On Fairy-Stories
| "On Fairy-Stories" | |
|---|---|
| Author | J. R. R. Tolkien |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Essay |
| Published in | Essays Presented to Charles Williams |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
| Publication date | 4 December 1947 |
| Preceded by | "Leaf by Niggle" |
| Followed by | "Farmer Giles of Ham" |
"On Fairy-Stories" is an essay by J. R. R. Tolkien which discusses the fairy-story as a literary form. It was initially written (and entitled simply "Fairy Stories") for presentation by Tolkien as the Andrew Lang lecture at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, in 1939.
In the lecture, Tolkien chose to focus on Andrew Lang’s work as a folklorist and collector of fairy tales. He disagreed with Lang's broad inclusion in his Fairy Books collection (1889-1910), of traveller's tales, beast fables, and other types of stories. Tolkien held a narrower perspective, viewing fairy stories as those that took place in Faerie, an enchanted realm, with or without fairies as characters. He disagreed with both Max Müller and Andrew Lang in their respective theories of the development of fairy stories, which he viewed as the natural development of the interaction of human imagination and human language.
The essay first appeared in print, with some enhancement, in 1947, in a festschrift volume, Essays Presented to Charles Williams, compiled by C. S. Lewis. Charles Williams, a friend of Lewis's, had been relocated with the Oxford University Press staff from London to Oxford during the London blitz in World War II. This allowed him to participate in gatherings of the Inklings with Lewis and Tolkien. The volume of essays was intended to be presented to Williams upon the return of the OUP staff to London with the ending of the war. However, Williams died suddenly on 15 May 1945, and the book was published as a memorial volume.Essays Presented to Charles Williams received little attention, and was out of print by 1955.
"On Fairy-Stories" received much more attention beginning in 1964 when it was published in Tree and Leaf. Since then Tree and Leaf has been reprinted several times, and "On Fairy-Stories" itself has been reprinted in other compilations of Tolkien's works, such as The Tolkien Reader in 1966 and The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays in 1983 (see #Publication history below). "On Fairy Stories" was published on its own in an expanded edition in 2008. The length of the essay, as it appears in Tree and Leaf, is 60 pages, including about ten pages of notes.
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