О сказках фей: Эссе Дж. Р. Р. Толкина

Essay by J. R. R. Tolkien

"On Fairy Stories" is an 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. By the time of the lecture, The Hobbit had become extremely popular, and Tolkien had started work on a sequel. but did not have the close linkage to history or contemporary times that his precursors had.

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. 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.

In the lecture, Tolkien chose to focus on Andrew Lang’s work as a folklorist and collector of fairy tales. He disagreed with Lang's broad inclusion in his Fairy Books collection (1889–1910), of traveller's tales, beast fables, and other types of stories. Tolkien held a narrower perspective, viewing fairy stories as those that took place in Faerie, an enchanted realm, with or without fairies as characters. He disagreed with both Lang and Max Müller in their respective theories of the development of fairy stories, which he viewed as the natural development of the interaction of human imagination and human language. Tolkien emphasises that through the use of fantasy, which he equates with imagination, the author can bring the reader to experience a world that is consistent and rational, under rules other than those of the normal world. He calls this "a rare achievement of Art," and notes that it was important to him as a reader: "It was in fairy stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine." Tolkien suggests that fairy stories allow the reader to review his own world from the "perspective" of a different world. Tolkien calls this "recovery", in the sense that one's unquestioned assumptions might be recovered and changed by an outside perspective. Second, he defends fairy stories as offering escapist pleasure to the reader, justifying this analogy: a prisoner is not obliged to think of nothing but cells and wardens. And third, Tolkien suggests that fairy stories can provide moral or emotional consolation, through their happy ending, which he terms a "eucatastrophe". In conclusion and as expanded upon in an epilogue, Tolkien asserts that a truly good and representative fairy story is marked by joy: "Far more powerful and poignant is the effect [of joy] in a serious tale of Faërie. In such stories, when the sudden 'turn' comes we get a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart's desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through." Tolkien sees Christianity as partaking in and fulfilling the overarching mythological nature of the cosmos:

The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger stated that "On Fairy Stories" would be at the centre of Tolkien research simply because it is Tolkien's own explanation of his art, of the "sub creation" (in his terminology) of a secondary world. She at once adds that it is much more than that, since it is "a deeply perceptive commentary on the interdependence of language and human consciousness", a useful summary of the study of folklore at that time, and a "cogent" analysis of myth, fairy story, and "the poet's craft". It is also, Flieger writes, an essential text for study of "the multivalent myth, epic and fairy tale romance that is The Lord of the Rings." Carl Phelpstead, also writing in the Companion, notes that the essay attempts to answer three questions, namely what fairy tales are, their origins, and their value, the last of these related to Tolkien's concept of mythopoeia. Clyde Northrup argues that through the essay Tolkien creates a framework of four necessary qualities for interpreting "Tolkienian fantasy", or as he called it "fairy story". These are fantasy (the contrast of enchantment and ordinariness), recovery (as the reader sees the "magic" of simple things in daily life), escape (from the primary world), and consolation (the "happy ending"). He suggests that these can be applied both to Tolkien's own Middle earth fantasies, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and to the works of later fantasy authors including David Eddings, Roger Zelazny, Stephen R. Donaldson, and J. K. Rowling.