Below is an extract from "On Fairy-Stories," an essay by J. R. R. Tolkien which discusses the fairy-story as a literary form. It was initially written for presentation by Tolkien as the Andrew Lang lecture at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, in 1939. I liked this extract:Not long ago—incredible though it may seem—I heard a clerk of Oxenford declare that he “welcomed” the proximity of mass-production robot factories, and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic, because it brought his university into “contact with real life.” He may have meant that the way men [sic] were living and working in the twentieth century was increasing in barbarity at an alarming rate, and that the loud demonstration of this in the streets of Oxford might serve as a warning that it is not possible to preserve for long an oasis of sanity in a desert of unreason by mere fences, without actual offensive action (practical and intellectual).
I fear he did not. In any case the expression “real life” in this context seems to fall short of academic standards. The notion that motor-cars are more “alive” than, say, centaurs or dragons is curious; that they are more “real” than, say, horses is pathetically absurd. How real, how startlingly alive is a factory chimney compared with an elm-tree: poor obsolete thing, insubstantial dream of an escapist!
Much that he (I must suppose) and others (certainly) would call “serious” literature is no more
than play under a glass roof by the side of a municipal swimming-bath. Fairy-stories may
invent monsters that fly the air or dwell in the deep, but at least they do not try to escape
from heaven or the sea.
And if we leave aside for a moment “fantasy,” I do not think that the reader or the maker of fairy-stories need even be ashamed of the “escape” of archaism: of preferring not dragons but horses, castles, sailing-ships, bows and arrows; not only elves, but knights and kings and priests. For it is after all possible for a rational man, after reflection (quite unconnected with fairy-story or romance), to arrive at the condemnation, implicit at least in the mere silence of “escapist” literature, of progressive things like factories, or the machine-guns and bombs that appear to be their most natural and inevitable, dare we say “inexorable,” products.
“The rawness and ugliness of modern European life”—that real life whose contact we should welcome —“is the sign of ... inferiority, of an insufficient or false reaction to environment.” The maddest castle that ever came out of a giant's bag in a wild Gaelic story is not only much less ugly than a robot-factory, it is also (to use a very modern phrase) “in a very real sense” a great deal more real. Why should we not escape from or condemn the “grim Assyrian” absurdity of top-hats, or the Morlockian horror of factories? They are condemned even by the writers of that most escapist form of all literature, stories of Science fiction.
These prophets often foretell (and many seem to yearn for) a world like one big glass-roofed railway-station. But from them it is as a rule very hard to gather what men in such a world-town will do. They may abandon the “full Victorian panoply” for loose garments (with zip-fasteners), but will use this freedom mainly, it would appear, in order to play with mechanical toys in the soon-cloying game of moving at high speed. To judge by some of these tales they will still be as lustful, vengeful, and greedy as ever; and the ideals of their idealists hardly reach farther than the splendid notion of building more towns of the same sort on other planets. It is indeed an age of “improved means to deteriorated ends.”
It is
part of the essential malady of such days— producing the desire to escape, not indeed from
life, but from our present time and self-made misery— that we are acutely conscious both of
the ugliness of our works, and of their evil. So that to us evil and ugliness seem indissolubly
allied. We find it difficult to conceive of evil and beauty together. The fear of the beautiful
fay that ran through the elder ages almost eludes our grasp. Even more alarming: goodness is
itself bereft of its proper beauty. In Faerie one can indeed conceive of an ogre who possesses
a castle hideous as a nightmare (for the evil of the ogre wills it so), but one cannot conceive
of a house built with a good purpose—an inn, a hostel for travellers, the hall of a virtuous
and noble king—that is yet sickeningly ugly. At the present day it would be rash to hope to
see one that was not—unless it was built before our time.
Source: http://brainstorm-services.com/wcu-2004/fairystories-tolkien.pdf
And if we leave aside for a moment “fantasy,” I do not think that the reader or the maker of fairy-stories need even be ashamed of the “escape” of archaism: of preferring not dragons but horses, castles, sailing-ships, bows and arrows; not only elves, but knights and kings and priests. For it is after all possible for a rational man, after reflection (quite unconnected with fairy-story or romance), to arrive at the condemnation, implicit at least in the mere silence of “escapist” literature, of progressive things like factories, or the machine-guns and bombs that appear to be their most natural and inevitable, dare we say “inexorable,” products.
“The rawness and ugliness of modern European life”—that real life whose contact we should welcome —“is the sign of ... inferiority, of an insufficient or false reaction to environment.” The maddest castle that ever came out of a giant's bag in a wild Gaelic story is not only much less ugly than a robot-factory, it is also (to use a very modern phrase) “in a very real sense” a great deal more real. Why should we not escape from or condemn the “grim Assyrian” absurdity of top-hats, or the Morlockian horror of factories? They are condemned even by the writers of that most escapist form of all literature, stories of Science fiction.
These prophets often foretell (and many seem to yearn for) a world like one big glass-roofed railway-station. But from them it is as a rule very hard to gather what men in such a world-town will do. They may abandon the “full Victorian panoply” for loose garments (with zip-fasteners), but will use this freedom mainly, it would appear, in order to play with mechanical toys in the soon-cloying game of moving at high speed. To judge by some of these tales they will still be as lustful, vengeful, and greedy as ever; and the ideals of their idealists hardly reach farther than the splendid notion of building more towns of the same sort on other planets. It is indeed an age of “improved means to deteriorated ends.”
It is
part of the essential malady of such days— producing the desire to escape, not indeed from
life, but from our present time and self-made misery— that we are acutely conscious both of
the ugliness of our works, and of their evil. So that to us evil and ugliness seem indissolubly
allied. We find it difficult to conceive of evil and beauty together. The fear of the beautiful
fay that ran through the elder ages almost eludes our grasp. Even more alarming: goodness is
Source: http://brainstorm-services.com/wcu-2004/fairystories-tolkien.pdf
