Horray for Fairy-Stories!

I rather enjoyed the supplemental reading to Tolkien. I think it was my first semester here that Mrs. Fobes talked about the “willing suspension of disbelief.” I don’t honestly remember what we were talking about, but I fell in love with the phrase then. Honestly, if you think about it, there are so many ridiculous movies and books in the world that, in order to believe them, one has to say “okay. I know this isn’t real, but for the sake of not doing anything overly school-related, I’ll pretend like this could happen.” Well, Tolkien apparently does not like this phrase. After reading his take on what it really means to will yourself to believe something, I think I like his perspective better.
He is talking about how children are willing to believe something for the sake of believing it. Instead of putting on the “willing suspension of disbelief,” Tolkien says that “what really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator’” because he “makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter” (36) In this secondary world, orange grass is acceptable or a Hobbit can really exist and he can destroy a ring that a giant eyeball has been searching for for years.
A second thing that I liked was that fairy-stories are good for kids because it allows their imaginations to grow (and Chesterton did say that those with imaginations are not the mad men). Tolkien makes a point of saying that fairy-stories are good for adults, too, because they “offer also, in a peculiar degree or mode, these things: Fantasy, Recovery, Consolation, all things of which children have, as a rule, less need than older people” (44). Yes, most older people do need to escape from their lives sometimes, and yes, most older people (myself included) do enjoy a happy ending. There are times when it would be great to escape from death, but death allows us to see what is truly important in our lives. We don’t usually value things until we don’t have them anymore, and I don’t really think that the Hobbits knew what they meant to each other until they are separated forever. At the end of “Return of the King,” Frodo decides to go with Bilbo to the Grey Havens. Sam does not want him to go but Frodo explains that “when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them” (Tolkien 338). He says this because, though he may not necessarily want to leave his friends, he has done all that he can to assure that they have a happy ending even though he does not get one. What he does get, though, is seemingly eternal life. Because we never hear of his death, only that he is leaving forever, he gets eternal life in the imaginations of most who read of his journeys. I think that Tolkien wanted to include that fairy-stories include consolation because we are consoled that Frodo gets to be a hero in his own little story. It’s nice to know that, in the secondary world, at least, people get the endings that they deserve.