To both Tolkien and Lewis, it seemed, Disney’s dwarves were a gross oversimplification of a concept they held as precious”—the concept, that is, of fairy stories. Some might brush away their opinions as two Oxford dons gazing down their noses at American mass entertainment. As Tolkien scholar Trish Lambert puts it, “I think it grated on them that he [Disney] was commercializing something that they considered almost sacrosanct.”
“Indeed,” writes Steven D. Greydanus at the National Catholic Register, “it would be impossible to imagine” these two authors “being anything but appalled by Disney’s silly dwarfs, with their slapstick humor, nursery-moniker names, and singsong musical numbers.” One might counter that Tolkien’s dwarves (as he insists on pluralizing the word), also have funny names (derived, however, from Old Norse) and also break into song. But he takes pains to separate his dwarves from the common run of children’s story dwarfs.
Tolkien would later express his reverence for fairy tales in a scholarly 1947 essay titled “On Fairy Stories,” in which he attempts to define the genre, parsing its differences from other types of marvelous fiction, and writing with awe, “the realm of fairy story is wide and deep and high.” These are stories to be taken seriously, not dumbed-down and infantilized as he believed they had been. “The association of children and fairy-stories,” he writes, “is an accident of our domestic history.”