Seth Dorman

For The Maine Campus

So far, all of Peter Jackson’s Tolkien-based films have opened just before Christmas. This upcoming Friday is no exception — “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” is opening. I doubt the studio has ever had many philosophical reasons for debuting the movies at this time — financial considerations have probably held highest priority — but nevertheless it is the most appropriate time of year for them; Tolkien had a close relationship to Christmas, both in cultural and philosophical ways.

It is not his most popular work, but every Christmas from 1920-1942, Tolkien wrote letters to his children from “Father Christmas,” placed them in envelopes complete with self-designed stamps from the North Pole, and left them in the mailbox. After his death, these letters were collected into a short work, “Letters From Father Christmas,” which has become a classic work of children’s Christmas literature.

However, it is “The Hobbit” and the “Lord of the Rings” that have the closest relationship with Christmas — not an explicit or cultural one, but a philosophical one. This connection is grounded in Tolkien’s view of fairy-stories. He was convinced that the best fairy-stories have an ending that is neither tragic nor comic, but one that appears to be impossibly hopeless that is suddenly intruded on by joy.

To describe this, Tolkien coined the term “eucatastrophe,” a sudden and unlooked-for turn from bad to worse. “The good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ … 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.”

It is this eucatastrophe that Tolkien saw as the ultimate source of beauty in his work — and this eucatastrophe which permeated his view of Christmas. He considered his sub-created fairy-story a reflection of the fairy-story of God: “The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels — peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: mythical in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe.

But this story has entered History and the primary world … The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. The story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the ‘inner consistency of reality.’ There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or wrath.”

He saw Christmas as the eucatastrophe of history, because in the Incarnation, God becomes man, entering the world to bring real life, reversing the Fall in the Garden of Eden, suffering, dying, and rising again to life. As the Gospel of John recounts: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” It is not too good to be true; it is too good not to be.

To close with the words of Tolkien, “It is not difficult to imagine the peculiar excitement and joy that one would feel, if any specially beautiful fairy-story were found to be ‘primarily’ true, its narrative to be history, without thereby necessarily losing the mythical or allegorical significance that it has possessed…The Christian joy, the Gloria, is of the same kind; but it is pre-eminently…high and joyous. But this story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men—and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused.”