"Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again." - C.S. Louis

“The land of fairy-story is wide and deep and high, and is filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both sorrow and joy as sharp as swords. In that land a man may (perhaps) count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very riches and strangeness make dumb the traveller who would report it. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates shut and the keys be lost. The fairy gold too often turns to withered leaves when it is brought away. All I can ask is that you, knowing these things, will receive my withered leaves, as a token that my hand at least once held a little of the gold.” - J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy Stories

The Fairy Tale

A fairy tale—also called a fairytale, fairy story, household tale, magic tale, or wonder tale—is a short narrative within the wider field of folklore. It moves through magic, enchantment, and beings beyond ordinary experience. In many traditions, the borders among myth, folktale, and fairy tale remain fluid. A fairy tale differs most clearly from a legend, which is told as having happened, and from the openly didactic animal fable. Its familiar inhabitants include dragons, dwarfs, elves, fairies, giants, gnomes, goblins, griffins, merfolk, monsters, monarchs, pixies, talking animals, trolls, unicorns, witches, wizards, and wild men.

essentially a myth

takes place in the imaginal realm, in the otherworld that interpenetrates this world

children love them, and adults do too

They can be deeply memorable and thus survive through time through oral tradition

archetypal, mysterious, magical, spooky,

Like a dream, like a fantasy - yet something in humanity loves this and feels drawn to this and feels that the ordinary “real” mundane world pales in comparison

And some people realize and feel that fairy stories are real in some deep way. And “real” life can actually be a fairy tale, a fairy story and be full of magic and mystery and trippy psychadlia……

In ordinary speech, “fairy tale” can also mean a far-fetched, implausible, or plainly impossible story.

The very fact that modern man says fairy tales “could not possibly true” shows how deep in a materialistic objective reality delusion….

Legends are received within a culture as connected with real people, places, or events; fairy tales usually inhabit the timeless register of “once upon a time.” The two may overlap, and a fairy tale can become a legend when a community treats its events as historical. Unlike legend and epic, however, a fairy tale rarely depends upon specific religious, geographical, or historical reference.

Myth

Fairy Tale

Legend

History

News

The French conte de fées helped give the genre its modern name, “fairy tale,” in the late seventeenth century through Madame d’Aulnoy.

The folk process - storytellers and the culture as a whole create stories and tell them.

They are:

given by spirit beings or ET’s or gods or …?

Dreamed up by early bards and prophets and channeles and seers and…..

heard and remembered and re-spoken and continually refined and split off and shift and……

only in recent times relatively have they been written down, then mass disseminated and set in print and scholarship

the folk process of tradition and time and the collective zeitgiest refining a story or song or mythology - creates deeply powerful and archetypal and mysterious and ….. stories

Which are deeper and greater than any one person alone could do.

And in each age, new Bards and Prophets and artists and poets re-create and innovate on the Tradition….

Some folklorists prefer the German Märchen—“wonder tale”—for a story that unfolds through a succession of motifs or episodes in an indefinite, marvelous world. In this realm, unlikely or humble heroes defeat adversaries, gain kingdoms, and marry princesses.

The figures and motifs of fairy tale remain simple and archetypal: princesses and goose-girls; youngest sons and gallant princes; ogres, giants, dragons, and trolls; wicked stepmothers and false heroes; fairy godmothers, talking animals, and other magical helpers; glass mountains; prohibitions, and the breaking of them.

Fairy Tales mirror the consciousness and zeitgiest of the poeple (and also help themselves to shape it)

A people/culture with a deep and wise and beautiful and powerful mythos is a much deeper and more enlightened people

For the stories/story itself helps to teach and enlighten and inspire and guide

And the mythos and fairy tales give the people a guiding identity, mission, sacred center, community, vision, morality, spiritual teachings, etc…..

My RA in it’s true form is meant to provide people this full deep mythos and guide and teaching and inspiration and …. - deep soul sustenence and healing and passion……

In On Fairy-Stories, J. R. R. Tolkien treats the fairy story as an adventure in Faërie: the perilous realm of enchantment, containing not merely fairies but princes and princesses, dwarves, elves, and every other marvel. His essay, with its reflection on the making of secondary worlds, became foundational for fantasy criticism.

Italo Calvino valued fairy tales for their quickness: their ability to carry wonder, consequence, and transformation with economy and precision.

Stories now called fairy tales were not always treated as a distinct genre. The German Märchen derives from Mär, meaning a report, tale, or piece of news; as a diminutive it can mean “little story.” Its customary “once upon a time” places it in an earlier, enchanted age—one traditional German opening speaks of the old days when wishing still worked.

Jack Zipes connects the later reduction of these stories to children’s material with social and political changes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when upper-class culture helped trivialize them.

The genre emerges from oral traditions across Europe, later shaped by Renaissance writers such as Giovanni Francesco Straparola and Giambattista Basile, and by collectors and adapters including Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm.

Before “fantasy” became a distinct genre, works now placed under that name were often called fairy tales. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz all passed through this broader usage. Modern fantasy—especially fairytale fantasy—draws deeply on fairy-tale motifs, yet is now generally treated as a distinct form.

Tolkien - “On Fairy Stories”

"Faërie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted." - J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy Stories

Tolkien defined fairy stories as stories about Faërie, the realm of enchantment. This realm is not merely a setting filled with magical creatures like elves and fairies, but a place that reflects wonder, danger, and the extraordinary.

He emphasized that fairy stories are not about small or whimsical "fairies" as popularly imagined but about a deeper engagement with the "perilous realm" of enchantment and imagination.

three primary functions: Escape

• Fairy stories offer an escape from the mundane, not in a negative sense but as a way to break free from the drudgery and constraints of the modern world.
• He believed that adults needed this escape even more than children, as they are often burdened by societal and material concerns.

"Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?” - J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy Stories

Recovery

• Fairy stories help readers recover a sense of wonder and clarity about the world. Through imaginative storytelling, they allow us to see familiar things—trees, stars, rivers—with renewed appreciation and awe.
• This process restores our ability to perceive the world as beautiful and meaningful.

Consolation

• Fairy stories provide consolation through what Tolkien called "eucatastrophe", a sudden, joyous turn of events. This is the moment of unexpected grace or victory, often tied to hope and redemption.
• Tolkien saw eucatastrophe as essential to fairy stories and linked it to the Christian story of the Resurrection, calling it the ultimate eucatastrophe.

Tolkien claims that one touchstone of the authentic fairy tale is that it is presented as wholly credible: "It is at any rate essential to a genuine fairy-story, as distinct from the employment of this form for lesser or debased purposes, that it should be presented as 'true'. ... But since the fairy-story deals with 'marvels', it cannot tolerate any frame or machinery suggesting that the whole framework in which they occur is a figment or illusion."[T 7]

Tolkien comments that fairy stories are ancient, and that it was once thought that they had derived from powerful, elemental "nature-myths", with gods personifying the sun, night, and other elements of nature. These myths were humanised to legends by telling them with human heroes as protagonists. Finally, the legends dwindled to folktales and fairy stories. But in Tolkien's view, this is "almost upside down". A tale of the Norse god Thor in the Elder Edda, the Thrymskvitha, is "certainly just a fairy-story"; it is just as old as the Norse myths. The historical King Arthur, perhaps a minor figure, went into the "Cauldron of Story", and "was boiled for a long time", eventually becoming a "King of Faërie". Tolkien notes that these old stories produce an effect of "distance and a great abyss of time", and suggests that they were selected precisely because they created this literary effect.

Tolkien argues that there is no essential connection between fairy stories and children, but that this "is an accident of our domestic history", meaning that they have been relegated "to the nursery" because adults no longer wanted them. Only some children, he writes, "have any special taste for them", and he suggests that the taste "increases with age, if it is innate".

Tolkien emphasises that through the use of fantasy, which he equates with imagination, the author can bring the reader to experience a world that is consistent and rational, under rules other than those of the normal world. He calls this "a rare achievement of Art", and notes that it was important to him as a reader: "It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine."

Tolkien suggests that fairy stories allow the reader to review his own world from the "perspective" of a different world. Tolkien calls this "recovery", in the sense that one's unquestioned assumptions might be recovered and changed by an outside perspective. Second, he defends fairy stories as offering escapist pleasure to the reader, justifying this analogy: a prisoner is not obliged to think of nothing but cells and wardens. And third, Tolkien suggests that fairy stories can provide moral or emotional consolation, through their happy ending, which he terms a "eucatastrophe".

, Tolkien asserts that a truly good fairy story is marked by joy: "Far more powerful and poignant is the effect [of joy] in a serious tale of Faërie. In such stories, when the sudden 'turn' comes we get a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart's desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through."

Tolkien sees Christianity as partaking in and fulfilling the overarching mythological nature of the cosmos:

I would venture to say that approaching the Christian Story from this direction, it has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt making-creatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels ... and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation.

“In interpreting fairy tales as we do here, we try to bring out a new approach or understanding of age-old words which have always been told and understood in some form in their essential wisdom, but not understood in the psychological form in which we understand and interpret them now. I feel, with this clue of Jungian psychology, that it is possible to renew such a story so that it again has the living meaning which people had always formerly felt in it. Nowadays fairy tales are only told to children and regarded from a literary and formal standpoint. Fairy tales, as a whole, have undergone a process of becoming mere poetical words, no one even hoping that any meaning might be conveyed by them which we could understand in an adult way. So it can be said that the Jungian interpretation acts as a renewal of the words of the fairy tale; the same thing can be done with any other representation. It can be renewed if it is linked again with its archetypal substratum, for then it becomes an emotional and feeling and intellectual total experience. One gets again the reaction of “Ah, now I understand it,” with all its vivifying psychological effect. Naturally such a thing is important for myths and fairy tales, or even minor symbolic facts.”

• Marie-Louise von Franz - Individuation in Fairy Tales

Library of Light Edition 1.0 — Last revised: March 2026