Episode 329: “On Fairy Stories” Revisited with Jenn Rogers
On today’s episode of The Literary Life, our hosts Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks are joined by Jenn Rogers for a new discussion of “On Fairy Stories” by J.R.R. Tolkien. After sharing some opening commonplace quotes, Jenn gives us background and context for how “On Fairy Stories” comes to us today. She talks about the conversations being had by Tolkien and other philologists and folklorists that set the stage for this essay. Angelina highlights the idea of the Tree of Tales and its importance to understanding all of literature. Other topics they discuss together include sub-creation, the soup of story, the real versus the ordinary, recovery and escape, plus so much more!
Don’t forget to check out everything going on over at HouseofHumaneLetters.com to stay up to date on all the upcoming new summer classes and webinars, including Heather Goodman’s May webinar on Mary Poppins.
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Commonplace Quotes:
Take what care you can and is possible and legitimate of yourself in body and soul, for . . . you do not belong wholly to yourself. I speak a human thing, for of course theologically that is tru of the most forlorn and outcast. But God is spoken of humanly thought of in terms of fatherhood for good reason: not as is falsely imagined, because God is a human apotheosis of the Old Man and derived from fathers, but the reverse; because fatherhood derives from and is delegated from God and carries a minute reflection of Him and on small drop of his infinite Love with its peculiar quality. God bless you! … Goodnight!
J.R.R. Tolkien, from a letter to his son Christopher
She plunged into a sea of platitudes an made her confident way towards the shores of the obvious.
W. Somerset Maugham, from A Writer’s Notebook
All too often the legends old men tell are closer to the truth than the facts young professors tell. The wildest fairy tales of the ancients are far more realistic that the scientific phantasms imagined by moderns.
Hilaire Belloc
Autumn
by Roy Campbell
I love to see, when leaves depart,
The clear anatomy arrive,
Winter, the paragon of art,
That kills all forms of life and feeling
Save what is pure and will survive.
Already now the clanging chains
Of geese are harnessed to the moon:
Stripped are the great sun-clouding planes:
And the dark pines, their own revealing,
Let in the needles of the noon.
Strained by the gale the olives whiten
Like hoary wrestlers bent with toil
And, with the vines, their branches lighten
To brim our vats where summer lingers
In the red froth and sun-gold oil.
Soon on our hearth’s reviving pyre
Their rotted stems will crumble up:
And like a ruby, panting fire,
The grape will redden on your fingers
Through the lit crystal of the cup.
Book List:
Amazon affiliate links below
Falling Inward, 2nd Edition by Jason Baxter
Why Literature Still Matters by Jason Baxter
Essays Presented to Charles Williams edited by C.S. Lewis
Poetic Diction by Owen Barfield
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