Tolkien comments that fairy stories are ancient, and that it was once thought that they had derived from powerful, elemental "nature-myths", with gods personifying the sun, night, and other elements of nature. These myths were humanised to legends by telling them with human heroes as protagonists. Finally, the legends dwindled to folktales and fairy stories. But in Tolkien's view, this is "almost upside down". A tale of the Norse god Thor in the Elder Edda, the Thrymskvitha, is "certainly just a fairy-story"; it is just as old as the Norse myths. The historical King Arthur, perhaps a minor figure, went into the "Cauldron of Story", and "was boiled for a long time", eventually becoming a "King of Faërie". Tolkien notes that these old stories produce an effect of "distance and a great abyss of time", and suggests that they were selected precisely because they created this literary effect.
Tolkien comments that fairy stories are ancient, and that it was once thought that they had derived from powerful, elemental "nature-myths", with gods personifying the sun, night, and other elements of nature. These myths were humanised to legends by tel.ling them with human heroes as protagonists. Finally, the legends dwindled to folktales and fairy stories But in Tolkien's view, this is "almost upside down". A tale of the Norse god Thor in the Elder Edda, the Thrymskvitha, is "certainly just a fairy-story"; it is just as old as the Norse myths. The historical King Arthur, perhaps a minor figure, went into the "Cauldron of Story", and "was boiled for a long time", eventually becoming a "King of Faërie". Tolkien notes that these old stories produce an effect of "distance and a great abyss of time", and suggests that they were selected precisely because they created this literary effect.