BY DANIEL PISCOYA
While I did not have the chance to attend what was no doubt an excellent class by Professor Nina Chordas on this exact same topic, I will try to do the subject justice by addressing it through the lens of one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s most prominent essays—one which I lightly referenced in a previous article, “Literary Traditions: Eucatastrophe”—“On Fairy Stories.”
Tolkien, of course, is well known for writing The Hobbit, which is widely regarded as a children’s story, and has recently been transformed into three feature films by director Peter Jackson. Legend has it that Tolkien, who was a professor at Oxford, was grading essays one evening when he came across a student who had mistakenly left a blank page. Extremely bored at the time, he apparently nearly gave the student an A for his error, and proceeded to write, in the spur of the moment, the famous first sentence of The Hobbit: “Once, in a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.” He then stared at it and wondered what on earth a hobbit was, which sparked a lifetime’s work of world-building, ultimately culminating in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.
In his essay “On Fairy Stories”, which he wrote just as he was beginning to write The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien unfolds why it is that he takes fairy stories like The Hobbit so seriously, and what they mean for children.
Continue reading “Literary Traditions: Children’s Literature”
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