Read this for school. “On fairy stories” is actually a really great (if not a bit bloated) essay that meanders in a nice, natural way, skewering drama/theatre somewhere in its middle enough to shock even me (a ‘hater’ of theatre, or at least someone who doesn’t care to indulge the life-support system that tries to distinguish it from film and assumes film isn’t already totally dominant); it’s curious that he argues fantasy is impossible to depict well in drama, when his works are the basis of the greatest fantasy film series of all time, but it’s a neat glimpse into what he thinks. I hardly agree with much of his essay, but it’s really well drafted. Wasn’t enthralled with his ‘rebuttal’ to CS Lewis, likely because we can already see his strength as an essayist, and to abandon that medium for verse (definitely not his strong-suit) is a poor tactic. Oh well. Glad to have done it tho, especially so recently after Fellowship.

Read On Fairy-Stories and Leaf by Niggle for my sci-fi and fantasy class. Tolkien never disappoints; before defining a genre with LOTR, he defines what fantasy should be in this essay. And Niggle is a beautiful rendering of all his ideas.

Defining fantasy is no easy task, as I now know. One of the ways to do so is to ask: how much of it is similar to LOTR? But this essay predates Tolkien's writing of LOTR. In a way, LOTR came out of this reflection of his. What are fairies? What is Faërie? What is the purpose of writing a fairy story?
He created terms such as eucatastrophe, primary and secondary worlds, and subcreation. If you want to study the problematization of fantasy as a genre, this is an essay you cannot skip. If only because all work coming after has its roots in this essay.
Leaf By Niggle is Tolkien's attempt at explaining his ideas. We see a bit of self-critique and his love of words and trees. If you don't understand the importance of these two, you might lose a lot of what Tolkien tried to do in his writing of Middle Earth.

The more I know about J.R.R. Tolkien, the more I fall in love. He was an incredibly relatable nerd and procrastinator wishing to escape all that is negative in this world by submerging oneself in fantasy.

Mythopoeia, for C.S. Lewis, is a cleverly written poem about the power of myth. I enjoyed reading it, especially the ending, where Tolkien explains his vision of evil, which he portrays in LOTR.
Evil is a choice, not nature, not innate.
The Homecoming of Beothtnoth is an interesting exercise. We can see some of Tolkien's love for philology and English history. He refers to other works, such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain, and the feeling of vassalage.

I think I barely understood what I read. I will be returning and rereading it many times.

A wonderful wee insight into the mind of Tolkien himself.