What's a "eucatastrophe" anyway?

Our chapter this week (Err, August 10th) is called "Mount Doom", and is the climax of our whole text.  Every chapter has led us to this point.  Frodo has brought the Ring to Mount Doom to destroy it.  He enters the mountain, which is pitch black inside except when the lava shoots up from below to light the cavern.  With this ominous setting Sam watches as Frodo stands at the edge of the walkway, directly over the lava.  And then Frodo says:

"I have come, but I do not choose to do what I came to do.

I will not do this deed.  The Ring is mine!"

And suddenly, as he set it on his finger, he vanished from Sam's sight.

 

It's a complete disaster.  Frodo claims the Ring, and we are told Sauron becomes aware of Frodo's presence, and the Nazgûl begin a "last desperate race" to retrieve the Ring.  Sam is stunned by this turn of events, and then knocked on the head by a rock.

 

Gollum has returned.

 

When Sam comes to, he sees Gollum floating in the air near the edge of the precipice, swaying this way and that.  Then he hears a loud crack, and Frodo reappears and falls to the ground.  Gollum lands on his feet and holds the Ring (still on Frodo's finger) and celebrates his victory.

And with that, even as his eyes were lifted up to gloat on his prize,

he stepped too far, toppled, wavered for a moment on the brink, and then

with a shriek he fell.  Out of the depths came his last wail "Precious," and he was gone.

The Ring is destroyed.  The struggle is over.  Sauron is defeated.

But let's look closely at how?  The Creative Wizard's own word for this type of event is a eucatastrophe.  What is a eucatastrophe?  The easiest way to understand it is to look at stress and eustress.  Eustress is the type of stress that motivates you, not overwhelms you.  Linguistically "Eu," Is a prefix meaning "good."

A catastrophe is an event wherein everything goes wrong.  Suddenly and terribly.  Suddenly is the key phrase here.  A eucatastrophe is where everything is going wrong, but suddenly there is such a reversal of fortune that, in fact, things turn out alright.  "It is always darkest before the dawn," is the (non-sensical) phrase that comes to mind (Note:  The discussion within that link is fantastically (and unnecessarily) detailed.  Enjoy at your own risk).

Pippin is being crushed by a troll.  Gandalf, Aragorn and the others have been led to believe Frodo is dead.  Frodo claims the Ring.  Sauron is coming to take back what is his.  Sam has been knocked to the ground.  Gollum attacks Frodo and takes the Ring.  How could things get worse?  Sauron's victory is nearly assured.

And then Gollum, lost in his celebration, accidentally falls off into the lava.  No one pushes him.  Gollum just falls.  No one could have seen it coming.  It's arguably not a very good plot device.  It isn't as if, to this point, we have seen other moments of Gollum's missteps.  In fact, he is has been shown to be very good at climbing.  Gollum, out of the blue, missteps and falls in.  The end.

Miraculous is a word that comes to mind.  Unbelievable, too.  For 10 months now we have read this text, following its plot carefully, which the Creative Wizard details greatly.  And now, at the climax, our heroes succeed due to a completely unpredictable turn of events, almost in spite of their own failures?  What’s the lesson here?

I think there are two.  First, hearkening to last week, the Ring plans and plots just as the free peoples do.  Every time Gandalf plans, the Ring has a chance to counter.  The Ring can twist those plans to its own will.  The Ring, we could choose to believe, bided its time while Frodo bore it, only to overwhelm his will in the heart of Mordor.  Otherwise, Frodo could have taken the Ring deep underground as Gollum has.  But by waiting until it was inside Mordor, the Ring could be assured Sauron would retrieve it.  Whether Gollum or Frodo left Mount Doom with the Ring, Sauron was going to get it from them.

But no one could have predicted Gollum’s fall.  It isn’t an event that could be planned for, and so there is no plan to twist.  Just as the oppressed must ensure their defiance doesn’t feed into a cycle of oppression, so only an accident can ensure the Ring’s destruction.

Widening our scope from the content of our text to the mind of our author (because within the context of the story it certainly seems too convenient to be believable) what was he thinking?  Having survived World War I, only to see World War II erupt mere decades after, we can understand Tolkien’s concern of a cycle of violence.  And if war is the true villain, and if war requires planning, then the only way to avoid war is by an act that cannot be planned.  But that doesn’t make for great stories.  We can imagine, in years after, when this tale becomes a common story among the people of Middle Earth, that this version will be lost in favor of a more dramatic version.  Frodo pushed Gollum, or the Nazgûl appeared in the cavern entrance, and Gollum panicked and fell in.  But sometimes things just... happen.

We all have experience with eucatastrophes, to one degree or another.  Everything goes wrong and seems to get worse and worse and worse but then, suddenly, everything gets better.  And because it is our life, we don’t do a good job of asking “why?”  We’re too relieved to wonder.  And if someone were to ask what happened, we’d either admit we don’t know, or we’d try to come up with a rationalization.  Neither makes more sense than the other.  There’s no good reason for Gollum to fall, and trying to invent one would be futile.  But it happened.  And maybe in our lives, looking for a reason why our fortune suddenly turned is futile.

We may never understand why the Creative Wizard decided to have the Ring come to such an anti-climactic end.  There are many good reasons we can come up with, but those say more about ourselves than the text.  That’s the beauty of this kind of text study.  We take a text, try to understand its original purpose, and then ultimately walk away with a lesson that is unique to us.