105 being unmoved in the face of darkness, evil, and all the perturbations sin has wrought in the world, good stories provide a way to escape to a different, truer reality: “Why should a man be scorned,” he says, “if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home?”15 Tolkien’s Christian perspective is that we are living in exile, longing for our true home in Eden. That is where the third effect of fairy stories comes in, which he labels Consolation. The consolation of the happy ending is something we long for, and which, when experienced, evokes an almost “amen” like response. Tolkien elaborates on the consoling effect by describing the way it is produced through “eucatastrophe’s”, or “sudden, joyous turns”: “It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the ‘turn’ comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality.”16 Tolkien’s wisdom for leaders is that good stories have a quality of nourishment. They enrich the one that will enter into them. Leadership will remain diminished if it only focuses on the usefulness of stories in pragmatic terms. The humanizing effect of stories is where the field of leadership has the most room to expand. There is more value in stories to leaders than simply providing character studies, which can be accomplished much easier anyway through reading biographies. The richer dimension of stories’ humanizing effect is in how they provide visualizations of the broad spectrum of life concerns, from how mythology and fantasy speak to world-building, to the way detective fiction focuses on motives and journey narratives on the importance of questing and adventure. Michael J. Urick’s recent book Leadership in Middle Earth uses the Lord of the Rings story as the basis for leadership study in Tolkien,17 which follows what Randall Colton argued for in his article proposing Tolkien’s work to be utilized as a model of leadership through the vein of literary study.18 Both of those works provide helpful connections between Tolkien and leadership, but instead of trying to provide anything systematic, I want to simply highlight two of the nuggets of wisdom I encountered in Tolkien’s letter corpus that “NOLO EPISCOPARI AND THE LEADERSHIP WISDOM OF J.R.R. TOLKIEN”
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