Tolkien’s ‘On Fairy Stories’ and The Gospel as the Greatest Fairy-Story
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Ep. 26: On Fairy Stories and The Gospel as the Greatest Fairy-Story
This week, we’re talking about Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories”, looking at Tolkien’s term Eucatastrophe, and how Tolkien calls the Gospels the Greatest Fairy-Story.
I wanted to begin with a little bit on Tolkien’s essay, On Fairy-Stories. Now this is in no way comprehensive because it’s really quite a long essay, but I still wanted to give you all an intro.
Written in 1939, this essay was presented by Tolkien as the as the Andrew Lang lecture at the University of St Andrews, in Scotland. For a bit of context, Andrew Lang was a Scottish poet, novelist, literary critic, and anthropologist with a love for folk and fairy tales. Tolkien’s essay was a response to Lang’s work as a folklorist and collector of fairy tales but it really grew into something much more.
On The Tolkien Estate’s website you can find an essay written by Verlyn Flieger, where she discusses On Fairy -Stories.
“If it were nothing else, “On Fairy-stories” would have a primary place in Tolkien scholarship as Tolkien’s definitive statement about his art — which he called “Sub-creation” — and the concept that lies behind it — the power of words to create a Secondary World. However, “On Fairy-stories” has a good deal more to offer, and to a wider audience, than a simple artistic declaration, however important, to a fellowship of scholars. It is also a wide-ranging discussion aimed at anyone interested in the subject of fairy tales…”
“And finally and above all, it is essential reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the multivalent myth, epic and fairy tale romance that is The Lord of the Rings.”
Verlyn Flieger
Tolkien addresses three questions primarily: What are fairy stories? What are their origins? And what is the use of them? It is also in On Fairy-Stories that we first see the word Eucatastrophe, a term coined by Tolkien himself, which we’ll talk about in a bit.
So if you weren’t sure if it was an essay worth reading, I hope by now you’re convinced!
You can find On Fairy Stories in a few different places. First, there are a few free PDFs floating around the internet and I’m linking to one of them in the show notes. If you’d like to purchase a copy or perhaps find one at your local library, you can find it included in “Tree and Leaf” or “The Monsters and the Critics”. Both are linked at the bottom of this post.
I wanted to read the first few lines of the essay because I think they set the tone quite well for the rest of the essay, as well as my own Tolkien studies.
“I propose to speak about fairy-stories, though I am aware that this is a rash adventure. Faerie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold. And overbold I may be accounted, for though I have been a lover of fairy-stories since I learned to read, and have at times thought about them, I have not studied them professionally. I have been hardly more than a wandering explorer (or trespasser) in the land, full of wonder but not of information.”
- JRR Tolkien, On Fairy Stories
If you’ve been listening to our podcast for a while, I think I read this quote in our very first episode because it reflects my own feelings toward reading and studying Tolkien -- I am a lover of Tolkien’s works, although I haven’t studied them professionally (yet).
So after just a super brief introduction to On Fairy Stories, I wanted to discuss a question that’s come up a lot over the years, moreso in my experience in Evangelical circles but it’s also something I’ve heard Catholics wrestle with: Should Christians read fairy tales?
To put it plainly, the answer is yes. In “On Fairy Stories”, Tolkien offers such a beautiful explanation that I wanted to share it with you all. Towards the end of the essay, Tolkien introduces the word ‘Eucatastrophe’, a term of his own invention.
In letter 89 to his son Christopher, Tolkien refers to the essay:
“And all of the sudden I realized what it was: the very thing that I have been trying to write about and explain - in that fairy-story essay that I so much wish you had read that I think I shall send it to you. For it I coined the word ‘eucatastrophe’: the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued in is the highest function of fairy-stories to produces).
And I was there led to the view that it 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 join had suddenly snapped back. It perceives -- if the story has literary ‘truth’ on the second plane (for which see the essay) -- that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made.
And I concluded by saying that the Resurrection was the greatest ‘eucatastrophe’ possible in the greatest Fairy Story -- and produces 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.
Of course I do not mean that the Gospels tell what is only a fairy-story; but I do mean very strongly that they do tell a fairy-story: the greatest. Man the story-teller would have to be redeemed in a manner consonant with his nature: by a moving story. But since the author of it is the supreme Artist and the Author of Reality, this one was also made to Be, to be true on the Primary Plane…”
JRR Tolkien, Letter 89
But not all fairy-tales are created equal, and not all fantastical stories are fairy-tales, at least Tolkien would argue this.
“Far more important is 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.”
“It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the “turn” comes,a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality.”
- JRR Tolkien, On Fairy Stories
Stories that produce this form of Joy are good for our souls; all small eucatastrophes of the Secondary World will, in the end, point us to, or offer us glimpses of, the Great Eucatastrophe.
In his poem Mythopoeia, Tolkien puts forth the argument that myths are not lies as C.S. Lewis once argued, but that they reflect in some way the True Myth, which is the story of Christ.
Joseph Pearce elaborates on this idea in an article entitled, J.R.R. Tolkien: Truth and Myth:
“Building on this philosophy of myth, Tolkien explained to Lewis that the story of Christ was the true myth at the very heart of history and at the very root of reality. Whereas the pagan myths were manifestations of God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using the images of their "mythopoeia" to reveal fragments of His eternal truth, the true myth of Christ was a manifestation of God expressing Himself through Himself, with Himself, and in Himself. God, in the Incarnation, had revealed Himself as the ultimate poet who was creating reality, the true poem or true myth, in His own image. Thus, in a divinely inspired paradox, myth was revealed as the ultimate realism.”
Tolkien calls the Gospels a fairy-story, a myth, but not just any fairy-story, not just any myth — the Greatest Fairy Story, the True Myth. The truth of Christianity, to Tolkien, is at the very root of reality, and these higher or complete fairy-stories and myths Tolkien refers to reveal slivers of it, some more, some less.