of the contributors … present their ideas of what story should be. None of them hazards a definition, although Mr. J.R.R. Tolkein [sic], who has a decided conception of what a fairy-story should be, gets nearest to a prescription’ (‘Telling Stories’, 19 June 1948, p. 345).
On Fairy-Stories received more attention in 1964 when it was published in Tree and Leaf, and since then has been widely cited (if not extensively discussed) in most books concerning Tolkien, as well as in writings about children’s literature and fantasy fiction. Folklore scholar K.M. Briggs disagreed with Tolkien’s ‘belief, which is shared by a good many well-informed people, that the tiny fairies came into folk-tradition from literature in the sixteenth century. It was actually the other way round, and they first entered literature from that time; but he is of course right in maintaining that diminutiveness is not an essential part of fairy nature’ (Folklore 75 (Winter 1964), pp. 293–4). When Tolkien expresses his distrust of ‘the classification of tales’ he ‘puts his finger upon an insensitiveness to the essence of a story which is apt to overtake the classifier, anxious to find a home for the rebellious original theme’. Some form of classification of the thousands of stories is needed, but in ‘our anxious efforts to preserve, to classify, let us not forget that the stories we study were invented and handed down for the sake of delight and enlargement of spirit. Such an essay as this of Professor Tolkien’s is a timely and permanent reminder of the delight that lies behind our occupation’ (p. 294).
In a review of the expanded edition of On Fairy-Stories for Mythlore 27, nos. 1/2, whole nos. 103/104 (Fall/Winter 2008) Jason Fisher praised the amount of previously unpublished working texts and information, but noted consistent errors in page references in commentaries to the working manuscripts, and found the two bibliographies and the index to be idiosyncratic. He also felt ‘that while the editors do a great deal to intercontextualize “On Fairy-Stories” with other works in the critical and literary milieu to which it belongs, they do less than they might have to intracontextualize it with the larger body of Tolkien’s own work, especially (but not exclusively) his fiction’ (p. 183).
Douglas A. Anderson, co-editor of the expanded edition, published a set of corrections to its hardback and paperback printings on his Tolkien and Fantasy blog, 31 March 2015.
See further, Robert J. Reilly, ‘Tolkien and the Fairy Story’, in Tolkien and the Critics: Essays on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, ed. Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo (1968); Chris Seeman, ‘Tolkien’s Revision of the Romantic Tradition’, in Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien Conference 1992, ed. Patricia Reynolds and Glen H. GoodKnight (1995); James V. Schall, S.J., ‘On the Realities of Fantasy’, in Tolkien: A Celebration: Collected Writings on a Literary Legacy, ed. Joseph Pearce (1999); and essays in Hither Shore 12 (2015). On the background to the study of folk- and fairy-tales as touched on in On Fairy-Stories, see Verlyn Flieger, ‘“There Would Always Be a Fairy-tale”: J.R.R. Tolkien and the Folklore Controversy’, Tolkien the Medievalist (2003).
See also *Escape; *Eucatastrophe; *Fairy-stories; *Recovery; *Sub-creation.
On ‘The Kalevala’ or Land of Heroes. Two versions of a paper on the Kalevala, delivered by Tolkien to the Sundial Society at Corpus Christi College, *Oxford on 22 November 1914 and to the Exeter College Essay Club (*Societies and clubs) in February 1915, together with a revised text of the early 1920s, first published complete, with The Story of Kullervo (see *Kalevala), in Tolkien Studies 7 (2010), pp. 211–78, edited by Verlyn Flieger, and later in book form in *The Story of Kullervo (2015), also edited by Verlyn Flieger, pp. 63–131 including editorial introduction, notes, and commentary. Short extracts from the essays were first included in the original edition of the Companion and Guide.
THE FIRST VERSION
The earlier of the two versions is a rough manuscript in pencil, overwritten in ink, considerably reworked with deletions and sections reordered. It begins: ‘I am afraid this paper was not originally written for this society, which I hope it will pardon since I produce it mainly to form a stop-gap tonight, to entertain you as far as possible in spite of the sudden collapse of the intended reader’ (The Story of Kullervo, p. 67). While Tolkien’s friend *G.B. Smith, a student at Corpus Christi College, might have suggested Tolkien as a stop-gap, the minute book of the Sundial Society gives no indication of an unexpected change of speaker, recording only that the title of Tolkien’s talk was The Finnish National Epic. No record survives of the Exeter College reading.
The underlying pencil version might have been that given to the Sundial Society, and the rewriting and reworking in ink done for Exeter College, but the latter work seems extensive for a ‘stop-gap’ paper. The ink manuscript, which refers to the Saxons as the enemy and Russia as an ally of Britain, certainly dates from the First World War. Some support for an earlier date for the pencil text or for a lost earlier version, and at least some passage of time, is given in the second paragraph: ‘If I continually drop into talking as if no one in the room had read these poems before, it is because no one had, when I first read it …’ (p. 67).
In the first part of the paper Tolkien discusses why he likes the Kalevala. Its poems are literature ‘so very unlike any of the things that are familiar to general readers, or even to those versed in the more curious by paths’, coming from Classic, Celtic, and Teutonic sources (‘I put these in order of increasing appeal to myself’), which in spite of differences imply ‘something kindred in the imagination of the speakers of Indo-European languages’ (pp. 67–8). ‘When I first read the Kalevala’, he continued, ‘that is, crossed the gulf between the Indo-European-speaking peoples of Europe into this smaller realm of those who cling in queer corners to the forgotten tongues and memories of an elder day’, the newness worried him, yet the more he read, the more he felt at home and enjoyed it. ‘When H[onour]Mod[eration]s should have been occupying all my forces I once made a wild assault on the stronghold of the original language [Finnish] and was repulsed at first with heavy losses’ (p. 69).
He admits that ‘heroes of the Kalevala do behave with a singular lack of conventional dignity and with a readiness for tears and dirty dealing’, and that its lovers ‘are forward and take a great deal of rebuffing. There is no Troilus to need a Pandarus to do his shy wooing for him: rather here it is the mothers-in-law who do some sound bargaining behind the scenes and give cynical advice to their daughters calculated to shatter the most stout illusions’ (p. 70).
Although the work is often described as ‘the national Finnish epic’, it is not an epic, but rather
a mass of conceivably epic material: but … it would lose all that which is its greatest delight if it were ever to be epically handled. The main stories, the bare events, alone could remain; all that underworld, all that rich profusion and luxuriance which clothe them would be stripped away ….
We have here then a collection of mythological ballads full of that very primitive undergrowth that the litterature [sic] of Europe has on the whole been cutting away and reducing for centuries with different and earlier completeness in different peoples …. Therefore let us rather rejoice that we have come suddenly upon a storehouse of those popular imaginings which we had feared lost, stocked with stories as yet not sophisticated into a sense of proportion; with no thought of the decent limits of exaggeration …. [pp. 70–72]
Both the Kalevala and the Mabinogion (*Celtic influences) delight in a good story and in exaggeration, but the former pays no attention to plausibility and has no feel of a background of literary tradition. To Tolkien, in the Kalevala ‘the colours, the deeds, the marvels, and the figures of the heroes are all splashed onto a clean bare canvas by a sudden hand: even the legends concerning the origins of the most ancient things seem to come fresh from the singer’s hot imagination of the moment’ (p. 73).
In the second part of the
