In J. R. R. Tolkien’s most famous lecture—“On Fairy-Stories”—he introduces a new word created to express what he calls the “highest function” of a fairy tale. The word is Eucatastrophe, and Tolkien uses it to describe “the Consolation of the Happy Ending,” declaring that “all complete fairy-stories must have it.”
The term Eucatastrophe gives a name to th…
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