And while I am conscious that, to a child, these words would probably mean little, still one recognizes the implication: that there are works of a fantastical nature in which authors have somehow managed to distill their deepest selves, both as human beings and as artists, such works as the fairy tales of Andersen and MacDonald, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Kenneth Grahame's classic, and, in our own time, the works of Farjeon, Lewis, Tolkien, Norton, and Boston Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden (Lippincott), de la Mare's The Three Royal Monkeys (Knopf), Enright's Tatsinda (Harcourt), Lloyd Alexander's Prydain cycle, and Henry Treece's last novel, The Dr eam Time (Hawthorn). I am thinking here, specifically, of the words “high fantasy,” the subject for the 1969 New England Round Table of Children’s Librarians. Though what it does we may never learn, for the child usually cannot tell us what lies down deep - if he himself knows. What matters is what the child loves and what each book does for him.
It is never important to pigeonhole works of fiction nor insist that a certain book should belong, in a child’s estimation, in this category or that (which is why I regret that in many libraries fantasy and fairy tales are separated from the realistic fiction so that a child’s initial predilection often remains entrenched for years, possibly for life). LeGuin received the 1969 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, given at the New England Round Table of Children's Librarians, October, 1969. A Wizard of Earthsea (Parnassus) by Ursula K.
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