Eucatastrophe, a term coined by J.R.R. Tolkien as the opposite of Greek tragedy’s “catastrophe,” was a central concept in his conception of literature and reality. In the lecture “On Fairy-Stories,” he defines it as “the sudden joyous turn” in a narrative, something that brings joy out of what seemed like sorrow. We see it over and over in his own stories — not least in the cry “The Eagles are coming!” But this was not an invention of Tolkien’s; rather, it was a working- out of what he understood to be a deeper truth. He concludes “On Fairy-Stories” with a discussion not of fantasy or folklore but of the Gospels:
They contain many marvels — peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: “mythical” in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation [that is, of storytelling] has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy.
This is, I think, the core of Tolkien’s identity and appeal as a Christian storyteller. In approaching God as Author, he highlights that the supreme story of our world is the story of joy, of grace. Because of this, those manmade stories that best echo this shape — this climactic revelation of joy — are among the truest and the greatest things in art.
There’s an instinct, in our culture and perhaps in all cultures, that happiness in stories has to be merited. That it has to be reasonable. That it is somehow “cheap” for characters to be saved from punishments they’ve fairly earned — or even, sometimes, to escape hardships they haven’t earned. It’s easy to find “realism” in bleak, somber works, liked the Greek tragedies that had catastrophe as their central “turns.” There is another human instinct, though, that stubbornly seeks joy in our stories. Tolkien’s perspective illuminates why that instinct persists, and why it runs truer than the admiration of tragedy.
The truest stories, the greatest works of art, are not bleak, cynical things, but those which give bleakness and cynicism and sorrow their full weight only to reveal that, with all that, there is something more behind and above them. That darkness and tragedy and the consequences of evil are all, in the end, a curtain drawn across something too bright for us to see.
One of the primary beauties of literature is the way in which it can illuminate that truth. Tolkien highlights this as a strength of fairy-stories, but it is true across classic literature: in Shakespeare’s comedies when “dead” characters reveal themselves, in Sir Orfeo when the tragedy of Orpheus is rewritten, and even, to an extent, in Homer’s Iliad when Achilles recognizes Priam’s humanity. It comes in a moment of sudden revelation, after we have been led to accept the justice of a poor ending, that the Author’s hand is kinder than we deserved: that reality is run not on justice alone, but on grace. For happiness to be undeserved does not make it untrue. On the contrary, when done rightly, the portrayal of eucatastrophe functions as a revelation of grace’s presence in the story — and even a glimpse of its presence in our own.
