Footnote #42 - Tolkien’s On Fairy Stories
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
Following up last week’s feature-length episode on The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Peter Jackson, 2003), the latest Footnote looks at J.R.R. Tolkien’s seminal essay “On Fairy Stories” that engages the definitions, origins, and applications of the fairy story; the fairy vs. faerie distinction and questions of magic and imagination; sub-creation and secondary belief in the construction of fantasy’s logically-consistent fictional worlds; and how Tolkien’s defense of fantasy literature can be helpful for the craft of fantasy stories across multiple forms of media.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
Suggested Readings
Krzywinska, Tanya. 2006. “Blood Scythes, Festivals, Quests, and Backstories: World Creation and Rhetorics of Myth in World of Warcraft.” Games and Culture 1, no. 4: 383-396.
Mendlesohn, Farah. 2008. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
Tolkien, J.R.R. 1947. [1939]. “On Fairy Stories.” In Essays Presented to Charles Williams, edited by C. S. Lewis, 38-89. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wolf, Mark J.P. 2012. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation. London and New York: Routledge.