The Irony in Tolkien’s Triumph

Examining a Great Storyteller’s Greatest Mistake

J. Daniel Sawyer writing “We Need To Talk About Frodo”

I recently gave Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films a rather thorough going over with a literary baseball bat, and in that article I hinted that I would follow it up with an article criticizing Tolkien:

This is not to say there’s nothing to criticize in Tolkien’s moral vision, but that essay won’t be done for another few weeks.

The Lord of the Rings in general, and Tolkien in particular, has come in for a lot of criticism since Middle Earth first found a place in our Earth. In its early pirate-release phase in the US¹ literary critics derided it as anti-modernist and escapist. Marxist critics found themselves in a strange alliance with American hyper-patriots in detesting Tolkien’s uncritical embrace (not to mention celebration) of the English class system and of feudalism. American Christian critics complained that the books celebrated witchcraft, and were none-too-happy about the popularity of the books among hippies and other counter-culture types.

The fundamental integrity of Tolkien’s mythopoetic craft eventually embarrassed all of them. To be frank, while all of those complaints were more-or-less accurate, all of them also more-or-less missed the point. The Lord of the Rings was popular because it was escapist and anti-modernist and hit the American market at a time when modernism was stifling and, for the younger generation especially, often felt well-worth escaping from. In its harkening back to more ancient social forms it reminded its readers that there were other ways of organizing society, and it helped kick-start the genre of High Fantasy and inspired social clubs (such as the Society for Creative Anachronisms) where the different social manners were adopted and practiced, giving participants a respite from the pressures of technocratic civilization.

The criticisms on moral and political grounds have not stopped. Last month anarchist shitposter, champion of Norse culture, and occasionally brilliant analyst² CatGirl Kulak of the Anarchonomicon here on substack posted a Twitter rant where she bitched about Tolkien’s moral vision being fundamentally evil as it demonizes those who wish to use hard power to defend their homeland (Boromir, Denethor, et.al.). In Tolkien’s world, she says, Gandalf is an evil inversion of Wotan who, instead of taking it upon himself to seize the Ring and defeat Sauron, hands this ultimate weapon to someone too weak to wield it and trusts to luck/providence to deliver the whole world from evil.

She compares the Ring to nuclear weapons, arguing that anyone willing to potentially sacrifice their own people and the people to whom they were responsible in order to make a moral point about how immoral a weapon of mass destruction is may be principled, but their principles are evil. Hoping for eucatastrophe is foolishness at best. A strong moral point that only applies in a fictional world, she says, is not a strong moral point at all.

And, like the other criticisms leveled against Tolkien I recapped, it’s hard to dispute the meat of her argument on its own terms.

But, like those other critics above, and like Tolkien himself, she missed something important that (ironically) would support her point with greater strength. Two things in fact.

First, in defense of Tolkien’s moral vision, his books are exemplary on matters interpersonal and intra-personal. The depictions of the struggle against temptation, of personal loyalty to friends and comrades, of courage and dignity in the face of impossible odds, are almost without equal in modern or post-modern literature. It is very common for a person (or an artwork) to have excellent integrity and judgment on matters interpersonal or intra-communal, but for that same person to be relatively hopeless when attempting to suss out ethics in matters of greater scale (such as the geopolitical). Likewise, it is common for those who are masters of ethics in realpolitik to be ethically hopeless in matters interpersonal. This, on its own, shouldn’t really count as a mark against Tolkien’s stories, in my estimation.

Nonetheless, I think Kulak put her hand on something unexpectedly insightful…but it’s a matter on which both she and Tolkien are woefully mistaken.

The criticism I am about to make against Tolkien’s writing will not, nor should it, be any more effective in dampening enthusiasm for Tolkien’s works, which in my estimation are timeless triumphs that will probably still be read five hundred years from now, just as Thomas Mallory’s La Morte D’Arthur (1485) is still read and inspiring readers and new writers today. Nonetheless, I hope it will add something new to the understanding of how and why these remarkable books, like all remarkable books, managed to capture something timeless and became more than their author intended, or could have intended.

Alan Lee painting, The Taming of Smeagol

The Eucatastrophe

Tolkien’s central moral vision, which he articulated in his letters, was the eucatastrophe.³ It was a word he coined himself, appending the Greek prefix “eu” (meaning “good”)⁴ to “catastrophe.” Like the Eucharist⁵ in Catholicism, the eucatastrophe is a turn of story in which goodness prevails by the grace of God, but just as the Eucharist re-enacts the horrific human sacrifice which is said to have ensured the eventual victory of God over Satan, the eucatastrophe snatches victory from the jaws of defeat at the cost of tremendous loss.

It is, in other words, a highly specialized form of that most execrable of literary devices: the Deus Ex Machina⁶.

Normally the Deus Ex Machina—when something unanticipated by the narrative saves the day at the last moment, be it supernatural or just a higher power than our characters (luck, the intervention of a political savior, etc.)—is incredibly frustrating. We, the audience, have just invested our lives and passions and sympathies in the hero’s struggle against impossible odds. When the gods (literal or metaphorical) come through in the clutch, it robs that struggle of meaning, leading to the inevitable “Why the hell did I just waste my time on that?!”

Tolkien wrote the whole of Lord of the Rings around the mechanic of the eucatastrophe. He, shockingly, seemed to have discovered a form of the dreaded Deus Ex Machina which actually seems to work dramatically. Tolkien spotted that it seemed to work in the Christian tradition (a story that captured the imagination of somewhere between a quarter and a third of the planet, depending on how and when you count) and it also seems to work in The Lord of the Rings.

Frodo, after all, fails in his Hero’s Journey. Instead of destroying the Ring, he claims it for himself. Tolkien himself said⁷ that by this point in the tale, had Gollum not bitten off Frodo’s finger and stolen the Ring, Frodo had grown savvy enough in his ability to command the Ring that he would have at least been able to resist the Nazgûl. Tolkien remained in doubt whether Frodo could have successfully compelled them to attack and kill Sauron—he might have done, but since Sauron still held the Nine Rings in his hand they may have merely bided their time until he was weakened, not paying attention, and away from a place where he could destroy the Ring.

However, the fortuitous intervention of Gollum, following the dictates of fate (which, in Tolkien’s world, are ultimately the dictates of Illuvatar, the All-Father and Creator-God) ensures the Ring’s destruction quite against Frodo’s wishes.

God saves the day, but he does it by working through events instead of superimposing his suffocating presence on events. It’s an appropriately Catholic view, and it is the ultimate moral point that Tolkien wanted to make in his stories: God is in control. Because of this, good will win. We fight not because we can prevail, but because we are duty-bound to as good people who ultimately serve the will of God.

That, my friends, is a grand feat of literary innovation.

It’s a shame, then, that this entire literary device is an illusion.

UK first edition cover of The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

An Author, a Ring, and a Eucatastrophe That Wasn’t

It is clear from the volume The Letters of JRR Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter, that this idea of divine providence working through tragedy to bring salvation was desperately important to Tolkien. It wasn’t just something he saw at work in his religious doctrine, but it was also something he saw at work in his own life.

It was the death of Tolkien’s father when Tolkien was a small boy that brought him to his beloved England and eventually saw his mother convert to Catholicism.

It was that conversion which cut him off from his mother’s family and left him an orphan when his mother died when Tolkien was 12—a tragedy that delivered Tolkien into the hands of his mentor, Father Francis Xavier Morgan, who encouraged him (mercilessly) to develop his mind and eventually to study at Oxford.

Every tragedy in Tolkien’s life purchased for him a future that he fell desperately in love with. Had he been a resident of ancient Greece instead of an Englishman, he would have seen the hands of fate at work in life’s interplay between triumph and tragedy. As an English Catholic, he saw the hand of God re-enacting the drama of the crucifixion, resurrection, and redemption.

And it was this deft hand with triumph born of tragedy that brings his stories a particular, beautiful life, especially in 20^th century English and American literature, which sees tragedy either as an injustice which provokes the hero to rage or despair (or both), or as an inconvenience that the hero must overcome. Since human life is inherently tragic, Tolkien’s willingness to put tragedy front-and-center in all of his works, and to find meaning within tragedy itself, satisfied a deep thirst in his readers. It was a truth he told that very few other writers dared (or still dare) to tell.

But Tolkien also loved a happy ending, and longed for one himself, so he arrived at the eucatastrophe as a way of making sense of what he saw as life’s tendency to make lemonade from lemons. He sought, in his fiction, to console tragedy even as he embraced it.

And, fortunately for us, Tolkien failed at this endeavor, because he was a far better storyteller than he was either a literary theorist or moralist.

The eucatastrophe pops up a few times in Tolkien’s legendarium, and with the exception of The Lord of the Rings, it plays exactly like an ancient mythological war between the gods (such as when the ancient elves convince the Valar—a race of gods/angels—to take up the cause against Sauron’s mentor Melkor in The Silmarillion). Only in The Lord of the Rings does Tolkien’s conception of the eucatastrophe attempt to play out in a myth where heroes are the only ones capable of action.⁸

So how does Tolkien acquit himself with this story mechanic?

Well...not as well as he thought he did.

The required ingredient for a eucatastrophe is divine intervention at the moment of triumph. This makes the central question of eucatastrophe in The Lord of the Rings boil down to this:

Why did Gollum fall into the Cracks of Doom?

If it was mere luck, or a push of fate, that would equate to divine intervention.

But if we rewind from the Cracks of Doom just a little ways, we find Gollum’s previous attack on Frodo on the slopes of Mount Doom, where, in what is (from a storytelling perspective) the single most important passage in the entire trilogy, we see something curious: Frodo uses the Ring against Gollum.

Then suddenly, as before under the eaves of the Emyn Muil, Sam saw these two rivals with other vision. A crouching shape, scarcely more than the shadow of a living thing, a creature now wholly ruined and defeated, yet filled with a hideous lust and rage; and before it stood stern, untouchable now by pity, a figure robed in white, but at its breast it held a wheel of fire. Out of the fire there spoke a commanding voice.
‘Begone, and trouble me no more! If you touch me ever again, you shall be cast yourself into the Fire of Doom.’
The crouching shape backed away, terror in its blinking eyes, and yet at the same time insatiable desire. Then the vision passed and Sam saw Frodo standing, hand on breast, his breath coming in great gasps, and Gollum at his feet, resting on his knees with his wide-splayed hands upon the ground.

—The Return of the King

Did you catch it?

If not, read it again.

Because there we see the answer to the question of eucatastrophe. Gollum fell not due to luck, or to fate, or to a nudge from Illuvatar or any of the Valar. He fell because Frodo willed it so. Frodo, using the power of the Ring, cursed Gollum to be cast into the fire.

And so Gollum fell, exactly as Frodo, using the Ring’s magic, commanded him to.

This is, fundamentally, why the destruction of the Ring...well...rings true. It happens because it must, because the very mortal hero within the story used the power at his command to make it happen. Frodo’s failure of nerve, at the end, was not a failure of his quest.

Frodo destroyed the Ring himself.

That he used a sort of magical insurance policy to pull it off, that he did it only half-consciously, does not matter. The climactic victory proceeds directly from the actions of the hero.

This, by the way, is those authors who attempt to employ Tolkien’s concept of eucatasrophe so often wind up with wonderfully drawn stories that are vaguely unsatisfying at the end.⁹

I talked in my essay Enter the Dream how, no matter how much we fiction writers wish to think that we can convey our own moral preachments through our writing, successful art has a logic of its own that cuts against our propagandistic intentions. Nowhere is this more startlingly true than in The Lord of the Rings, where the author assiduously avoided propagandizing except insofar as he wished to make only one personal moral point—that good will win because God wills it—and then his mastery of story prevented him from doing so, despite his own convictions.

This is not to say that The Lord of the Rings builds triumph atop tragedy—it does. But the eucatastrophe is wholly absent from The Lord of the Rings. And, ironically, this may be one of the most important reasons why the epic so perfectly recapitulates the great story forms of old and captures the minds of each generation afresh.

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For more on how literature—especially literature written for younger audiences—captures the reader’s imagination and lingers in the cultural memory, check out my book The Secrets of the Heinlein Juvenile, which examines the books which created the genre of Young Adult Science Fiction.

Thank you again for your continued support, which allows me to write articles like this and has recently, literally, saved my life. If you’re not currently a subscriber or supporter, please consider joining now.

1. Ace Books originally exploited a loophole in US copyright law which allowed it to print and sell The Lord of the Rings without a license. The public demand thus created spurred Tolkien to make a deal for authorized editions with Ballantine Books and Houghton-Mifflin.

2. At least when she doesn’t let her performance art schtick get in her way, which happens more often than not in my estimation.

3. From Letter 89: "I coined the word 'eucatastrophe'…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 – if the story has literary 'truth' on the second plane (....) – 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..."

4. Thanks are due on this point to Mel Dunay, who sent me a message pointing out an error at this point in the original version of this article. I was first introduced to Tolkien’s thinking on the eucatastrophe by a professor in college lo these many decades ago, and that professor, having never even heard of the Greek language, gave the etymology of eucatastrophe as deriving from the Eucharist, rather than both of them deriving from a common root. The original version of this article reflected that ancient and mistaken learning. I have posted her note to me as a comment below the article. Many thanks for the correction!

5. i.e. the part of the Catholic mass that Protestant churches call “communion,” a ritual meal where bread and wine represent the body and blood of Christ (in the Catholic tradition, they are held to actually become the body and blood in a sense that is somewhat more than spiritual and somewhat less than completely literal and ingesting them confers the grace of God; in the Protestant tradition, they are held to be symbols of remembrance). The ritual is based on one that Jesus is seen initiating in Mark 14:22-25, Luke 22:14-23, Matthew 26:26-29

6. Literally: God from the Machine, from the days of Greek theater when the gods were lowered onto the stage with a crane

7. Letter 256

8. It may be argued, as Tolkien-the-narrator did retroactively when he rewrote The Hobbit to fit with The Lord of the Rings, that Bilbo’s discovery of the Ring was divinely ordained, and that since it was the key to seeing Bilbo safely through the quest for the Lonely Mountain despite the loss of Thorin, Bombur, et.al. that The Hobbit also counts as a eucatastrophe, but I think that would be stretching the concept a bit.

9. The most obvious high-profile offender in recent years is J.K. Rowling, whose hero, Harry Potter, loses his battle with Voldemort in the final book only to be sent back from the afterlife by a posthumous Dumbledore with the secret to defeating his enemy. The attempt here at a deus ex machina fails to work as well as it wishes to precisely because it takes the eucatastrophe at face value. Had Harry been sent back with knowledge that he won from a challenge in the afterlife, or had he, in the moment of death, been aided by something he had previously won (both mechanics are common in ancient hero stories), the story would have been different—instead, he is aided by something given, that he did not earn: the reminder of the love of his mother, rendering him, in the end, a passive hero. It wasn’t enough to ruin the books for most readers, but upon the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows there was a widespread experience of let-down at the climax. This is one of a handful of authorial missteps in the final volume that contributed to that feeling of let-down, and led to the books ultimately feeling juvenile (in a bad sense) in retrospect—a sin of which Tolkien, despite his intentions in some cases—was never guilty.