论童话故事 (1947)

"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.

The essay is significant because it contains Tolkien's explanation of his philosophy on fantasy, and his thoughts on mythopoeia and sub-creation or worldbuilding. Alongside his 1936 essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics", it is his most influential scholarly work.

Several scholars have used "On Fairy-Stories" as a route to understanding Tolkien's own fantasy, The Lord of the Rings, complete with its sub-created world of Middle-earth. Clyde Northrup contends that in the essay, Tolkien argues that "fairy-story" must contain four qualities, namely fantasy, recovery, escape, and consolation. Derek Shank argues that while Tolkien objects to structuralism in the essay, Tolkien also proposes that a secondary world must have a structure with coherently related parts; but since it works by its effect on the reader, humans are inside the structure and cannot analyse it objectively.

Context

J. R. R. Tolkien was a professional philologist and an author of fantasy fiction, starting with the children's book The Hobbit in 1937. The Andrew Lang Lecture was important as it brought him to clarify his view of fairy stories as a legitimate literary genre, rather than something intended exclusively for children. By the time of the lecture, The Hobbit had become extremely popular, and Tolkien had started work on a sequel, which became The Lord of the Rings.

History

Tolkien created the material as a lecture entitled "Fairy Stories"; he delivered it as the Andrew Lang lecture at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, on 8 March 1939.

"On Fairy-Stories" first appeared in print, with some enhancement, in 1947, in a festschrift volume, Essays Presented to Charles Williams, compiled by C. S. Lewis. Charles Williams, a friend of Lewis's, had been relocated with the Oxford University Press staff from London to Oxford during the London blitz in World War II. This allowed him to participate in gatherings of the Inklings with Lewis and Tolkien. The volume of essays was intended to be presented to Williams upon the return of the Oxford University Press staff to London with the ending of the war. However, Williams died suddenly on 15 May 1945, and the book was published as a memorial volume. Essays Presented to Charles Williams received little attention and was out of print by 1955.

"On Fairy-Stories" began to receive much more attention in 1964, when it was published in Tree and Leaf. Since then, Tree and Leaf has been reprinted several times, and "On Fairy-Stories" has been reprinted in other compilations of Tolkien's works, such as The Tolkien Reader in 1966, though that edition was impaired by poor proofreading. It appeared again in the 1980 Poems and Stories, and in the 1983 The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays. "On Fairy Stories" was published on its own in an expanded edition in 2008.

Synopsis

The essay "On Fairy-Stories" is an attempt to explain and defend the genre of fairy tales, under the following headings.

Fairy-story

Tolkien distinguishes fairy tales from "traveller's tales" (such as Gulliver's Travels), science fiction (such as H. G. Wells's The Time Machine), beast fables (such as Aesop's Fables and The Tale of Peter Rabbit), and dream stories (such as Alice in Wonderland).

Tolkien claims that one touchstone of the authentic fairy tale is that it is presented as wholly credible: "It is at any rate essential to a genuine fairy-story, as distinct from the employment of this form for lesser or debased purposes, that it should be presented as 'true'. ... But since the fairy-story deals with 'marvels', it cannot tolerate any frame or machinery suggesting that the whole framework in which they occur is a figment or illusion."

Origins

Tolkien comments that fairy stories are ancient, and that it was once thought that they had derived from powerful, elemental "nature-myths", with gods personifying the sun, night, and other elements of nature. These myths were humanised to legends by telling them with human heroes as protagonists. Finally, the legends dwindled to folktales and fairy stories. But in Tolkien's view, this is "almost upside down". A tale of the Norse god Thor in the Elder Edda, the Thrymskvitha, is "certainly just a fairy-story"; it is just as old as the Norse myths. The historical King Arthur, perhaps a minor figure, went into the "Cauldron of Story", and "was boiled for a long time", eventually becoming a "King of Faërie". Tolkien notes that these old stories produce an effect of "distance and a great abyss of time", and suggests that they were selected precisely because they created this literary effect.

Children

Tolkien argues that there is no essential connection between fairy stories and children, but that this "is an accident of our domestic history", meaning that they have been relegated "to the nursery" because adults no longer wanted them. Only some children, he writes, "have any special taste for them", and he suggests that the taste "increases with age, if it is innate". He criticises Andrew Lang's suggestion that children have an "unblunted edge of belief" as trading on their credulity and inexperience. As an infant, when the Green Fairy Book was published, Tolkien says he had "no special 'wish to believe'. I wanted to know." On the other hand, fairy stories did awaken desire, such as for dragons. He had no time for Lang's talking down to children, or for "covertly sniggering". He notes that G. K. Chesterton remarked that children are not uncritically tender: "For children are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy."