Tolkien and Fantasy

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Tolkien and Fantasy
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There is no market for fantasy.

• -- U.S Publisher to an aspiring author in the
  1950s

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The Romance

• Presents life as we would have it bemore
  picturesque, fantastic, adventurous, or heroic
  than actuality.

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Realism

• Realistic fiction is written to give the effect
  that it represents life and the social world as
  it seems to the common reader, evoking the sense
  that its characters might in fact exist, and that
  such things might well happen.

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Realism

• The subject matter of Realism must be fairly
  limited. It tends to prefer commonplace, and
  everyday material, represented in minute detail.

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• His work is so outstanding and his influence so
  conspicuous that his name stands first Tolkien
  and twentieth-century fantasy, like Shakespeare
  and Elizabethan drama.
• (Deborah Webster Rogers)

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Fantasy

• Any narrative that is disengaged from reality.
  Often such stories are set in nonexistent
  worlds, such as under the earth, in a fairyland,
  on the moon. The characters in fantasy are often
  something other than human or include non-human
  characters.

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Some Characteristics of Fantasy

• Is often set in the past before recorded history
  begins or at some time that cannot be put into a
  definite relationship with real time but
  resembles past eras of history or
• contains persons or other creatures that have
  been the subject of myths or legends or

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Some Characteristics of Fantasy

• involves marvellous events of which no scientific
  explanation is given or perhaps seems possible
  or
• involves magic.
• (Richard L. Purtill J.R.R. Tolkien Myth,
  Morality and Religion 33).

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Fantasy Science Fiction

• Fantasy can be distinguished from science fiction
  in that the latter, though it may have a strange
  world similar, or vastly different from our own,
  its laws are explained by science and technology
  (whether real or imagined).

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Fantasy Science Fiction

• Fantasy deals with things that are not and
  cannot be. Science fiction deals with things that
  can be,
• that some day may be.
• (M. H. Abrams)

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Tolkien on Fantasy

• Fantasy is the making or glimpsing of Other
  worlds (i.e., worlds made up by the author) (On
  Fairy Stories).

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Tolkien on Fantasy

• The fantasy writer creates
• a Secondary World which the readers mind can
  enter. Inside it, what he relates is true it
  accords with the laws of that world. Thus the
  writer creates Secondary Belief.

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Tolkien on Fantasy

• Fantasy, when well achieved, should have a
  quality of strangeness and wonder in the
  Expression, yet an author must be able to give
  to his or her ideal creation the inner
  consistency of reality.
• (On Fairy Stories)

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Tolkien on Fantasy

• Faërie (the perilous and magical realm of
  fantasy) 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.
• (On Fairy Stories)

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Tolkien on Magic in Fantasy

• His fantasys magic, is a magic of a peculiar
  mood and power, at the furthest pole from the
  vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific
  magician. . whose desire is power in this
  world, domination of things and wills.
• It is more the magic of enchantment.

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Sub-creation

• We make still by the law in which were made.
• (On Fairy Stories)

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Sub-creation

• The making of things is in my heart from my own
  making by Thee
• (Aule in The Ainulindale).

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Recovery, Escape andConsolation
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Recovery, Escape and Consolation

• Tolkien believed that fairy-stories are valuable
  because they help us overcome an imaginative
  poverty he saw behind his contemporaries failure
  to respond to the mythological vision of works
  like Beowulf.

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Recovery

• Too much of our life and our art, Tolkien
  complains, is like play under a glass roof by
  the side of a municipal swimming-bath, forgetful
  of heaven and the sea.
• (On Fairy Stories)

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Recovery

• We need to clean our windows so that the things
  seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of
  triteness or familiarity.
• (On Fairy Stories)

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Recovery

• Tolkien believed Fairy stories let us see or
  discover the world as we originally were meant to
  see it. We are left to imagine that the
  stupidity, barbarity, squalor, and horror of the
  war drove a sensitive young imagination toward
  the conviction that he was seeing the very
  opposite of life as it was meant to be seen
  (Roger Sale).

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Escape

• Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself
  in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Of
  if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks
  about other topics than jailers and
  prison-walls? (On Fairy Stories)

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Escape

• The world outside has not become less real
  because the prisoner cannot
• see it
• The critics who accuse fantasy of being escapist
  have chosen the wrong word, and, . . . are
  confusing The Escape of the Prisoner with The
  Flight of the Deserter.
• (On Fairy Stories)

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Consolation

• Fairy tales offer consolation from this worlds
  suffering through tapping into desires we have,
  such as the desire to visit far off places, . .
  .to survey the depths of space and time. Another
  is to hold communion with living things.
• (On Fairy Stories)

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Consolation

• The main consolation is seen in all fairy tales
  It is the happy ending.
• Tolkien calls this the Eucatastrophe.
• When we experience a Eucatastrophe, we feel a
  deep, piercing joy with a turn from sorrow to
  happiness.

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Consolation

• Eucatastrophe the sudden happy turn in a
  story which pierces you with a joy that brings
  tears (which I argued it is the highest function
  of fairy-stories to produce). . . . it is a
  sudden glimpse of Truth, your whole nature
  chained in material cause and effect, the chain
  of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major
  limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back.
  (Tolkien, Letters)

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Consolation

• The gospels, according to Tolkien, are like a
  fairy story, artistic, yet true, not fictitious.
  The incarnation and resurrection are both
  Eucatastrophes.

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• The poetry of the mythic imagination makes the
  ability to perceive truth possible, putting
  imaginatively starved modern man back once again
  into awed and reverent contact with a living
  universe (Randel Helms).