Review of “On Fairy-Stories” (1939/1947)

A defence of fairy-stories on the basis of four aesthetic values, most of which “are nowadays very commonly considered to be bad for anybody”: Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, and Consolation. Children, thinks Tolkien, don’t need those values, and are not the natural audience of the genre.

Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker's art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called “willing suspension of disbelief.” But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful “sub-creator.” He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.