Tolkien On Fairy Stories, by Professor Castronova

A lecture about JRR Tolkien's 1939 essay "On Fairy Stories." Tolkien is known as the author of The Lord of the Rings, but he was also a highly respected scholar of languages, especially Old English. He rarely talked about why he created the fantasies of Middle Earth, but in this essay Tolkien unpacks the idea of faery and relates it to both the Infinite and our daily lives. An aside: Most portraits of Tolkien that we see online show him in advanced age, as a kindly old man. The portrait thumbnail here is one that I found only recently and shows a younger man with a darker affect. This haunted man, and not the pleasant Oxford don, is the one who launched Middle Earth.