Ben Domenech

I'm fine with that.

I still like a lot of stuff that Tolkien probably wouldn't consider fantasy because it doesn't reveal that kind of truth.

But yeah, for Tolkien, I think it's really important to recognize that fantasy was more than just making up worlds of elves and swords and dragons.

Yeah, it's a lot more than that.

It was glimpsing some kind of truth.

Yeah, and I think that's why, for him, the secondary worlds, moving into that next word, were why they had to be made so real.

The idea was that if you're going to convey a truth in this fantasy...

then it has to be in a world that's believable, right?

It has to be grounded and internally consistent, right?

And that's one of the big ideas that he talks about when it comes to secondary worlds is that they have to create this internal consistency of reality.

To give you an idea of what he's talking about in that On Fairy Story essay, Tolkien writes that anyone inheriting the fantastic device of human language can say the green sun.

Many can then imagine or picture it, but that's not enough, though it may already be a more potent thing than, and he goes on to describe a couple examples.

His point is, to make a secondary world inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding secondary belief is,

and I think we really have to connect secondary beliefs to secondary worlds, and we're trying to do that here, will probably require labor and thought and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft, if you 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, story-making in its primary and most potent mode.

And that's the thing.

The...

We can talk about a world in which all the things that happen in the Lord of the Rings happen, that there are three foot tall people with hair on their feet, and there are dwarves that live in the mountains, and you've got these essentially immortal elves, got wizards running around doing magic, or what we might think of as magic.

But to make that world believable enough to then convey truths within it, you have to create it so that it's internally consistent