What was the title of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1939 Andrew Lang Lecture?

J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1939 Andrew Lang Lecture was titled “On Fairy-Stories.”

Tolkien delivered “On Fairy-Stories” at the University of St Andrews in 1939 as the annual Andrew Lang Lecture. The essay later became one of his best-known statements about fantasy, fairy stories, imagination, and the purposes of invented worlds.

In the essay, Tolkien discusses what he calls the “fairy-story” and argues that such stories can provide recovery, escape, and consolation. He also explains how a story-maker constructs a believable secondary world through what he called “secondary belief.” These ideas are frequently used to interpret his own fiction.

The lecture is sometimes confused with Tolkien’s famous 1936 lecture on Beowulf, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” That was a different academic address and concerned Old English poetry rather than the theory of fairy stories.