I decided to purchase Tree and Leaf for the purpose of having Mythopeia in book form. When it arrived I decided to reread On Fairy Stories. I already had it in Tales from the Perilous Realm and in Beowulf the Monsters and the Critics, but you really can’t have enough copies of On Fairy Stories.
In working to improve my personal writing craft, I felt it was a good time to revisit On Fairy Stories. Tolkien begins by telling the reader, “Faerie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold.”
The concept of the perilous realm and sanctuary of home and the familiar is something that has become core in my thinking and life. I wrote a series on Crickhollow back in March of 2025 speaking to the importance of sanctuary. To understand the need for sanctuary, one must understand peril. Peril lay in the land of fairy.
Fairy is not a being, but a realm or state and all things within it.
In his essay Tolkien desires to address three questions: What are fairy-stories? What is their origin? And, what is the use of them?
On of his more famous quotes on writing is included early and reads, “We must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled.”
The soup is the story as the author tells it and the bones the sources and material from which the story came. He goes on and addresses the Cauldron of Story and how the cook doesn’t dip randomly into it.
He addresses inner consistency and secondary belief as critical elements of story.
His other major discussion is of recovery, escape, and consolation, which ultimately brings him to address the eucatastrophe.
In taking my time to read and take notes as I worked my way through On Fairy Stories this time, I can fairly say that this is well worth reading regardless of the genre you write or if you desire to have a better understanding of story when reading
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