On Fairy-Stories: Part 5, The Eucatastrophe

In the last two posts we've discussed two of the three aspects of fairy-stories described by by J.R.R. Tolkien in his famous lecture "On Fairy-Stories." These were Escape and Recovery. In Hunting Magic Eels, I used Tolkien's discussion of recovery to describe enchantment as stepping into a sacramental ontology. 

But it's the third aspect of fairy-stories--Consolation--that is featured in Hunting Magic Eels, given a whole chapter entitled "The Good Catastrophe." 

For Tolkien, it's with Consolation where we reach the very essence of enchantment, the "highest function" of the fairy-story. To describe this aspect of enchantment, Tolkien coins a new word:

But the “consolation” of fairy-tales has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires. Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending. Almost I would venture to assert that all complete fairy-stories must have it. At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite—I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function. 

For Tolkien the eucatastrophe--the good catastrophe--is an experience of "sudden and miraculous grace":

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,” nor “fugitive.” In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. Importantly, eucatastrophic grace is not a denial of the sorrows and sufferings of the world. Eucatastrophic grace is, rather, commitment to hope, loyalty to hope, fidelity to hope:

It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

Enchantment is a committed watchfulness for the eucatastrophe, the sudden unanticipated turn in the story that brings miraculous grace. In Tolkien's work, we see the eucatastrophe first appear at end The Hobbit as the forces of good are about to suffer defeat in the Battle of the Five Armies:

“It will not be long now,” thought Bilbo, “before the goblins win the Gate, and we are all slaughtered or driven down and captured. Really it is enough to make one weep, after all one has gone through. I would rather old Smaug had been left with all the wretched treasure, than that these vile creatures should get it, and poor old Bombur, and Balin and Fili and Kili and all the rest come to a bad end; and Bard too, and the Lake-men and the merry elves. Misery me! I have heard songs of many battles, and I have always understood that defeat may be glorious. It seems very uncomfortable, not to say distressing. I wish I was well out of it.”

The clouds were torn by the wind, and a red sunset slashed the West. Seeing the sudden gleam in the gloom Bilbo looked round. He gave a great cry: he had seen a sight that made his heart leap, dark shapes small yet majestic against the distant glow.

“The Eagles! The Eagles!” he shouted. “The Eagles are coming!”

We see a similar eucatastrophe at the end of The Lord of the Rings. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe the eucatastrophe looks like this, the dawn after the night when the White Witch kills Aslan:

The rising of the sun had made everything look so different - all colours and shadows were changed that for a moment they didn't see the important thing. Then they did. The Stone Table was broken into two pieces by a great crack that ran down it from end to end; and there was no Aslan...

"Who's done it?" cried Susan. "What does it mean? Is it magic?"

"Yes!" said a great voice behind their backs. "It is more magic." They looked round. There, shining in the sunrise, larger than they had seen him before, shaking his mane (for it had apparently grown again) stood Aslan himself.

"Oh, Aslan!" cried both the children, staring up at him, almost as much frightened as they were glad.

"Aren't you dead then, dear Aslan?" said Lucy.

"Not now," said Aslan...

"But what does it all mean?" asked Susan when they were somewhat calmer.

"It means," said Aslan, "that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know: Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitors stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards..."

"And now," said Aslan presently, "to business. I feel I am going to roar. You had better put your fingers in your ears."

And they did. And Aslan stood up and when he opened his mouth to roar his face became so terrible that they did not dare to look at it. And they saw all the trees in front of him bend before the blast of his roaring as grass bends in a meadow before the wind.

As I describe in Hunting Magic Eels, the issue here isn't wishful thinking, a naive belief in "happy ever after" endings. As Tolkien notes above, belief in the eucatastrophe doesn't "deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure." Lament is welcomed here. What the eucatastrophe denies, continues Tolkien, is "universal final defeat." 

In short, the eucatastrophe is about hope. Which is why my chapter in Hunting Magic Eels starts off with my prison ministry, and the role hope plays in the lives of the inmates I love and serve. For them, hope is a matter of life and death. 

The eucatastrophe is an eschatological and ontological posture. What sort of world are you living in? Is the story of your life a tragedy or a comedy? (And by comedy, we don't mean funny. We mean the ancient Greek distinction that dramas have one of two outcomes, happy or sad.) Do you live your life as a nihilistic fatalist, or are you, ultimately speaking, hopeful? Does nothing matter, or does everything matter?

The power of fairy-stories, says Tolkien, is that they are a pedagogy of the imagination. Fairy-stories inculcate an eschatological and ontological worldview. Fairy-stories are stories of hope, grace, and resurrection. Fairy-stories are tales of the good catastrophe.