The text of Tolkien's 1937 lecture ‘On Fairy-stories’, from which he developed the now famous published essay, is authoritatively considered to be unidentified, probably lost. Another still unsolved mystery is the date of the earliest substantial text of ‘On Fairy-stories’, labelled MS B by its editors. The essay purports to solve both mysteries by showing that the running text of MS B was actually the script Tolkien used for his lecture at St Andrews on 8 March 1939. The longest newspaper report of the lecture reflects all kinds of emendations to MS B, while visual aspects of MS B explain most of the report's errors. Unexpectedly, this means the lecture text is already published almost in full in Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson's expanded edition Tolkien On Fairy-stories – though hitherto unrecognised it for what it is.
John Garth (2025) studied this question.
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