"No Tale Ever Told That Men Would Rather Find Was True"
Tolkien on the "Eucatastrophe" of the Christmas Story
Each week a book club I lead, the Provo Great Books Club, discusses a work that is counted as Great, according the to lists from Mortimer Adler, St. John’s College, etc. This year, for example, we read Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Thomas Aquinas, the sections of the Summa Theologica on the soul, Dante’s Paradiso, about twelve Greek tragedies from Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, Jane Austen’s Persuasion, and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
We had a few open slots this December, and one member requested something “Christmas-y.” I’m not much of a Dickens-fan, and I had a sense that J.R.R. Tolkien’s little book of short stories, Tales from the Perilous Realm, all of them set in an older England, an England indeterminately dated or near-Arthurian, would fit the bill. They would be a nice transition into our reading his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which I’ve been interested in since seeing the recent film we’ve highlighted here at Pomocon. I also thought it would be a good excuse to revisit his great essay of literary criticism, “On Fairy Stories,” which I had dipped into once—but never finished—when I wrote Songbook No. 104, Pink Floyd, “Matilda Mother.” My commentary in that post was thus incomplete, but as it stands, it is a decent introduction to what is at stake in Tolkien’s conception of fairy-literature for us, and how to think about the Hippie use/misuse of it.
So we’ve been reading the essay—newer editions of Tales include it—alongside two of the stories, “Leaf by Niggle” and “Smith of Wootton Major”; and now that I have read it to the end, I see that it is just about the most “Christmasy” selection, besides the gospels themselves, that I could have possibly made!
For after all the other riches of “On Fairy Stories,” which center around Tolkien’s effort to give us non-definitional sense of what they are, he raises the idea of “Eucatastrophe”:
...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.
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. 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.
Tolkien is particularly entitled to speak about the literary depth possible in happy endings. Usually, readers wants such endings to be a mere book-end to the story: we want the words “lived happily ever-after,” yes, but we will get bored if a tale-teller tries to describe that living. But the end of The Lord of the Rings has a couple of its chapters—after the big victory, and before the return to the Shire—draw out the happy ending, and if younger readers might be initially impatient with them, Tolkien somehow makes them work. For a time, he makes it so that we want to luxuriate in the hobbits’ reunions, healings, and happiness-es.
That’s in a novel, which in Tolkien-terminology might be thought of as a long fairy story turned into novel form, but perhaps the best example of Eucatastrophe in story that I know of, the one which best fits Tolkien’s criteria, is the marvelous moment in “Leaf by Niggle” when Niggle sees… …well, I won’t spoil it for you, other than to say it’s a moment where Tolkien delivers everything he’s just described.
So I do recommend the essay quite highly. You’ll eventually want the full version, but there seems to be an edited version that excludes some of Tolkien’s discussions of well-known fairy-stories, a version which this video artist “Apollonian Germ” reads quite well, and pairs with a masterful selection of Tolkien’s own paintings and illustrations.
Merry Christmas, Pomocon Readers! Consider this beautiful video and my post a little gift. The final passages of the essay, the ones I’m discussing here, begin at 101:40, and the best part of this gift-post, even better than those lovely images from Tolkien’s hands, will be my pasting here of the last passages, in which Tolkien connects his theory of the Eucatastrophe to the Christmas Story.
This ”joy” which I have selected as the mark of the true fairy-story (or romance), or as the seal upon it, merits more consideration. Probably every writer making a secondary world, a fantasy, every sub-creator, wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it. If he indeed achieves a quality that can fairly be described by the dictionary definition: “inner consistency of reality,” it is difficult to conceive how this can be, if the work does not in some way partake of reality. The peculiar quality of the ”joy” in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. It is not only a “consolation” for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question, “Is it true?” The answer to this question that I gave at first was (quite rightly): “If you have built your little world well, yes: it is true in that world.” That is enough for the artist (or the artist part of the artist).
Incidentally, in a different way, “Leaf by Niggle” also exemplifies this point. Tolkien continues:
But in the “Eucatastrophe” we see in a brief vision that the answer may be greater—it may be a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world. The use of this word gives a hint of my epilogue. It is a serious and dangerous matter. It is presumptuous of me to touch upon such a theme...
I would venture to say that approaching the Christian Story from this direction, it has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt making-creatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. 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 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. It has pre-eminently the “inner consistency of reality.” There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.
It is not difficult to imagine the peculiar excitement and joy that one would feel, if any specially beautiful fairy-story were found to be “primarily” true, its narrative to be history, without thereby necessarily losing the mythical or allegorical significance that it had possessed. It is not difficult, for one is not called upon to try and conceive anything of a quality unknown. The joy would have exactly the same quality, if not the same degree, as the joy which the “turn” in a fairy-story gives: such joy has the very taste of primary truth. (Otherwise its name would not be joy.) It looks forward (or backward: the direction in this regard is unimportant) to the Great Eucatastrophe. The Christian joy, the Gloria, is of the same kind; but it is preeminently (infinitely, if our capacity were not finite) high and joyous. But this story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men—and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused.
To say that the kind of Art that Tolkien most treasures, which is connected to Legend, and thus to his conception of Faërie, is “verified” by the Christmas Story and Event, is to point, I think, to one of a hundred blessings for humanity flowing from it that our theologians might articulate and categorize, this one particularly precious to the lover of literature, who in our day is likely to be troubled by the problem of The Sources of Poetry in our modern and democratic eras, the problem laid out in Tocqueville’s rich chapter on the subject in Democracy in America, and in various ways touched upon, in their own terms, by a number of 18th and 19th-century thinkers, such as Wordsworth in “The World Is Too Much with Us,” and by the Weberian phrase “Disenchantment of the World.” Christ’s being born into our world means, says Tolkien, that man’s literary sub-creative work with the old mythologies, is not just fiddling with what is dead, or demonic in the fallen sense, but is a work natural, redeemable, and living.
Huge topic, that, but here is Tolkien’s final paragraph of the essay:
But in God's kingdom the presence of the greatest does not depress the small. Redeemed Man is still man. Story, fantasy, still go on, and should go on. The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the “happy ending.” 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. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know.
Ah, Tolkien…who could have said it better? Perhaps through a sweet tear or two, dear reader, I again wish you a Merry Christmas, and this kind of Joy.