eucatastrophe: piercing joy that brings tears

[littlemanpoet]

I still haven't read through this entire thread over again, but the attempts at etymology were bugging me, so I did a little research. From the Greek:

A "strophe" is a Greek dramatic musical device such that the chorus (think of Shakespeare) turns from one side to the other.

A "cata-strophe" is therefore, in Greek drama, the down-turn in the plot, that is, the final disaster, so to speak.

cata-pult = down-throw
eu-calyptus = good-cover
eu-reka = good-find
eu-genics = good-genes
Eu-clid = good - what? geometer? - I don't know what 'clid' is - there are no Greek derived words in English that I know of, having this particular root.

Hmmm, I wonder about "european"? eu-rope = good - earth/land (I think) - which makes sense from a Greek's point of view.

And now for the big one that we all find so fascinating:

eu-cata-strophe = good-down-turn. It's a kind of contradiction in terms, and I'm sure Tolkien fully intended it that way; a good culmination.

What I find strange, however, is his (I think) subcreation of the other new word, 'dys-catastrophe':

dys = bad, so dys-cata-strophe = bad-down-turn.

What Tolkien has done is taken a former negative, 'catastrophe', and turned it into a neutral: 'down-turn'. By the way, neither eucatastrophe nor dyscatastrophe are to be found in my dictionary.

Well, I did all that for the sake of accuracy. But I'm interested in why Tolkien felt the need to do it. I think we've answered it in part already by talking about the alternative to the happy ending in fairy stories, on one hand, and the alternative to tragedy, ironic pessimism, and other things of that ilk. Why do you suppose one can't find the two words in a dictionary? (tongue firmly in cheek)

There is another piece of eucatastrophe that we have talked only indirectly about:

the denial (in the face of much evidence) of universal final defeat that catches the breath and lifts the heart...it depends on the whole story which is the setting of the turn, and yet it reflects the glory backwards.

This piece of Tolkien's definition (more accurately the explication of his definition) gives me pause in opening the concept up as widely as some on this post have. Okay, I get the sense that I'm beating a dead horse, but darn it, this concept is one that I treasure deeply and I don't want to think about it flabbily, nor am I willingly going to sit idly by and say nothing while others do (if they do). By the way, I'm still working on that end to dormancy thing - these things take time, do they not?