He then attempts to answer the question the question ‘What is a fairy story?’, turning to the *Oxford English Dictionary but finding its definitions too narrow. He rejects the notion of fairies as ‘supernatural beings of diminutive size’, propagated by works such as Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–6) and Michael Drayton’s Nymphidia (1627), and notes that although ‘fairy as a noun more or less equivalent to elf’ (p. 12) was hardly found until the late fifteenth century, faërie, meaning the realm of fairies or ‘Elfland’, appeared in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (c. 1390). Tolkien also rejects the definition of fairy-story (or fairy-tale) as simply ‘a tale about fairies, or generally a fairy legend’.
Fairy-stories are not in normal English usage stories about fairies or elves, but stories about Fairy, that is Faërie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being. Faërie 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.
Stories that are actually concerned primarily with ‘fairies’, that is with creatures that might also in modern English be called ‘elves’ are relatively rare, and as a rule not very interesting. Most good ‘fairy-stories’ are about the aventures of men in the Perilous Realm or upon its shadowy marches. [p. 14]
Tolkien would exclude from a list of ‘fairy-stories’ traveller’s tales such as Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), dream-fiction such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), and beast-fables such as Reynard the Fox, although the latter has a connection with fairy-story in that it ‘derives from one of the primal “desires” that lie near the heart of Faërie: the desire of men to hold communion with other living things’ (p. 19).
Considering the origin or origins of fairy elements in stories, he finds little value in folklorists’ relation of tales according to similar motives. ‘It is precisely the colouring the atmosphere, the unclassifiable individual details of a story, and above all the general purport that informs with life the undissected bones of the plot, that really count’ (pp. 21–2). Using Sir George Webbe Dasent’s words, he says that ‘we must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled …. By the “the soup” I mean the story as it is served up by its author or teller, and by “the bones” its sources or material – even when (by rare luck) those can be with certainty discovered. But I do not, of course, forbid criticism of the soup as soup’ (pp. 22–3).
He notes various theories concerning the origin and history of fairy-stories, ‘independent evolution (or rather invention) of the similar; inheritance from a common ancestry; and diffusion at various times from one or more centres’, of which the first ‘is the most important and fundamental’ (p. 23). *Philology is no longer thought to be of such significance; nevertheless, the human mind and language have played a part.
The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and be able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into swift water …. Or we may cause woods to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and put hot fire into the belly of the cold worm [dragon]. But in such ‘fantasy’, as it is called, new form is made; Faërie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator. [pp. 24–5; see *Sub-creation]
After a discussion of mythology and religion related to folk- and fairy-tales, and of the magical face of fairy-story (notably in ‘The Golden Key’ by *George MacDonald), Tolkien comments that ‘new bits’ have been continually added to the constantly boiling ‘Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story’ (p. 28), and shows how fairy-tale elements may become attached to ‘the great figures of Myth and History’, such as Arthur (*Arthur and the Matter of Britain). The antiquity of some of these elements opens ‘a door on Other Time, and if we pass through, though only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself, maybe’ (p. 32). Tolkien thinks that such story 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