BMEM '08: The Consolation of Fantasy
Mar. 8th, 2008 11:40 pm"...[F]airy stories offer also, in a peculiar degree or mode, these things: Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, Consolation, all things of which children have, as a rule, less need than older people...
"The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous 'turn' (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially 'escapist', or 'fugitive'. In it's fairy-tale - or otherworld - setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur."
J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories
"The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous 'turn' (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially 'escapist', or 'fugitive'. In it's fairy-tale - or otherworld - setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur."
J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories