Eucatastrophe (n.) a sudden, joyous turn of events resulting in a happy ending.
Eucatastrophe is my favorite word of all-time. It’s a word that has implications for Christmas and Easter, the human soul, world history, the existence of God, and fairy stories.And you’re about to find out why.Eucatastrophe was coined by J. R. R. Tolkien, in a 1947 essay entitled On Fairy Stories, which was originally delivered as a lecture at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Within it, Tolkien enumerates what he believes to be the essence of “fairy-stories,” or stories that touch on or use “Faërie,” which may be thought of as a magic “of a peculiar mood and power, at the furthest pole from the vulgar devices of the laborious [and] scientific[.]”
The “highest function” of fairy stories is something Tolkien calls eucatastrophe—a word formed by combining the Greek prefix “eu” (meaning “good”) with “catastrophe” (meaning, well, catastrophe). A eucatastrophe then, is literally a good catastrophe, or a sudden turn of events that results in “the joy of the happy ending.”
In contrast to eucatastrophe is dyscatastrophe (the bad catastrophe), and both elements coexist within the context of fairy story. A fairy story, actually, cannot have one without the other. Eucatastrophe, he says,
does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; [instead,] it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium [good news], giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.
Tolkien believed the story told within the pages of Scripture was a kind of ultimate fairy story, or “a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy stories.” The story told in the Gospels, in other words, was not mere myth, but the True Myth, which redeems and gives meaning to all others.
The Gospels, he said,
contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: “mythical” in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable Eucatastrophe.[T]his story has entered History and the primary world[.] . . . The Birth of Christ is the Eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the Eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. . . . There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. . . . To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.
In other words, if Christianity is true, eucatastrophe is not mere wishful thinking. It is something that is fundamentally true, something woven into the very fabric of the world we live in.
Eucatastrophe is something human beings yearn for at a fundamental level. We know the world is evil and rent asunder by our own sin and sorrow, and in spite of this, we still long for a happy ending. We desperately want eucatastrophe to be true, which is why our enjoyment of fairy stories is not mere escapism but an implied acknowledgement of a higher reality.
Tolkien believed there was a reason for this yearning—that it wasn’t just a freak accident of natural selection. Our desires always point to fulfillment. Hunger finds its fulfillment in food, thirst finds its fulfillment in water, and the sexual urge finds its fulfillment in the marital act.
Our desire for eucatastrophe—for a sudden turn in the events of world history, resulting in the joy of ultimate victory—finds its fulfillment in God as the Divine Author of the history of the world, because (in the words of St. Augustine), God has made us for Himself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Him.