(avg. read time: 21–41 mins.)
“On Fairy-Stories” (Andrew Lang Lecture in 1939, published in 1947, revised in 1964)
Of all Tolkien’s expressions of his theology of sub-creation, none is more extensive than this famous essay. This essay almost has the function of an apologia in that it is both a defense and an explanation of fairy-stories. Tolkien explains that much of the value and virtue of fairy-stories stems from the fact that they are the stories that most vividly exemplify the quality and act of sub-creation. It is this kind of story that uses words most effectively to create (or sub-create) a world with Secondary Reality.
It is in the use of words as such that sub-creators come closest to their Creator who creates through Word. The root aspect of fairy-stories is the use of adjectives:
But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faërie is more potent. And that is not surprising: such incantations might indeed be said to be only another view of adjectives, a part of speech in a mythical grammar. The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both. When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter’s power—upon one plane; and the desire to wield that power in the world external to our minds awakes.1
Indeed, it is fairy-story that takes the adjective to its fullest significance with its ability to combine such words vividly in a Secondary World through which one can look at the Primary World to make more sense of it and come to a greater love of it. In this vision, one might say that myths and adjectives, which make up their grammar, are ultimately indicators of transcendence. Adjectives are more evocative than the empirical realities they may describe. In the act of naming something about reality, the describer takes on a role approximating the human action in Gen 2:19–20 and thereby the derivative sovereignty that comes with such naming and description of things in the world. And it is saying something more than describing a scientifically observable phenomenon. To say that grass is green, for example, is not simply an observation that one can describe in the language of chemical composition, photosynthesis, or the way light reflects off this plant. Nothing about such properties and processes logically leads to using the words “green” or “grass”, but humans give such names to designate the characters of the objects so that the adjectival process is, from one perspective, an act of making and, from another perspective, an act of discovery. Mythopoeia, as the quintessence of sub-creation, consists of extending this adjectival logic to the level of story and world-setting.
Sub-creation can of course be subject to corruption and abuse of its elements—as the text after this excerpt shows—but it is properly an action that arises from love of the Primary World, the respect and love for creation because of who its Creator is. Tolkien’s own sub-creation has its foundational reality in language, whether it is Eru Ilúvatar speaking the Ainur into existence, the Ainur participating in the music of Eru Ilúvatar with their own words from him, or Tolkien developing the story of the Third Age of Middle-earth from combining his earlier mythology with the question of what kind of world would exist in which the word “hobbit” makes the sense that it does.2 In a similar way, sub-creators can take the adjectival language and other parts of speech that fit in the Primary World (such as “green” and “grass”) and make a Secondary World that explores its depth and richness more vividly. In such wise, they imitate the manner of God’s creative action in how he forms, sustains, and designates functions/purposes for the objects and beings of his creation through the speech of his Word and Spirit. Once more, fairy-stories do not properly provide a flight from reality per se, but rather a passage to deeper engagement with the world through the enchantment of language. They can do so because they are naturally explorative, searching out the possibilities of creation and discovering new dimensions to reality by presenting them to us as alien things.
His first use of the term “sub-creator” here appears in the context of describing what Faërie is as a product of the imagination, a fantasy that makes new things. In brief, “An essential power of Faërie is thus the power of making immediately effective by the will the visions of ‘fantasy.’”3 The combination of imagination, will, and word (or as Tolkien says earlier, mind, tongue, and tale) gives rise to another world and, as such, provides an analogy to God’s own creative activity. Of course, it is only an analogy because humans cannot be true creators like their own Creator and because humans suffer the effects of their fallenness (and thus have some further distance from fulfilling the identity of being image-bearers). Of course, one such effect—with multiple forms—of that fallenness on sub-creation in terms of mythology is that it often becomes a servant to the cause of idolatry.
In Tolkien’s own sub-creation, the Marring of Arda and the Fall in general stems—in nigh-Miltonian fashion—from the prideful idolatry of Melkor, the mightiest of the Ainur. He too seeks to be Creator and to be worshiped as such. To this end, he seeks to claim Eru Ilúvatar’s Flame Imperishable, to disrupt the Ainulindalë in each of its three themes (and thereby gaining some followers who conform to his cacophony, most notably the one later known as Sauron), to tear down whatever his fellow Valar build up, to rule over all of the world, and to make his own creatures by corrupting existing ones (most famously: the Orcs). Unlike the fourteen Valar and their servant Maiar who accept their places as subordinates and sub-creators, Melkor desires more and thus corrupts the gift of sub-creation that Ilúvatar gave him in order to rebel and to attempt usurpation. Such is the danger humans face in using the gift of sub-creation for reasons other than the love and respect of the creation and the Creator. And because of how corruptive sin has been for humans, no one has purely unmixed motives and this danger of following through on the course of the Fall, including with the sub-creative capacity, is a potential danger for all.
Even so, mythology and fairy-story (Tolkien sees both as being on the same ground and born from the same stock) as sub-creation have provided revelatory glimpses of something higher; namely the sense of divinity and the one (though often not limited to one in historical expression) who is worthy of worship. Mythology and religion have a long history of close connection, both being at the service of each other. In Tolkien’s view, such is as it should be—even if the exact actual character of that relationship has been problematic and idolatrous—because of the function of sub-creation in exercising the identity of being an image-bearer of God, the proper function of which is worship toward God. Fairy-story and mythology share this connection with religion because, while remaining critical of the human realm that they encounter, they illustrate the world with its transcendent dimension, which Tolkien considers the three faces of fairy-stories: the mystical towards the supernatural, the magical towards nature (what Tolkien calls the essential face), and the mirror of scorn and pity towards humanity.4
Because of this sense of transcendence, myth shares in another sphere alongside religion: history. In Tolkien’s words, referencing the Anglo-Saxon and Norse myth of Ingeld and Freawaru, “History often resembles ‘Myth,’ because they are both ultimately of the same stuff. If indeed Ingeld and Freawaru never lived, or at least never loved, then it is ultimately from nameless man and woman that they get their tale, or rather into whose tale they have entered.”5 One of the ways of expressing the transcendent dimension of history that mythology has often taken is to analogize the lives of the gods with human lives, the divine history with human history, with proper amplifications of course. Fundamental similarities between the stories of history and the stories of mythology are thus scarcely surprising. This connection and the transcendent dimension that mythology reveals gives mythology and fairy-story the “magical” power of enchantment. As Tolkien notes, “Small wonder that spell means both a story told, and a formula of power over living men.”6 In the true myth of the gospel (from god-spell or “good story”), this true transcendent power comes to its most powerful bearing on history while myth and history come together more deeply than they ever have before with the Incarnation of the Word who is the creative Lord of history.
The comportment of sub-creation with the Primary Reality of creation, in terms of both internal integrity and external correspondence, is essential to making sub-creation of proper quality as subordinate creation. In one of Tolkien’s most defining passages, he explains the importance of the principle of sub-creation as being reflective of reality rather than a mere flight from it:
Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker’s art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called ‘willing suspension of disbelief.’ But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator.’ He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed.7
Ever since Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the phrase “suspension of disbelief” in the early nineteenth century, it has entered popular parlance for audience approaches to fictional stories, especially ones of speculative fiction. But here Tolkien insists that this mindset is precisely backwards. Suspension of disbelief is in fact an acknowledgment of the failure of the sub-creative project for the audience. The audience thus resorts to a condescending “humoring” of the storyteller when in fact he/she has already lost them. It shows that the enchantment, the spell (with both senses that Tolkien has referenced) that attempts to give a Secondary World Secondary Reality, has failed. The experience of the story in this sub-creation becomes akin to watching a bad movie and trying to find something worthwhile (whether unintentional humor or actually good elements) to pass the time.
But the phrase is an attempt to capture a true effect of sub-creational enchantment. It seems intended to say that the audience is willing to overlook the fact that the story is not happening or did not happen (or that it is not a definite foretelling of the future) or that there are elements of implausibility in it—according to the putative rules of reality—in order to enjoy an otherwise good story. Tolkien insists that the effect of fairy-stories in particular, as the quintessence of sub-creation, is to convince recipients of the plausibility of the story and the Secondary World in which it occurs because, in some way, that world is reflective of the Primary World. As much as its enchantment consists of its discontinuity with the world, it also comes from its continuity with it. A good Secondary World has grasped some profound and deep truth that people can recognize on reflection in the Primary World. Both of these broad dimensions of enchantment—along with the more particular features such as the unique features of the world, a sense of mythology within the mythology (i.e., a deep history), engaging characterization, vivid environments, an enthralling plot, and so on—help the mind enter this Secondary World and stay there for a while with the cornucopia for the senses and the imagination it offers. The spell (the formula of power) works through the power of the spell (the story told). That power comes from the greater reality featured and invoked in the process. The sub-creation is a larger world with a particular instantiation of a story that allows the audience a vision and journey into that world.
Of course, the sub-creative project relies upon the power of the faculty of imagination on the part of both the sub-creator and the audience. He describes this faculty in a traditional way as what makes the human mind, “capable of forming mental images of things not actually present.”8 Against some of his contemporaries, he refused the tendency to describe imagination as that which gives the inner consistency of reality to ideal creations. In his view, such is to confuse the beginning for the end. Imagination is the womb and birthplace of what could mature into sub-creation. He calls the link between the two—birth and maturation—art. For Tolkien’s purposes, defining imagination in this way and making proper linguistic distinctions is essential to giving the proper respect to Fantasy and its laudable functions and purposes (contra its critics). While the contemporary definition of his interlocutors attempted to “salvage” imagination by exalting it above something so childish and preposterous as Fantasy, it does so by spurious means. If imagination forms mental images of things not present (by inspired mental action on the part of the author/artist/speaker/etc. or by excited mental action on the part of the audience), then it is the sine qua non of Fantasy and Fantasy is the most nearly pure, most direct expression of that celebrated faculty through art, and therefore its potentially most potent exhibition (its potency being that of a sub-creative spell as Tolkien has described heretofore). It is from imagination that Fantasy derives its alluring and wondrous strangeness, the character of discontinuity with the Primary World. Sub-creative Fantasy thus has the quality of being explorative of this strangeness through the use of language. As befits Fantasy, the exploration resembles both a journey in a strange land and the practice by which one with power learns how to use it (e.g., in a spell).
Though Tolkien does not expound on the linguistic media of imagination, it is possible to discern at least a few of them from what this analysis has already noted from “Mythopoeia” and earlier in this lecture. Some of the basic building blocks are nouns. Whatever else the sub-creator adds, nouns are the subjects and objects of action and description, of thought and relation. They are the raw materials for the imagination of the sub-creator to use in forming and shaping the sub-creation and the imagistic impressions it can leave on the minds of the audience. They are the features of the world that will give it plausibility or implausibility and all of the resultant characteristics that emerge from the choices of the sub-creator’s will.
Adjectives provide vividness, vigor, vitality, virtue, vice, variety, and various other qualities to the sub-creative work. If nouns are the raw materials that one could think of as being like dust in the hands of the Creator, then adjectives are the breath breathed into the formed dust in order to give it life. They enliven and color the nouns, which provides the spirit and character of the characters of the Secondary World. They are also what evoke images, inculcate the audience with interest in the sub-creation, and invite them to inhabit it for a while. Adjectives have a function of a summons to explore.
Similarly, metaphors are the vigor of imagination. They are particularly effective at exciting the imagination and exploring the richness of imaginative treasures in the sub-creation. They function as such precisely because they are essential to imagination as imagination is essential to fantasy. After all, imagination is seeing/visualizing “as if” something is present and metaphors are expressions and descriptions of things “as if” they are like other things. In this invigoration of the imagination, metaphors help guide one in exploring the continuity and discontinuity they perceive in the Secondary World, which Fantasy is especially capable of sub-creating.
Finally, the use of certain words to incite evocations through connotation/sense serves as a testimony to the power of the spell of language. Words have effects that go beyond their straightforward definitions that reflect typical usage. Connotations add depth to the spell of sub-creation in terms of storytelling and in terms of the formula of power as it aids the vividness of the story and invokes the multifarious and reverberating powers of particular words in order to introduce multitudinous effects into the sub-creation through the creative/sub-creative principles of words. Connotations are devices of reverberation, creating effects that emerge from an epicenter of a word and influence the setting of that word.
But there was resistance to the “arresting strangeness”9 in Tolkien’s time (even as there is in the present time). As Tolkien says, “Many people dislike being ‘arrested.’ They dislike any meddling with the Primary World, or such small glimpses of it as are familiar to them. They, therefore, stupidly and even maliciously confound Fantasy with Dreaming, in which there is no Art; and with mental disorders, in which there is not even control: with delusion and hallucination.”10 In a footnote, Tolkien qualifies his statement about dreams and art: “This is not true of all dreams. In some Fantasy seems to take a part. But this is exceptional. Fantasy is a rational, not an irrational, activity.”] That which has power like Fantasy can be threatening and there is danger in it (as Tolkien most vividly portrayed, alongside the joys and wonders of Faërie, in “Smith of Wootton Major”) and people have developed dismissive defenses against its power. The denigrators wrap their defenses in a veneer of rationality, but the actual substance of their claims reveals the irrationality of them as they encounter a form of sub-creation, but deny its power.
While Fantasy can be more truly sub-creative than other forms of art, the fact remains that it has an intrinsic deficit to overcome in the achievement of sub-creation, of that inner consistency of reality provided by giving a Secondary World Secondary Reality. This deficit comes from Fantasy’s strangeness/discontinuity. The greater this strangeness, the more difficult it is for an inhabitant of the Primary World to provide it with that inner consistency that moves beyond superficial window dressing of the fanciful. Herein is an illustration of the essence of sub-creation as imitative of true (i.e., divine) creative action in sub-creating not only individual things, but also sub-creating a world with interrelationships, proper functions, and narrative logic that gives the individual things and features the context in which they make sense. The example Tolkien provides in this particular context is “the green sun”:
To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft. Few attempt such difficult tasks. But when they are attempted and in any degree accomplished then we have a rare achievement of Art: indeed narrative art, story-making in its primary and most potent mode.11
Paradoxically, then, Fantasy is the art form that provides the strongest inherent obstacles to the accomplishment of sub-creation, but, because it provides such obstacles to overcome, it is also the art form most capable of producing sub-creation in its fullness.
In the above quote, he identifies the prerequisite skill for accomplishing sub-creation as a kind of elvish craft. But what is this elvish craft? After rejecting the names of Magic (being the operations of a Magician) and Art (being the process that can produce Secondary Belief, but is not a sufficient condition of it), he settles on the name Enchantment. It is the sub-creative power that makes a Secondary World in which, by means of imagination exercised and incited through the spell of language, designer and spectator can enter and exercise Secondary Belief in that inner consistency of reality that Tolkien speaks of here. As such, it represents a will to art rather than a will to power, like Tolkien thinks of Magic (of course, the fact that there can be and is confusion between them is surely an effect of the Fall, in accordance with what was noted from “Mythopoeia”). Its power is something that the will to power can never attain even as the deceiver and destroyer can never be a true Creator, though desiring the worship as such. Sub-creation has a purity about it precisely because it stems from the vocation and capacity of image-bearing by which humans fulfill their creative purpose when they represent and imitate their Creator.12 Sub-creation involves the imitation of the Creator’s creative action in the Primary World.13
In response to people who question the legitimacy of Fantasy, he refers back to what he wrote several years prior, specifically the first block quote cited here. Though Misomythus in that context may have been unusually appreciative of myths and fairy-stories for a modern person, he was typical of modern doubt and denigration of these stories as legitimate stories that should be told and should demand the use of the sub-creative faculties. It is not only legitimate, it is a proper function of humanity, and even one that comes naturally. When it is done properly—contrary to popular criticism—it is actually rational and—as sub-creative activity—it brings about reflection of reality with an inner consistency that impresses itself upon the minds of spectators by means of Secondary Belief. Because Secondary Belief and the Secondary World are in some way derivative from Primary Belief and the Primary World (since the sub-creators are denizens of the Primary World), a stronger connection to reason is crucial to the formation of Secondary Belief, which is itself crucial to sub-creation.14 The superstructure of Fantasy proper requires a substructure composed of reason, for, as Tolkien says, “If men really could not distinguish between frogs and men, fairy-stories about frog-kings would not have arisen.”15
But caveat emptor, as Tolkien has noted elsewhere, including the block quote from “Mythopoeia,” even Fantasy and its telos of sub-creation have not avoided the effects of the Fall. There is a kind of purity to it, just as humans are still beings made in the image of God, so that Tolkien can describe it as a good to be pursued. However, even as holy things can be corrupted and defiled and even as that which is pure exists amidst a world of impurity, Fantasy does not remain untouched. It can go so far into the fantastic as to be world-denying, it can be poorly done, and there could be other evil uses for it, such as deception (which is a legitimate fear of some critics of Fantasy).
Yet, Tolkien is careful to note that a world of idolatry would inevitably involve corruption of Fantasy. When the true God of the Primary World is denied, all else follows. As such, Fantasy does have true risks for achieving evil ends, but it is mundane in that sense. Everything of the present world and time has suffered effects of the Fall. There is sense in recognizing the evils possibly associated with Fantasy, but there is no sense in singling it out even among literary/storytelling forms. Despite the risks, fantasy remains a good, a divinely granted right and gift. As with other corruptible goods and rights, in Tolkien’s words, abusus non tollit usum.16
As a matter of fact, Fantasy—by offering its fantastic perspective—indirectly unveils the Primary World (being built with “materials” from the Primary World) and assists in the recovery of its truth by gaining some apparent distance. He describes the relationship of the sub-creator of fairy-stories (of which Fantasy is the core element) to the elements of the Primary World as being, “a good craftsman [who] loves his material, and has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone and wood which only the art of making can give. By the forging of Gram cold iron was revealed; by the making of Pegasus horses were ennobled; in the Trees of the Sun and Moon root and stock, flower and fruit are manifested in glory.”17 Because of the nature of craftsmanship that is Fantasy and sub-creation, the sub-creator also has a function akin to angels in many ancient apocalypses. These angels pulled back the veil between heaven and earth to show the transcendent dimensions of earthly features, events, and characters as well as the characteristics of the heavenly realms. In Tolkien’s view, when Fantasy is done right, sub-creators can similarly use Fantasy to reveal the true transcendent character of the Primary World by putting them in a seemingly strange and alien setting that is the matter of Fantasy. The story-maker (or “mythopoet”) can perform this function because of a free relation of love with nature/creation over and against worldviews that try to have relations of corrupt power, whether as slaves locked in blinding bounds (as is the case in Tolkien’s image here), or as would-be emperors attempting to bend and to dominate nature (the function Tolkien assigns to the Magician). And if—in reflection of the Creator—the sub-creators’ principles of making are words, they can reveal not only the character of the referents, but of the words that bear symbolic relations to those referents.18 Fantasy can accomplish this goal because it breaks the world free from the familiar, the triteness that comes from possessiveness:
This triteness is really the penalty of ‘appropriation’: the things that are trite, or (in a bad sense) familiar, are the things that we have appropriated, legally or mentally. We say we know them. They have become like the things which once attracted us by their glitter, or their colour, or their shape, and we laid hands on them, and then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them.19
He borrows a word from G. K. Chesterton to describe this effect: Mooreeffoc, “the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle.”20 Fantasy done right is, then, not so much about seeing the world as it is, but about seeing the world as people are meant to see it, which can indeed have the potential for a redemptive liberation from a world imprisoned in fallenness (Rom 8:18–27).
It is in such a context that Fantasy is properly escapist (and, as Tolkien describes the fitting concomitant, consolatory). Tolkien does not use this label with scorn like many of his contemporaries. Too often, more jaded or priggish critics have conflated escape with cowardly desertion and, intentionally or unintentionally, have become or conspired with the people who hate escapism more than anyone else: the jailers, “Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it.”21 As such, Fantasy can offer a true escape, not so much a flight from harsh reality as a flight into reality, the deeper reality that is above and beyond what Tolkien regarded as the scourges of modern life and its industrial/technological obsessions, as well as the more perpetual problems of the prison of transience (which technological advances have exacerbated to some extent even as they have provided some benefits), vicious cycles of sin and destruction that engulf the world (reinforcing its imprisonment), severance—even isolation—from the rest of creation, and, most of all, death. Fairy-stories have many ways of offering escape from some or all of these problems—such as the characteristic of talking animals to have some semblance of restorative reunion with other creatures—but one feature is more powerful and also more derided than all the others: the ending.
It is in the ending that the fairy-story provides its greatest consolation and highest function. The “happy ending” is often regarded with scorn as cliché and unrealistic, but if the world is imprisoned with the aforementioned walls, bars, and chains, it is actually that which is most real, speaking redemptively to a world out of alignment with the will of God—and therefore containing some measure of unreality. While tragedy often speaks to the world in its current state, fairy-stories have the opposite function, for which Tolkien coins the term eucatastrophe. As he defines the term, it refers to,
the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially ‘escapist,’ nor ‘fugitive.’ In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is 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 in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.22
Here is a key quote for understanding Tolkien’s theology of sub-creation because it describes an essential aspect of its telos, and there are at least five points worth noting before continuing to Tolkien’s more extensive exposition on eucatastrophe. First, from the above analysis of “Mythopoeia,” one should note that the terminology is different, but the points are fundamentally the same here as in Tolkien’s response to Lewis’ criticism of the wishful thinking of myths. There is of course deeper exposition here and below as this is a lecture rather than a poem. It also seems that in the intervening years that Tolkien has finally devised a name for the function of fairy-stories—the highest form of sub-creation—and that he is in a better position to explore this function by using the word as a launching point.
Second, while Tolkien has defended the “escapist” label up to this point, so much as to rebrand it “fugitive” at certain points, he now thinks it better to leave it behind as describing the essence of eucatastrophe. Even in the setting of the fairy-story, the eucatastrophe is miraculous, not a typical feature of the sub-creative world as might be other features Tolkien would be more inclined to deem “escapist.” Furthermore, it is more like a headlong flight into a deeper reality as it directly confronts dyscatastrophe and defeats it at the point of confrontation when the deeper reality found in deliverance breaks through into the sub-created Secondary World as it does at times in the created Primary World. Though deliverance has an element of escape to it—as in the flight of Israel from Egypt through the Sea of Reeds—it is a larger event as it involves confrontation and victory.
Third, he describes eucatastrophe as being miraculous in character. In the immediate context, Tolkien refers to acts of special grace from the divine (in the context of the fairy-story) that are atypical divine action, and not repeatable, except by divine volition. Considering how unpredictable providence can be and how variegated its forms are, Tolkien insists that such miraculous grace cannot be counted on to recur simply because it is so irregular (e.g., even though Christian tradition and reports today have many cases of miraculous healing, there are many other similar cases in which it does not happen). Again, this is from the standpoint of the fairy-story and thus stands in contrast from denizens of the Primary World who may be inclined to complain about the “predictable” and “recurring” happy ending.
Beyond the immediate context, it might be helpful to consider what Tolkien means by “miraculous.” In a letter written five years after this lecture, he describes them simply as seeming intrusions (though he thinks the term to be problematic) into real/ordinary life.23 In a draft of a letter written seventeen years later, he offers a more developed picture of the possible meaning of miracles being, “to produce realities which could not be deduced even from a complete knowledge of the previous past, but which being real become part of the effective past for all subsequent time.”24 Though these statements are later than his essay, they confirm the common sense of suddenness and turn/reversal, along with the sense of a providential initiative, that Tolkien sees in miracles and in eucatastrophes as a sub-category.
But there is more to it, still. In the first aforementioned letter, he notes the most important quality of miracles and—as hinted here and explored later—eucatastrophes. In the Primary Miracle of the resurrection of Jesus, as well as the lesser Christian miracles, “you have not only the sudden glimpse of the truth behind the apparent Anankê [“necessity/constraint”] of our world, but a glimpse that is actually a ray of light through the very chinks of the universe about us.”25 Note how reminiscent this statement is of “a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” Miracles and eucatastrophes are revelatory in that they unveil an enduring reality beyond the apparent bounds of the world, a reality that encounters the world of disorder, dysfunction, and death with order, proper function, and life. This briefly unveiled reality is that of God’s intention for the world, known in the Primary World as the kingdom of God and new creation.
As such, like miracles, eucatastrophes are perhaps best described as “transnatural.” This term is similar to N. T. Wright’s coined term “transphysical,” which implies transformed physicality, so that it is no longer subject to obstacles, so that it becomes a more physical state.26 In a similar manner, a “transnatural” action implies an action which produces, at least briefly, transformed nature, so that it is no longer restricted to its typical capacities, so that it becomes more natural (i.e., more aligned to the creative purposes of God, from which and whom creation came). Miracles—and by sub-creative extension, eucatastrophes—are brief transnatural acts of God which transform nature to bring it into accord with God’s purposes, enabling it to become more authentically what it was created to be. In other words, miracles are brief glimpses of new creation, creation that is in line with God’s creative intention. Another term for such a state of affairs, which was more popular amongst the New Testament writers, is, “kingdom of God.” The kingdom of God is creation’s experience of God’s kingship and reign in a new, more complete way than it currently knows. While the New Testament does not indicate that the kingdom had come fully yet, it shows that the dynamic power and transformative life which would be characteristic of the kingdom is present already through the work of the Holy Spirit (Matt 12:28//Luke 11:20; John 14:9–21; Acts 1:4–8; 2:14–39; 10:38; Rom 8; 14:13–18; 1 Cor 4:20; 6:9–20; Gal 5:16–26; Eph 5:1–21; 2 Pet 1:3–11; Rev 2–3; 12:10–11).27 In Rom 8:18–27, Paul describes creation as currently being in bondage to decay due to the wide-ranging effects of sin and that there are now groans of labor pains anticipating the bringing forth of the new creation, a birthing process that Paul here identifies with suffering and prayer, but could also apply to preview transnatural acts known as miracles or to eucatastrophes of Secondary Worlds that anticipate the consummate eucatastrophe of the Primary World.
Fourth, Tolkien notes the importance of the existence of dyscatastrophe to the occurrence of eucatastrophe. In painting, the juxtaposition of contrasting colors makes each one stand out even more. In characterization, stark contrasts between protagonist and antagonist (or between characters on either side of the distinction) enhance the vividness of both. The same principle is at work with the contrast between eucatastrophe and dyscatastrophe. The suddenness and joy that are characteristic of eucatastrophe are results of that contrast. A world that never experienced death or its subordinates of sorrow and failure (along with other forms of suffering) would never know the joy of deliverance that overturns and overcomes that suffering. Confrontation is thus essential to deliverance and to eucatastrophe. An opiate that helps people ignore and avoid these problems of existence in the current world is not a eucatastrophe nor is it deliverance, for it does not bring victory in any sense. The victory of deliverance clearly does not deny the existence of circumstances from which deliverance happens; it simply denies final victory to those circumstances. As Tolkien later notes, every deliverance in the present time—whether through eucatastrophe in sub-creation or otherwise—is a prelude to the consummate deliverance and victory to come.
Fifth, because of the peculiar joy that eucatastrophe produces, what Tolkien considers the true mark of a fairy-story, it is—in effect—evangelium. The joy of deliverance and the delivering joy found in eucatastrophe replicates, in fragmentary fashion, the joy of deliverance and delivering joy of the gospel. Its source is transcendent in that it comes from beyond the walls of the world, the same source as that of the gospel concerning the Word who came from beyond the world to the world to dwell among us and to give to the ones who receive him the power to become children of God (John 1:1–18). It is that joy which comes from some sense—even if only briefly perceived—of union with God (given the source of the joy). But there is also the poignant quality of grief to this joy, which adds to its unique character.28 Indeed, it is this joy that occupies Tolkien’s epilogue in what is perhaps his most concentrated and extensive expression of the relationship between eucatastrophe and gospel, and thus of the eschatologies of sub-creation and creation (or Secondary World and Primary World).
He returns to the importance of the inner consistency of reality—and some measure of the reflection of reality—to the project of sub-creation and how its achievement fulfills the wish of writers of fantasy to be real makers. The Secondary Worlds they sub-create derives their reality from the Primary World and, if they are indeed to have Secondary Reality, there must be some form of participation/partaking in Primary Reality. If the true form, highest function, and purpose-fulfillment of fantasy and sub-creation comes through eucatastrophe, then the evangelical joy thereby produced is the sign of partaking of Primary Reality and Primary Truth:
It is not only a ‘consolation’ for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question, ‘Is it true?’ The answer to this question that I gave at first was (quite rightly): ‘If you have built your little world well, yes: it is true in that world.’ That is enough for the artist (or the artist part of the artist). But in the ‘eucatastrophe’ we see in a brief vision that the answer may be greater—it may be a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world.29
Here, Tolkien expands on what he says above. While there is a sense in which internal consistency/coherence makes a eucatastrophe true, Tolkien argues that there is a deeper truth that forges the true link between Secondary World and Primary World. The eucatastrophe derives its truth from the truth of the gospel, the story of the Primary Eucatastrophe. Conversely, without this truth, eucatastrophe could not speak truly to the Primary World as a reflection of the Eucatastrophe of this world.
If such is the case, Tolkien believes it is only fitting. Humans, who are making-creatures and storytellers by nature, created to bear the image of the Creator and Author of history, received redemption from God by story, the fulfilling story. They receive redemption by the way in which God made them: the Word, which became incarnate.30 The stories they tell and the worlds they sub-create in exercise of their image-bearing capacities find their fulfillment (particularly if the stories involve eucatastrophe). Though humans are corrupt, sinful, and woefully incomplete, they can still reflect God in fragmentary form. But if humanity is created in the image of God for the purpose of bearing that divine image, only God can provide the fulfillment of human identity and purpose when they are in proper relation to God. By the same principle, human stories are, in their own ways, corrupt, flawed, and woefully incomplete, though they can still reflect the fulfillment of story in fragmentary form, particularly through eucatastrophe. But if story-making, world-making, and so on are functions of image-bearing, then stories would also find fulfillment in proper relation to the Author of authors, the one who has provided a eucatastrophe in the Primary World in anticipation of the consummate eucatastrophe. Eucatastrophes of fairy-stories anticipate the consummate fairy-story by which God redeems humans and thereby anticipate redemption. But the gospel is the consummate fairy-story because the features of fairy-story—including, most importantly, the ending—are raised from Secondary Reality when the Author of history writes them into Primary Reality, at which point, “the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation.”31 In the grand story of history, Tolkien describes the Birth of Christ as the eucatastrophe of history and the resurrection as the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation, making it the eucatastrophe of a eucatastrophic story. It is thus a story with an inclusio of joy. And it achieves one of the primary goals of sub-creation in having the inner consistency of reality precisely because it has that quality by virtue of happening on the stage of creation and bringing the art of God’s action of creation to fulfillment in redemption.
The joy one would experience as a result of a fairy-story having Primary Reality is of the same kind and quality as the joy of eucatastrophe in a fairy-story with Secondary Reality. Of course, its degree would certainly be greater. For though the joy of the eucatastrophe has a taste of primary truth—the joy experienced is in fact an experience in Primary Reality—the joy of knowing eucatastrophe is actual in the Primary World is purer, more concentrated, and more potent because it is in closer proximity and union with the events that produce it. Truly, it is closer to the (final) cause, culmination, crystallization, and climax of eucatastrophe, towards which all others draw, point, and (in some ways) testify. After all, it is here where he describes Legend (i.e., the Secondary World and the hidden dimensions of the Primary World glimpsed therein) and History (i.e., the story of the Primary World) meet and fuse in a way that is not possible for any other fairy-story and thus only this one can be the denouement of all other fairy-stories. It is also where the Author and the authors created in the Author’s image know union impossible through any other means. Indeed, it is a marriage of sorts between creation and sub-creation so that they become one and the joy experienced within the sub-creation and its eucatastrophe is multiplied by the joy of matrimonial union (itself an anticipation of the holiest of unions between heaven and earth as related in Rev 21). It is in fact where the Author upholds the verity of sub-creation and its most important aspect and makes it part of creation (so that, as he indicates, God is not only the God of humans and angels, but also of elves). And since the ending of eucatastrophe is the most exalted of aspects, the Author uses it as a way to show the true eschatological climax of the Primary World being one of eternal eucatastrophic outflow.
Though it is tempting to think of fairy-stories and their eucatastrophes as mere—though lovely—signs and thus fit to discard when all have reached the destination and reality to which the signs were pointing, Tolkien has a different view, as one would gather from “Mythopoeia.” Rather, since fairy-stories are proper expressions of divine image-bearing, he suggests that God assumes them into the kingdom—inaugurated and later consummated via eucatastrophe—and thereby hallows them, redeems them, and makes them participatory in new creation:
But in God’s kingdom the presence of the greatest does not depress the small. Redeemed Man is still man. Story, fantasy, still go on, and should go on. The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the ‘happy ending.’ The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know.32
Just as Christ’s presence in the kingdom of God does not render the presence of people superfluous, neither should one expect that the fact of the gospel happening in the Primary World of creation should render the Secondary Worlds of sub-creation superfluous. Instead, the kingdom and the gospel make sub-creations hallowed (or sanctified) by virtue of their union and the divine vindication of their storylines insofar as they align with the divine will. If story-making, world-making, fantasy, and other such activities are part of being an image-bearer of God, then they would not wither away in the kingdom, but flourish in ways not possible before due to the lack of such union with the Creator.33
The logic here also seems to be an extension of Gregory of Nazianzus’ paradigmatic statement about the Incarnation of Jesus: that which is not assumed is not healed/saved.34 While Tolkien would most likely agree with a specific application of this statement to the sub-creative faculties Jesus assumed (and it would further buttress his theology about the importance of sub-creation to being human), such a claim is not his interest here. His extension comes in that he uses the positive variation on this formulation—that which is assumed is saved—and broadens it to include God’s assumption of both the sub-creative faculties and the sub-creative results/artifacts. Through the story of the gospel, God brings the sub-creative hopes to bear on the Primary World and thereby assumes the exercises of these faculties—imperfect though they are in conveying that human sub-creators bear the image of the Creator—and redeems them by that assumption. And their redemption means that humans are to continue contributing to the eschatological reality of the kingdom in this way because it is part of their vocation as image-bearers to be reflective of God and to contribute to the flourishing—or, in his words, “effoliation” and “enrichment”—of creation.35
It seems that Tolkien here goes even further than before in the eschatological impact of sub-creation as he sees humans participating in creation by divine enablement. He does not violate one of his fundamental assumptions that only God truly creates; but in God’s assumption and use of human sub-creation—which they are only able to make because of God’s gift—God graciously and willingly allows and features human works as part of the new creation, including sub-creation. Participation in the life of the kingdom of God in anticipation of when the kingdom comes consummately undergirds New Testament ethics because it is of a piece with the logic of final judgment in which God vindicates and confirms the works for the kingdom of God, which are themselves divinely sourced by means of the Holy Spirit.36 All of these points are further enveloped in the logic of resurrection (and new creation), which has elements of both continuity and discontinuity in that the one resurrected is identified as the person who died, but the resurrected person is also transformed and takes on a new kind of life (i.e., the life of the kingdom). What the discontinuous state of the resurrection body will be is not easily discernible and only a few hints about it appear in scattered texts (1 Cor 15:35–49 describes the glory of resurrection bodies and 1 John 3:2 states that believers will be made like him, but neither of these texts are any clearer). To affirm belief in God’s power to resurrect the dead is not the same as knowing what resurrected people will look like or otherwise be like (even the comparison to Jesus in 1 John presents the challenge that the qualities of Jesus’ body post-resurrection are mysterious in the resurrection appearances). In the same way, to say that sub-creation is redeemed is not to say what consummate redemption will look like for it as the logic of resurrection entails that there will be transformation that no one can truly anticipate, except that what God redeems consummately will have identifiable continuity with what God redeems now.
J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in The Monsters and the Critics, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: HarperCollins, 2006), 122.
See Letters #163 and #165 in the next entry in this series.
Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” 122.
Ibid., 125.
Ibid., 127.
Ibid., 128.
Ibid. 132.
Ibid., 138.
Ibid., 139.
Ibid.
Ibid., 140.
Ibid, 145.
Tolkien’s own mythology provides some examples of beings, generally Elves, who master this craft of Enchantment. Of course, the sub-creators par excellence are the Ainur, who each operate according to particular understandings of the Ainulindalë, the song which Eru Ilúvatar composed to form and shape the world he would bring into being, and the subsequent vision of history. (Letter #212, p. 284) In the way Lúthien sings the song of the travails of Elves and Men, she tells the story in such a way that she moves Mandos—ever stern and immovable—to pity and willingness to do a new thing for Lúthien and her lover Beren. One description from Book II, when Frodo is in Rivendell, captures well Tolkien’s sense of enchantment: “At first the beauty of the melodies and of the interwoven words in elven-tongues, even though he understood them little, held him in a spell, as soon as he began to attend to them. Almost it seemed that the words took shape, and visions of far lands and bright things that he had never yet imagined opened out before him; and the firelit hall became like a golden mist above seas of foam that sighed upon the margins of the world. Then the enchantment became more and more dreamlike, until he felt that an endless river of swelling gold and silver was flowing over him, too multitudinous for its pattern to be comprehended; it became part of the throbbing air about him, and it drenched and drowned him. Swiftly he sank under its shining weight into a deep realm of sleep.” (II/1) The nameless minstrel who sings on the Field of Cormallen enchants all who attend the celebration with his song of Frodo and the Ring and leads them into a state where pain and delight flow together and joy is all the sharper.
Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” 144: “If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts or evidence), then Fantasy would languish until they were cured. If they ever get into that state (it would not seem at all impossible), Fantasy will perish, and become Morbid Delusion.”
Ibid.
Ibid. “Misuse/abuse does not remove/exclude use.”
Ibid., 147.
Ibid.
Ibid., 146.
Ibid.
Ibid., 148.
Ibid, 153.
Letter #89, p. 100.
Letter #181, p. 235.
Letter #89, p. 101.
N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, vol. 3 of Christian Origins and the Question of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 477–78.
Colin Brown, Miracles and the Critical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984), 290, 292; Anthony E. Harvey, Jesus and the Constraints of History (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982), 116; Graham H. Twelftree, Jesus; the Miracle Worker (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 357–58.
Tolkien’s most direct representation of this phenomenon in The Lord of the Rings comes in the aftermath of the eucatastrophe on the Field of Cormallen when a minstrel recounts the story leading up to and including the eucatastrophe.
Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” 155.
This notion is the narrative-focused version of Justin Martyr’s argument about the seeds of the Logos/Word God spread among the teachings of the world in anticipation of the Incarnation, even if he accuses the devil and his demons of corrupting them (1 Apol. 20–23; 44; 46; 59–60; 2 Apol. 8; 10; 13).
Ibid., 156.
Ibid., 156–57.
Of course, there is potential for thinking that one of Tolkien’s implications is that it is a logical consequence that the ones thus united to the Creator necessarily sub-create better or make better art. There could be a sense in which this idea is possibly true if the Christian aims to glorify God, but it is only possibly so. There are many qualities in these actions that need cultivation and the humility to learn from any source. Believers are not the only ones who bear the divine image and even if many have glorified false gods or have otherwise devoted their gifts to the decay of the fallen creation, God has still gifted them with good capacities that they still use well.
Gregory of Nazianzus, Ep. 101 (NPNF2 7:440–441).
Though he does not explicitly relate it to the gospel, Tolkien provides an imaginative vision of sub-creation being taken up into creation in “Leaf by Niggle.”
Matt 5–7; John 14–16; Acts 2:14–39; Rom 6:1–14; 7:4–6; 8:9–27; 1 Cor 3:10–15; 13; 15:35–58; 2 Cor 1:20–22; 5:17–21; Gal 5:16–25; 6:14–16; Eph 2; 4:1–4; Phil 1:9–11; 2:1–13; Col 1:3–14; 2:6–3:17; Heb 2; Jas 4:1–12; 1 Pet 3:8–4:19; 5:8–11; 1 John 3; Rev 2–3; 5:9–10.