The Lord of the Rings occupies a unique, privileged, and beloved place in the English-speaking world. Its characters and themes, its setting, and when reduced to one, its broader aesthetic have cemented themselves in popular consciousness in ways few other novels have managed over the past couple of centuries. Depicting a slumbering world dragged into the waking hell of war and uncertainty, the story’s characters are at once larger than life in speech and deed, yet altogether realistic enough to practically walk right out of the page.

Tolkien had much to say about The Lord of the Rings, writing extensively about the creative process that brought it about in private correspondence. These, along with drafts and notes, have been made available thanks to the work of Christopher Tolkien, who spent the rest of his life curating and safeguarding his father’s legacy to the best that he could. This came often at the expense of proposals to take the story ‘public,’ to license it, turn it over to a collection of corporate execs whose only relation to the work is its status as a salable product.

Unfortunately, licensing did take place at a time when the estate was in great financial need, and as a result, film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings began in the late seventies. By some stroke cool-headed zeitgeist, these films, although popular enough to receive cult followings after the fact, did not ignite broad cultural interest in the title. The books remained popular, of course, but aside from closely -knit communities of avid fantasy readers, the story had not yet become the household name that it is today. Peter Jackson’s films in 2001, however, would change that.

This piece is a reaction to that phenomenon. Jackson’s films will be given treatment, as will the text of The Lord of the Rings itself, but only in order to service the main thrust: that the popular consensus of Tolkien’s works has been skewed as a result of The Lord of the Rings becoming a licensed property, and this deformation has been exacerbated by the explosion of consumer media. Tolkien’s works do not fit easily into the interpretive mode required by consumer media; however, due to the proliferation of the films, popular consciousness has replaced his novel with the media that has surrounded it.

At heart, however, this piece is about the differences between artistic creative endeavors and the flattened, simplified products of that mass produced consumer media. Some may accuse this as being a distinction without due cause, or a sophistic and unnecessary over-complication of things that are in fact only distinguished according to some level of quality. This is not the case, however, as will be argued toward the end.

The first section establishes some definition of fantasy, fairy-story, and ultimately of art, while introducing a distinct definition for consumer media. Tolkien is relied upon to define the foremost of these terms, as consumer media, at least as it has come to exist in its current form, was not as prolific and inescapable as it was when he published The Lord of the Rings.

Section two focuses on the distinction between The Lord of the Rings as it is written down and The Lord of the Rings as it is popularly conceived. This section uses excerpts from the text and Tolkien’s letters and positions them against the film series that catapulted the works out of the hands of fantasy literature enthusiasts and into the mass market popular culture. The express purpose of this contrast is not specifically to denigrate Peter Jackson’s film franchise, nor is it an in depth critical analysis of either the books or the films. Rather, it is to illustrate how differently Tolkien considered his novel, what it was about, and why he wrote it compared to how modern audiences engage—or fail to engage—with it. For this reason, the study is limited to only three aspects of the work: how Tolkien uses setting, violence, and politics in The Lord of the Rings. Of special import here will be how he expresses real things and draws upon real experiences in order to create his fantasy, and how this aspect of his work is totally neglected in the popularized forms of fantasy media.

In the last section, the distinctions, if any, between art and consumer media are studied and elaborated upon. With the examples of the second section on display, and with the assistance of Tolkien’s own definitions of the key terms, we make apparent any substantial differences between works of art and works of consumer media. Similarly, this section will address the reasons that one creates a work of art versus consumer media, as well as the reasons an audience seeks out a work of art versus that of consumer media. This will form the conclusion, drawing off of Tolkien while offering some final critique of his definitions, seeking a synthesis between his views on art and this writer’s own.

I. Defining Fantasy

Here, then, we must entreat with the term ‘Fantasy.’ Tolkien had his own thoughts on the subject, and his take on the subject will be approached first. Then we must deal with terms such as ‘escapism’ and ‘desertion,’ both terms that Tolkien himself had definitions for, albeit one was far clearer than the other. The last part of this section deals with Fantasy in colloquial terms as a genre of fiction, its relationship with consumer media, and the preliminary distinctions to draw between consumer media and art.

Across this entire section, Tolkien’s understanding of the terminology being used, such as ‘fantasy,’ ‘escapism,’ and especially ‘art’ are all used toward the effort of determining the difference between The Lord of the Rings and the more common forms of fantasy on display in popular media today.

Tolkien’s Fantasy

In 1939, Tolkien wrote “On Fairy Stories,” as a lecture to be given at the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland, which was later published as an essay in 1947. It would be fair to assume that his beliefs about fairy stories, fantasy, narrative, and literature in general in this essay most closely match those he believed as he was writing The Lord of the Rings, given that he had begun writing the latter only two years before the lecture and completed it two years after the essay’s publication.

At a little over forty pages, it’s not a short read. In it, Tolkien covers the essence of fairy tales, how children view them, as well as some formalized thoughts on escapism more broadly. Of specific interest is his definitions of art and fantasy, how these relate to the world, the storyteller and the reader, and the purpose of both writing and reading fantastic stories.

Throughout the essay, Tolkien expresses “sub-creation,” or the act of creation from the imagination, as the basis of artistry. Narrative serves as the literary mode of creating a “Secondary World,” an alternate reality that requires greater development than simple decoration; efforts (or idles) that fail to embark upon such development he refers to as “frivolous” and “merely fanciful.”¹ He explains, “Anyone inheriting the fantastic device of human language can say the green sun. […] But that is not enough,”

To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft. Few attempt such difficult tasks. But when they are attempted and in any degree accomplished then we have a rare achievement of Art: indeed narrative art, storymaking in its primary and most potent mode.²

It almost seems as though he is referring to something quite different from literature. Literature, after all, is concerned with character, plot, setting and style, each playing significant roles in forming some narrative or other. Tolkien, however, starts with setting and holds it above the other three as the preeminent pillar upon which any narrative can function—and this is deliberate, as he holds drama to be distinct from literary narrative as an art.³

The entertainment of a hypothetical, ‘what if the sun was green?’ followed by the elaborate processes of defining how different things would be in such a situation: this calls to mind a special effects artist, a dioramist, a platform model enthusiast similar to the now near-extinct train hobbyists. Sub-creation, then, is an act of model-building, and it refers also to the model that is built; in the case of Tolkien, the model’s medium is that of literature, as opposed to, say, balsa wood, plaster, electric engines, and 1:87 scale locomotives.

This is important to note. A model is a representation of reality. Tolkien, although he does not mention this, and although he goes in a different direction with his observations, operates under these pretenses. In fact, in order for his “Secondary World” to exist, it must exist within the “Primary World”, i.e. real, observed, tangible reality, as a subservient if partly-distinct sub-creation. His alternate reality seeks to explain the primary one.

The term model is used only slightly differently in different contexts. Attractive women are hired to be models in order to exemplify a standard of beauty, often toward the end of presenting clothing or accouterments in an idealized setting. This definition leans heavily into the aesthetics of human experience. Mathematics and the sciences use models to study certain phenomena, be those phenomena the ‘behavior’ of numbers or the circumstances of physical environments; in either case, the model is a defined space subservient to but mostly distinct from reality. It is an intellectual laboratory in which to conduct experiments. The observations are informed by real life, but the data generated by the model is, ideally, restricted to the closed system that defines the model.

Both cases seek to study or otherwise exemplify a particular ideal. Both draw upon the natural order to make presumptions about the ideal, something that transcends the fallenness of the natural world, so as to have a tangible object by which to study it. By studying the model one can glimpse the transcendental, and he thereby comes to better ascertain the realities of nature. One flows to the other and then back again, transformed.

In much the same way does Tolkien use the terms ‘sub-creation’ and ‘Secondary World.’ The latter specifically creates a model, a fictional environment, albeit with the beauty of created things as its object. A fictional world brings with it real life in order to be better understood as a fictional world—and, as Tolkien even argues, in order for that fictional world to be relevant to the audience:

Probably every writer making a secondary world, a fantasy, every sub-creator, wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it. If he indeed achieves a quality that can fairly be described by the dictionary definition: “inner consistency of reality,” it is difficult to conceive how this can be, if the work does not in some way partake of reality. The peculiar quality of the “joy” in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. It is not only a “consolation” for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question, “Is it true?” The answer to this question that I gave at first was (quite rightly): “If you have built your little world well, yes: it is true in that world.” That is enough for the artist (or the artist part of the artist). But in the “Eucatastrophe” we see in a brief vision that the answer may be greater—it may be a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world.⁴

Tolkien expresses here that well crafted narratives, although being fiction, are composed of reality and thus in turn shed the light of the meaning found within them back on reality. He frames it in his terms of sub-creation and Fantasy, but fiction being fiction, what applies to a well constructed Secondary World or model also applies to the narrative that shapes it as much as takes place within it. As stated before, a story remains a story, no matter what setting it takes place in or what characters comprise its drama. In the case of fiction, if you have no narrative, you have nothing else. The narrative is both what allows the Secondary World to come into existence, as well as the means by which any audience is able to access (or using a better term, ‘interpret’) it.

True, one may spend inordinate amounts of time, as Tolkien himself did, drawing maps and composing grammars and imagining names, but without narrative, these ‘Secondary Worlds’ are not only inaccessible to any audience, but also irrelevant to reality past the idle speculation of their dreamer. This is not the composition of art but rather the indulgence in a very thorough daydream. This will be treated with more seriousness in the following segment. For our purposes here, Tolkien stressed the importance of not daydreaming but active and lucid forethought in the creation of art. Sub-creation demands the full attention of its sub-creator, as his sub-creation must by its existence generate or reflect some order of meaning. As Tolkien wrote, “art is the human process that produces by the way (it is not its only or ultimate object) Secondary Belief.”⁵ The work must be so thorough and its narrative so compelling as to completely maintain a suspension of disbelief.

Fantasy as a Means of Escape

There is a famous anecdote from Sir Alec Guinness when, late in his life, he encountered a twelve-year-old who had enthusiastically professed to have seen Star Wars some hundred times. “Looking in the boy’s eyes I thought I detected little star shells of madness beginning to form and I guessed that one day they would explode,” he wrote, whereupon he insisted to the boy never to watch the films again. According to Guinness, the boy burst into tears and his mother reprimanded the actor, but Guinness nonetheless hoped the boy, “now in his thirties, is not living in a fantasy world of secondhand childish banalities.”⁶

Guinness famously soured on Star Wars, having initially found the story ridiculous on its face, but his disdain compounded greatly when the film reached monumental (and, for the cast, quite unexpected) heights of popularity. As one can imagine, Guinness preferred his career defined by more serious works of cinema than that of a space wizard from a Flash Gordon homage. But, despite the harsh words of his autobiography, he was also somewhat of an unreliable narrator to his own life. Although the exchange did indeed occur, he didn’t go out of his way to make a child burst into tears.

All this aside, he characterized a sort of fantastical obsession as a form of madness in a manner that should sound all too relatable to the average internet denizen. The last twenty years saw an explosion of geek media, aided in part by the proliferation of accessibility to the internet, as well as the normalization of nerd material by Hollywood and other mainstream outlets. The ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe’, video and table games, streaming services, social media, and even politics has turned entertainment into a vehicle for pure escapism. One can spend an entire day, even a life, wrapped up in the consumption of narratives without ever facing the realities of his true personal circumstances, except maybe to use the bathroom or eat a meal, or, perhaps, freeze when the house is repossessed. The rise of ‘fandoms’ and their most extreme adherents illustrate this sad reality all too well.

When confronted with this sort of madness, one desires an easy definition: to place reality up and against fantasy, wherein one must choose a particular world to live. Reality, being exterior to ourselves, is more real and agreed upon: it is social, it is tangible, and therefore it seems as the obviously correct choice. All those who flee from the responsibilities and hardships of reality therefore must be fantasists, deserters, or at their most extreme, schizophrenics; these are men who have abandoned life in order to reside in a cell so small that not even walls exist for it, as it borders the region of their mind. For these men, fantasy suffices even as their body withers into frailty and their soul rots in its own vessel. And if one has given up on reality, what counterargument can be offered, what plea be made that can bring them out of their shells? None, of course, and this completely defines their insanity.

However, fiction and storytelling, and fantasy too, are not so simple. Reasoned out to its extreme, the belief above leads to tiresome regurgitations of a dissatisfied striver’s lifestyle, where all recreation is shunned unless somehow it furthers personal or professional goals. A disdain for fantasy in toto naturally implies a disdain for the impulse to fantasize, and while fantasizing is often a poor use of time, the impulse that draws a man toward fantasies is the same impulse that draws a man toward leisure and, more importantly, sub-creative acts: art. The war on leisure is well documented, and remains one of the most unjust wars fought in the secular age; in response, one can remember St. Charles Borromeo as he is famously quoted, when asked what he would do if he knew he had only fifteen minutes left to live during a game of pool: “keep playing billiards.”

Tolkien, it would seem, greatly values the ‘escapist’ element of fairy stories and fantasy more broadly, particularly in narrative form. Through storytelling, a man is able to escape the drudgery inflicted by the modern industrialized world, a sentiment that Tolkien goes to great lengths emphasizing throughout his essay On Fairy Stories. Perhaps his most famous quote on the topic comes from this very essay, though it is frequently misquoted:

Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.⁷

Tolkien refrains from elaborating further on the distinctions between the escaped prisoner and the fleeing deserter, but the use of terminology serves ample enough purpose. Throughout the piece, Tolkien expresses skepticism at a sort of dichotomy between ‘real’ and ‘fantastical’, insofar as they are separate realms wherein one is abandoned in order for the other to serve as a home. Rather, fantasy should function in a mythopoeic mode: it forms the tools and means by which reality is knowable. This includes a moral dimension, but Tolkien focuses on the aesthetics: “we should look at green again, and be startled anew by blue and yellow and red,” he writes, explaining how fantasy serves as “recovery […] so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness.”⁸

The mention of possessiveness here touches on a distinction he makes elsewhere: that appreciation of beauty is something to take part in, something that sublimates the soul to a greater and transcendental experience. This is altogether different from the possessive character of domination, wherein a man seeks to exert power over something he desires. In either case, desire is an operator within the will, but the former surrenders the possessiveness of desire in order for that desire to be the means by which beauty better enriches his soul. The the latter, he surrenders his appreciation in the misplaced effort to use desire as a means to dominate it.

Fantasy then, according to Tolkien, is the artful act of sub-creation that serves, when done properly, to rejuvenate the reader’s appreciation for real things. He treats this as a form of escapism, in the sense that modern life—or all life naturally, but modern life especially—forms a prison that requires some time for the soul to think out of its particular box.

Is it fair then to accuse Tolkien of embracing escapism the way we might more commonly use the term? Tolkien’s understanding of the practice, rather than a flight from reality, seems rather quite the opposite: an exercise of more thoroughly engaging with reality after a period of contemplation. By taking time to consider, in his case, the mythical and the fantastic, distinctions are drawn with the everyday and the mundane which then draws the exterior world into greater focus. “We should meet the centaur and the dragon,” he writes, “and then perhaps suddenly behold, like the ancient shepherds, sheep, and dogs, and horses—and wolves.”⁹

The escapism frequently criticized is what Tolkien labels as desertion, and although he doesn’t expand much on the topic, its name plainly states what so deserves scorn. This is where idle fantasy lurches toward the realm of idolatry, where the soul is distracted totally from real things in order to flounder in the recesses of its imagination and itself. For the deserter, fantasy does not serve him to better engage with reality but instead offers him simulacra of comforts which he uses to deceive himself.

To return briefly to Sir Guinness, this is the sort of thing he referred to as the “little star shells of madness.” Self-professed fanatics of particular titles do not delude themselves into believing that a particular fantasy is real. That’s never been the danger. The danger in their fanaticism is that the duties and obligations owed to real things become sublimated to private, mediocre, and irrelevant desires, and this is facilitated through n overindulgence of fantasy. Fantasy, rather than acting as something of a rejuvenating force for the soul, becomes a prison that the deserter of life flees into.

Fantasy as a Genre of Fiction

All of this has been well and good. According to Tolkien, fantasy is the genre best suited to the art of narrative literature, as fantasy allows for the maximum entertainment of the imagination. Unlike the more restrained forms of fiction, such as historical romances or realistic dramas, Tolkien considered the fantastic, the faerie world, to keep the most building blocks on the table from which an author can construct his model, so to speak.

The use of the term in common parlance, however, no longer carries with it quite the same connotations that it did in Tolkien’s time—a fact he no doubt became increasingly aware of toward the end of his life. True, the sort of ‘fairy story’ Tolkien wrote had its antecedents in late nineteenth and early twentieth century English writers that Tolkien drew inspiration from. Without getting too deep in the weeds, the modern genre of fantasy, while including the fairy stories of the Isles, traces a genealogy of publication back through Sword and Sorcery and the pulp fiction of yesteryear.

As mentioned earlier, narrative fiction is best considered according to four basic elements: character, plot, setting, and style. All four of these rely on one another in order to bring the story into a form capable of being interpreted, but depending on the author, the genre, and the story in question, it is common for one or two of these elements to be more obvious to the reader than the others. Jane Austin’s characters and settings are unforgettable, whereas Ulysses is well known for its style. Meanwhile, mystery staples aren’t uncommonly formed around specific characters, like Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot, even when the specific works they’re known for are plot-heavy puzzle books. Tolkien, obviously, cared very much about setting.

In general, when it comes to genre fiction, style plays a reduced role in determining a particular story’s quality than the other three. Style remains, however, the unavoidable means by which the audience first witnesses the other three, so while it’s considered with far less weight than in a work of high literature, it is nonetheless a relevant component.

Some writers of fantasy may disagree on this, pointing out that high fantasy is carried by a sort of heraldic, antiquated and lofty form English. No doubt one can cite Tolkien as some inspiration for this, and perhaps rightfully so. Tolkien’s ‘fairy stories’ themselves draw from such use of English. While unorthodox for use in common speech, the highfalutin language seems only appropriate for settings involving dragons, elves, knights, wizards and kings. In addition, it contributes to the suspension of disbelief necessary for adequate immersion.

But that last point is precisely it: the only end for use of such a style is to service the end of escapism. Some beloved stories of the genre may do more with it, certainly; The Lord of the Rings is one, as does Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun. But for this reason, among others, it should be disputed as to whether it’s fair to judge these books according to the definitions of particular genres rather than according to some more thorough literary mode. Doing so seems to stunt the reader’s ability to engage with them, as evidenced, for example, by the shallow critiques of many self-professed fans of Tolkien’s works. These can range anywhere from not using the Eagles ‘correctly’ to believing that the first half of Fellowship is inconsequential roaming while Tolkien spun his wheels in befuddlement. Such thoughtless criticisms can only come about because the reader, informed by preexistent patterns and tropes of particular genres, expects the story to conform to that genre and thus dispenses with anything that fails to meet that genre’s standard.

When one reads a work of literary fiction, style is at the forefront of the reader’s consideration. The characters, plot, and setting are all important, but the style with which these are presented, explored and depicted are usually of greatest importance to the writer. While writers shouldn’t chase after novelty, writers of this sort are nonetheless artists as much as they are communicators, and as such, are using experiments with style in order to seek more immediate, more deliberate, more impactful means by which the communication of their story can speak to the reader’s soul.

To reconcile this with Tolkien’s definition of art as a form of sub-creation, we can again apply the same idea to model building. Style is the (usually) unseen lens by which the content of a work is brought into focus. In the case of a model diorama, the style will be found in things quickly brushed over by general audiences; the kind of brushes used for specific strokes of paint, the manner in which particular accoutrements are attached and their positioning, the colors used in order to evoke particular moods or recreate certain nostalgic memories. The mark of an artist is that he pays attention to these details in order to better and more immediately depict the image or thought that he seeks to capture with the model in question.

Here, the genre of ‘fantasy’ butts up against what can only be termed ‘consumer media’, or media made specifically for consumption. Such terminology doesn’t need to differentiate much between what sort of medium in which a given piece is made; consumable music, movies, young adult novels, comic books, et. al. exist on the same scale as pornography (the ultimate consumer media) as far as cultural artifacts go. Differentiating between the two may give the impression that these are opposites sharing a sliding scale; something like The Lord of the Rings exists on one side of that scale, but as the quality of the piece diminishes, as its writing gets worse, as it draws from the same narrowing pool of familiar ideas and derivative elements, a piece (such as just about any Japanese ‘Isekai’ story that started life on Narou) drifts closer and closer to merely consumable media. While this is possible, it is also possible, and will be argued in the last part of this piece, that consumer media and works of art are two separate things made according to two separate endeavors and engaged with for two separate reasons.

In the more than half-century since Tolkien published The Lord of the Rings, the fantasy genre has ballooned into a $590 million dollar industry with publication tutorials, writing guides, author coaches, and plot formulas enough to fill libraries themselves, and this is only limiting the survey to literature. In printed and digital media, only comic books surpass the genre in sales, and a majority of comic books too can be classified as some form of fantasy. When one factors in television and film, the industrial output cascades well into the billions. It is not hyperbole to consider it the most popular genre of narrative on the planet.

While its popularization does nothing to diminish Tolkien’s definition of the term, the fact it now has a massive industry driving it prompts a few distinctions to be made. Now, rather than drawing from folklore to aid in the invention of a new work, a new writer can draw instead from the pandering illustrations commissioned by boards of directors. As the genre has crystalized around the profit motives of large publishing houses and the power point presentations of agent-chasing guides, the myths once used to formulate narratives have been replaced with the assumptions best guessed to resonate with the editors of legacy media.

The internet has played its role, too. Since the Nineties, both amateur and professional artwork, stories, renders, and films have crafted for themselves organizational repositories through the use of hashtags. Over-categorization, usually in the effort to publicize work, be it to make it marketable or satisfy search engine optimization algorithms, has resulted in a rigid framework of narrative expectations that few fantasy writers are willing to step outside of.

And now, at the cutting edge of technological progress, clever manipulators of AI prompts can find the same niche to exploit. As advances in large language models have come along, AI-generated narratives will quickly become something of a normal occurrence. At a growing rate, writers will use AI to assist in the development of their style, outlining of narrative, tailoring of character, until the genre becomes even more derivative and mediocre than it is now.

The introduction of industry to literature changes the mode of writing from prioritizing artistic interest into chasing audiences for clout and money. The writer has to please a publisher, and the publisher has to please an audience. While this system can preserve and even amplify artistic geniuses in some cases, traditional publishing requires a literate and discerning public in order to do so. But a literate public is not what the last half-century of Western media trends has revealed; far from it, as evidenced by a public that has chased after pornography, comic and picture books, and films with increasingly little to offer their audiences.

Reiteration

So we reach the end of part one. To reiterate:

According to Tolkien, fantasy is the highest form of literature. Narrative art allows for the creation of ‘Secondary Worlds’ in which the artist, or writer, can create models of reality that facilitate escapism. The escape from modern industrialized life, Tolkien asserts, is something to be actively sought after, as it is only through such an escape that a reader can regain the broader context of life necessary to make the events of reality sensible. While all narrative art does such a thing, Tolkien believed that works of fantasy and fairy-stories facilitate this recontextualization the best because fantasy introduces alien content to the mind in the form of settings and characters, yet being narrative fiction, it does not break fundamental rules of orderliness and sensibility. It serves as something of a shock to the system to encounter dragons and elves in high countries with talking eagles, much more so than a murder mystery that takes place in London.

The impulse to ‘sub-create’ is the beating heart of all artistic endeavors, according to Tolkien. By making a work of art, the artist seeks to better fulfill himself as the image of God, who alone holds pure and true creative power. Still, this sub-creative act images the act of creation, and it uses creation in order to do it; one flows into the other, and by engaging in the enterprise, an artist uses the sub-creative act to better know reality.

In the effort of defining fantasy, we must cross an additional bridge. Tolkien uses escapism as a means to interact with the sub-creation of the artist. As a man grows cold in the real world, his desire to escape it sends him either into the artistic mode of creative reproduction, or into the contemplative mode of an attuned audience; in either case, his desire to escape the incidental mediocrity results in his attention being turned elsewhere: in this case, to the secondary worlds of artists. Upon his return from his fantastic sojourn, reality is better illuminated and the forms of real life sharper. A similar if more intense process occurs in the mind of the writer, who embarks upon a more thorough escape in the act of sub-creation: his attention to the details of an imaginary world draw forth from the wellspring of his soul, itself compelled to pour into this new work in a way that images, however crudely, the pouring forth of God’s Grace into His creation.

Against this seemingly mystical take on artistic expression sits the genre-fied industrial output of mass media. In order to properly contrast Tolkien’s definition of fantasy, or fairy-story, with modern consumer media, we must produce proper examples of both for analysis. Fortunately, The Lord of the Rings itself presents such examples. Section two will cover this exercise, pitting Tolkien’s opus up against Jackson’s film treatment that bears its name.

1J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” 23.

2Ibid.

3Ibid, 39, Note F: “Drama is anthropocentric. Fairy -story and Fantasy need not be. […] A drama could be made about the sufferings of a victim of research in radiology, but hardly about the radium itself. But it is posible to be primarily interested in radium (not radiologists)—or primarily interested in Faerie, not tortured mortals. One interest will produce a scientific book, the other a fairy-story. Drama cannot cope well with either.”

4Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories”, 35.

5Ibid, 25.

6Alec Guinness, A Positively Final Appearance, (London: Penguin Books, 1999), Chapter 2.

7Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories”, 29-30.

8Ibid, 28.

9Ibid.

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