J. R. R. Tolkien
1892 – 1973 · England
“The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.”
Tolkien resisted calling The Lord of the Rings an allegory, unlike his friend C. S. Lewis's more direct Narnia — but he described it, at its core, as “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.” Central to his thinking was a term he coined himself: “eucatastrophe,” the sudden joyous turn in a story that snatches victory from apparent defeat. He argued this wasn't just a literary device but something Christianity had made real, calling the Incarnation “the eucatastrophe of Man's history” and the Resurrection “the eucatastrophe of the Incarnation” — the one true story where the happy ending actually happened. That conviction runs through his fiction: Frodo ultimately fails to destroy the Ring himself, and it is only through Gollum's fall, made possible by the mercy Bilbo and Frodo had shown him earlier, that the quest succeeds at all — grace succeeding where willpower alone could not. It was this same argument, that the Gospel was “the true myth,” which Tolkien made to Lewis on a late-night walk at Oxford in 1931 — a conversation Lewis credited as pivotal in his own return to Christian faith.
Read more on Wikipedia ↗Portrait: British Army, 1916 · Public domain