Tolkien and Eucatastrophe
Joy Beyond the Walls of the World
One of the terms invented by Tolkien in his excellent essay “On Fairy-Stories” is eucatastrophe. Using the Greek prefix eu-, meaning “good,” Tolkien defined eucatastrophe as
the sudden joyous ‘turn’… 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 …
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