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 these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and inso far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.
In the context of this essay, he applied eucatastrophe specifically to the “happy ending” of fairy-tales, which he said produce a “joy… [which] is not essentially ‘escapist,’ nor ‘fugitive.’”[1] Rather, like the “true myth,” as he described it to C.S. Lewis,[2] of the Gospel, when the supernatural and metahistorical definitively entered human history and whose own eucatastrophe was the Resurrection, fairy-tales usually involve a great deal of pain and loss, of “dyscatastrophe,” yet by their eucatastrophe of a happy ending, they serve as a reminder that God cannot be defeated, that Christ has already won the war, even if the battle for our soul rages on. Tolkien elsewhere described it this way: “a sudden glimpse of Truth, your whole nature chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back.”[3]
In Tolkien’s Middle-earth legendarium, eucatastrophes figure prominently – especially in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which are more fairy-tale and closer to our history than the higher myth of The Silmarillion. In a sense, although the Elves were always monotheistic and taught their fidelity to Ilúvatar and the Valar to the other Free Peoples, the later stories in Middle-earth’s Third Age are more explicitly Christian in character, as are many fairy-tales, with their consistent use of eucatastrophe. The deliverance of Lake-Town from the decimation of Smaug by Bard the Bowman is one example from The Hobbit, a final, surprising victory when all seemed lost; another is the arrival of the Eagles (who are frequently used by Tolkien as messengers of divine intervention throughout his stories, as they are in Scripture, e.g. Ex 19:4; Mt 24:28) and Beorn, without whom the Battle of Five Armies would have been hopeless.
In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien uses eucatastrophe at several key moments, including the arrival of Gandalf with Erkenbrand’s Rohan foot soldiers at Helm’s Deep, alongside the Huorns from Fangorn, just as the final charge of Théoden and Aragorn portended ultimate defeat. Even earlier in the story, when Frodo, riding Asfaloth alone, came to the Ford of Bruinen pursued by all nine Nazgûl, who ensorcelled him and were crossing the river to retrieve the One Ring, Elrond and Gandalf sent a powerful wave which swept the wraiths back to Mordor; this incident shows that eucatastrophes need not always be large battles, they only have to be unexpected moments of salvation when all hope seems lost.
Perhaps the most famous eucatastrophe in Tolkien’s magnum opus, which like the others was portrayed beautifully and memorably in Peter Jackson’s film adaptations, was the arrival of the Rohirrim, led by Théoden, at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, just as the forces of Mordor were on the verge of completely overrunning Minas Tirith. Unlike in the film, Aragorn did not bring the Dead Men to the battle; instead, he contributed personally to the eucatastrophe alongside Legolas, Gimli, the sons of Elrond and the Rangers of the North, as well as Gondor Men from southern regions liberated by them. Together with the Rohirrim, they saved Gondor, defeated the Witch-King and made possible the final and greatest eucatastrophe during the Battle of the Black Gate. This time, no mortal army could save the day; instead, God Himself, as He would in the future on the Cross, intervened in history, rewarding Frodo’s faithfulness and his mercy toward Gollum by destroying the Ring, thus banishing Sauron from the material world and throwing his forces into chaos.
These eucatastrophes, which are some of the clearest foretastes of Evangelium in Tolkien’s stories, also recall unexpected happy endings in factual history, when God rescued His people, either directly or through human heroes empowered by His grace. These include some of the central events in Scripture, such as the Exodus from Egypt, when God delivered the Israelites from slavery against a foe who in worldly sight seemed invincible, as well as His support of the Maccabees in their later defense of Israel and finally in the aforementioned salvation won by Christ on the Cross.
Throughout Christian history, the saints have experienced both dyscatastrophe and eucatastrophe, often suffering horrific martyrdoms which to the world appeared as defeats but in fact acted as the seed of the Church, as Tertullian once said, by inspiring stronger Christian devotion and enabling them to intercede for us in Heaven. However, even in worldly terms, the saints were sometimes victorious. As a devout Catholic, in a time when Catholics were less ashamed of their history than they are today, Tolkien was surely away of these great historic victories, and the eucatastrophes in The Lord of the Rings described previously seem to parallel some of them directly. Two such events have the clearest similarity.
In 1683, the Ottoman Empire, which had been expanding its Islamic imperialism further into Europe ever since its conquest of Constantinople and destruction of the Eastern Roman Empire in 1453, besieged the city of Vienna for two months. As the seat of the Habsburg dynasty in the Holy Roman Empire, Vienna was seen by all as the gateway to western Europe; if Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha, leader of the Turkish forces, overran the city, he would have a clear path to the final destruction of Christendom and the enslavement of Europe to Islam. To all appearances, his victory seemed inevitable, as his massive army of 300,000 vastly outnumbered the Germanic defenses of Vienna. However, contrary to all expectations, the Polish-Lithuanian relief army, led by John III Sobieski and his Winged Hussars, arrived just in time, emerging from a forest and catching the divided Turkish forces by surprise. In the largest cavalry charge in history, Sobieski led 18,000 horsemen of the Holy League downhill, smashing through the lines of the Ottomans and driving toward the headquarters of Mustafa, soon joined by the Viennese fleet which waited nearby. This is almost an exact image of the siege of Minas Tirith, when Théoden, like Sobieski, led his vast contingent of horsemen into the fray and was soon aided by Aragorn and his men who sailed into the battlefield on the Anduin. What appeared to be certain defeat soon became a resounding eucatastrophic victory in both battles. After the siege of Vienna, Sobieski uttered a modified version of Julius Caesar’s statement of victory which could also apply to Théoden and Aragorn: “Venimus, vidimus, Deus vicit”- “We came, we saw, God conquered”.
In an earlier conflict between the Holy League and the Ottomans in 1571, a fleet of Christian ships from many nations, organized by Pope St. Pius V and led by his appointed commander Don Juan of Austria, met the fleet of the Ottoman Empire which had dominated the Mediterranean for centuries and inspired Christians to seek trading routes by sailing across the Atlantic instead. In the largest naval battle since Antiquity and involving over 450 ships, the Christians, after receiving the Eucharist and aided by Christian slaves freed from captured Muslim ships, ultimately defeated the enemy forces, inflicting far greater casualties than they received and capturing or destroying almost the entire Ottoman fleet. Similarly, at the Battle of the Morannon, Aragorn led his league of allies drawn from among the Free Peoples against the host of Mordor at the Black Gate which, even more so than at Lepanto, vastly outnumbered them, but they were finally victorious, both through their own courage and God’s intervention. At Lepanto, the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, through the prayers of Pius V, ensured their unlikely victory, and in thanks the pope established the Feast of Our Lady of Victory. Tolkien was especially familiar with this battle through a poem named after it and written by G.K. Chesterton, which was popular with soldiers in the trenches of WWI and which Tolkien could recite from memory, as his daughter Priscilla recalled.[4]
All of these stories, both from literature and history, act as foretastes of the final eucatastrope, already begun on Calvary and soon to be fulfilled in the Second Coming, when Christ and the Church Triumphant will overthrow Satan and all his evil works and usher in the New Heaven and New Earth in eternal joy. (2 Pt 3:13; Rev 21:1-2) Among their many other benefits, this attribute makes fairy-tales, like those written by Tolkien, perennially edifying, and their deep satisfaction can inspire us, particularly those far from the Faith, to search for the Joy “beyond the walls of the world” to which they point.
(Cover image source: By Ted Nasmith: https://tolkiengateway.net/w/index.php?curid=8443)
[1] J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” at University of Houston, at https://uh.edu.
[2] https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/culture/art/j-r-r-tolkien-truth-and-myth.html
[3] J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (eds), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (London: HarperCollins, 2012), 100. Kindle.
[4] Holly Ordway, Tolkien’s Modern Reading (Park Ridge, IL: Word on Fire Academic, 2021), 266.
Again wonder-filled essay