Who Are Fairy Stories Written For? Come, Tom Bombadil, for our need is near us!

         J.R.R Tolkien believed that Fairy stories were written for both children and adults.  He suggested in his essay On Fairy Stories that children were more apt to enjoy fairy stories because they have less knowledge of the world and therefore can more easily believe in them.  Furthermore, Tolkien surmised that children are less likely to voice their disapproval and thusly, if they do not enjoy the story, they just may not say so.  Tolkien’s salient point that fairy stories are meant just as much for the enjoyment of adults as for children because they are a “natural human taste,” is coupled with the idea that the successful fairy story comes from a sub-creator who can create a secondary reality.  The “willing suspension of disbelief” in this secondary reality should not be necessary because the secondary reality is different than our own primary reality and therefore no need arises to disbelieve anything within it.  So if the target audience of Tolkien’s fairy stories was not specifically children, whom then did he write them for? 

This question seems inherently tied to another important question of what fairy stories do according to Tolkien.  We know from Tolkien’s essay that fairy stories have four main functions.  The first is that fairy stories must be different from other stories, which makes them very difficult to compose.  It is harder to create a consistent reality when one cannot reference everyday things (like airplanes, or TVs, or phones etc.).  Secondly, fairy stories must promote a kind of “recovery” for those who read them. They provide the renewal or “regaining of a clear view” of our primary reality.  The things of everyday life that might become drab and insipid can appear in another form in the fairy story.  Then when we leave the story and look at those drab and insipid things they are no longer dull.  Our familiarities are suddenly seen anew without our “appropriation.”  Thirdly, fairy stories must provide an escape for everyone: escape from the bustle, noise, and technology of our time, escape from this world and satisfaction of curiosities, escape from death through the deathlessness of elves, escape from the things we cannot flee from in our primary reality.  The secondary reality, however, provides us the way out.  Finally, fairy stories provide consolation.  Tolkien uses the word “eucatastrophe” to mean pure and true joy that comes after sorrow and this joy is as sharp as any grief.  These four components of fairy stories make them special and unique.

Knowing that fairy stories accomplish these four things, we can now look at the context in which Tolkien wrote his own, very successful, fairy stories.  When Tolkien began writing The Lost Tales and The Silmarillion he was in the trenches of World War I.  Writing was his own way of escape from chaos, his avenue for expression of feeling, and his method of recovery of all he did not have and missed during the war.  While writing The Hobbit he seemed to do so along with the advice of his youngest son, Christopher.  Despite being sickly, Tolkien nonetheless prized Christopher as his first and most important helper.  Later when Christopher went off to World War II, Tolkien sent him the manuscripts of the Lord of the Rings as he was writing it, maybe understanding that Christopher too would need a “way out” of the trenches.  Are fairy stories, however, merely a recovery, escape, and consolation for those battling through tough times or is there a use for them in our every day lives?

Now we must ask Tom Bombadil for help!  In The Fellowship of the Ring Tom Bombadil begins to tell the hobbits stories about the history of Middle Earth and beyond.  On this occasion, the hobbits begin to realize how insignificant they are and how small their own story is in the greater context of the life of Middle Earth and the rest of the world.  The stories gave them perspective.  Tom Bombadil does not simply tell Frodo and his companions stories, but they are “enchanted” before him.  According to Tolkien in On Fairy Stories, enchantment is an essential part of fairy stories.  “[Tom] had now wandered into strange regions beyond their memory and beyond their waking thought, into times when the world was wider and the seas flowed straight to the western Shore; and still on and back Tom went singing out into the ancient starlight, when only the Elf-sires were awake…The hobbits sat still before him, enchanted; and it seemed as if, under the spell of his words, the wind had gone…and all the sky was filled with the light of white stars” (Ballantine Books 1994, p. 148).  In this passage Tom is what Tolkien describes as a “sub-creator” within the created story of the Lord of the Rings, or secondary reality, Tolkien himself has already created.   This passage gives us a further insight into the purpose of fairy stories: they bring us out of a myopic view of our own story and show us how much greater the Great Story is.  So perhaps fairy stories are for those who need recovery, escape, and consolation and also for everyone, to help us all see, like the Hobbits, how small we really are in the Great Story.   Like Aragorn says in The Two Towers, “For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time…Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves, and another among Men. It is a man's part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house” (Ballantine Books 1994, p. 33).  We are merely a small part of this Great Story but we can still discern this good and ill which is not one thing in Lord of the Rings and another in our own world.
     So not only are fairy stories for everyone but they are needed by everyone.  In his biography on Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter says that, “his essay On Fairy Stories and in his story Leaf By Niggle, both…suggest that a man be given by God the gift of recording ‘a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth…always I had the sense of recording what was already “there,” somewhere: not of “inventing.”’” (p. 99-100).  Each person battles through tough times at some point, and those people do need escape, recovery, and consolation, but they are not the only ones.  We all must at some point see the greater story around beyond our own individual primary reality – we must see the true primary reality!  To Tolkien the greatest fairy story was the Gospel of Jesus Christ – the message of Christianity – and the best part was that this was the true story to Tolkien: the consolation was quite real.  And this story, according to Matthew 28:19-20, is just like Tolkien’s ideas of fairy stories: created for all people for all time.

- KK