Eucatastrophe
- “tolkien word for happy ending”
- “what is eucatastrophe”
- “the sudden turn in a story”
- “eucatastrophe meaning”
:: COMPARE ::
EucatastrophevsDeus ex machina
The short answer
Both are sudden rescues, and the difference is whether the story earned it. Deus ex machina arrives from outside the story's logic and cheapens what came before. Eucatastrophe is the rescue the story had made possible all along and the reader had stopped expecting.
Side by side
| Aspect | Eucatastrophe | Deus ex machina |
|---|---|---|
| Arrives from | Inside the story | Outside it |
| Reader feels | Pierced | Cheated |
| Requires despair first | Yes | No |
| Coined by | Tolkien | Greek stagecraft |
Which one you meant
Readers who land here meaning Eucatastrophe rather than Deus ex machina are usually searching for phrases like “tolkien word for happy ending”, “what is eucatastrophe”, “the sudden turn in a story”.
Deus Ex Machina
- “what is deus ex machina”
- “god from the machine meaning”
- “is deus ex machina bad writing”
- “deus ex machina examples”
Which came first
Deus ex machina. c. 335 BC — Aristotle, in the Poetics, insists the unravelling must come from the plot itself 'and not produced mechanically as in the Medea'.
- c. 335 BCDeus Ex MachinaAristotle, in the Poetics, insists the unravelling must come from the plot itself 'and not produced mechanically as in the Medea'.
- 8 March 1939EucatastropheTolkien delivers 'On Fairy-Stories' as the Andrew Lang Lecture at St Andrews; the essay is published in 1947.
Read either one in full