Tolkien's On Fairy Stories
3 Ideas: Immersion, logic, and the joy of endings
In 1938, two Oxford professors declined an invitation to talk at the University of St. Andrews. Lucky for us, a third professor, JRR Tolkien, said yes. The lecture he gave became one of the most profound essays I've ever read. It’s called ‘On Fairy Stories.’
In it, Tolkien argues for the merits of speculative fiction, specifically fantasy, but hidden within that argument are insights into how he thought storytelling itself works.
Today, we’ll explore three of those ideas and attempt to apply them to story more broadly.
Idea 1: World building is the art of keeping the reader immersed.
In writing fiction, especially speculative fiction, you hear the term ‘world building’ tossed around more than the all important terms ‘plot’ and ‘character’ and ‘theme.’ But nobody knows what it means. Some say culture and language. Others give you a million plants or a specific style of clothes. Basically, people use the term as a catch all for the visual apparatus that makes up the periphery of your story.
Tolkien, who could spend three pages describing a leaf, argues that world building means something else entirely:
“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.”
Tolkien saw world building as the art of keeping the reader immersed in your story. The moment a reader thinks “That doesn’t make sense” you’ve lost them.
Tolkien again:
“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.”
You establish the laws of your story. But violate them, and you lose your reader’s belief.
Idea 2: Stories are built on logic.
The engine driving reader immersion is story logic.
Tolkien argued that a story can have elves, dragons, or time travel – or none of the above – but that wouldn’t matter if the logic of the world, the logic of the characters, or the logic of cause and effect didn’t line up.
“[Story] is the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it. So upon logic was founded the nonsense that displays itself in the tales and rhymes of Lewis Carroll.”
Tolkien calls this logic “the inner consistency of reality.” The internal laws you, the writer, set up. Break them, and nothing works.
Again, this applies to all stories. Not just fantasy fiction.
If your character acts out of convenience instead of motivation, the spell breaks. If a plot twist happens without setup, the spell breaks. If the tone of your story shifts without reason, the spell breaks.
Idea 3: The joy of a happy ending.
In his classic talk, Kurt Vonnegut diagrams the emotional arc of Cinderella.
“We’re gonna start way down here,” he says, drawing on the chalkboard. “Worse than that, who is so low? It’s a little girl… the shoe fits, and she achieves off-scale happiness.”
Vonnegut is saying that many great endings require the story to end in a place with more joy than it started with. Not because real life always happens like that – remember, stories do not follow the logic of real life; unlike life, you pick the starting and ending point of a story – but because this framing is encouraging to readers.
Tolkien agrees:
“The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending . . . is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure. . . . It denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief… I will call it Eucatastrophe.”
The “poignant as grief” line gets me. Your reader earns that joy, what Tolkien calls their ‘consolation,’ because of the sorrow and failure that came before.
The end of The Lord of the Rings is not triumphant in the usual sense. Frodo is too wounded, too altered, to return to his old life. But Tolkien gives him the Grey Havens. That final scene, Frodo boarding the ship, Sam watching from the shore, is Tolkien’s version of a happy ending.
The joy in that moment only works because it hurts. This, I think, is what Tolkien meant by eucatastrophe.
Thanks for reading. Thanks for your support.
Nathan
Reminder: This week, I launched a new membership for people who want to tell better stories. It’s just a few dollars a month.
Here’s a look at the first four private workshops:
Billy Oppenheimer (writer + research assistant for Ryan Holiday & Rick Rubin) — How to Use Stories to Illustrate Big Ideas
Renee Fountain (President of GH Literary) — The Most Common Mistakes in a Novel’s First 10 Pages
Nat Eliason (author of Crypto Confidential and the upcoming sci-fi novel Husk) — Nonfiction vs Fiction: What Great Stories Have in Common
Alex Petkas (host of The Cost of Glory podcast and former Princeton classics professor) — Ancient Storytelling: Lessons from the Masters of Rhetoric
You’ll also get member-only essays, a private chat, and access to the full workshop archive. If you think about story more than most people, you’ll probably like it here.
Nathan’s Three Notes
1 Sentence I Wish I Wrote
Author James Islington on the ladder of compromise:
“They ask something small of you. A thing you would prefer not to do, but is not so terrible. You think you are working your way up, but in fact they are changing you. Moulding you into what they think you should be, one compromise at a time.”
From The Will of the Many
1 Thing I’m Reading
What matters in the age of AI is taste, and my new favorite newsletter focuses on just that.
1 Odd Thing I Found
F. Scott Fitzgerald died while writing this book. The published work includes Fitzgerald’s notes he left in the margins of the draft, showing what he had planned to change in the story if he had had the time. (Shoutout James McCabe for the recommendation.)
Love this, Nathan. I'm currently reading the book, "Entangled Life" by Merlin Sheldrake and recently came across this nod to Tolkien in Chapter 5: Before Roots.
Albert Frank's findings caught the eye of J.R.R. Tolkien, who had a known fondness for plants, and trees in particular. Mycorrhizal fi soon found their way into The Lord of the Rings.
"For you little gardener and lover of trees," said the elf Galadriel to the hobbit Sam Gamgee, "I have only a small gift... In this box there is earth from my orchard. if you keep it and see your home again at last, then perhaps it may reward you. Though you should find all barren and laid waste, there will be few gardens in Middle-Earth that will bloom like your garden, if you sprinkle this earth there.”
Albert Frank was a German biologist who coined the terms symbiosis and mycorrhiza.