Now I'm going to tuck you up in the shawl and give you the fir pillow, and while you sleep I am going down on the shore and write a fairy story for you.
This is Rebecca's fairy story, copied the next day and given to Emily Maxwell just as she was going to her room for the night.
"I only chanced to think of an absurd little
fairy story I read the other day," I said, "which is quite irrelevant at the moment.
And I told him a lovely
fairy story while we were waiting, so he didn't find the time long at all.
"It sounds like a
fairy story," was the Justice's comment.
"You look like a milkmaid in a
fairy story," said Philip, as he shook hands with her.
This is no
fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one-- there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.
She had just remembered a French
fairy story she had once read called "Riquet a la Houppe." It had been about a poor hunchback and a beautiful princess and it had made her suddenly sorry for Mr.
That's a
fairy story the grafters shove at you every time they want to rob you some more."
Tolkien himself, of course, deserves a great deal credit for bringing magical stories back to adult audiences--through the international success of his own epic
fairy story, The Lord of the Rings.
Reading like a modern day
fairy story, this is perfect escapism.
The waking world within his stories often act as metaphor for the reader's own reality, with the dreaming, fairy world becoming his own literal
fairy story. Which world do we want to live in?