“The peculiar quality of the ‘joy’ in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth….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….The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This 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 sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits….”
~J.R.R. Tolkien from “On Fairy Stories”
J.R.R. Tolkien writes of the delight of fairy stories, of glimpsing truth in fiction. He sees the fairy tale’s “eucatastrophe” or “sudden and favorable resolution of events in a story; a happy ending” as a foretaste (or backtaste, as it were) of the great turning points of human history: the Incarnation of Christ and His subsequent Resurrection.
I love how clearly that can be seen in George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin. The Princess and the Goblin is story, not allegory. Yet at every turn, it gives glimpses of something true, something beyond this world. And is that not what fairy tales ought to do? They ought to take us outside of our worlds such that we would see our world with new eyes and love truths that we did not cherish when stated propositionally.
Did you read The Princess and the Goblin along with the Reading to Know Classics Bookclub this last month? Check out the conclusion post at RTK to read the rest of my thoughts – and to link up your own!