What is the title of J.R.R. Tolkien’s influential 1939 lecture about fantasy and fairy stories?

J.R.R. Tolkien’s influential 1939 lecture about fantasy and fairy stories is titled On Fairy-Stories.

Tolkien delivered the lecture as the Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of St Andrews in 1939. It was later revised and published in essay form, becoming one of his most important statements about imagination, mythology, and the value of fantasy.

The essay discusses concepts including the “fairy-story,” the “secondary world,” and what Tolkien called recovery, escape, and consolation. Its ideas help explain why he regarded fantasy as more than simple entertainment. Readers sometimes confuse it with The Monsters and the Critics, another important Tolkien lecture, but that work concerns Beowulf and was delivered in 1936.