The Return of the King by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp. 799-803

There are many dark moments in The Lord of the Rings, and I do not wish to take part in one of those polls that seem to be popular in social media. You know the kind that I mean; what are the ten darkest moments in this story? Is it Sam Gamgee kneeling beside the body of Frodo after his friend has received what seems to be a deadly sting from Shelob, or is it this moment when it seems that Minas Tirith will fall to the assault of the Morgul Host under their deadly captain, the Witch-King of Angmar? I do not wish to compare them. At the very least it would be a terrible slight upon the anguish that Sam feels as he looks upon Frodo and feels that the whole world has come to an end. But although Gandalf has been right to call Denethor to think of more than Gondor, Denethor has also been right to say that if Gondor falls the fall of the rest of Middle-earth will inevitably follow.

There is a word that serious readers of Tolkien’s work eventually come to know and that is the word, eucatastrophe. In his famous essay On Fairy Stories, Tolkien defined this word as “the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argue is the highest function of fairy-stories to produce)”. And so he thinks of the moment when the prince awakens the Sleeping Beauty from her hundred years sleep, or, in the Christian story, the moment of the incarnation, the birth of Christ in Bethlehem, the moment that is heralded in Isaiah 9.2 by the words, “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.” The essential contrast here is between darkness, the shadow of death and the great light that suddenly and entirely unexpectedly breaks in upon them in their utter hopelessness.

We will, of course, come back to the eucatastrophic moments in the telling of the story of the breaking of the siege of Minas Tirith later in this series of reflections, and we will see that not one of these moments is able to lift Denethor, the Steward of Gondor, from his deep despair. But what I wish to reflect upon here is that the essential feature of a true eucatastrophe is that it is entirely unlooked for. If we were to expect the “sudden happy turn” in our stories, then what such an expectation would create in us would be complacency. Unlike Pippin, who stands “alone and sleepless” on the walls of Minas Tirith looking eastward through the night we would sleep comfortably in our beds even through the greatest disaster. Don’t worry, we would say to one another, something will turn up, it always does.

And not all the sudden happy turns that have happened either in our own experience or in the telling of stories that we love the most are able to assure us that this time, in this present darkness, there will be an inbreaking of light. Like Pippin we wait, robbed of sleep, and asking, as we thought of a few weeks ago, “Is there any hope?”

And therein we see the action that we can take. There is the anxious waiting that Pippin shows us. There is the courageous if hopeless action of Faramir going out to the fords of Osgiliath even though he knows that he will not be able to hold them. Or there is the steady and indomitable spirit of Gandalf who remains in the darkest places so that those who are lost in them will not be utterly abandoned.

None of these actions can bring about the eucatastrophic events that will deliver Minas Tirith from the siege of the Morgul host, but without them, without the faithful perseverance that each of these actions represents, there can be no “joy that brings tears”, the tears that will later fall at the Field of Cormallen when Sam will cry out, “Is everything sad going to come untrue?”