Circumstantial evidence that Tolkien was working on the lecture, and perhaps reading it to or discussing it with the *Inklings, is contained in a letter by *C.S. Lewis to Gerald Hayes on 12 March 1943, defending his taste for works such the Morte Darthur, The Faerie Queene, Arcadia, the High History of the Holy Grail, and the prose romances of William Morris. ‘But ought we not both to defend our tastes more stoutly?’ he wrote. ‘To all this about being “grown up” may we not answer that the desire to be grown up is itself intrinsically puerile but the love of “fine fabling” is not. These books were written neither by children nor for children. Because they are now out of fashion they have gravitated to the nursery as the old furniture has – the same is true of fairy-tales themselves’ (Collected Letters, vol. 2 (2004), pp. 562–3). There are similar statements by Tolkien in versions of the essay. By 5 August 1943 *Charles Williams had arranged for the newest version to be typed by his friend Margaret Douglas, and on that date she wrote to a friend that she had agreed to type the lengthy essay and that Tolkien’s handwriting was difficult to read.
In late 1944, with the prospect that Williams would soon be leaving Oxford for the London office of Oxford University Press, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis began to organize a Festschrift to honour Williams’ work for Oxford University. When Williams died unexpectedly on 15 May 1945, the Festschrift became a memorial volume. Tolkien’s contribution, On Fairy-Stories, needed only a few emendations to the carbon copy of the typescript made by Margaret Douglas.
Tolkien felt that the ideas he developed in On Fairy-Stories had influenced the writing of *The Lord of the Rings, and said so in letters at least as early to correspondents including Peter Hastings (September 1954) and Dora Marshall (3 March 1955). In a letter to *W.H. Auden on 7 June 1955 he complained that Oxford University Press had ‘most scurvily’ allowed the lecture (in Essays Presented to Charles Williams) to go out of print (Letters, p. 216). But Allen & Unwin were eager to publish it themselves, perhaps as a small book if Tolkien could expand it by about half and remove references that revealed its origin as a lecture. In August 1959 Tolkien signed a contract with Allen & Unwin for publication of an expanded version of On Fairy-Stories, which he hoped to have ready by the end of the year; in the event, the idea lay dormant until 1963, when Tolkien and *Rayner Unwin discussed the possibility of publishing On Fairy-Stories to keep Tolkien’s name in the public eye while he continued to work on *The Silmarillion. At length it was decided to publish the lecture together with the story *Leaf by Niggle in a new volume, *Tree and Leaf.
In 2008 On Fairy-Stories was published by HarperCollins, London, in an ‘expanded edition’ as Tolkien on Fairy-Stories, with commentary and notes by editors Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson. The essay proper was reprinted ‘in its final form as edited by Christopher Tolkien and published in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays’ (p. 27). With this are partial transcriptions, edited to form ‘a readable text’, of the two manuscript versions we refer to in the present article (numerous extracts also appear in Reader’s Companion); editors’ introductions and annotations; and a comparison of the essay as published in Essays Presented to Charles Williams with that published in Tree and Leaf (similar to the analysis in Descriptive Bibliography, pp. 184, 186–9).
CRITICISM
Published on 4 December 1947, Essays Presented to Charles Williams received few reviews. The anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement commented that ‘some 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