62 Comments
Oct 23Liked by Clifford Stumme

I don’t know if it has to be happy. I’ve read a lot of fantasy where it isn’t. My feeling is that it should be meaningful. Often, that’s good triumphing over evil (frequently though sacrifice) but sometimes it isn’t.

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*through

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Based on my reading of the text, I think Tolkien would make a distinction between the Fairy Story proper and the Tragedy. But I think a Tragedy can still be beautiful instead of despairing. Would love to know what he would think of that.

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Comparing the work of a living author to a dead one is unfair to them both.

That being said: I am extremely sick of the amount of nihilism in contemporary film and television and have replaced it in my own writing with optimism, though tempered by reality. There is still a place for this philosophy in the media, but it is ignored and undervalued by being compared too much to reality, which is not a fair assessment.

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Great points, David. Nihilism is in vogue--but it's a dangerous stick of dynamite that people are handling too lightly.

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...until it blows up in their face....

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I feel bad liking that comment, so I'll settle for just saying "exactly"

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Oct 23Liked by Clifford Stumme

Excellent post here. I was frankly unaware that Tolkien was Catholic, and, while I do see the Christian subtext in LOTR, I had always seen it mainly as a metaphor for the two world wars and the "little people" rising heroically to oppose the evil. For my own tastes, give me heroism, idealism, and yes Happy Endings every time.

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I think what you're saying here introduces a productive tension that deserves more fleshing out; namely, the role and place of *power* in producing a beautiful, credible ending.

Part of what makes Martin's world feel "credible" (at least to him) is that it's full of people who only want power. And so long as power is the only thing anyone values, you're going to have a crapsack world. Part of his point is that monarchy represents an irreversibly corrupting desire for power, and the fact that no one escapes from that corruption is central to his art.

Compare that, for example, to Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive, which I love, but which also feels a little IN-credible in its optimism. Yes, Sanderson puts his characters through the ringer, and it's beautiful when they finally come out on top. But *the ways* in which they succeed also end up vindicating a pretty traditional idea of power: once the good guys overcome their inner demons and are in charge of everyone else, then the world can become a better place. This is fun, as far as it goes. It's also naive and escapist when done poorly. At worst, it dangerously reinforces some of our worst habits.

People think Tolkien does the same thing as Sanderson, but he doesn't. Tolkien's eucatastrophe at the end of LOTR is also a subtle critique of "traditional" heroic power. Many of the obstacles the Fellowship faces, like Denethor, are people who have been corrupted by their power. Even when Aragorn takes the throne in the end, Tolkien makes it very clear that this isn't the New Heaven / New Earth come to reign forever; in a terribly Biblical idiom, Aragorn's grandson ends up being a terrible ruler. The only enduring legacy is that left by the "little people," as you said: those who sacrificed much for the sake of a better world. The "least of these."

And I think that's an underrated part of what fantasy can give us, and what makes it feel credible: a story in which the power of "littleness" and meekness is itself the point, belying all the powerful rivalries going on around it. It's a story we don't often get to see come to fruition in real life, but it is also, to me, the "realest" story that most pulls on my heart.

(The ending of Fullmetal Alchemist is also a great example of this, btw.)

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Great points here. Bows are tied too neatly in some Fantasy works. And character arcs are over simplistic. I agree that Sanderson's vision of the world is just too naive. His character development feels color-by-number. What's more, I think Tolkien really excels because his characters are being tested by their ability to avoid temptation, not by their ability to overcome their own demons. That's a huge and much under-mentioned facet of what he's doing. As Mark Baker would say, he writes about virtue, not about competence.

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Virtue =/= Competence… Maaaan, I'm gonna carry that one around with me for a while. That's fantastic.

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Good stuff!

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As a reader, I'm not a huge fan of overly happy endings but also not a fan of overly depressing endings. I like tales that end somewhere in the middle but that keep my favorite protagonists among the living. As a writer, I also lean in that direction.

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I think that's a great way to do it. And the spectrum is wide. I'm down with bittersweet endings too--I think a happy ending is at the very least one that means something, you know?

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My wife and I were just talking about a moment from The Last Airbender where Iroh goes to consult with the White Lotus, and you realize this eccentric old guy (who's also been through tremendous grief, and is living through it again as he watches his nephew struggle with his resentment and violence) is also a member of a worldwide secret society who see the world's problems and are dedicated to rectifying them. You get this overwhelming sense that the protagonists aren't alone; that the path to victory has been being paved for generations before them, and they will have help on that path.

In Martin's worlds, there is *no one* like that. No one lives for a virtue greater than power without being punished for it, because ultimately no two people believe enough in virtue to put it out in front of them and cooperate towards that virtue's fulfillment. Someone always ends up betraying the Good in the name of personal power. In Tolkien, too, the number of people who live towards the Good for its own sake is very, very few... But the point is that they do exist. And part of the serendipity / Providence at work in LOTR is that these few people manage to find one another.

That's my "pang of relief": whenever an unknown character, after a moment of weighing and tension, says, "Yes. I will help you. Don't worry about paying me back. Let's make this happen." That is the height of redeemed humanity.

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Amen. That's a beautiful moment.

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Oct 23Liked by Clifford Stumme

Good article, though unless I misunderstand I would adamantly argue that eucatastrophe is NOT synonymous with "happy ending." It's something closer to "happy end," in a teleological sense. Children of Hurin should suffice as evidence that Tolkien did not believe every story must end happily, although I concede that CoH is borne out of notes compiled by Christopher.

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Tolkien's early version of it has the full darkness.

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Very true, and some of his earliest unpublished work is incredibly dark. That said, I suspect that’s more indicative of the evolution of his own sentiments than him secretly harboring nihilistic tendencies.

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No, it's a fair point. Eucatastrophe is the means by which the happy ending is affected.

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I think we have to remind ourselves from time to time that On Fairy Stories was published long before Lord of the Rings and so should not be read as a defense of it. And I think that by the time Tolkien got to the end of LOTR he had learned something that he didn't know when he wrote On Fairy Stories.

Let me step back and suggests that there are four kinds of endings, not two. There are the two that recognize the moral order of the universe, the comic and the tragic, and the two that deny it, which are the erotic (life is meaningless but ends in pleasure) and the chaotic (life is meaningless and ends in pain).

But, of course, if you don't acknowledge the moral order of the universe and look only at the physical aspect of life, you recognize that there are no final erotic endings. You may transit through the erotic, but real endings are chaotic.

Comedy is the story that acknowledges the moral order of the universe and ends in joy. Tragedy is the story that acknowledges the moral order of the universe but ends in sorrow, as least in the present world. But as far as this life is concerned, the comic ending is as transitory as the erotic. It all ends in tragedy, and our hope is in the next life. And this leads us to what is in many ways the noblest of endings, the redemptive tragedy.

And I think that by the time Tolkien was wrapping up the end of The Return of the King, much of which is comic in tone (and the slightest and most eccentric part of the work) that he must have realized that there could be no comic ending for Frodo. His redemptive sacrifice has come at the expense of a wound that will not heal (a not uncommon fairytale motif) and he cannot return to the life he set out to preserve in his beloved shire. He must go to the Gray Havens and pass over the sea. To have healed Frodo, body and mind, would have been to cheapen all that had gone before. The dignity of tragedy can and sometimes must prevail in fairytales.

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It's not a sorrowful ending, any more than it ends in joy. Bittersweet, in that Samwise has lost his friend, and Frodo has lost his home, but both have kept some things.

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That's a fair distinction. Part of me wants to say that tragedy, or sorrow, are always bittersweet, because they mourn for a great loss made to gain a great victory. But it would also be fair to say that the ending is bittersweet in a compound sense, that Frodo's ending is bitter and Sam's ending in sweet. And when all it said and done, we really don't care about the return of the king or the defeat of Sauron. What we actually care about are Frodo and Sam. And Frodo's ending is bitter, and Sam's ending is sweet, and so it is fair to say that then ending of the whole is bittersweet.

And I will also say that the Grey Havens and Sam's return home save the book for me, because it loses me after the destruction of the ring, and if we did not have those two scenes to end it, I would have been left with a bitter taste in my mouth.

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Frodo has the consolation of knowing he saved Middle-Earth for Sam and the others, and also there will be some refuge in the West.

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Yes, and that raises another interesting distinction, between he heroic tragic sacrifice of Frodo, which has the consolations you mention, and the tragedy of Macbeth, which is not heroic, but is not chaotic either, because Macbeth acknowledges the moral order of the universe but fails to follow it. So there is both the consoling tragedy and the unconsoling tragedy. Some pondering is required to decide if the unconsoling tragedy can also occur in a fairytale. I'm inclined to point to The Once and Future King to claim that it can. But then we might just end up arguing about definitions.

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It's a fair point. Frodo had gone through a lot and to erase that with an overly happy ending would have denied the evil of evil, I think, too. Evil does leave a scar at least here on this Earth. Frodo had to sale to a sort of Heaven to find peace.

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Did you save the DEM passage for another essay?

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It was haphazard enough that I did not. No great loss I'm afraid.

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Oct 23Liked by Clifford Stumme

Thanks for another well-thought summary and analysis! I think On Fairy Stories is very useful to understand Tolkien's work, but I wonder more and more about about its usefulness in a wider sense. I have nothing against happy endings and I'm not a grimdark fantasy fan--I prefer fantasy that enables at least a moment of transcendence, but I'm not sure that requires a happy ending to occur. Of course I'm not Christian, so I cannot truly align myself with the worldview that suggests that happy endings are realistic because they reflect the "true" story of the Christian narrative. If it works for you, then wonderful. But there are other worldviews and moral structures (or lack of them) that the toolbox of fantasy can be used to explore, some that come with happy endings and some that don't. Fantasy isn't one kind of story but an aesthetic or mode that can be used to tell all kinds of stories, and Tolkien's narrow perspective (in OFS) just doesn't resonate with me anymore.

After spending the last few weeks engaged with OFS and your and Eric's essays, I find myself wondering, do we even need a philosophy of fantasy anyway? Why do we fantasists keep feeling the need to defend our chosen mode of storytelling by demonstrating how it serves some greater purpose? Do other genres engage in this kind of apologia -- I'm asking seriously, because I really have never read much lit crit about other genres. I feel like it's time we just tell the world, "We're writing about elves! Get over it!"

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Oct 23Liked by Clifford Stumme

BTW, I hope you'll continue to explore these kinds of essays (despite my asking if we even need them). I'd love to see an exploration of Le Guin's essays, or perhaps China Mieville's critique of Tolkien.

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Thanks! I didn't know CM had one. I will check it out.

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Totally off the cuff here, but I wonder how much of it comes down to the types of people who enjoy fantasy - it seems like there's a solid streak of us who just enjoy the deep dives and analysis, maybe not so much that we are defending the genre from others, but making sense of it for ourselves?

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Also, romance. Romance is the other genre that engages in this kind of apologia.

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That's a really great point. I know I have written a few "why I love fantasy" essays myself, and I am very self-analytical. I may not think fantasy needs defending, but I do want to know why I like it so much more than "normal" fiction!

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Exactly! It's so satisfying.

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All great thoughts here. Thanks, Stace. A few thoughts in response:

I do agree that the Fantasy genre has expanded since Tolkien's time and includes a lot more themes and ideas than he maybe even thought possible. I balk at the idea of calling it an aesthetic mode when I think of it more as a ideologically or philosophically aligned genre. Personally, I think currently Fantasy is most useful for taking things from our world and exploring them in a different context--usually themes or values.

For me, the reason I want a philosophy of fantasy is that I want accountability that what I'm writing and reading has value or what Le Guin calls "moral resonance." I LOVE the genre and all the ideas behind it, but I really want what I read/write to have eternal significance to individual human souls in the same way that Lord of the Rings will continue to impact me for as long as I can remember it. So for me, a philosophy of fantasy is more like a gold standard or a self-policing and only secondarily a defense of the value.

Just my thoughts, but I understand we're coming from different perspectives, and I think there's a lot of value in starting a story with a fun premise and just seeing where it goes.

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The tale of Turin Turamber gives the Game of Thrones a run for its money.

Tolkien did not deny or even fail to write tragic stories, he just didn't think they were the whole story.

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Good point. And, yep, just a cropped image.

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I loved this post. Tolkien imbued fantasy and adventure with transcendence. The reader was allowed to infer powers beyond the visible world, that there was a creative good moving through Middle Earth and its beings. I guess my favorite quote is the following from The Return of the King ( I pasted from Goodreads for convenience)

“PIPPIN: I didn't think it would end this way.

GANDALF: End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.

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BOOM! I should have included that...

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There are a lot of elevated moments in the trilogy but that one always stayed with me.

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Oct 24Liked by Clifford Stumme

Loved this post! 'Happy Endings are as real as reality gets because God made the world to end happily.' Hooray!

You said you didn't want to get into the difference between 'eucatastrophe' and 'deus ex machina', but I'd love to read what you have to say on that. I wonder if 'eucatastrophe' works by Aslan's 'deeper magic' - that is, it's drawing on something greater that's already in the story world...

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Thanks for reading!

The basic difference is that eucatastrophes are still earned and DEM just isn’t. Eucatastrophe will feel like a possibility or at least after it happens, we’ll see how it was a possibility. The Gondorians maybe gave up on the Rohirrim showing up, but we get to see how the Rohirrim rode really hard and pushed themselves and their horses to make it in time. We knew Gandalf was going for help, but we didn’t know if those in Helms Deep would last until then.

Yeah, I think Aslan’s deeper magic can be seen as an agent of eucatastrophe too.

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You cannot compare the spoof-Hulk beat down of Loki to the grandeur of the Eucatastrophes of Tolkien's Legendarium. Seriously, the Hulk thing was typical cringe MCU nonsense meant to undermine the idea of a villain being an actual threat.

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Definitely miles apart. As a casual MCU fan (who stopped bothering after Endgame), I haven’t stayed up on the criticism or what’s going on. MCU movies are made for a very young audience, so I could see someone arguing that the Hulk/Loki moment is a dumbed down version of what eucatastrophe is supposed to be.

But you’re right. It leaves the question of “Why didn’t we just feed Loki to Hulk in the first place?”

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Hahahaha thanks, I’m completely um MCU dumb, I don’t see the appeal and find the stuff dull as dishwater. So I think I was undully harsh, and felt quite guilty to-day as I went about my errands and my Driver’s test. Sorry for that.

Your essay really was awesome.

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Nah, you're good. If no one's calling me out on stuff, then I have to spend the whole time wondering what I got wrong. And not knowing makes me uneasy because I know there's something somewhere. You made a good point. I appreciate the feedback and respect the fervor.

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Anytime, still though your essays are really good, can’t wait to finish on Faerie Stories to type up a contribution to you and Eric’s essays.

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Yes! Excited to read it.

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Tolkien died a long time before anime started going global but his writings explain why so many Christians love Dragon Ball even though the cosmology and philosophy is based on Buddhism. Buddhism is very similar to Christianity, both stressing forgiveness and compassion.

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Cynicism has chopped its dick off and now identifies as lady Wisdom

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That is a lot to unpack.

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Oct 24Liked by Clifford Stumme

really enjoyed this series! Well done!

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Thanks so much!

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