What an extraordinary thing, I thought; though Tolkien makes never so much as a glancing reference to Jesus Christ in a single paragraph of all The Lord of the Rings’ thick volumes, His face is glimpsed on virtually every page. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is the furthest thing from a religious tract, yet it proclaims a clear and winning gospel. In my narrow experience, I had never before encountered such a thing.48
CHAPTER 6
THE CREATION OF MIDDLE EARTH:
THE MYTH BEHIND THE MAN
Probably no book yet written in the world is quite such a radical instance of what its author has elsewhere called ‘sub-creation’. The direct debt (there are of course subtler kinds of debt) which every author must owe to the actual universe is here deliberately reduced to the minimum. Not content to create his own story, he creates, with an almost insolent prodigality, the whole world in which it is to move, with its own theology, myths, geography, history, palaeography, languages, and orders of beings—a world ‘full of strange creatures beyond count’.1
These words were written in 1954 by C.S. Lewis in his review of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume of The Lord of the Rings. Yet the ‘theology, myths, geography, history, palaeography, languages, and orders of beings’ did not originate in The Lord of the Rings but in an earlier work which was not actually published until after Tolkien’s death. This was The Silmarillion, the earliest versions of which dated back to 1917.
The Silmarillion delved deep into the past of Middle Earth, Tolkien’s sub-created world, and the legends recounted in its pages formed the vast landscape of myth within which The Lord of the Rings was born. Indeed, Tolkien’s magnum opus would not have been born at all if he had not first created, in The Silmarillion, the world, the womb, in which it was conceived.
The most important part of The Silmarillion is its account of the Creation of Middle Earth by the One. This Creation myth is perhaps the most significant, and the most beautiful, of all Tolkien’s work. It goes to the very roots of his creative vision and says much about Tolkien himself. Somewhere within the early pages of The Silmarillion is to be found both the man behind the myth and the myth behind the man.
The ‘myth’ behind Tolkien was, of course, Catholic Christianity, the ‘True Myth’, and it is scarcely surprising that Tolkien’s own version of the Creation in The Silmarillion bears a remarkable similarity to the Creation story in the book of Genesis.
According to T.A. Shippey in The Road to Middle Earth, a similarity with ‘the history of Genesis’ was the ‘most obvious fact about the design of The Silmarillion’.2 Shippey compares Tolkien’s Creation myth with ‘a summary list of doctrines of the Fall of Man common to Milton, to St Augustine, and to the Church as a whole’ which C.S. Lewis had given in chapter ten of A Preface to Paradise Lost. Most of these reappeared with little change in The Silmarillion:
Thus Lewis asserts that ‘God created all things without exception good’,—in Tolkien even Melkor begins with good intentions (p. 18). ‘What we call bad things are good things perverted. . . This perversion arises when a conscious creature becomes more interested in itself than in God. . . the sin of Pride’; compare Melkor in the music of the Ainur seeking ‘to increase the power and glory of the part assigned to himself. Lewis again, ‘whoever tries to rebel against God produces the result opposite to his intention. . . those who will not be God’s sons become his tools’: and Ilúvatar to Melkor, ‘no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me. . . he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined’.3
Shippey concludes that the remarkable similarity between Lewis’s and Tolkien’s approach suggests that they probably ‘collaborated in their analysis of Christian essentials’. This is not the case. Not only did Tolkien compose his Creation myth before Lewis wrote A Preface to Paradise Lost, but the doctrines present in The Silmarillion were merely an expression of the orthodox Christian theology on which Tolkien had been reared since childhood. He had no need to collaborate with Lewis in order to incorporate Catholic teaching into his writing.
Shippey was more perceptive in his belief that Tolkien was careful to ensure that his own Creation myth did not contradict the account in Genesis:
Is it a rival to Christian story? The thought clearly occurred to Tolkien, if only to be repudiated. Significantly he left a gap in The Silmarillion, or designed a dovetail, for the Fall of Man as described in the Old Testament. In his work the human race does not originate ‘on stage’ in Beleriand, but drifts into it, already sundered in speech, from the East. There something terrible has happened to them of which they will not speak: ‘A darkness lies behind us. . . and we have turned our backs on it’ (p. 141). Furthermore they have met ‘the Lord of the Dark’ before they meet the Elves; Morgoth went to them before they were created, to ‘corrupt or destroy’. Clearly one can, if one wishes, assume that the exploit of Morgoth of which the Eldar never learnt was the traditional seduction of Adam and Eve by the serpent, while the incoming Edain and Easterlings are all sons of Adam flying from Eden and subject to the curse of Babel. The Silmarillion, then, tells the story of the fall and partial redemption of the elves, without contradicting the story of the Fall and Redemption of Man.4
Tolkien’s totally orthodox understanding of the Fall and Redemption of Man was deeply coloured by his philosophy of myth. This was evident in the poignancy of his view of Genesis in general and Eden in particular in a letter to his son Christopher on 30 January 1945:
As for Eden. I think most Christians. . . have been rather bustled and hustled now for some generations by the self-styled scientists, and they’ve sort of tucked Genesis into a lumber-room of their mind as not very fashionable furniture, a bit ashamed to have it about the house, don’t you know, when the bright clever young people called: I mean, of course, even the fideles who did not sell it secondhand or burn it as soon as modern taste began to sneer. In consequence they have. . . forgotten the beauty of the matter even ‘as a story’. Lewis recently wrote a most interesting essay. . . showing of what great value the ‘story-value’ was, as mental nourishment. . . It was a defence of that kind of attitude which we tend to sneer at: the fainthearted that loses faith, but clings at least to the beauty of ‘the story’ as having some permanent value. His point was that they do still in that way get some nourishment and are not cut off wholly from the sap of life: for the beauty of the story while not necessarily a guarantee of its truth is a concomitant of it, and a fidelis is meant to draw nourishment from the beauty as well as the truth. . . But partly as a development of my own thought on my lines of work (technical and literary), partly in contact with C.S.L., and in various ways not least the firm guiding hand of Alma Mater Ecclesia, I do not now feel either ashamed or dubious on the Eden ‘myth’. It has not, of course, historicity of the same kind as the NT, which are virtually contemporary documents, while Genesis is separated by we do not know how many sad exiled generations from the Fall, but certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of ‘exile’.5
The Eden ‘myth’ was at the very heart of Tolkien’s creation of The Silmarillion, as well as being at the very heart of the Creation myth contained within it. Tolkien’s longing for this lost Eden and his mystical glimpses of it, inspired and motivated by his sense of ‘exile’ from the fullness of truth, was the source of his creativity. At the core of The Silmarillion, indeed at the core of all his work, was a hunger for the truth that transcends mere facts: the infinite and eternal Reality which was beyond the finite and temporal perceptions of humanity.
The deep theology behind the Creation Myth at the start of The Silmarillion was discussed by Brian Rosebury in Tolkien: A Critical Assessment:
Ainulindalë, the Elves’ version of Genesis, seems to me a success: its central image, the world
as a Great Music made visible, its history a fulfilment of creative purposes which proceed both directly from God and mediately from him, through the sub-creativity of created beings, is elaborately worked out and represents a profound meditation on the Augustinian theology, its address to the problem of evil and its account of the contingency of temporal existence. And its prose is at once appropriately ‘scriptural’ and distinctive of Tolkien.6
Not surprisingly, Tolkien’s ‘profound meditation on Augustinian theology’ has found many admirers among the Christian clergy. The Jesuit, Father Robert Murray, a friend of Tolkien’s, alluded to the ‘biblical’ nature of Tolkien’s Creation myth:
The Bible contains traces of various poetic creation myths besides the accounts in Genesis, especially in Job and the Psalms. But in all literatures since the formation of the sacred books of humankind surely there is hardly a creation myth to equal, in beauty and imaginative power, the one with which The Silmarillion begins. Here Tolkien projected his idea of sub-creation back to the beginning of all things, and conceived it in terms of music. Ilúvatar, the One, first created the Ainur, ‘the Holy Ones. . . the offspring of his thought’, and proposed themes for them to make music on. At last he called a halt, and then revealed that this music, both in its beauty and in the discords which had arisen within it, formed the archetypes and ‘script’ for a whole world and its history.7
Father Murray’s view was echoed by another Jesuit, Father James V. Schall, who told a friend, ‘I have never read anything quite so beautiful as the first page of The Silmarillion, the chapter entitled, “Ainulindalë: The Music of the Ainur.’ ”8 Father Schall not only liked to read the opening lines of The Silmarillion but to have them read aloud, echoing Rosebury’s view that the prose was ‘appropriately scriptural’:
There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made. And he spoke to them themes of music; and they sang before him, and he was glad.9
A more whimsical view of Tolkien’s Creation myth is provided by Richard Jeffery, a leading member of the C.S. Lewis Society who has made a life-long study of Tolkien. Jeffery had met Tolkien in 1956, soon after the third volume of The Lord of the Rings had been published, and they discussed The Silmarillion. At the time, Tolkien had recently resumed work on it. More than forty years later, Jeffery remains convinced of the book’s merits:
I am rather fond of The Silmarillion. . . the idea that God allows the archangels to take part in the Creation. . . It strikes me that his picture of the archangels is surprisingly like small children with their father, rather trying to get the advantage over each other. Also, the one who rebels is rather like a child who refuses to co-operate in the making of grand sand castles. . . so is told not to join in. . . He responds by trying to smash them up. Of course because the Valar are immortal they can’t really do anything to each other so they can only smash up each other’s creation. All of this is the background to The Lord of the Rings as having been created by the archangels, the Valar, under the direction of the One.10
Jeffery’s one crucial sin of omission in this amusing rendition of Tolkien’s Creation myth was his failure to stress that Elves and Men, known together as the Children of Ilúvatar, were not created by the Valar, or the Ainur, but by the One directly. Describing the Ainur at the beginning of The Silmarillion, Tolkien wrote:
The Ainur know much of what was, and is, and is to come, and few things are unseen by them. Yet some things there are that they cannot see, neither alone nor taking counsel together,—for to none but to himself has Ilúvatar revealed all that he has in store, and in every age there come forth things that are new and have no foretelling, for they do not proceed from the past. And so it was that as this vision of the world was played before them, the Ainur saw that it contained things which they had not thought. And they saw with amazement the coming of the Children of Ilúvatar, and the habitation that was prepared for them; and they perceived that they themselves in the labour of their music had been busy with the preparation of this dwelling, and yet knew not that it had any purpose beyond its own beauty. For the Children of Ilúvatar were conceived by him alone; and they came with the third theme, and were not in the theme which Ilúvatar propounded at the beginning, and none of the Ainur had part in their making. Therefore when they beheld them, the more did they love them, being things other than themselves, strange and free, wherein they saw the mind of Ilúvatar reflected anew, and learned yet a little more of his wisdom, which otherwise had been hidden even from the Ainur.11
Tolkien then states that ‘amid all the splendours of the World, its vast halls and wheeling fires’, Ilúvatar chose a place for the habitation of his Children ‘in the Deeps of Time and in the midst of the innumerable stars’.12 Thus, in a feat of ingenious invention, or sub-creation, Tolkien not only distinguishes Men and Elves as being made directly ‘in the image of God’, essentially different from the rest of Creation, but at the same time accommodates the theory of evolution. The evolution of the cosmos was simply the unfolding of the Music of the Ainur within which the One places his Children in a habitation prepared for them. The enormity of the concept, and its apparent paradox, was addressed by Tolkien in words of poignant mysticism: ‘this habitation might seem a little thing to those who consider only the majesty of the Ainur, and not their terrible sharpness’.13
In a similar feat of ingenuity, Tolkien explains that the Valar, the angelic powers given the responsibility of shaping the cosmos, have often been called ‘gods’ by Men.14 In this way he manages to accommodate paganism as well as evolution within his mythology, making both subsist within Christian orthodoxy.
Following his whimsical exposition of Tolkien’s Creation myth, Richard Jeffery added, more seriously, ‘I think Tolkien and Lewis would have both said that God’s relationship with the world is very complex, good and evil are very complex.’15 Doubtless they would have, but they would not have allowed the complexity to become an excuse for sophistry. For both Tolkien and Lewis the explanation of good and evil was to be found in orthodox Christian teaching. In fact, for all Tolkien’s much publicized disdain for allegory, there is no mistaking his allegorical treatment of the Christian doctrine of the Fall in The Silmarillion. Melkor, later known as Morgoth, is Middle Earth’s equivalent of Lucifer, also known as Satan. Melkor is described by Tolkien as ‘the greatest of the Ainur’ as Lucifer was the greatest of the archangels. Like Lucifer, Melkor is the embodiment and the ultimate source of the sin of pride, intent on corrupting mankind for his own purposes. Melkor desired ‘to subdue to his will both Elves and Men, envying the gifts with which Ilúvatar promised to endow them; and he wished himself to have subjects and servants, and to be called Lord, and to be master over other wills’.16
The allegory becomes even less mistakable when Tolkien describes the war between Melkor and Manwë, who is clearly cast in the role of the archangel Michael:
When therefore Earth was yet young and full of flame Melkor coveted it, and he said to the other Valar: ‘This shall be my own kingdom,—and I name it unto myself!’
But Manwë was the brother of Melkor in the mind of Ilúvatar, and he was the chief instrument of the second theme that Ilúvatar had raised up against the discord of Melkor; and he called unto himself many spirits both greater and less, and they came down into the fields of Arda and aided Manwë, lest Melkor should hinder the fulfilment of their labour for ever, and Earth should wither ere it flowered. And Manwë said unto Melkor: ‘This kingdom thou shalt not take for thine own, wrongfully, for many others have laboured here no less than thou.’ And there was strife between Melkor and the other Valar; and for that time Melkor withdrew and departed to other regions and did there what he would; but he did not put the desire of the Kingdom of Arda from his heart.17
The parallels between Melkor and Lucifer are made even more apparent when Tolkien explains that the name, Melkor, means ‘He who arises
in Might’—‘But that name he has forfeited; and the Noldor, who among the Elves suffered most from his malice, will not utter it, and they name him Morgoth, the Dark Enemy of the World.’18 Similarly, Lucifer, brightest of all the angels, means ‘Light Bringer’, whereas Satan, like ‘Morgoth’, means ‘Enemy’. Tolkien’s intention, both as a Christian and as a philologist, in identifying Melkor with Lucifer is plain enough.
Taking his inspiration, no doubt, from the Book of Isaiah (‘Thy pomp is brought down to the grave, and the noise of thy viols: the worm is spread under thee, and the worms cover thee. How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning’ (Isaiah 14:11-12)), Tolkien says of Melkor:
From splendour he fell through arrogance to contempt for all things save himself, a spirit wasteful and pitiless. Understanding he turned to subtlety in perverting to his own will all that he would use, until he became a liar without shame. He began with the desire of Light, but when he could not possess it for himself alone, he descended through fire and wrath into a great burning, down into Darkness. And darkness he used most in his evil works upon Arda, and filled it with fear for all living things.19
As well as the scriptural influence, the other over-riding influence, as discussed already, is clearly Augustinian theology. Evil, as symbolized by darkness, has no value of its own but is only a negation of that which is good, as symbolized by light.
Shortly after this description of Melkor, Tolkien introduces Sauron, the Dark Enemy in The Lord of the Rings. Sauron is described as a ‘spirit’ and as the ‘greatest’ of Melkor’s, alias Morgoth’s, servants: ‘But in after years he rose like a shadow of Morgoth and a ghost of his malice, and walked behind him on the same ruinous path down into the Void.’20
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