"We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God." — J.R.R. Tolkien, Mythopoeia
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) is the great modern mythmaker — the writer who, in the age of the machine and the death of God, dared to create a complete mythological world and, in doing so, restored to millions of readers the experience of the sacred story that modernity had discarded.
Tolkien was a scholar of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, a philologist who loved languages as living things with histories, personalities, and hidden powers. He was a devout Roman Catholic who believed that the Gospel was the supreme "fairy-story" — the eucatastrophe that all other true stories dimly reflect. And he was a soldier who survived the Battle of the Somme and carried the memory of that devastation into everything he wrote.
His life's work — The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and the vast body of unfinished mythology published after his death — constitutes the most ambitious act of literary sub-creation in modern history.
Sub-Creation: The Theology of the Artist
Tolkien's most important contribution to the philosophy of art is the concept of sub-creation. In his essay On Fairy-Stories, he argues that the human being, made in the image of the Creator, possesses a derived right and power to create secondary worlds — worlds that, while not "real" in the primary sense, reflect the light of the Primary World and participate in the truth of creation.
The "escape" of the fairy-story is not the flight of the deserter but the escape of the prisoner — the refusal to accept the walls of the prison as the final reality. The sub-creator who builds a world where eucatastrophe is possible is performing an act of resistance against despair and an act of faith in the ultimate goodness of creation.
"The eucatastrophe is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function… it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat." — J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories
Eucatastrophe — the sudden joyous turn, the unexpected salvation at the moment of greatest darkness — is what happened (and happens in eternity) in Christ’s Resurrection. It is the moment when all seems lost and then, by grace, is not.
Secondary World
A secondary world - a world that exists only within the mind.
The Silmarillion: The Myth of Creation and Fall
The Silmarillion — Tolkien's unpublished mythology, the work he laboured on for his entire life — begins with the Ainulindalë: the Music of the Ainur, in which God (Ilúvatar) creates the world through song. Each angelic being contributes a theme to the Great Music, and from that Music, the world takes shape.
But Melkor — the mightiest of the Ainur — introduces a discord. He desires to create on his own terms, to dominate the Music with his own theme. This is the Fall: the primal act of separation, the ego's assertion against the divine harmony. And from that discord, all the sorrow and beauty of the world flows.
The Silmarillion then traces the long history of the Elves and their wars against Morgoth (Melkor incarnate) — a history of heroism, tragedy, hubris, loss, and the persistent hope that the Music will one day be made whole.
The Lord of the Rings:
“Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic ‘progress’ leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.”
J.R.R. Tolkien
Within the Royal Art Opus
Tolkien is the bard who proved that the sacred story is not dead — that in the modern age, despite everything, the great myths can still be told and still be true. His concept of sub-creation is the Bardic Art articulated as a theology: the artist as a participant in the ongoing act of divine creation, making secondary worlds that reflect the light of the Primary World.
The Ainulindalë is a creation myth that resonates with the Music of the Spheres, with the Pythagorean harmony, with the Kabbalistic understanding of creation through divine speech. Melkor's discord is the Fall. The wars of the Silmarillion are the Trials. Frodo's journey is the Quest. The destruction of the Ring is the Crucifixion of the false self — the renunciation of power. And the Grey Havens — where Frodo sails into the West, healed but changed forever — is the translation beyond the mortal world: Atonement, the passage to the Kingdom that lies beyond the circles of the world.