In a recent post I discussed JRR Tolkien’s brilliant 1947 essay on Fairy Stories. One of the many interesting terms he introduces is “eucatastrophe”.<\/p>\n
A eucatastrophe is something that happens quite often in fairy stories: It’s a sudden twist at the end, which makes everything turn out all right.<\/p>\n
I mentioned this the other day to somebody I know who is from the Commonwealth. She laughed when I explained to her the meaning of the word.<\/p>\n
I asked her why she found it so funny. She told me that these days you can parse the same word in an entirely different way.<\/p>\n
“Brexit,” she explained, “is an E.U. Catastrophe.”<\/p>\n
I can see her point. JRR Tolkien had a prodigious imagination, but even he could not have foreseen Boris Johnson.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In a recent post I discussed JRR Tolkien’s brilliant 1947 essay on Fairy Stories. One of the many interesting terms he introduces is “eucatastrophe”. A eucatastrophe is something that happens quite often in fairy stories: It’s a sudden twist at the end, which makes everything turn out all right. I mentioned this the other day … Continue reading “Eucatastrophe”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21635"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21635"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21635\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21636,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21635\/revisions\/21636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}