Grown-Up Fairy Tales

On Children, Fantasy, and 'The Lord of the Rings'

In 1955, while preparing for a radio presentation on J.R.R. Tolkien’s work for the BBC Third Programme, W. H. Auden wrote a letter to Tolkien seeking insights into his conception and composition of The Lord of the Rings. As part of his response, Tolkien wrote:

“… I was not prepared to write a ‘sequel’ [to The Hobbit], in the sense of another children’s story. I had been thinking about ‘Fairy Stories’ and their relation to children - some of the results I put into a lecture at St Andrews and eventually enlarged and published in an Essay […] As I had expressed the view that the connexion in the modern mind between children and ‘fairy stories’ is false and accidental, and spoils the stories in themselves and for children, I wanted to try and write one that was not addressed to children at all (as such); also I wanted a large canvas.” (Letter 163, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 314-15)

The lecture described here is, of course, the essay ‘On Fairy-stories’, originally delivered by Tolkien as part of the Andrew Lang lecture series at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. At the time of its delivery in 1939, Tolkien had recently skyrocketed to notoriety as the author of The Hobbit - a highly successful children’s book - and was already engaged in the process of writing a sequel. But as he notes, the process was far from straightforward, and was greatly impacted by his evolving opinions regarding the presumed connections between children and fairy stories.

Per Tolkien’s own account, The Hobbit was itself somewhat of a creative accident. We’re told that, having encountered a blank page in a student’s exam booklet that he was tasked with grading, he somewhat absentmindedly jotted down, “In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit” (Letter 163, Letters, 314). Given that this was relatively unconscious, the spontaneous line left him to probe the identity of this strange ‘hobbit’ creature, out of which a story gradually began to emerge. His own children were the original audience for the tale, and we’re told that “they liked it well enough” (314), but it was only after a manuscript fell into the hands of a student working for George Allen and Unwin Publishers that formal publication became a possibility.

Despite its success, Tolkien always considered The Hobbit to have been somewhat of a distraction from his more serious literary endeavours - particularly the collection of tales that came to comprise The Silmarillion. The story of Bilbo Baggins was, at the beginning, intended to be quite external to Tolkien’s ‘personal mythology’ - though over time, he notes that it “inevitably got drawn in to the circumference of the greater construction” (314). But the respective tones of the works could not have been more different. While The Silmarillion materials were constructed in a ‘high’ mythological style (akin to works like Beowulf, The Mabinogion, The Völsunga Saga, Homer’s epics, etc.), The Hobbit was explicitly more juvenile in tone. “It was unhappily really meant,” Tolkien writes, “as a ‘children’s story’, and as I had not learned sense then, and my children were not quite old enough to correct me, it has some of the silliness of manner caught unthinkingly from the kind of stuff I had had served to me […] I deeply regret them. So do intelligent children” (314).

For many, it may seem odd that Tolkien would feel any sense of regret surrounding The Hobbit - the book which secured his literary infamy and set him on track to become one of the most acclaimed authors of the 20th century. But to better understand his reasoning - and his complex feelings regarding ‘children’s literature’ - we must turn to his essay ‘On Fairy-stories’.

‘On Fairy-stories’

Tolkien first delivered ‘On Fairy-stories’ at the University of St. Andrews as part of the Andrew Lang lecture series. His approach to the lecture was largely apologetic, setting out to defend fairy stories as a legitimate literary genre worthy of serious consideration by scholars and readers alike. By his time, fairy tales were already largely regarded as an immature art-form with limited literary value, effectively relegated to nurseries and children’s play-rooms. Some scholars - like Andrew Lang - viewed them as ‘useful’ insofar as they could serve as quarries out of which the primitive beliefs of ancient peoples could (theoretically) be mined, but Tolkien took a fundamentally different approach - evaluating and defending them from a literary (rather than anthropological or philological) point of view. But as the author of a famous ‘fairy story’ himself - one which was notably intended for a young audience - the most profound impact of this essay was, arguably, not on Tolkien’s audience, but on Tolkien himself.

The lecture largely centred around three primary research questions: “What are fairy-stories?”, “What is their origin?”, and “What is the use of them?” (OFS, 27). Given only three months to prepare his lecture (part of which he spent incapacitated with influenza), Tolkien spent this time poring over a number of tales and essays, including those compiled and composed by Andrew Lang himself, and came to some highly interesting hypotheses which would ultimately quite radically alter his own authorial process.

Eight years after the lecture was originally delivered, an expanded and revised written form was published for the first time in Essays Presented to Charles Williams (1947), a memorial volume dedicated to the recently-passed ‘Third Inkling’, and a second revision was published near the end of Tolkien’s life in the 1964 volume Tree and Leaf. This latter redaction serves as the basis of Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson’s Tolkien On Fairy-stories: Expanded edition, with commentary and notes, published in 2014.

This essay is, without a doubt, one of the most important academic works that Tolkien ever wrote - offering not only some astute scholarly perspectives on the inner workings of fairy stories, but also serving as a manifesto of sorts for his own mythopoeic endeavours. While the essay evolved significantly over the course of Tolkien’s professional life, the timing of the original lecture is highly notable, particularly in relation to the composition of his ‘sequel’ to The Hobbit - which would eventually become The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien began writing The Lord of the Rings at the end of 1937, and over the following year he managed to complete much of what would become the first ‘book’ of The Fellowship of the Ring. He had, by this point, reached the twelfth chapter in his manuscript, with the hobbits successfully arriving in Rivendell and being reunited with Gandalf. But getting there had proven to be quite a challenge. He had already comprehensively reworked the manuscript thrice over, and was now working on what Christopher Tolkien called the ‘Third Phase’ of the narrative. Many elements of the story remained up in the air, and Tolkien seems to have had some doubts about the direction in which he would take it.

In October 1938, Tolkien wrote in a letter to Stanley Unwin,

“When I spoke, in an earlier letter to Mr Furth, of this sequel getting ‘out of hand’, I did not mean it to be complimentary to the process. I really meant it was running its course, and forgetting ‘children’, and was becoming more terrifying than the Hobbit. It may prove quite unsuitable. It is more ‘adult’ […] the darkness of the present days had had some effect on it” (Letter 34, Letters, 52).

With each subsequent ‘phase’ of development, both the narrative and its tone underwent increasing maturation, straying further and further away from the style of The Hobbit for which it was intended to serve as a sequel. Specifically, Tolkien was clearly concerned that the more ‘adult’ tone of the text might prove ‘unsuitable’ for his publishers, and struggled to find a path forward that would accomplish his publishers’ aims while still holding true to his more serious creative vision.

After receiving the invitation to deliver his lecture in November of 1938, Tolkien embraced the opportunity to take a much-needed break from his manuscript to focus on the essay. This proved to be highly consequential, offering him the space to pause and reflect on his own creative process, and to answer some important questions which had been floating around his mind for some time. Had this opportunity not presented itself precisely when it did, the ‘Hobbit sequel’ may have ultimately looked profoundly different from what we ended up with in The Lord of the Rings.

On Children

In attempting to identify (and defend) the literary value of fairy stories, Tolkien found that he must first address the prevailing notion that “children are the natural or the specially appropriate audience for fairy-stories” (OFS, 49). The idea that “there is a natural connection between the minds of children and fairy-stories” (50) was, by Tolkien’s time, taken quite for granted. In his Green Fairy Book, Andrew Lang himself surmised that such a natural affinity was a function of the fact that “men were much like children in their minds long ago, long, long ago, and so before they took to writing newspapers, and sermons, and novels, and long poems, they told each other stories, such as you read in the fairy books” (Lang 2020, The Green Fairy Book, 2).

Tolkien was highly critical of this theory. Not only did he doubt the legitimacy of the notion that prehistoric humans had ‘child-like’ minds, he also took issue with the relegation of children to some alternative category of being - “a special kind of creature, almost a different race, rather than as normal, if immature, members of a particular family, and of the human family at large” (OFS, 50). He proposed that the popular association of children with fairy stories was actually largely an “accident of our domestic history”, due to the fact that fairy tale collections - much like old and discarded furniture - were often haphazardly stuffed away in the same spare rooms that would ultimately become the nurseries and play-rooms of young children.

Upon reflection, Tolkien concluded that children have no more of a natural ‘taste’ for fairy stories than adults do. “Children”, he writes, “neither like fairy-stories more, nor understand them better than adults to; and no more than they like many other things […] But in fact only some children, and some adults, have any special taste for them”, further arguing that such a taste “does not decrease but increases with age, if it is innate” (50). Even in his own experience, an appreciation for fairy stories was evidently not a “dominant characteristic” of his early tastes, only emerging after his introduction to philology “on the threshold of manhood” (56). While it was clear that fairy stories had become gradually associated with children over time, he maintained that this was a consequence of largely coincidental historical factors, rather than a function of their essential nature.

There is, of course, also the fact that many fairy stories have been intentionally reworked and reformulated to be suitable for a younger audience. Tolkien took particular issue with this - what he called the bowdlerisation and mollification of fairy stories, i.e. the sanitisation and stripping of ‘objectionable’ content from tales in order to make them more suitable for children. While he notes that many different kinds of media - like music, poetry, history, and science textbooks - have successfully undergone similar processes, they importantly differ from fairy stories because their ‘adult’ forms have never been abandoned. If every scientific text or book of poetry was expected to be suitable for children - as fairy stories generally are - this would assuredly lead to the terminal impairment of science as a whole. “Fairy-stories banished in this way, cut off from full adult art, would in the end be ruined”, he writes, “indeed in so far as they have been so banished, they have been ruined” (51).

Tolkien argues that, “If fairy-story as a kind is worth reading at all it is worthy to be written for and read by adults. They will, of course, put more in and get more out than children can” (58). This is an important point, but it is not to say that he objected, in any way, to children reading them as well. Quite the contrary, in fact. But it is precisely because of their ability to deal with serious ‘adult’ themes in a potent and enchanting way that they are valuable for children set upon the path to maturation. He writes, “it may be better for [children] to read some things, especially fairy-stories, that are beyond their measure rather than short of it. They books like their clothes should allow for growth, and their books at any rate should encourage it” (58).

Perhaps Tolkien’s most important insight is that the particular values and functions associated with fairy stories are, in general, far more applicable and useful for the average adult than they are for the average child. While he argues that fairy stories can, and should, be evaluated much like any other genre of literature, there are certain functions that they are uniquely poised to offer, namely Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, and Consolation - “all things of which children have, as a rule, less need than older people” (59). Unless a child is exposed to particularly difficult and dire circumstances in early life (which Tolkien himself notably was), processes like ‘recovery’ and ‘escape’ are generally quite unnecessary. But for adults, especially those who have been steeped in an instrumentalist and disenchanted world full of ‘grown-up’ perils and tribulations, these functions are far more poignant and valuable.

Effects on the Narrative

In the months following the delivery of his lecture, Tolkien’s work on The Lord of the Rings seemed to grind to a halt. In addition to rising political tensions in Europe, 1939 brought Tolkien an array of personal hardships - including illness, injury, and even a gardening-related concussion. It isn’t until August 1939 that he appears to have returned to the project with fresh eyes, penning an assortment of “rough papers containing plot-outlines, questionings, and portions of text” (Return of the Shadow, 370). Christopher Tolkien notes, “These show my father at a halt, even at a loss, to the point of a lack of confidence in radical components of the narrative structure that had been built up with such pains” (370). At one point, he even considered scrapping his existing narrative entirely to make Bilbo the chief protagonist “all through” (370-71). While he swiftly abandoned this approach, it is clear that he still had some serious doubts about the direction in which he should take his story.

The source of Tolkien’s angst is somewhat difficult to pin down, though it is clear that concerns about the ‘suitability’ of the text as a ‘Hobbit sequel’ remained prominent. In a letter written to Philip Unwin on September 15th, 1939, Tolkien writes, “I owe a humble apology for my silence about the state of the proposed sequel to the Hobbit, which you enquired about as long ago as June 21st. I do not suppose this any longer interests you greatly - though I still hope to finish it eventually” (Letter 36b, Letters, 56). It is notable that this letter was written only twelve days after England joined the Second World War, which was clearly also on Tolkien’s mind. He was, in many ways, being pulled in two rather different directions: on the one hand, he was expected to produce another hobbit-centred adventure novel that would satisfy readers of The Hobbit; but as a myth-maker on the threshold of a(nother) catastrophic war, writing another children’s story was hardly at the fore of his mind.

In a letter written to Stanley Unwin on December 19th, 1939, Tolkien writes, “I fear [the sequel] is growing too large. I am not at all sure that it will please quite the same audience (except in so far as that has grown up too). Will there be any chance of publication, if I can get it done before the Spring?” (Letter 37, Letters, 57). He, of course, did not get it done before Spring - it would be another 15 years before The Fellowship of the Ring would actually reach publication. But his repeated remarks about the tone of the text are notable, particularly given his statements in the OFS essay. While only two years had elapsed since the publication of The Hobbit, he already felt that the young readers of his first novel were ready - whether due to natural maturation or the unique perils of war - for something with a bit more gravitas. In any case, he seems to have decided that writing fairy stories for children was not nearly as valuable as writing fairy stories for adults - and he sought to use his new platform to do just that.

In this light, Tolkien’s 1955 remark to W. H. Auden about not being “prepared to write a ‘sequel’, in the sense of another children’s story” (Letter 163, Letters, 314) makes a great deal of sense; and once the pressure to rapidly reproduce the success of The Hobbit had largely subsided, he took The Lord of the Rings as an opportunity to thoughtfully put his theories about ‘grown-up’ fairy stories into practice. In a 1961 letter to his aunt Jane Neave he writes:

“Never mind about the young! I am not interested in the ‘child’ as such […] and have no intention of meeting him/her halfway, or a quarter of the way […] I have only once made the mistake of trying to do it, to my lasting regret, and (I am glad to say) with the disapproval of intelligent children: in the earlier part of The Hobbit.  But I had not then given any serious thought to the matter: I had not freed myself from the contemporary delusions about ‘fairy-stories’ and children. I had to think about it, however, before I gave an ‘Andrew Lang’ lecture at St. Andrews on Fairy-stories; and I must say I think the result was entirely beneficial to The Lord of the Rings, which was a practical demonstration of the views that I expressed.” (Letter 234, Letters, 440).

It is, once again, somewhat jarring to see Tolkien’s own self-directed criticism surrounding The Hobbit. In the OFS essay, he spills quite a bit of ink criticising popular so-called ‘fairy-stories’ for their inclusion of spurious elements which he found unbefitting a true work of Faërie. He dismisses Carroll’s Alice adventures due to their emplotment within Alice’s dreams (OFS, 33-34), while Gulliver’s Travels is rejected because it is essentially a ‘travellers’ tale’ in which marvels are encountered merely by crossing some measure of geographic or temporal distance (34). Stories like The Monkey’s Heart, Reynard the Fox, Brer Rabbit, and The Three Little Pigs are all discounted because, as ‘beast fables’, they use animals as mere stand-ins or metaphors for human characters - exploiting our natural enchantment with other-than-human beings to teach distinctly human lessons in an allegorical style (36). Tolkien also takes issue with the unskilful overuse of comedy and satire in many presumed ‘fairy stories’, particularly when magic itself becomes the butt of the joke. He notes that “if there is any satire present in the tale, one thing must not be made fun of, the magic itself” (33).

Tolkien pulls no punches in his criticism of the many ‘classics’ that he felt were erroneously shoe-horned into the ‘fairy story’ genre. But, as noted by Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson in their introduction to the OFS essay, “we can find between the lines his recognition of the flaws in his own fairy-story, The Hobbit”. By contrast, in The Lord of the Rings, “[w]hat was problematic or ill-fitted - the heavy-handed jokes, the patchwork marvels, the inconsistent mixture of talking purses and third-act saviours - has been eliminated” (16). Tolkien clearly took his own advice, leaving us with a far more mature tale - a fairy story for grown-ups - which embraces magic and enchantment without sacrificing gravity and maturity. While such an approach is certainly far more common today than it was in Tolkien’s time, we largely have him to thank for that evolution.

It is notable that, within the internal historiography of the Middle-earth materials, Tolkien did devise an ‘in-world’ explanation for the stylistic variability in his texts. The Hobbit (or ‘There and Back Again’) was ‘internally’ composed by Bilbo Baggins as an autobiographical account of his adventures, principally to be shared with his young hobbit relatives. The whimsical and humorous elements of the text can, as a result, be attributed to Bilbo’s own unique authorial style. It is also made clear that some elements of his tale are intentionally confabulated, either for dramatic/comedic effect or (somewhat more scandalously) to obscure unsavoury aspects of Bilbo’s own actions, such as the circumstances by which he came about his magic ring. The Lord of the Rings, by contrast, was composed principally by Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee, with additional materials and research provided by a range of contributors including Aragorn, Meriadoc Brandybuck, and Peregrin Took (among others). In addition to being composed by entirely different authors, the historical context of the text also warranted a far more serious and dramatic tone, particularly when compared to Bilbo’s adventure. Within this framing narrative, Tolkien’s role is not that of an ‘author’ but of a translator, editor, and historian, effectively repackaging the childish tone of The Hobbit as a historiographic feature of the primary text rather than a function of his own creative immaturity. By establishing a suitable frame, he was able to transform the ‘regretful’ elements of his earlier work into an even more potent vehicle for literary enchantment, further bolstering the sense of an “inner consistency of reality” (OFS, 59-60).

Contemporary Reception

To briefly address the topic of contemporary evolutions, it is worth noting that things are indeed quite different today than they were 75 or even 50 years ago. ‘Fantasy’ literature has certainly grown up, but not necessarily in the direction that Tolkien had hoped. Most centrally, the heavy presence of allegory in modern fantasy literature largely betrays its perennial applicability, as well as its capacity to truly enchant its audience.

While Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings helped Tolkien’s stories reach an entirely new audience (to largely triumphant effect), I would argue that certain elements of their tone and timing have augmented public perceptions of the legendarium in some unsavoury ways. The expansion of the Battle of Helm’s Deep (which is given around 16 pages in the text) into a 40-minute action sequence is particularly egregious, giving many viewers a distorted perception that Tolkien’s work is mainly concerned with dramatic battles and superhero elves skateboarding down staircases on shields.

But as a fan of the films (for all their flaws), I feel that the most unfortunate aspect of their release was their timing. After all, The Fellowship of the Ring was not the only popular ‘fantasy’ film to be released in 2001. A couple weeks before its premiere, audiences were given the first instalment of the Harry Potter films, based on a series which - unlike The Lord of the Rings - was indeed explicitly crafted for young readers. It is no surprise that Joanne Rowling took a great deal of inspiration from Tolkien’s work, but Harry Potter is explicitly *not* The Lord of the Rings. They are radically different in tone, depth, and execution, as well as their intended audiences. But in the public eye, the two became indelibly conflated over time.

Beyond my personal criticisms of Rowling and her work (of which I have many), I feel that this unfortunate coincidence has significantly impacted popular perceptions of Tolkien’s legacy. To the uninformed media consumer, The Lord of the Rings became thought of as another ‘young adult’ novel, full of magic, wizards, and fantastical beasts that are primarily suited for adolescent tastes. In my experience, many adults who had not already read the trilogy came to the conclusion that it wasn’t really meant for them - that they were ‘too old’. Even those with a natural predisposition to fantastical prose might now feel more compelled towards the works of writers like George R. R. Martin, who differentiate their works by bringing sexuality, political allegory, and heavy violence front-and-centre. While I certainly have no problem with such things, blood and sex are not themselves what make a piece of literature ‘mature’ or ‘grown-up’. The works of Phillip Pullman are, arguably, far more impactful in their considered treatment of profound philosophical and existential matters. But whether any of these works are truly classifiable as ‘fairy stories’ (per Tolkien’s standards) is up for debate.

In closing - in both his academic works as well as his popular literature, Tolkien went to great lengths to defend ‘fairy stories’ as a serious genre of adult literature. In ‘On Fairy-stories’, he effectively dismantles many of the antiquated prejudices that so many ‘modern’ readers harbour against fantastical tales, while The Lord of the Rings gives us a masterful demonstration of a ‘grown-up fairy tale’ in practice. But some of these lessons have, unfortunately, often fallen on deaf ears in a world that still regards fantasy as something other than ‘serious literature’. I have personally felt this most strongly in fields like literary ecocriticism (in which I have often dipped my toes). While ecocritical approaches to Tolkien Studies have become quite popular, the reverse cannot equally be said. For too many ‘serious’ critics, fantasy literature is treated as little more than a novelty - perhaps good for entertainment, but not for serious exploration and analysis. But in a world marred by instrumentalism and ruthless Anthropocentrism, stories which allow us to embrace natural wonder, enchantment, and other-than-human perspectives are of critical importance. It is my hope that we can awaken to this truth, and allow ourselves to embrace the profound magic of grown-up fairy stories.

Bibliography

Lang, Andrew, The Green Fairy Book. New York: Racehorse for Young Readers, 2020.

Tolkien, J.R.R., On Fairy-stories. Expanded edition, with commentary and notes. Edited by V. Flieger and D. A. Anderson. London: HarperCollins, 2014.

—., The Return of the Shadow. Edited by C. Tolkien. London: HarperCollins, 2017.

—., The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition. Edited by H. Carpenter and C. Tolkien. London: HarperCollins, 2024.