Here’s another fascinating essay for you. This one comes from Story-1 https://www.facebook.com/share/1BcKi74x5w/?mibextid=wwXIfr)

I see a lot behind the publishing curtain, and the “commercial” requirements are doing damage in some places. Lots to digest here!

J.R.R. Tolkien’s hostility toward Disney was not the reflex of an aging scholar suspicious of cartoons or new technology. It was not jealousy, nor a cranky dislike of popular taste. It was a deeply reasoned rejection rooted in a clash of worldviews about what stories are, what they are meant to do, and what is lost when they are reshaped for mass consumption.

The conflict began with a striking convergence in 1937. That year, Tolkien published The Hobbit. On the surface it appeared to be a children’s adventure, but beneath that simplicity lay a carefully engineered mythology. Tolkien was not merely telling a story. He was building a world shaped by ancient languages, medieval literature, and a belief that stories carry moral and spiritual weight. Every place name, every song, every creature belonged to a history that extended far beyond the page. The book was playful, but it was not casual.

Just months later, on December 21, 1937, Disney released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It was the first full-length animated feature film, a technical triumph and a financial gamble that paid off spectacularly. When it reached Britain in early 1938, it was impossible to ignore. It dazzled audiences and redefined what popular entertainment could be.

Two visions of fairy tales had arrived almost simultaneously. Tolkien and his close friend C.S. Lewis went to see Snow White together. Both were medievalists. Both believed fairy tales mattered. Neither viewed them as light amusement or childish diversion. They watched carefully. They left unimpressed.

Lewis wrote in his diary that he found the film cloying. Tolkien’s reaction ran deeper and lasted far longer. What disturbed him was not the animation, which he openly admired, nor Disney’s skill, which he never denied. What unsettled him was what Disney believed fairy tales were for.

Tolkien’s view of fairy tales was precise and serious. In his essay On Fairy-Stories, he argued that they were not decorative fantasies for children but ancient instruments for confronting reality. True fairy tales, he believed, acknowledged fear, loss, danger, and moral consequence.

They dealt in peril, not comfort. Their power came from the fact that disaster was genuinely possible. Central to this belief was what Tolkien called “eucatastrophe,” the sudden turn toward joy that feels miraculous only because the darkness beforehand is real. The happy ending matters because it was never guaranteed. Remove the danger and the joy becomes sentimental. The story loses its truth.

Disney’s Snow White, as Tolkien saw it, did exactly that. The symbols were still there. The wicked queen. The forest. The dwarfs. But they had been reshaped into something safer, softer, and easier to digest. Evil was obvious and contained. The dwarfs became comic personalities. Fear was present but carefully managed. Everything moved toward reassurance.

To Tolkien, this was not reinterpretation. It was dilution. He believed Disney had taken stories that once functioned as myth and turned them into spectacle. The transformation kept the outward form while hollowing out the inner purpose. It was like translating poetry into plain prose. The meaning might survive, but the force that made it poetry was gone.

Years later, in a 1964 letter to a film producer, Tolkien put his feelings plainly. He wrote of a “heartfelt loathing” for Disney’s work, not because of incompetence, but because he believed Disney’s undeniable talent had been “hopelessly corrupted.” Anything Disney touched, Tolkien feared, would be flattened into something visually rich but morally shallow.

This was not personal animosity. Tolkien never met Walt Disney. He did not concern himself with Disney the man. His objection was philosophical. It was about intent.

Disney believed stories reached their fullest purpose when they were simplified and clarified. Moral ambiguity became good versus evil. Characters were sorted cleanly into heroes and villains. Darkness was made approachable. Endings were unambiguously happy. This, Disney believed, allowed stories to reach millions.

Tolkien believed the opposite. He believed stories gained power by resisting simplification. Moral ambiguity was not a flaw but a reflection of reality. Characters could be brave and weak at the same time. Evil was rarely simple. Fear mattered because it was earned. Stories were not meant to comfort first. They were meant to tell the truth.

This belief shaped Tolkien’s fierce resistance to adaptation. Throughout his life, filmmakers approached him about adapting The Lord of the Rings. He resisted nearly all of them. He feared that Hollywood would do to his work what Disney had done to fairy tales. He imagined Sam Gamgee turned into comic relief. Gollum reduced to a straightforward villain. Boromir stripped of his moral struggle. Mordor softened to suit family audiences. The darkness replaced by spectacle. The joy manufactured rather than earned.

These fears were not hypothetical. They were based on what Tolkien had already seen happen to traditional stories. He had watched the Grimm brothers transformed into merchandise. He had no reason to trust that his own work would be spared.

In his letters, Tolkien made his position clear. He would rather his stories never be filmed than be altered in ways that destroyed their integrity. Reaching fewer people mattered less to him than preserving what made the stories true.

To Tolkien, mythology was not raw material for improvement. It was something to be guarded.

Stories changed naturally over time, he understood that. But there was a difference between organic evolution and alteration driven by commercial necessity. Disney’s changes belonged to the latter.

Critics accused Tolkien of elitism. They argued that Disney introduced fairy tales to children who would never read medieval texts or folktales. They said accessibility mattered.

Tolkien’s answer would have been simple. What, exactly, were those children being introduced to? If danger is removed, if moral struggle is simplified, if fear becomes harmless, then the story may entertain, but it no longer performs the function of a fairy tale. It becomes something else.

This did not mean Disney’s films lacked value. Tolkien never claimed they were poorly made. His claim was that they were doing a different job. They delighted. They reassured. They did not confront. To Tolkien, when stories lose their darkness, they lose their mythic power. They can still charm and teach basic lessons, but they can no longer grapple with evil, choice, and consequence in a way that prepares the human mind for reality.

The irony is unavoidable. Tolkien’s own work was eventually adapted to film and achieved enormous commercial success. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy reached a global audience and earned billions. Tolkien did not live to see it. Whether he would have approved is impossible to say.

The films changed many things. But they preserved darkness, loss, and moral struggle in ways Disney adaptations typically did not. They did not fully sand the edges away.

The question Tolkien raised remains unsettled. When stories are adapted for the widest possible audience, what is lost? When clarity replaces complexity, when safety replaces danger, when comfort replaces truth, do we still have the same story?

Disney proved that transformation brings reach. Tolkien argued that it also brings loss. One believed stories should be reshaped so everyone could enjoy them. The other believed some stories lose their soul when reshaped that way. Neither position is trivial. Neither is easily dismissed.

But Tolkien’s opposition to Disney was not stubbornness or nostalgia. It was the considered judgment of a man who devoted his life to understanding how stories work, why they matter, and what happens when their purpose is changed.

It began with Snow White. It ended as a warning. That not all success is harmless. That not all change is improvement. And that sometimes, in making stories available to everyone, we quietly remove the very things that once made them worth telling.

Here’s some interesting history I stumbled across from The Curiosity Curator. A new to me story!

Her name was Judy-Lynn del Rey. And she became the most powerful editor in science fiction history.

Born in 1943 with achondroplastic dwarfism, Judy-Lynn grew up devouring science fiction in New York City’s public libraries. At a time when the genre was dismissed as pulp fiction for teenage boys, she saw something else entirely: the future of storytelling.

She started at the bottom—an office assistant at Galaxy, the most prestigious science fiction magazine of the 1960s. Within four years, she was managing editor.

Then Ballantine Books came calling.

When she arrived at Ballantine in 1973, science fiction and fantasy were afterthoughts in publishing. Fantasy in particular was considered unsellable—unless you were Tolkien. Judy-Lynn thought that was nonsense.

Her first major move was audacious: she cut ties with one of Ballantine’s bestselling authors, John Norman, whose “Gor” novels were popular but notoriously misogynistic. It was a risk. She didn’t care.

Then came the gamble that changed everything.

In 1976, someone brought her an opportunity: the novelization rights to an upcoming space movie by a young director named George Lucas. Hollywood thought the film would bomb. Studio executives were skeptical. Most publishers passed.

Judy-Lynn said yes.

The Star Wars novelization sold 4.5 million copies before the movie even premiered.

She would later call herself the “Mama of Star Wars.”

In 1977, she launched Del Rey Books—her own imprint, with her husband Lester editing fantasy while she oversaw everything else. Their first original novel was Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara. It became a phenomenon.

She didn’t stop there.

Remember The Princess Bride? The original 1973 novel had flopped. It was headed for obscurity. Judy-Lynn rescued it, reissuing it in 1977 with a striking gate-fold cover and an aggressive marketing campaign. Without her intervention, there might never have been a movie.

She published the Star Trek Log series. She championed Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant trilogy—convincing Ballantine to release all three books on the same day from a completely unknown author. Unprecedented.

She published Anne McCaffrey’s The White Dragon—the first science fiction novel ever to hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

And she did all of this while competitors called her imprint “Death-Rey Books”—because she was utterly dominant.

Between 1977 and 1990, Del Rey Books had 65 titles reach bestseller lists. That was more than every other science fiction and fantasy publisher combined.

Arthur C. Clarke called her “the most brilliant editor I ever encountered.”

Philip K. Dick went further: “The greatest editor since Maxwell Perkins”—the legendary editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

But here’s what burns: the science fiction community never nominated her for a Hugo Award while she was alive. Not once. The men who ran the industry praised her in private and overlooked her in public.

In October 1985, Judy-Lynn suffered a brain hemorrhage. She died four months later, at 42.

Only then did the Hugo committee vote to give her the Best Professional Editor award.

Her husband Lester refused to accept it.

He said Judy-Lynn would have objected—that it was given only because she had just died. That it came too late.

He was right.

Judy-Lynn del Rey transformed science fiction from a niche hobby into a cultural force. She made fantasy into a mainstream publishing category. She bet on Star Wars when no one else would. She saved The Princess Bride from oblivion. She published the first #1 New York Times science fiction bestseller.

She did all of this standing 4’1″ tall in an industry run by men who underestimated her at every turn.

The next time you pick up a fantasy novel, or watch a Star Wars movie, or quote The Princess Bride—

Now you know who made it possible.

Here’s a fascinating essay by Genny Harrison, and I think there’s a lot to think about.

Too often we’re tempted to wrap up our stories in a neat bow, but that’s not life. Too often we want to make things easier on our characters. Perhaps it’s because our characters are secretly us and we just want to catch a break – haha! 🙂 Some authors struggle with showing natural consequences, or even just cause and effect.

But it is important to let our characters fail and be human. I love the thoughts below on cumulative trauma and how mercy (and the little decisions) make the biggest impact in the end.

I would love to hear your thoughts!

At the most important moment in modern fantasy, the hero fails. Not quietly. Not ambiguously. He stands at the edge of the world, feels the full weight of evil loosen its grip, and chooses it anyway.

At the edge of Mount Doom, with the fate of the world balanced on a single will, Frodo Baggins does not throw the Ring into the fire. He claims it. The moment every heroic narrative has trained us to expect as triumph becomes instead a confession of failure. Tolkien does not flinch. He lets the hero break.

And yet the world is saved.

This is not a plot twist. It is a moral thesis. The destruction of the Ring happens not because Frodo earns victory, but because mercy extended long before the ending finally comes due. The quest resolves because of a chain reaction of restraint. The decisive force is not discipline, not optimization, not grit. It is pity.

This is where Tolkien quietly dismantles the moral machinery of hustle culture decades before we had language for it. We live inside a story that teaches us effort converts cleanly into outcome. That endurance guarantees reward. That suffering is a down payment on success. Tolkien offers a colder and far more honest truth. Sometimes you do everything right and still cannot finish the job.

Scholars have long noted that Frodo’s failure is not a betrayal of his character but the completion of it. The Ring is not a fair test of willpower. As J. R. R. Tolkien wrote plainly in his letters, the will is not infinite. Power erodes agency. The closer one comes to absolute domination, the less freedom remains. Frodo is not weak at the Crack of Doom. He is human at the end of an inhuman burden.

By the time he reaches the Fire, Frodo has endured starvation, sleep deprivation, repeated physical injury, and sustained psychological terror. Modern neuroscience would describe this as cumulative trauma. Tolkien simply wrote it as reality. Expecting one last burst of perfect moral clarity from a nervous system already wrecked by suffering is not heroism. It is wishful thinking disguised as virtue.

The quest only succeeds because of Gollum. And even that rescue is not redemption in the sentimental sense. Gollum does not transform into goodness. He falls into the fire because of what he already is. The deeper truth is that Gollum is alive at all only because he was spared when mercy looked foolish. First by Bilbo. Then by Gandalf. Then most dangerously by Frodo himself.

The Ring is destroyed not because Frodo conquers it, but because Frodo once chose not to destroy someone else.

This is a devastating inversion of the moral economy most of us were raised to believe in. We are taught to look for visible proof that goodness works. Tolkien gives us an older logic. Moral victories are often retroactive. The most transformative decisions rarely announce themselves as such. They look inefficient. They look naive. They often look like failure.

In the medieval moral tradition that shaped Tolkien, mercy was not sentimental. It was strategic in a way power could never be. Mercy refused to close the future. It kept outcomes unresolved. It preserved the possibility that evil might one day undo itself. Tolkien does not sanctify Gollum. He allows evil to collapse under its own gravity because mercy refuses to force a premature ending.

This alone would be enough to unsettle the reader. But Tolkien goes further. He denies us the fantasy that salvation heals everything.

After the Ring is destroyed, Tolkien insists on the Scouring of the Shire. Home is violated. The saved world is not the same world. The victory does not restore innocence. Frodo returns permanently wounded. He cannot sleep without pain. He cannot fully enter the peace he helped secure.

The modern myth is that collapse will be redeemed by recognition. Tolkien refuses that lie.

We want the hero to stand at the end and receive the moral reward. Tolkien lets his hero sit down and admit he is finished. Frodo does not recover because recovery would falsify the cost.

This is why The Lord of the Rings remains psychologically modern beneath its ancient scaffolding. The story already understands what burnout culture would take another century to articulate. Some burdens cannot be survived without damage. Some systems demand more than one conscience can sustain. Sometimes the bravest outcome is not conquest but survival long enough to make mercy matter.

We live in an age that worships visible dominance. We measure virtue through performance. We reward leaders who claim they can bend chaos through sheer will. Tolkien issues a quiet warning instead. When power becomes the proof of goodness, goodness collapses.

Frodo fails because no one was ever meant to pass that final test.

The world is not saved by the flawless execution of the righteous. It is saved by the accumulated weight of restraint. By choices made without assurance of payoff. By mercy that looked wasted at the time. By patience that looked irrational. By hands that refused the easy kill and kept the future open instead.

The modern fantasy is not Middle-earth. The modern fantasy is that effort always guarantees justice.

Tolkien tells a harder truth. Sometimes the most important moral decisions you will ever make will feel powerless when you make them. Sometimes the victory will not belong to your endurance at all. It will belong to mercy that looked like weakness years earlier.

Frodo does not win.

Mercy does.

And it does not feel triumphant.