HISTORY
In June 1938 the Faculty of Arts of the University of St Andrews (*Scotland) recommended to the Senatus Accademius the names of three candidates to deliver the next three Andrew Lang Lectures. Tolkien was chosen for the 1941 lecture, his name having been put forward probably by T.M. Knox, then Professor of Moral Philosophy at St Andrews but earlier associated with Jesus College, Oxford, and a former pupil of *R.G. Collingwood. Tolkien later sent Knox a copy of Essays Presented to Charles Williams (including On Fairy-Stories) with a covering letter in which he begged Knox to accept his gift ‘at the least in memory of your kind hospitality [presumably at the time of the lecture], and (I suspect) your part in obtaining for me not only an undeserved honour, but a glimpse of St Andrews’ (reproduced in Meic Pierce Owen, ‘Tolkien and St Andrews’, University of St Andrews Staff Newsletter, January 2004, p. 1). When neither of the first two candidates – Gilbert Murray, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, and Lord Hugh Macmillan – were able to accept for the most immediate lecture, the Senatus voted, on 7 October 1938, to ask Tolkien to do so.
Andrew Bennett, Secretary to the University, wrote to him on 8 October 1938, inviting him to deliver the Andrew Lang Lecture for the current academic year and offering a stipend of £30. The subject of the talk was to be either ‘Andrew Lang and His Work’ or one of the many subjects on which Lang wrote. By preference, the lecture was to be delivered in November or December 1938, but a date in January or February 1939 was also
