themarginalian.org · 4 hours ago

J.R.R. Tolkien on Fairy Tales, Language, the Psychology of Fantasy, and Why There’s No Such Thing as Writing “for Children”...

In a 1939 lecture that became one of literature's quieter masterpieces, J.R.R. Tolkien argued that fairy tales belong not to children but to the full range of human imagination - and that relegating them to the nursery says more about adult indifference than about any natural affinity between children and enchantment. At the heart of his essay lies a startling claim about language itself: that the moment early humans learned to separate color from object - "to take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood" - they had already become enchanters, already held "an enchanter's power." Tolkien saw fantasy not as an escape from reason but as its most refined expression, a "sub-creative" act through which human beings participate in the ongoing work of making meaning from the world. And perhaps most surprisingly, he identified fairy tales as a cure for a very modern ailment - the way familiarity dims perception, locking the things we love into a "hoard" where we stop truly seeing them - arguing that creative fantasy "may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds."