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 possible. Tolkien’s letter of acceptance does not survive, but was acknowledged on 14 October. The Secretary having heard nothing more concerning either the subject chosen or a suggested date, wrote again to Tolkien on 18 January 1939. Tolkien replied on 1 February that his chosen topic was ‘Fairy-stories’ and suggested 8 March for its delivery.
Tolkien had little time to prepare the lecture before its delivery at St Andrews on 8 March 1939, but already had given thought to the subject. Probably towards the end of 1937 he was invited by the Lovelace Society at Worcester College, *Oxford to read a paper at a meeting of 14 February 1938. In a letter to C.A. Furth of George Allen & Unwin (*Publishers) on 24 July 1938, Tolkien said that he had rewritten *Farmer Giles of Ham the preceding January ‘and read it to the Lovelace Society in lieu of a paper “on” fairy stories’ (Letters, p. 39). It seems likely that he did not give a paper on fairy-stories on that occasion, because he found that he did not have enough time to write one, or to finish writing, and it was easier in the event to revise Farmer Giles of Ham, a version of which was already in hand.
Drafts for the lecture preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (*Libraries and archives) show that Tolkien drew upon resources that became available only after he accepted the invitation, and evidently worked on his text until the eleventh hour. He included several references to The Coloured Lands by *G.K. Chesterton, which was published in November 1938; and it seems likely that a comment in the second version of the lecture was inspired by a letter of 11 February 1939 to Tolkien from C.A. Furth, who found Farmer Giles of Ham hard to categorize for a prospective market. (‘Grown-ups writing fairy-stories for grown-ups’, Tolkien wrote, ‘are not popular with publishers or booksellers. They have got to find a niche. To call their works fairy-tales places them at once as juvenilia; but if a glance at their contents shows that that will not do, then where are you? This is what is called a “marketing problem”’ (Tolkien Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford).)
Notes and working papers, as well as citations of many tales and authorities within the lecture, indicate that Tolkien did a considerable amount of background reading. It is also clear from his drafts that composition of the lecture did not come smoothly. After writing a first text, Tolkien decided that it needed revision and reorganization and wrote a second version, reusing some of the pages from the first. Both versions are heavily marked with revisions, and neither seems suitable as a reading copy for the actual lecture at St Andrews; it seems, in fact, that the text delivered in 1939 has not survived. One can say for sure, as Tolkien does in an introductory paragraph to On Fairy-Stories in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, only that the 1939 text was ‘abbreviated’ relative to that of 1947. The earlier papers contain nothing about eucatastrophe, or any of the material contained in the published ‘epilogue’. It is certainly significant that a lengthy summary of the lecture in the St Andrews Citizen for 11 March 1939 makes no mention of ‘eucatastrophe’ or any reference to Christianity (‘Andrew Lang’s Unrivalled Fairy Stories: Oxford Professor’s St Andrews Address’, p. 6).
The rough handwriting and frequent emendation of the On Fairy-Stories manuscripts, together with many miscellaneous notes and memoranda of various dates in the Bodleian papers, make it hard to trace the history of writing of the lecture. But much evidence exists, both among and outside of the preserved papers, to show that Tolkien returned to On Fairy-Stories only a few years later, revising and enlarging it, now including the ‘epilogue’. The first reasonably legible and continuous surviving manuscript (though still with many deletions and replacements) cannot be earlier than 1943, since it contains a new reference that a story about the Archbishop of Canterbury slipping on a banana skin might be disbelieved if it was said to have taken place between 1940 and 1943 (1940 and 1945). Drafting for this is on the verso of a sheet referring to cadets whom Tolkien taught at Oxford beginning in spring 1943.
It may be that Tolkien was inspired to look at On Fairy-Stories again after being appointed