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"On Fairy-Stories" is a 1947 essay by J. R. R. Tolkien which discusses the fairy story as a literary form. It was written as a lecture entitled "Fairy Stories" for the Andrew Lang lecture at the University of St Andrews , Scotland, on 8 March 1939.
"On Fairy-Stories", the 1939 Andrew Lang lecture at St Andrew's University, is a defence of the fantasy genre. "A Secret Vice" talks about creating imaginary languages, giving background to Tolkien's Quenya and Sindarin. "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is a study of the medieval poem of the same name.
Devin Brown, writing in Mythlore, argues that storytelling itself is "the ultimate time travel machine", noting that Tolkien's 1939 essay "On Fairy-Stories" stated that a defining characteristic of a fairy story is "its ability to transport the reader outside of time to realms otherwise inaccessible". [12]
This category is for essays, lectures, studies, letters and other short works of non-fiction by J. R. R. Tolkien. Pages in category "Essays by J. R. R. Tolkien" The following 13 pages are in this category, out of 13 total.
In his essay "On Fairy-Stories", Tolkien discusses the function of dreams in fantasy, stating that [7] [T 1] in dreams strange powers of the mind may be unlocked. In some of them a man may for a space wield the power of Faërie, that power which, even as it conceives the story, causes it to take living form and colour before the eyes.
Tom Shippey notes that Tolkien made equivocal statements about fantasy, such as in his essay "On Fairy-Stories". Tolkien was similarly equivocal about the nature of evil, as seen through the One Ring, created by the Dark Lord Sauron to dominate the whole of Middle-earth; it behaves both as an inanimate object, and as a thing with constantly ...
Each story has its feet firmly planted in the real world, but serves as an epicenter for swirling fantasies. In one story, "The Lizzie Borden Jazz Babies," Sparks makes use of a tragic plot point that sets off many classic fairy tales – the untimely death of a protagonist's parent – and applies it to the father instead of the mother.
[6] [32] Tolkien's influence, and his literary criticism, greatly popularized secondary worlds, as his formative essay "On Fairy Stories" termed them. This led to the decline of such devices as dream frames to explain away a fantastical setting.