Faerie Research Paper

Faerie stories were told in past centuries to adults to explain the world. As science developed, faerie stories were tossed away by adults and left to only be read to children as imaginative stories of fantasy and things that could never exist. Adults felt began to feel as if the stories were for amusement and became slaves of disenchantment because of their logic, reason, and understanding of newly found science. Nowadays the definition and idea of a faerie story is misconstrued. When one is asked to name a faerie story what usually pops into their mind is something including fairies, such as Tinkerbell. While Peter Pan, the novel where Tinkerbell became popular, may just as well be a faerie story, a true faerie story, by the definition of

Consolation is the one function that Tolkien stresses must be present for any written work or storyline to be considered a faerie story. Consolation is what the reader commonly knows as the happy ending. Tolkien also called this the eucatastrophe or good catastrophe, of a story. In The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the White Witch and her followers put Aslan, a lion that represents all that is good in Narnia, to a torturous death. All the children and all of Aslan’s followers are mourning over his loss and begin to feel hopeless. The next day, Susan, the oldest of the four children, wakes up to find that Aslan is no longer on the stone table where he was put to death the night before and that moreover the stone table is now cracked. As she begins to worry, Aslan rises up with the sun shining behind him and the reader realizes, just as Susan does, that Aslan conquered death induced by evil. The conquest of death is known as the great eucatastrophe, the greatest of all other eucatastrophes. Aslan then goes on to unfreeze the prisoners of the White Witch and leads them to the battle against her and her followers. Peter, the oldest of the brothers, makes the final move to end her life and stabs the White Witch with his sword. Tolkien states that a eucatastrophe can only be made achievable if a dyscatastrophe, a catastrophe of sorrow or failure, is possible in the story. In The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the dyscatastrophe was the possibility of Aslan not coming back from the dead, as many readers suspect that he would not, and the White Witch winning the battle of good versus