On Fairy-Stories

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973) was a writer and scholar best known for his novels The Hobbit (1939) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955). Tolkien, an Englishman, was born in South Africa and moved to Birmingham, England, at age three with his mother and brother after the passing of his father. He received a scholarship to study at King Edward’s school as a young man and pursued a degree in Classics, then English, at Exeter College, Oxford. While serving in World War I, Tolkien began compiling stories of Elves and Men inspired by Old Norse, German, and Celtic tales, which would later be the basis for The Hobbit, a children’s novel published in 1937, The Lord of the Rings, published across 1954-1955, and The Silmarillion, a posthumously published history of Middle-Earth (the imagined world of his novels).

When Tolkien returned from the war, he worked first at the Oxford English Dictionary as a philologist and was then offered a professor position at the University of Leeds, where he taught from 1920-1925. In 1925, Tolkien became the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, a position he maintained for the rest of his career. Two of Tolkien’s seminal lectures, “Beowulf: the monsters and the critics” (1937) and “On Fairy-stories” (1939) were given during this time, in addition to the publication of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and many short works in the world of Middle-Earth. He retired in 1968 and died in 1973.

Tolkien’s academic work grew out of philology, the study of the history of language and story. He was proficient in French, German, Latin, Greek, Old English, Middle English, Old Norse, and Gothic. Much of philologic work at the time centered on tracing language within founding mythological texts and epic poems, and Tolkien himself wrote two influential texts in the discipline: Middle English Vocabulary (1922) based on Kenneth Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, and a translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, co-edited with Eric Gordon (1925). It is this background of study that Tolkien draws on throughout “On Fairy-stories” for the basis of his argument.