Tolkien’s Essays & Compendiums

There are a number of essays, compilations or productions which don’t fit neatly into any of the ‘collection’ pages and so this page is a home for all of these. There are entries for the two, very different, collections called Tales from the Perilous Realm. For a detailed description of these differences, see this original collection entry.

JRR Tolkien’s On Fairy-Stories and Mythopoeia are seminal texts that articulate his literary philosophy, particularly his defense of fantasy as a profound form of art. Both works center on the concept of Sub-creation—the human ability to create Secondary Worlds.

Tolkien delivered the essay On Fairy-stories as a lecture in 1939, using it to define and defend the genre of “fairy-stories,” which he argued were not exclusively for children. In 1947 he expanded the lecture into an essay which has been the text used ever since.

Also included on this page is a French collection of Tolkien’s tales titled Faërie et Autres Textes (Faërie and Other Stories). This comprises Farmer Giles of Ham, Smith of Wootton Major and Leaf by Niggle, as well as the essay On Fairy-stories. A similar, but differing collection from the UK called The Tolkien Treasury as well as a few odd independent productions of, so far unrecorded commercially, works like Mythopeia.

Dates of January 1st indicate that the exact day of the year is not known.