At heart, the works of J.R.R. Tolkien — The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and even the often bleak and sad Silmarillion — are kindly works, not bitter and cynical ones. He was not interested in leaving his readers holding onto the last page of his books feeling empty, hopeless, cheated, or confused. Nor did he leave vast parts of his plots deliberately obfuscated and unresolved in order to claim an unearned depth and complexity for his work and thoughts. Quite the contrary: Tolkien took immense pains to give his tales not only spiritual and literary but dramatic satisfaction. He attempted — at great expense of time and effort, over a period of many years — to fill his work not just with questions but with answers, right down to carefully detailing the fate of Sam’s horse Bill (although, alas!, not the Entwives or Radagast!).
By graciously satisfying his readers’ insatiable curiosity in as many ways as possible, Tolkien puts himself at odds with many of today’s authors who, in an attempt to be ostentatiously arty and edgy, delight in leaving their readers with a sense of dramatic emptiness and thematic pointlessness. Just like in the film world, stories that ultimately resolve nothing and leave important plot threads hanging are in increasing vogue. Providing a paying reader with such basic dramatic tenets as resolution and closure is so last century, dont’cha know? Many books are so egregious in this regard that they leave readers saying, “Forget about happy endings, I’d be willing to settle for an ending of any kind — just tell me what happens!”
In the fantasy arena, a reader can easily wade through the swampy sludge of three books, five books, ten books, and even more, all spaced out over a period of many, many years, without ever reaching that terminus. Many fans die every year waiting for our fallen fantasists to achieve some sort of climax in their work worthy of the name.
As we have seen, Tolkien’s goal was to create “heroic legend on the brink of fairy-tale and history, of which there is far too little in the world (accessible to me) for my appetite.” The good professor and his voracious literary appetite didn’t live to see Terry Brooks usher in the first of what would eventually be a tidal wave of slavish-yet-shallow Lord of the Rings copycat series, nor the later crop of nihilists who have reacted against that phenomenon with their tedious reliance on the artistic, cultural, and moral dead-ends of anti-heroes and torture-porn. But my guess is that — despite the abundance of fantasy choices on bookshelves, and the common refrain among fans that there is “something for everybody” out there — none of it would have satisfied the hunger that originally drove him to write his own books in the first place.
“My work is not a novel,” he insisted, “but an heroic romance, a much older and quite different variety of literature.” The writers of modern-day fantasy soap opera — their novels chock-full of dozens of point-of-view characters all trapped in bewildering plots so lengthy and complex that, quite often, not even the authors are able to successfully keep track of them — don’t seem to have a clue about what this means. The answer, I believe, can be found in a little-quoted letter of Tolkien’s.
When a fan once called Tolkien “a believer in moral didacticism,” the author blanched and replied huffily that “I neither preach nor teach.” But writing to friends, he could let down his guard enough to admit that, “I would claim, if I did not think it presumptuous in one so ill-instructed, to have as one object the elucidation of truth, and the encouragement of good morals in this real world, by the ancient device of exemplifying them in unfamiliar embodiments.” (italics mine)
Our fallen fantasists, one can’t help but notice, recoil from truth like a vampire from a crucifix. There is none of their beloved shades of gray in truth: by its very nature, the word renders or implies some sort of moral judgment on the events described, and forces the author to come down on one side or the other of the cosmic “good vs. evil” debate at play. Liberals often contort the English language into pretzels in their effort to avoid making these judgments, hence they speak of “my truth” versus “your truth” and how all truths need to be respected in an enlightened society. If, say, Sauron’s truth is different from Gandalf’s truth, then who are we to force the reader into embracing one over the other?
Tolkien, at least, refused to torture the English language until the words lost all sense of meaning. To him the word truth said what it meant and meant what it said: to wit, there can be only one truth, with all other conflicting views being false. Furthermore, he believed that “fairy story has its own mode of reflecting ‘truth,’ different from allegory, or (sustained) satire, or ‘realism,’ and in some ways more powerful.”
Mind you, Tolkien’s method of explicating truth was not evangelistic. He very deliberately left all mentions of religion out of his fiction, as well as all totems, icons, and symbols of Christianity. Instead, he chose to bring to life what he called a “monotheistic world of ‘natural theology'” wherein the lamps illuminating truth are invisible but nevertheless there. Only very rarely are we lucky enough to see that light burst through dark clouds in full splendor, revealing the sense that Life, for all of its seemingly random evils and tragedies, is threaded with a great, majestic pattern that provides both comfort and the bracing sense of underlying reason.
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“The reason of my waking mind tells me that great evil has befallen and we stand at the end of days. But my heart says nay; and all my limbs are light, and a hope and joy are come to me that no reason can deny. Éowyn, Éowyn, White Lady of Rohan, in this hour I do not believe that any darkness will endure!” And he stooped and kissed her brow.
And so they stood on the walls of the City of Gondor, and a great wind rose and blew, and their hair, raven and golden, streamed out mingling in the air. And the Shadow departed, and the Sun was unveiled, and light leaped forth; and the waters of Anduin shone like silver, and in all the houses of the City men sang for the joy that welled up in their hearts from what source they could not tell.
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Sitting in church in late 1944, J.R.R. Tolkien had an epiphany. As he later told his son Christopher in a letter, he was listening to “a wonderful commentary on the gospel” one peppered with stories of modern miracles of healing among the faithful. “I was deeply moved,” Tolkien said, “and had that peculiar emotion we all have. . . For it I coined [in his now-famous essay “On Fairy Stories”] the word ‘eucatastrophe’: the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears. . . [which is] is the highest function of fairy-stories to produce.”
Eucatastrophe.
It’s a word that has been studied by Tolkien fans and scholars a great deal, but often I think in the wrong way. It is not just a feeling of preternatural joy or relief — it is a revelation of truth. As such, it is also a judgment — thunderous in its silence — on the nature of Man, God, and the Universe. Tolkien stressed that…
[Eucatastrophe] produces its peculiar effect because it is 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. It perceives. . . that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made.
Truth, in other words, with a capital T. Eucatastrophe is revealed truth on a biblical scale — it’s no wonder that Tolkien referred to The Resurrection as “the greatest ‘eucatastrophe’ possible in the Greatest Fairy Story,” and credited it with creating “that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love.”
That feeling of “Christian joy,” so deeply felt that it’s almost indistinguishable from sorrow, was in Tolkien’s view the closest a living human being could come to discerning an underlying reason for existence, and thus satisfying that ultimate appetite which all men have gnawing away deep within their guts, whether they admit it nor not. The film director Werner Herzog, in much the same context (a context which, I propose, was derived from his own flirtation with Catholicism in his teens) calls this same feeling ecstatic truth.
For those keeping score, this is the exact opposite of nihilism.
To be continued. . . .
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