¹ Russell, Bertrand, “A Free Man's Worship” in Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Edwards, Paul (ed.) (New York: Touchstone, 1957), 112Google Scholar.

² Tolkien describes history as a “long defeat” in letter dated December 15^th, 1956 (see The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Carpenter, Humphrey (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), p. 255)Google Scholar. Pearce, Joseph cites this letter in his Tolkien: Man and Myth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998), p. 148Google Scholar, and my use of the phrase is influenced by his.

³ Tolkien, J.R.R., “Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics” in Beowulf: a Verse Translation, translated by Heaney, Seamus, edited by Donoghue, Daniel, (New York: Norton, 2002), p. 119Google Scholar.

⁴ Tolkien, J.R.R., “On Fairy‐Stories” in The Tolkien Reader, Introduced by Beagle, Peter (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966), p. 86Google Scholar.

⁵ Rolland Hein speaks the experience of kairos time, the transcendent time in which God dwells and in which successive, chronological time seems to stand still for a heartbeat or two; see his Christian Mythmakers (Chicago: Cornerstone Press, 1998), p. 4Google Scholar.

⁶ Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 496Google Scholar.

⁷ There are exceptions: Martha Nussbaum draws on the novels of Henry James and others in exploring possibilities for a meaningful moral life (see her Love's Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar), while Daniel Dennett blends the existentialist and analytic projects, explicitly endorsing Nietzsche's call to affirm the purposeless universe, but is also concerned to argue that modern notions of morality and meaning can be preserved in it (See his Darwin's Dangerous Idea (New York: Touchstone, 1996)Google Scholar, especially the closing few chapters).

⁸ Let me just note that, in the foregoing, I do not take myself to have provided anything like an airtight argument that metaphysical naturalism cannot provide a satisfactory account of the meaning of life. Rather, I have just tried to argue that such a project would be at least very difficult (and maybe futile), and to suggest that what appears to be the general movement of secular academic thought away from such a project seems to indicate a widespread recognition of this (perhaps without as widespread recognition of what I think are its unhappy implications).

⁹ Characters in Tolkien's stories facing immanent death often express a hope to go out in a manner worthy of a song of remembrance – they hope also that those songs will be sung. And in Tolkien's world, unlike Russell's, they will be.

¹⁰ Leaf by Niggle in The Tolkien Reader, pp. 119‐120.

¹¹ This seems to be the emerging consensus of careful critical attention. In addition to secondary sources already cited, see for example Understanding the Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism, edited by Isaacs, Neil and Zimbardo, Rose (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004)Google Scholar; Shippey, Tom, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002)Google Scholar; Woods, Ralph, The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle‐Earth (London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003)Google Scholar; and Dickerson, Matthew, Following Gandalf: Epic Battles and Moral Victory in The Lord of the Rings (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

¹² Birzer, Bradley, J.R.R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2003), p. 58Google Scholar.

¹³ I largely agree with Thomas Hibbs's reading of Tolkien on Divine Providence in his “Providence and the Dramatic Unity of The Lord of the Rings” in The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy, edited by Bassham, Gregory and Bronson, Eric (Chicago: Open Court, 2003)Google Scholar, although he does not call attention to Frodo's (self‐fulfilling?) prediction (in fact, to my knowledge, this point has not been made by any commentator).

¹⁴ Tolkien, J.R.R., The Lord of the Rings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994)Google Scholar, Book IV, c. III, p. 626. All references are to this edition, which has the pages numbered continuously throughout the trilogy.

¹⁵ J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy‐Stories” in The Tolkien Reader, p. 86.

¹⁶ The qualifier “in the Fallen world” is important, because it ensures that Dante's Divine Comedy, which is about human life beyond the Fallen world, is not the massive counterexample it might otherwise be. I say might, for perhaps it does take this form. Or perhaps it would be wiser to say that Dante is right (of course!) that his work is a comedy, and also grant that the human condition taken absolutely is best represented by comedy, but hold that that small but vital part of the human condition embracing our journey through the Fallen world is best represented by the eucatastrophic story, now seen as a sub‐genre of comedy – tragedy baptized is also comedy‐in‐hope.

¹⁷ This list, obviously enough, includes only 20^th Century English‐language works. I believe the list could be expanded in both dimensions in ways that would support my thesis (here I have in mind, e.g., Jane Austen's novels and Georges Bernanos's The Diary of a Country Priest), but a more thorough historical investigation of my claim is not undertaken here. Let me note, however, that the eucatastrophic is not limited to fiction: Consider for example the narrative history of Christopher Dawson, for instance in his second set of Gifford Lectures (Religion and the Rise of Western Culture): there he concludes with the decline of the medieval civilization, yet noting that it has wrought a permanent, and positive, change in the soul of man. Or again, Alasdair MacIntyre's characterization in After Virtue of the moral life as a quest susceptible to tragedy – a characterization later amended so as to portray the moral life as a pilgrimage: “The moral progress of the plain person is always the beginnings of a pilgrim's progress.” (see his “Plain Persons and Moral Philosophy” in The MacIntyre Reader, edited by Knight, Kelvin (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), p. 152Google Scholar

¹⁸ Gioia, Dana, “The Litany” in Interrogations at Noon (St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 2001), p. 11Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Or at least potentially non‐final: Theism leaves open, in the form of Hell, the possibility of final tragic defeat and Augustine's second death: to adapt Léon Bloy's words, “The only tragedy in life is not to be a saint.”

²⁰ C.S. Lewis makes a similar point in an interview, reprinted in God in the Dock, edited by Hooper, Walter (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970); cf. p. 264Google Scholar.