The Secret of a Good Fairy Tale: Why did Tolkien value hope?
The Secret of a Good Fairy Tale: Why did Tolkien value hope?
By Jonny Thomson | Published: 2024-12-02 15:02:00 | Source: High Culture – Big Think
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This article was first published on Big Think in October 2023. It was updated in December 2024.
There are at least two versions of the story of Pandora’s Box. In the classic version by the Greek poet Hesiod, when Pandora’s curiosity got the better of her, she unleashed all manner of evil upon the world: disease, famine, death, and people asking questions at the end of the meeting. When Pandora finally closed the jar, she left only one “evil” inside: He hopes. For Hesiod, there is nothing crueler than hope. Hope is what compels us to continue to build, repair, and love when the world offers nothing but destruction, chaos, and heartbreak. This is what gets us up off the ground and then back down. Hope is the naivety of a fool. As Friedrich Nietzsche said: “Hope, indeed, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs man’s torment.”
Another variation of the Pandora’s Box story is a Greek tale called “Zeus and the Jar of Goodies.” In this calculation everything is upside down. The jar does not contain misery however good Things. When the “humans” (no Pandora in this version) opened the jar, they walked out and lost all that good stuff: things that would have made life heaven. When the lid was closed, only one divine blessing remained: “Only hope still exists among people.”
Author J. R. R. Tolkien and Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel would likely prefer the second version. After all, they reasoned, hope is perhaps the most important part of being human.
The disaster
Kurt Vonnegut is famous for writing novels such as Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s cradle. He is famous in storytelling circles for his “story shapes.” These were eight charts that defined the traditional arcs of popular stories, such as “boy meets girl” or “from bad to worse.” His fairytale story goes like this: things start out bad and then get a little better. But then a disaster occurs that destroys everything. The story ends with a radical reversal of fortunes – a turnaround and a magical ending – and everyone lives happily ever after.
Tolkien, if he were alive, would agree. For himUnfortunately, the single most important element of the fairy tale is this final dramatic twist. He coined the word “eucatastrophe” to describe it. “The consolation of fairy tales,” Tolkien wrote, “is the pleasure of a happy ending: or, more precisely, the good catastrophe, the delightfully surprising ‘twist’.” Lord of the Rings It doesn’t end with the hobbit’s death and Sauron’s gossip about his industrial orcish empire. It ends with the light that overcomes the darkness – with simple kindness, love, and companionship that triumphs over evil.
Raising the heart
Tolkien is very careful to make clear that this is not a form of escape. It is not the fulfillment of imaginary wishes. She doesn’t pretend that the world is an endlessly happy ode to singing dwarves and gentle wizards. The world is experiencing great suffering and misery, and there are plenty of nightmares to be found. However, the real catastrophe is “the joy of salvation; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) global final defeat.”
The purpose of a good fairy tale is not to hide the shadows of the world. The original Grimm’s fairy tales (Not the sanitized Disney versions) were full of infanticide, cannibalism and horror. Tolkien wrote that the mark of a good fairy tale, “…(is) however wonderful or terrible the adventures may be, they can give to the child or man who hears them, when ‘the turn’ comes, a breath-taking, a throbbing and a lifting of the heart, close to (or indeed accompanied by) tears.”
Hope is all we have
Religious overtones here are not accidental. Tolkien was a Catholic who was enamored of the redemption and grace found in biblical narratives. Marcel has not, as far as we know, read Tolkien, but his philosophy of hope bears striking similarities.
What Tolkien described as a true catastrophe, or final salvation, as Marcel called it He hopes. For Marcel, “Hope lies in affirming that at the heart of existence, behind all data, behind all stores, all calculations, there is a mysterious principle that conspires with me.”
Hope is belief in an order to the universe, an order in which everything will work out well enough. It is a kind of faith that simply refuses to accept that things are broken, or that misery, suffering, and death are all that there is. Marcel was a Christian, but his account of hope could apply to anyone. Cosmopolitan optimists are those who see that the universe is on their side. Against “all experience, all probabilities, all statistics,” they argue that “a certain order must be reestablished.” Hope is not a wish. It is not optimism or naivety. It’s confirmation. that it He says Scientist: “No, things won’t be this way, things will be better.” For both Marcel and Tolkien, only with hope can we banish despair.
You don’t bargain or beg for darkness. Like a burning torch, hope must shine bright and fierce.
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