Ben Domenech

And I'll take the next one after that?

Or do we want to try to both?

Sure.

And I'm going to try and do this without having the text of on fairy stories in front of me and just go from memory and probably embarrass myself.

I think fairy is a good place to start because fairy for Tolkien is it's a state of being.

It's a it's almost a place, but I don't think it's really a physical place.

It's more of a mode of.

uh, of existence rather than a, like an actual physical place.

And it is the place where all of these ideas that inspire fantasy and people come from, you know, when Tolkien is talking about fairy stories in this lecture slash essay, uh,

He makes a point to say fairy stories are not stories about fairies, as in, you know, little winged Tinkerbells running, you know, flying around, not running around.

They're not the little creatures.

Fairy stories are stories about fairy, which he spells F-A-E-R-I-E with a little umlaut over the E. And he's talking about a fairy.

A place, a mode of being where things are enchanted.

And when we read fantasy or when writers write fantasy, they're sort of tapping into fairy.

So I think fairy is a good place to start because I think fairy is the source of all of the other things that we're going to talk about in this list of words.

Anything to add, Alan?

No, you really nailed it.

I mean, I actually pulled up the text just to see if I could pull something useful, but you nailed it.

Sure, that may be where the fairy creatures live, but it's also where giants and dragons live.

But it also holds the things that we know from the real world, things like the sun and the moon and the sky and food and water and all of these things, but they're all enchanted.