ABSTRACT
Coleridge spoke of the ‘willing suspension of disbelief ’, and it is this belief and disbelief in the worlds created in fiction, and how the children reached these states, that is studied here. Tolkien takes issue with this suspension. He says that children are ‘capable of literary belief’ and that the ‘story-maker’ creates a secondary world
which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed.
