“To make a Secondary World . . . commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labor and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft. Few 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, storymaking in its primary and most potent mode.” — J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories” J.R.R. Tolkien’s seminal lecture/essay “On Fairy-Stories” is nothing short of a manifesto of his art, and a spiritedly reasoned elaboration of his Theory of Story — specifically Fairy-Stories, or tales of the Land of Faërie. Such Fairylands of Secondary Creation are realms in which readers can glimpse the miraculous, find fresh eyes with which to see the everyday, and experience the catharsis of Eucatastrophe — that is a ‘positive catastrophe,’ the sudden turn that finds us leaping from the depths of peril and despair into the warm light of a happy ending. Tolkien mentions classic examples of Fairyland tales, of true myths, the stories of the Gods and Heroes, Beowulf and the Norse Sagas, or Gawain and the Green Knight and the Legends of the Round Table, to name a few of his favorites. But it is to The Lord of the Rings, the ‘sequel’ to The Hobbit that the Good Professor was currently working on, that we can truly see his theory put to the test — and enthusiastically validated by every metric. Absolutely central to Tolkien’s point was the power and necessity of language in first conceiving of, then in actually creating the worlds and peoples of Faërie — the enchanted lands of imagination’s desire. And, while “Faërie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible”, it can of course be evoked by the careful craft of the narrative storyteller operating in the most potent mode of their craft. The following assortment of quotations for The Lord of the Rings serve as a small sampling of Tolkien’s linguistic magic. “Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to…” “Yet at the last Beren was slain by the Wolf that came from the gates of Angband, and he died in the arms of Tinúviel. But she chose mortality, and to die from the world,...