For
Tolkien, the Happy Ending lies at the heart of fantasy and fairy story; it is
so essential to the genre that when he revised his talk for publication in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, he
coined the word “eucatastrophe” for eu (Greek for good) and
catastrophe (Greek for overturning) to describe those glorious volte-faces in
which evil, on the verge of triumph, gives way to good, corruption to innocence,
grief to rejoicing, certain death to yet more certain life. It is “a sudden and
miraculous grace . . . a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the
world, poignant as grief.” There are echoes here of Lewis’s idea of Joy, that
painful, delicious longing that only God can fulfill. It may be that Lewis drew
inspiration for his carefully constructed account of Joy in his autobiography
from Tolkien’s earlier presentation. In any event, eucatastrophe is for Tolkien
the crucial even in fairy tale, the hinge upon which the greatest stories turn,
imparting “a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or
indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by reason for this “peculiar
quality”: the joy that floods us as eucatastrophe leads us out of literature
and into faith. Through it we glimpse “a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in
the real world.” Fairy tale, then, is a door opening upon divine truth.
Recovery, Consolation, Escape, in their highest modes of Escape from Death and
eucatastrophe, would play a crucial role in The
Lord of the Rings. (p. 246)
[Obedience]
appears to me more and more the whole business of life, the only road to love
and peace –the cross and the crown in one . . . What indeed can we imagine
Heaven to be but unimpeded obedience. I think this is one of the causes of our
love of inanimate nature, that in it we see things which unswervingly carry out
the will of their Creator, and are therefore wholly beautiful and though their kind of obedience is infinitely lower
than ours, yet the degree is so much more perfect that a Christian can see the
reason that the Romantics had in feeling a certain holiness in the wood and
water. (p. 250 but quoting from Lewis, Collected
Letters, vol. 2, p. 177)
My
thought and talent (such as they are) now flow in different, though I think not
less Christian, channels, and I do not think I am at all likely to write more directly theological pieces. . . If I am
now good for anything it is for catching the reader unawares – thro’ fiction
and symbol. I have done what I could in the way of frontal attacks, but I now
feel quite sure those days are over.” p. 365
On
September 19, 1931, an event unfolded that has acquired its own mythic
numinosity in the minds of the Inklings lovers: The Night of Addison’s Walk.
Lewis, Tolkien, and their mutual friend, Hugo Dyson, strolled for hours along
Addison’s Walk – a tree-lined path within Magdalen College circling a meadow
bordered by the River Cherwell – discussing the nature of myth and it relation
to Christianity. Lewis insisted that myths are essentially lies; Tolkien
countered that myths are essentially true, for they reflect and transmit, in
secondary form, the primary and primordial creative power of God. Tolkien later
reworked the conversations of that night in “Mythopoeia” a soliloquy in heroic
couplets addressed by Philomythus (myth-lover=Tolkien) Misomythus
(myth-hater=Lewis) and dedicated “To one who said that myths are lies and therefore
worthless, even though “breathed through silver.’”
Moreover,
Tolkien argued –and this was the crux of the matter –that in the life, death,
and resurrection of Jesus we discover a myth that has entered history. Here God
tells – indeed, enacts – a tale with all the beauty and wonder and symbolic power
of myth, and yet a tale that is actually true. It was a strange thought, but it
reminded Lewis of an off-hand remark he had heard five years before from the
atheist Harry Weldon. “Rum thing.” Weldon had said, “all that stuff of Frazer’s
about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened
once.” It looked as if it had really happened once – and yet it lost none of
its mythic power for having become fact.
Tolkien’s
exposition hit home; as he talked, a strong wind rustled the overhanging leaves,
and all three noted, as Lewis put it, the ecstasy of such a thing” – almost like
the passing-by of a god, or of God. At 3:00 a.m., Tolkien headed home, but
Dyson sustained the offensive, delineating the blessings that come from a
Christian life, as he and Lewis walked in the cloister garden of New Building. They went to bed at 4:00 a.m.
This
night of Lewis’s passion – intellectual, as it must surely be – bore fruit on a
sunny morning a week or so later. The key moment came as in Lewis’s conversion
to theism, while he rode a vehicle, this time not a bus ascending Headington
Hill but the sidecar of Warnie’s motorcycle as the brothers motored toward Whipsnade
Zoo, a new animal park thirty miles north of London. “When we set out I did not
believe that Jesus Christ is the Song of God, and when we reached the zoo I
did.” p. 188-189
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