Lalwende wrote:
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Now, that's a bit naughty because those who write about folklore and indeed know quite a lot about it, are not polarised in that way. Not at all. Indeed in OFS you will find that Tolkien himself dislikes Bowdlerisation, and would rather they stayed in their true 'adult' form. He did not set the aspects some readers are uncomfortable with 'aside' from his view of Fairy Tales.
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It seems to me that there are two quite distinct issues here:
1. "Bowdlerization"; making stories "safe" for children - i.e. removing or avoiding anything too frightening, too serious, or too grim.
2. Rejecting the "amorality" and the focus on, as Lalwende puts it, "bodily fluids" commonly found in many folk tales.
Tolkien did not make his stories safe for children by avoiding grim or frightening material, and this is not what he meant when he said "purged of the gross". A work in which there are evil characters is not amoral - on the contrary, the amoral sort of fairy story generally does
not include clearly evil characters any more than it includes clearly good ones. In fact, it seems to me that the amoral fairy story and the "bodily fluid" obsessed fairy story are nearly always
less serious, less grim, and less frightening. If any kind of fairy story ought to be called puerile or adolescent, it is this kind. Or am I alone in finding
Beowulf and
Gawaine far more serious and 'adult' than, say, the
Kalevala?
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In fact, and this has been asked before, was LotR and The Sil (the Hobbit is excluded from this) Faerie Tale at all? Was it not something different, i.e. myth?
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Again I must question the distinction between myth and fairy tale, particularly in the context of Tolkien's views on the subject. In OFS, it seems clear that he considers
Beowulf a fairy-story, for example.