That sudden, joyous turn

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, had a shadow over his life. His father Arthur died when John was very young, leaving him in the tender care of his mother, Mabel. When she and her children converted to Catholicism, they were estranged from their remaining relatives. When Tolkien was 12, his mother passed away, leaving him and his sister orphans. As a young adult, he served in the First World War, including the bloodshed of the Somme where he, like so many others, lost many friends. The literature of this time portrayed a civilization left in “a heap of broken images,” as in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. It is no wonder that Tolkien himself often suffered moments of great sorrow and pessimism. In “Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics” he famously comments that the poem’s hero “is a man, and that for him and many is sufficient tragedy.”

In The Personal Heresy, C.S. Lewis answered Tolkien, his friend, “Yes, and comedy enough too.” In his happier moments, Tolkien would agree, for though there was a shadow over his life (whose life is wholly without shadow?), there was also light. As he has Samwise Gamgee sing from the midst of the glooms of Mordor in The Lord of the Rings, “Above all shadows rides the Sun / and Stars for ever dwell.” Any reader of Tolkien’s epic fantasy will remember that Frodo and Sam do not remain in Mordor, but, against all odds, defeat its lord and return to the Shire. The tale ends gradually – the Shire is scourged and must be recovered and healed, and Frodo must pass over the shores of the world into Valinor to heal his deeper wounds.

Nevertheless, the wounds heal. When Sam is reunited with Gandalf, the hobbit asks, “Is everything sad going to come untrue?” And Gandalf answers, “A great Shadow has departed,” and laughs, and his laughter was “like water in a parched land.” In his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien discusses a “Joy [from] beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” Tolkien evokes such heart-rending Joy when he has Sam recall “that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count.”

Miraculous grace

Such dearly won joy is the essence of eucatastrophe – a word Tolkien invented. Opposing it to tragedy, Tolkien defines the “eucatastrophic tale” as “the true form of fairy tale, and its highest function.” The eucatastrophe is “the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’” that a story takes; it is not quite a happy ending, for “there is no true end to any fairy-tale.” Of course, this joyous turn depends on the tragic turn, on “dyscatastrophe,” on “sorrow and failure.” The tale presupposes the dragon for the knight to slay, the wicked stepmother for the princess to overcome. And, within the tales themselves, the hero’s triumph must be uncertain; the dragon out-matches the knight, the stepmother the princess. Within such tales, the joyous turn exists as “a sudden and miraculous grace” which may “never be counted on to recur.” When the righteous snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, it pierces the heart like a sword and draws tears from excess joy.

The moment of eucatastrophe “rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through.” It “denies” that “universal final defeat” that Tolkien found in the Norse myths that he so loved, wherein the gods and heroes ultimately drown. In a world where children are left orphans and wars envelop the world, one might be forgiven for thinking that the great tale of history is destined to succumb to such an ultimate despair. For Tolkien, eucatastrophe hints that history is heading towards some sweeter unravelling; it is “a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium [good news] in the real world.”

The epilogue to the essay “On Fairy-Stories” waxes lyrical on this theme. The Gospel itself, the Christian view of history, assumes the form of one great fairy tale. If the Fall is the dyscatastrophe of human history, Christ’s birth is its eucatastrophe. If the Crucifixion is the dyscatastrophe of the Incarnation, its eucatastrophe is Easter. The Gospel is “supreme” among stories, and what is more, “it is true.” Through the Gospel, “Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men – and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused.” From God’s perspective (and ours, once we learn to see aright) history is one great fairy tale.

Where does that leave us? In the middle of a great tale. Of course, the great tales, as Frodo recognizes, “never end as tales,” for “the people in them come, and go when their part’s ended.” As Tolkien writes in the essay, “The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed.” Part of that work is the fashioning and sharing of fairy-tales, which “may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation.” In the making of such tales, the creative powers of humanity are joined with the creative power of God, which may redeem and transfigure humanity’s fictions and make them true. In a word, eucatastrophe is our hope. It is our faith that God’s hand lies over history, even if, through the abuse of free will, it deviates temporarily from what he would have it be. Eucatastrophe grants us the courage to fear no evil, even while we “walk through the valley of the shadow of death.”

Can ‘eucatastrophe’ be captured by a camera lens?
Photos in this theme have tried!

“I experience ongoing health trials,” photographer Danielle Bierman says, “so every picture I take has a beauty to it that I don’t ever want to take for granted. Going through my photos reminds me of God’s goodness over the years.”