T. R. Tolkien's On Fairies-Stories

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As implied in On Fairies-Stories, the nature of the universe is served as a “Primary World”, where we actually live in. Through Fairies-Stories, we sub-create the “Secondary World” of imagination. These worlds, according to Tolkien, seemed to be different and unlikely, but in fact, closely connected to each other. Best practice of Secondary World should be focused on rationalization and logic. In another word, that is “the inner consistency of reality”. Fantasy, in return, also had a significant impact on the Primary World as a tool of “Recovery, Escape and Consolation”. These two worlds, one reality and one created, affect each other in a close relationship. Therefore, the existence of fairies-stories is critical for our universe. The universe …show more content…

Every person is governed by his or her own desire, like “its desire is power in this world, domination of things and wills”, “the desire to visit, free as a fish, the deep sea”, or “the desire to escape, not indeed from life, but from our present time and self-made misery” and so on. Basically, people are attracted to fairy stories that can help them to recover or refresh their view on the world, to escape from the ugliness and evil of reality, and to console their soul by aiming at “the joy of the happy ending”, or defined as “Eucatastrophe” by Tolkien. Here, it can be easily draw a conclusion about the author’s paradigm: he strongly supported the escapism. As stated in his essay: “Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic”, Tolkien claimed that escape is actually a good thing, not something scorn or pity. He showed a deep sense toward Escapists by mentioning “the Great Escape: the Escape from Death”. In addition, the author regards fantasy as imagination, one of the human being’s characteristics: “The human mind is capable of forming mental images of things not actually present” .In a nutshell, the nature of human is the seek for satisfying the desire for a greater world or something that people cannot have in real life, and also for escaping from the ugly world they are living in. Besides, the nature of human also presents

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