Fairytales are Not Fantasy

The matter of fairytales is the experience of living one’s life under the eye of heaven.

The Lord of the Rings is unique in that it birthed a genre it does not belong to. The genre it birthed is, of course, fantasy. But The Lord of the Rings is not a fantasy. It is, as Tolkien himself said, a fairytale. Many today regard fantasy and fairytales as two words for the same thing. But though they have features in common, just as Westerns and war novels have features in common, or spy stories and mysteries have features in common, fantasy and fairytales are distinctly different, and the difference is significant.  

This essay began life as a talk I was supposed to give at the Catholic Imagination Conference, which I was unfortunately unable to attend. But it has also been hugely influenced by a series of essays between Clifford Stumme and Eric Falden examining Tolkien’s essay On Fairy Stories. That series begins here:

The Heart of Fantasy According to Tolkien

Some of what I say here will repeat the comments I made in response to those essays, but my main point here is to delineate the particular literary virtues of fairytales in a literary environment that is very different from the one that pertained when Tolkien wrote On Fairy Stories (which was many years before The Lord of the Rings was published). I wrote this essay with Catholic writers in mind, but I suspect that the point it makes is of broader interest. I will leave it to the reader to decide if it applies to their own reading or writing.

Stumme and Falden make explicit that they take the word “fairy-story” in On Fairy Stories to mean what we mean by “fantasy” today and that they take the word “fantasy” in On Fairy Stories to mean what we now call “worldbuilding.” I disagree on both points, though the second is not important enough to argue about. It is the distinction between fantasy and fairytales that concerns me.

Of course, Tolkien was not setting out to make this distinction in On Fairy Stories. The modern fantasy genre did not exist when he wrote it. Nonetheless, Tolkien does actually touch on the distinction in a significant way in On Fairy Stories:

Faerie itself may perhaps most nearly be translated by Magic—but it is magic of a particular mood and power, at the furthest pole from the vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific, magician.

But if there is one feature that dominates modern fantasy, it is the laboriously developed magic system. When magic becomes a system, it behaves like an alternative physics, the very product and study of a scientific magician. The magic of a fairy story, Tolkien goes on to say, must never be explained away. Fantasy magic is operational; it can be learned and mastered. Fairytale magic is mysterious and chaotic and cannot be explained. This distinction, clearly present in On Fairy Stories, is fundamental to the distinction between fairytales and fantasy.

Is this a sufficient difference on which to base the distinction between two genres? The question is somewhat fraught because genre itself is not exactly defined. There is genre in the bookstore sense, which separates fiction into different shelves for easier browsing. But bookstore genre is not based on a single set of principles. The romance and mystery genres, for instance, are defined by having very specific types of plots. Fantasy, Westerns, and historical fiction are defined by their settings. A book can thus fall into more than one genre. You can have historical romance, Western mystery, etc.

At the level of literary analysis, it is more common to argue about where the boundaries of genre should be drawn than it is to assign particular works to a commonly agreed genre classification scheme. On Fairy Stories is an essay of this type. So is this essay. Such an essay aims to establish that a particular distinction is based on something real and significant and that at least one of the things so distinguished is of value for particular reasons. (Sometimes, one is defining gold from dross; sometimes one is defining gold from diamonds.)

Genres should be defined by their substance, not their accidents. Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty is a horse story. Steinbeck’s The Red Pony is a horse story. Mikhail Sholokhov’s The Colt is a horse story. Each of them centers on a love of horses. Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy, despite the fact that there is a horse in the title and as a major character, is not a horse story. It is not centered on the love of horses. If you are concerned to define horse stories, you will include the former and not the latter.

What is the substance of modern fantasy? It is the love of the fantastic for its own sake, a love that expresses itself in a dedication to worldbuilding. Fantasy authors are told that their first task is to build a world. The first thing reviews of fantasy novels are likely to comment on is the worldbuilding. The stories are often pedestrian adventure plots, but that matters little if the worldbuilding is good. And once readers fall in love with a world, they will continue to consume stories set in that world almost without end. No matter how poor they may be as stories, they are an excuse to spend more time in that world. One has only to look at the Star Wars franchise to see the truth of this.

The Lord of the Rings, of course, did grow out of decades of worldbuilding, but as Tolkien comments:

The magic of Faerie is not an end in itself, its virtue is in its operations: among these are the satisfaction of certain primordial human desires. … A story may thus deal with the satisfaction of these desires, with or without the operation of either machine or magic, and in proportion as it succeeds it will approach the quality and have the flavour of fairy-story.

Worldbuilding is definitive of fantasy. It may be, and often is, an element of fairytales, but it is not definitive of fairytales.

Another way to look at genre is by identifying its principle virtue: the virtue that the story is built around and which is exercised to bring about the conclusion of the story. The principle virtue of much genre fiction today is competence. For instance, if you read Patrick O’Brien’s naval war stories or Bernard Cornwell’s stories of riflemen in the Napoleonic wars, you will find that both Captain Aubrey and Major Sharpe are constantly lecturing their men on the importance of rate of fire. Rounds per minute is the measure of a soldier in these books, and tactical competence is the mark of a good officer.

Compare this to Henry V’s St. Chrispin’s Day speech. Westmoreland has pointed out that there are a lot of French and not a lot of English and that, therefore, tactical competence suggests a withdrawal. Henry does not see things that way. He sees only a greater share of honor for each man present:

What’s he that wishes so?
My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin:
If we are mark’d to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires:
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England:
God’s peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more, methinks, would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian:’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

Nothing of competence here. This is about honor entirely. This is fairytale stuff.

Modern fantasy, I will suggest, is a hybrid. It took The Lord of the Rings as its rootstock but removed its fairytale branches and grafted onto it the literature of competence from the world of science fiction. Science fiction was, after all, the literature of those who discovered The Lord of the Rings in the sixties, and the two genres have been united ever since under a common monica, SFF. Thus it became the genre of the very scientific magician whom Tolkien dismisses as being at the furthest pole from fairy stories.

While there will, of course, be exceptions, in modern science fiction and fantasy, the sophisticated knowledge of an engineer or wizard is the basis of their competence in science or magic with which they will win the day. Thus a modern fantasy has a magic system with well-defined methods that can be learned, and the task of the hero is to master those methods, to build the competence that they will need to triumph. If needs be, they are sent to a school of wizardry to acquire the magical knowledge that complements their innate magical competence.

The twentieth century was, after all, the century of competence. The twenty-first differs only in being the century of digital rather than mechanical competence. Tolkien, like Lewis, took a much more jaundiced view of competence. I don’t mean that they despised competence itself or that they embraced idiocracy. They were both competent scholars, after all. But they were enemies of competence as a central or justifying virtue. Lewis’s space trilogy, particularly Out of the Silent Planet and That Hideous Strength, are broadsides against the cult of self-justifying competence. Ransom’s attempt to translate Weston’s self-justifying speech into the language of Malacandra comes out like this:

And he says we exchange many things among ourselves and can carry heavy weights very quickly a long way. Because of all this, he says it would not be the act of a bent hnau if our people killed all your people.

Here, very clearly, is the rejection of competence as a form of justification. Similarly, Saurauman in Lord of the Rings represents the spirit of an age that justifies itself by its competence. But the science fiction crowd who adopted The Lord of the Rings stripped out that aspect of the work and married its legendarium to the cult of competence, thus producing the literature of the scientific magician.

The Lord of the Rings is really a hybrid of several things: a something-for-everyone novel if ever there was one. It includes elements of fairytales, mythology, and the adventure story. It is hugely influenced by the Arthurian cycle and functions as a kind of anti-grail story, seeking to destroy rather than discover its mystical McGuffin. It has its own Arthur (Aragorn) and Merlin (Gandalf). But at its very heart, it is a fairytale. Which is to say, at its very heart, it is about virtue and the cost of virtue.

Arthur did not establish the Round Table to teach knights to be more competent fighters but to be more virtuous knights. Lancelot, the most competent, failed most grievously in virtue. Boromir is Lancelot. Sir Gawain survives the Green Knight's challenge not by prowess at arms but by heroic chastity. Compare this to the casual lechery of Jack Aubrey or Richard Sharpe, which is presented as yet another aspect of their competence. They are competent pickup artists.

Fairytales are different. Fairytales are not about competence, any more than Henry V’s Saint Crispin’s Day speech is about competence. Hans Christian Andersen’s very brief story, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, is the perfect model of a fairytale. A box of tin soldiers is made out of an old spoon. The last of these has only one leg because there was not enough tin left to give him two. From his box in the toyroom, he spies a paper ballerina. She is standing on one leg, and the other is raised so that he cannot see it. He thinks that she, like him, has only one leg, and he falls immediately in love with her.

Through the malice of a jack-in-the-box magician (the only intrusion of magic into the story) the tin soldier falls into the street where small boys put him in a paper boat and set him sailing in a gutter. He goes through the drains to the sea where he is eaten by a fish. The fish is caught and sold and when it is cut open they discover the tin soldier. It is the very same house. He is reunited with his brothers and gazes helplessly once again on his unattainable love, the paper ballerina. Through all these adventures, he has neither moved nor spoken. He has stood steadfastly on his one leg, never flinching or losing hope through all that chance and malice has thrown at him. A wind comes in at the window and blows him into the fire. It blows the paper ballerina into the fire with him, and they are immolated together. In the morning, the maid cleaning out the fireplace finds a perfect tin heart among the cinders.

This is, of course, what Tolkien calls a eucatastrophic ending. The unexpected good event. The steadfast tin soldier does nothing, says nothing. He is united with his love by the very breath of God, an ending that is merited not by his effort or enterprise or competence but simply by his defining virtue of steadfastness.

Tolkien said that “The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.” But clearly, a eucatastrophic tale cannot have competence as it central virtue. In a competence genre, success must come through the exercise of the core competence that defines the genre. The gunfighter must win by drawing first and shooting straight. The detective must win by understanding the clues and identifying the criminal. In a competence genre, eucatastrophe would be mere deus ex machina. It would violate the elementary law of stories, which is that accidents can get a character into trouble, but they cannot get them out of trouble. They must do that themselves, through their competence.

But this is not the law of all stories. It is the law of competence stories. Fairytales are different. Fairytales are rooted not in the laws of nature, which they freely violate, but in the Natural and Divine Law (which I will henceforth refer to collectively as “The Law”). The eucatastrophe may be a violation of the laws of nature, or at very least the laws of probability, but it is not a violation of The Law. Indeed, eucatastrophe is The Law in action.

The Round Table was always about virtue. So is LOTR, where the mighty, the competent, are not to be trusted with the ring. The only chance is to entrust it to the most humble. It is Frodo's virtue in sparing Gollum that permits the eucatastrophic ending that saves the day. Even so, Frodo is immolated by the experience and cannot remain in Middle Earth. It is not merely socially compliant virtue that matters in fairytales, but the high romantic virtue that can sometimes, as with the steadfast tin soldier, consume those who attain it.

The primary virtue of fairytales, therefore, is virtue itself. It is conformance to The Law. As Tolkien notes, it is the prohibitions of Faerie that define it. He writes:

[T]here is in fact no wedding between a princess and a frog: the frog was an enchanted prince. And the point of the story lies not in thinking frogs possible mates, but in the necessity of keeping promises (even those with intolerable consequences) that, together with observing prohibitions, runs through all Fairyland.

So we see that Sir Gawain survives his encounter with the Green Knight not through any competence or prowess of arms but through the virtue of chastity, resisting the blandishments of the Green Knight’s lady. The tale throws the laws of nature out of the window. The Green Knight survives his beheading and walks out with his head under his arm. But The Law remains and thus comes to the fore. Sir Gawain survives his wager with the Green Knight not because he masters the Green Knight’s magic but because he observes the tale’s core prohibition. And it is this prohibition, this article of The Law, not the Green Knight’s magic, that lies at the center of the tale.

Competence can be corrupted by the prospect of power. Such is the fate of Boromir. Gandalf and Galadriel are competent also, but they honor the central prohibition of the novel: thou shalt not covet the dark lord’s ring. Competent though they may be, the story hinges not on their competence, but on their virtue, on their obedience to The Law.

Harry Potter is just the opposite. Sent to school to aquire competence in magic, Harry begins by breaking The Law, flying his broom when he has been ordered not to. But rather than being punished, Harry is rewarded with a place on the Quidditch team. Time and again, we are shown that Harry is special, and therefore, The Law does not apply to him. This is the rule of modern fantasy. The combination of good intentions and competence places you above The Law. It is a message with enormous appeal to the modern child, and modern children are often slow to grow up. They would be better served if they had been brought up on fairytales.

The function of the fairytale, and the function of magic within a fairytale, is to show The Law in action. The Law, in the normal world, does not act upon those who obey it or upon those who contravene it. These matters are left to heaven. But in Faerie, The Law is an active thing. One cannot flout the law without consequence in Faerie. Nor yet can one submit to The Law without reward in Faerie.

In Orthodoxy, Chesterton writes:

The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal. But in the modern psychological novel the hero is abnormal; the centre is not central. Hence the fiercest adventures fail to affect him adequately, and the book is monotonous. You can make a story out of a hero among dragons; but not out of a dragon among dragons. The fairy tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad world. The sober realistic novel of to-day discusses what an essential lunatic will do in a dull world.

Faerie is a mad world precisely because its magic exempts itself from the laws of nature: that is the particular mood and power of fairytale magic. Its magic is mad. It obeys no system and is not discoverable or conquerable by competence.

But if that is all there was to Faerie, it would be mere chaos, and you can’t set a story in chaos. Chaos destroys all possibility of plot or structure. But however chaotic its magic may be, there is, in Faerie, a magic older still, that magic that the White Witch did not know. That deeper magic is The Law.

Thus the sane man can walk through the mad world and can triumph not by competence but by virtue. His adventure is conducted not in the physical realm, which is mad, but in the moral realm, which is sane and which in Faerie is made visible and operative.

The point here is not that fairytales are morality tales. That would be terribly dull. The point is that fairytales bring the moral world to the fore. They present a world in which The Law is as obvious and as immediate and as operative as the laws of nature are in the primary world.

Fantasy, by contrast, specifies an alternate law of nature in the form of a magic system, but it does not make The Law part of the structure of the universe. The key feature of Faerie is not its magic but its laws. The Law is fundamental to the structure of Faerie.

This permits the writer of fairytales to do something that is at very least difficult in other genres. In perhaps the most famous passage from On Fairy Tales, Tolkien says,

[The storyteller] 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.

“Inside it, what he relates is true.” This is important because it is not something that we can say of other genres. Readers don’t give that kind of universal assent to all that an author says about the primary world. A story set in the primary world will be judged by the reader’s own opinions on the primary world, both as to the laws of nature and The Law.

But the author of a fairytale can not only rewrite the laws of nature in their subcreated world, they can declare The Law of their world and the reader will accept that Law as true in that story. The storyteller can thus endow their secondary world with additional and sometimes quite specific Laws with quite specific consequences. Hans Christian Andersen, for example, created for The Little Mermaid a Law that said that if a mermaid can join herself in sacramental marriage to a human prince, she will gain an immortal soul. (No, that part is not in the Disney version. Disney took out the fairytale elements and turned the story into a fantasy.)

The assertion of such Laws in Fairie does not raise the same rebellion in the reader that might be raised by the assertion of a disputed item of morality in a work set in the primary world. It bypasses all disputes and opinions about what The Law is or should be to focus on what is, for the novelist, the more important question: what is it like to live subject to The Law? The matter of fairytales is the experience of living one’s life under the eye of heaven.

Fairytale tasks are not our normal-world tasks. For instance, it is not a requirement of The Law in our world to drop magic rings into volcanoes. But a story in which the need to do so is an imperative of The Law focuses us on the act of dedicating ourselves to mission, to the service of The Law, with all its terrible urgency and all its terrible cost. It is in this way that fairytales present a unique opportunity for the Catholic writer, and for any other writer who wishes to explore the experience of living one’s life under The Law.

My own fairytale novel, Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight, has its own mystical McGuffin, the Elf Knight’s horse, sword, and horn, which, like Tolkien’s ring, possess their holder with irresistible desire and endow them with extraordinary beauty, power, and desire for blood. In my story though, the protagonist succumbs to the enchantment of the Elf Knight’s tools and is rescued only by a eucatastrophe of a different kind.

If you should chance to read it, please leave a review, particularly on Amazon. Reviews are the good magic in the dark alchemy of the Amazon algorithm.