Relative Powers

[Aiwendil]

Certainly in M-e its true that 'evil choices lead to self-defeat, whereas self-sacrificing choices lead to victory', but is that true in the primary world? Certainly we would all wish it to be the case, but how many of us can say it reflects our everyday experience?

Yet this begs a further question - if the 'primary' world is not (as our experience suggests) a place where goodness & compassion ultimately win out, why do we respond so strongly to a world that is so 'out of touch' with our experience? Where does our innate sense that the way things work in M-e is 'right' & the way things seem to be in the 'real' world is wrong or 'faulty' come from?

Interesting questions. However, I don't think that Tolkien would have seen Middle-earth as fundamentally different from the 'primary' world in this regard. It is an over-simplification to say that in Middle-earth 'evil choices lead to self-defeat, whereas self-sacrificing choices lead to victory'. Yes, this is true to an extent - but it does not mitigate the Long Defeat. Self-sacrifice does not always lead to victory, and indeed it seems that the forces of good are doomed to lose in the end - at least within the world.

But insofar as the victory that arises from self-sacrifice is the 'eucatastrophe' of the story, I think Tolkien would say that it does accurately represent the real world. Tolkien thought that the eucatastrophe was a true 'glimpse of the Evangelium'.