(avg. read time: 27–55 mins.)
“On Fairy-Stories” is certainly the richest source of Tolkien’s theology of sub-creation and it represents a continuation and development of “Mythopoeia” that would further solidify many of his convictions in this regard. While not as extensive or focused, over a dozen of his letters feature relevant material that draws from the wellspring of “On Fairy-Stories” or adds another element to it.1 These letters also contribute to the picture of Tolkien’s theology of sub-creation in that the reader sees how he applies thoughts he developed elsewhere in relation to the general subjects of fairy-stories and myths to his own fantasy since most of these letters concern either The Hobbit, (most often) The Lord of the Rings (hereafter abbreviated), or The Silmarillion.
Letter #17 (15 October 1937 to Stanley Unwin)
Stanley Unwin had noted the complaint of Richard Hughes that as much as The Hobbit is aimed at children, there are certain parts of it that are too dark for children. In response, Tolkien reiterates—with the even-more strengthened conviction of a sub-creator whose work has gone through the scrutiny of others—a theme that he continues to emphasize particularly throughout this period in which he writes LOTR. He insists that Hughes’ complaint is a common problem, “though actually the presence…of the terrible is, I believe, what gives this imagined world its verisimilitude. A safe fairy-land is untrue to all worlds.”2 As much time as Tolkien famously devoted to maintaining the internal consistency and integrity of his sub-creation, he also wanted to ensure that his sub-creation was realistic in terms of reflecting accurately the character of the Primary World. Sub-creation in its truest form comes from a desire to be creatively truthful. To lie as part of sub-creation is to corrupt the result and to deny the reality of the image-bearing identity of humanity. As long as terrible evil is part of the Primary World, it is only honest for the Secondary Worlds to reflect that fact in whatever way they can.
Letter #87 (25 October 1944 to Christopher Tolkien)
This particular letter offers a singular point of interest. Tolkien relates to his son that a twelve-year-old from Pennsylvania named John Barrow had written him with praise for The Hobbit. He had read the book eleven times and thought of it as being beyond description. He then asks Tolkien to tell him if he had written any other books. Tolkien found such a response amusing and saddening. That his own fantasy could have such an effect on someone was, to Tolkien, also a demonstration of dearth in fantasy, myth, and the exercise of imagination that this boy had otherwise known in his life. And the boy was but one example of dearth in the impoverished field of modern humanity that made Tolkien say, “What thousands of grains of good human corn must fall on barren stony ground, if such a very small drop of water should be so intoxicating! But I suppose one should be grateful for the grace and fortune that have allowed me to provide even the drop.”3 Tolkien has made it clear that he regards fantasy, storytelling, and world-making as human necessities and in situations of necessity-deprivation even the slightest provision gives a refreshment that has the quality of deliverance. Hence, Tolkien sees his role as a fantasy writer in his time as being a recipient of divine grace in order to become a participant in the outpouring of divine grace for others. This is an example of carrying out the vocation of image-bearing so that one becomes a divine instrument through which God exercises grace.
Letter #89 (7–8 November 1944 to Christopher Tolkien)
This letter describes a Sunday (the 5th of November) when Tolkien went to mass at St. Gregory’s with his daughter Priscilla. The sermon concerned the stories of the healing of Jairus’ daughter and of the woman with an issue of blood. The priest also mentioned three healings in more recent times, one of which especially drew Tolkien’s attention. This story was of a little boy (in 1927) with “tubercular [tuberculous] peritonitis” who was mortally ill and taken on a train by his parents, apparently to go die in peace. But as the train passed by a Marian grotto—apparently the one at Lourdes, judging by the context—he was suddenly well and went to play with a little girl on the train.
The suddenness of this turn produced an emotion he has associated peculiarly with eucatastrophe. It was a particular experience of what he had tried to describe analytically, “For it I coined the word ‘eucatastrophe’: the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of the fairy-stories to produce).”4 This effect comes from the sudden glimpse of Truth, the truth that transcends typical perceptions of life bound in the chains of decay and death (which later in the letter he refers to as, “the apparent Anankê of our world”5) and shows humans the truth of Primary Reality and their nature with a relief that is as if, “a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back.”6 No other eucatastrophe provides the relief and distinctive effect like the eucatastrophe of the fairy story that happened in the Primary World; namely, the resurrection of Jesus. In his description of the emotional effect the resurrection produces for those with Primary Belief, he gives his most poetic description of Christian joy, which “produces tears because it is qualitatively like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love.”7 Tolkien echoes this description in the celebration of the eucatastrophe of LOTR on the Field of Cormallen: “And all the host laughed and wept, and in the midst of their merriment and tears the clear voice of the minstrel rose like silver and gold, and all men were hushed. And he sang to them, now in the Elven-tongue, now in the speech of the West, until their hearts, wounded with sweet word, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.”8 Similarly, he describes the proper Third Theme of the Ainulindalë—the music that intentionally followed Eru Ilúvatar’s direction rather than Melkor’s—as follows: “The one was deep and wide and beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came.”9 Such is what happens when eucatastrophe meets dyscatastrophe, the true light of the world meets its characteristic deceptive darkness, and the delivering love of God meets a rebellious world. When the response to eucatastrophe is the joy of deliverance and Primary Belief, the result is a holistic redemption for the believer. The condition becomes a more permanent part of who the believer is and thus the mix of joy and sorrow characterizes the believer’s existence as they await the consummation of hope.
He also reiterates his point about the gospel redeeming humans in a manner consonant with human nature by giving them a story that affects them in a way that fulfills the fairy-story. It is fitting that God should do such for beings created to be divine image-bearers, that secondary authors who express hope for redemption in fairy-stories experience redemption through the story from the Primary Author. By God’s action of having the story of the Primary World climax with eucatastrophe, God reveals the truth about the world that transcends empirical observation, a revelation God had anticipated by using fairy-stories (among other means) as instruments to reveal the salvation that comes from beyond the circles of the world.
Letter #109 (31 July 1947 to Sir Stanley Unwin)
In this letter Tolkien responds to Rayner Unwin’s comments on Book I of LOTR via a letter to his father the publisher. Rayner Unwin had noted that the number of events happening all at once was almost overpowering and that the struggle of darkness and light had become much more intense relative to The Hobbit. Of course, Book I was also the most comical of the six—as one would expect from a narrative spending so much time in the Shire and featuring Tom Bombadil—and it provided some levity while Tolkien was still trying to figure out the character of this story.10 At the same time, Tolkien saw it as his task to balance the comedy with the growing sense of darkness, especially in the chapters “The Shadow of the Past,” “Fog on the Barrow-Downs,” “A Knife in the Dark,” and “Flight to the Ford” (not to mention the several other scattered intimations and near-encounters). Again, just as contrasting colors make each more vivid, comedy and darkness (against which comedy arises) complement each other in storytelling. Tolkien saw this contrast as reflective of real life. As Tolkien has stated several times, having this inner consistency of reality is essential to the project of true sub-creation. This concern comes through in his description of the circumstances the hobbits have faced: “But I have failed if it does not seem possible that mere mundane hobbits could cope with such things. I think that there is no horror conceivable that such creatures cannot surmount, by grace (here appearing in mythological forms) combined with a refusal of their nature and reason at the last pinch to compromise or submit.”11
Rayner had remarked that the intensity of the struggle of light and darkness is of such character that he suspected that Tolkien had taken detours into the realm of Allegory rather than following the logic of the story. Here Tolkien insists that Book I has been realistic in the perils the hobbits have experienced and overcome. Their appearance belies their indomitable nature, as does the typical simplicity and ease of hobbit life. But Tolkien notes in the Prologue of his magnum opus, “Nonetheless, ease and peace had left these people still curiously tough. They were, if it came to it, difficult to daunt or to kill; and they were, perhaps, so unwearyingly fond of good things not least because they could, when put to it, do without them, and could survive rough handling by grief, foe, or weather in a way that astonished those who did not know them well and looked no further than their bellies and their well-fed faces.” Gandalf similarly praises Bilbo’s durability as an exemplar of something he alone among the Wise knows about hobbits, “Soft as butter they can be, and yet sometimes as tough as old tree-roots. I think it is likely that some would resist the Ring far longer than most of the Wise would believe.”12 Furthermore, he writes when Frodo is in the Barrow-Downs, “There is a seed of courage hidden (often deeply, it is true) in the heart of the fattest and most timid hobbit, waiting for some final and desperate danger to make it grow.”13 These statements crystallize one of Tolkien’s themes throughout the story, perhaps most succinctly stated by Elrond, “This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.”14 These characteristics of hobbits give the story and their actions within it plausibility and inner consistency of reality.15
While the hobbits have a nature that enables them to be curiously well-suited for a quest as Tolkien describes, the other element that enables them to surmount the challenges is grace. The actions that Tolkien refers to here as grace have what he considers more mythological appellations in LOTR, such as chance, fate (or, sometimes, doom), fortune, and other ambiguous names for providence.16 In these means by which the never-named but never-absent One is at work empowering, providing, sustaining, ordering, purposing, governing, and delivering the inhabitants of Eä and Arda specifically (and Middle-earth even more specifically in the scope of the story), Tolkien is sub-creatively imitating—as best he can—the mysterious workings of divine providence in the Primary World.17 And even these means are only exemplifications and notable points in a whole artwork providentially arranged and ordered. At the same time, because Tolkien is writing about the actions of the one God on a sub-creative level, he draws attention to the actual ways of providence in the Primary World. Indeed, providence is one of the primary elements that lends Tolkien’s work the inner consistency of reality if God similarly exercises grace in the Primary World.
These elements of inner consistency lead him to his typical eschewal of classifying his work as allegory. There is a moral point—or multiple such points—to it in that it is a worthwhile story. There are universals in the particular characters—because all people/characters instantiate universals to varying degrees—but they do not simply represent those universals (such as darkness and light). Characteristics of allegory—like other stories—derive from reality because they are ways of presenting truth. By extension, the stories that have an inner consistency of reality will have some perceived or intended allegory to them. Story and allegory converge, or come close to converging, in that, “the better and more consistent an allegory is the more easily can it be read ‘just as a story’; and the better and more closely woven a story is the more easily can those so minded find allegory in it.”18 Tolkien’s own project is definitely the latter and that is why there have often been impressions of allegory attached to his story. But such is a by-product of the story he tells. One can conceive of it as an allegory of, “the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power.”19 But it is so only because Tolkien’s story has that inner consistency of reality that would lead to certain definite consequences if something like the One Ring existed in a world populated by the wise and simple, the powerful and the weak, the exalted and the humble (though the story focuses on particular characters that have varying measures of these characteristics and others, not to mention that these characters include products of fantasy such as the Istari, Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits, and so on).20
Letter #113 (Septuagesima [25 January] 1948 to C.S. Lewis)
This letter of apology and repentance concerns some situation of Tolkien’s criticism of a work of Lewis during a meeting of the Inklings, but it also gives one ray of insight into how he thought of sub-creation. Tolkien had caused some sort of offense and he writes hoping for Lewis’ forgiveness. At one point he writes that this situation reminds him about a correspondence between G. M. Hopkins and Canon Dixon, authors who wanted that most essential of authorial desires: recognition. Dixon was overjoyed at Hopkins’ appreciation of him and it had brought to mind the words of Burne-Jones that, “one works really for the one man who may rise to understand one.” But Tolkien agrees with Hopkins’ response that, “Burne-Jones’ hope can also in this world be frustrated, as easily as general fame: a painter (like Niggle) may work for what the burning of his picture, or an accident of death to the admirer, may wholly destroy. He summed up: The only just literary critic is Christ, who admires more than does any man the gifts He Himself has bestowed.”21 Niggle’s story—written almost a decade and published a few years prior to this letter—represents Tolkien’s own experience with sub-creation with its interminable labor, his obsessive attention to detail, the endless duties and distractions that take him away from the work, and the looming “trip” for which he has not prepared. Tolkien thus knows in a personal way—which has become more and more apparent as he has spent around thirty years working on The Silmarillion off-and-on to this point while working on LOTR for around a decade—what it means to have such a dream constantly deferred. Instead, he quotes Hopkins to see the value in what is higher than any human evaluation. While people make many criticisms about art that are right and wrong, just and unjust (as well as criticisms that are neither here nor there), the only critic that can fully appreciate works of literary art—particularly sub-creative art—is the one from whom the gifts for it come. At once, Tolkien describes sub-creation as the exercise of a divine gift and thus as a gift for which Christ has a unique appreciation, since Christ is the one through whom the world came to be (John 1:3; 1 Cor 8:6; Col 1:16–17). The Word through whom the Father speaks into existence, orders, sustains, purposes, reveals, redeems, and renews has the greatest appreciation for the gift of language, its sub-creative power, and its many uses.
Letter #131 (late 1951 to Milton Waldman)
One of the letters richest in sub-creation theology is this one written to Milton Waldman, an editor of Collins. Tolkien wrote this letter at a time when he had broken off a professional relationship with Allen & Unwin—as of April 1950—because they were hesitant to publish The Silmarillion along with LOTR (despite their long-standing interest in the latter). Waldman had expressed interest in publishing both works, especially since he had read part of the unfinished Silmarillion. However, negotiations on the actual publishing process thereafter became stagnant and confusing. Late in 1951, Tolkien wrote a letter around ten thousand words in length to Waldman outlining the story of his sub-creation including The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and LOTR in order to show the interdependence of the first and third works in particular. It was one long demonstration that they belong together in conception, writing, and publication. In the process, he also gave insight into the nature of his sub-creative work and how he thought about it.22
One of his passions in myth-making and fairy-story-making (initially) was to give to the English what they lacked but the Greeks, Celts, Romans, Germans, Scandinavians, and Finnish already had: high-quality myths of their own concerning their own lands in their own languages with their own heroes. The closest the English had beforehand was the Arthurian stories. But Tolkien thought of them as not being of a high enough quality, belonging to the land of Britain, but not quite English enough. Its elements of “faerie” actually work against the goal of the inner consistency of reality, as does the explicit presence of Christian religion on the level of the Secondary World. In his evaluation, “For reasons which I will not elaborate, that seems to me fatal. Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‘real’ world.”23 In other words, the appearance of these elements in the Arthurian legends makes them something of an amorphous hybrid which attempts to have its Secondary World cake and eat it in the Primary World. It is not truly part of either creation or sub-creation and therefore it has the inner consistency of neither. While all sub-creation is by nature derivative in some fashion, Tolkien seems to think that the Arthurian stories are both too derivative—drawing too much on the explicit forms of the Primary World—and not derivative enough—not pursuing far enough the inner logic of sub-creation. He believes these unnamed moral and religious truths (or errors) to be true (or false) across Primary and Secondary Worlds, but a proper Secondary World does not have them appear explicitly in the same forms as they do in the Primary World if that world has the inner consistency of reality, in accordance with which there are proper forms for these truths (or errors) to appear. Tolkien even states that these forms and their stories that make up his Secondary World have a curious relationship to his mind. For he says, “yet always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there’, somewhere: not of ‘inventing’.”24
Tolkien himself dislikes intentional allegory, but he recognizes that the use of its language is indispensable when addressing the purpose of myth or fairy-story. His mythology fundamentally relates and addresses the problem of the relationship between Art (and sub-creation) and Primary Reality. He divides this fundamental concern into three categories of problems: Fall, Mortality, and Machine. Of these three issues he says:
With Fall inevitably, and that motive occurs in several modes. With Mortality, especially as it affects art and the creative (or as I should say, sub-creative) desire which seems to have no biological function, and to be apart from the satisfactions of plain ordinary biological life, with which, in our world, it is indeed usually at strife. This desire is at once wedded to a passionate love of the real primary world, and hence filled with the sense of mortality, and yet unsatisfied by it. It has various opportunities of ‘Fall’. It may become possessive, clinging to the things made as its own, the sub-creator wishes to be the Lord and God of his private creation. He will rebel against the laws of the Creator – especially against mortality. Both of these (alone or together) will lead to the desire for Power, for making the will more quickly effective, - and so the Machine (or Magic). By the last I intend all use of external plans or devices (apparatus) instead of developments of the inherent inner powers or talents – or even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills. The Machine is our more obvious modern form though more closely related to Magic than is usually recognised.25
The element of Fall happens at several levels in Tolkien’s mythology and it happens sometimes through the realization of personal mortality—in the case of Men—or of the mortality of the world (to which the lives of Elves are tied), but every time it is in encounter with limitation deemed unacceptable. The angst that leads to the Fall often explicitly arises from corrupted sub-creative concerns (with varying degrees of concern for the good). The primary Fall is Melkor’s, who, though a sub-creator among the Ainur, desired to usurp the Ainulindalë of Eru Ilúvatar and to harness the creative power of the Flame Imperishable (making his Fall different from the Fall of the Primary World in that his discordance was written into Eä rather than subsequent to the world’s coming into existence). His part in the grand story is one of destruction or corruption of creation and sub-creation, which is all in service to his primary desire to be served and worshiped as Creator. He even wins some of the Ainur to his cause, most importantly Sauron, who himself has a corrupted sub-creative desire that turns into the desire for power, domination, and worship, wills and desires he instills in the One Ring. A near-Fall happens for Aulë, the craftsman of the Valar, when he makes the Dwarves (though Ilúvatar hallows them and makes part of his creation). While Melkor sowed seeds of deceit and dissatisfaction among the Noldor—the Eldar who have the strongest inclination to make, shape, and form and thus have the strongest inclination to learn from Melkor’s instruction—Fëanor reaps the harvest of bringing about their rebellion against the Valar after he had already experienced his own Fall born out of pride in his crafts. A Fall of sorts came about for Celebrimbor and other Elves in the Second Age as Sauron deceived them in their ring-making craft by taking advantage of their desire to enrich the world and to preserve things in their beauty against the entropy of time. The Fall of the Númenóreans was especially focused on mortality, though it was also egged on by the desires to explore, to know, and to continue in their other delights. These Falls and others illustrate some or all of the elements Tolkien cites above about the ways of a Fall. The desire for power—the effective influence of the will—is among the chief forms of corrupt sub-creative urges and faculties as it becomes desire for domination over other sub-creators and arrogant usurpation of the Creator.26
Despite what he writes of Magic and Machine, he does not use the former consistently, even in his mythology. In fact, he wrote this point into LOTR in the mouth of Galadriel as she speaks to Sam, “For this is what your folk would call magic, I believe; though I do not understand clearly what they mean; and they seem to use the same word of the deceits of the Enemy.”27 In his thought, there is not a proper word for what the Elves do as opposed to what Melkor, Sauron, and their allies do in re-shaping creation according to their wills. What the Elves do is closer to art, though, “delivered from many of its human limitations: more effortless, more quick, more complete (product, and vision in unflawed correspondence).”28 Such is the spell of sub-creation to which Tolkien referred in “On Fairy-Stories.” It is the good and proper form from which the parasitic evil of domination through magic and machines arises. In fact, the more powerful the magic and machines are and the greater the desire to change the world for the benefit of others, the more hastily one rushes headlong down the mountain of sub-creation, not realizing that they will eventually fall from a cliff.29
Letter #142 (2 December 1953 to Robert Murray, S.J.)
At least one part of this letter is well known to anyone familiar with interpretations and analyses of LOTR that focus on Christian or biblical elements. This is the letter in which Tolkien wrote what each and every one of those interpretations and analyses quotes at least in part, that LOTR is, “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults or practices, in the imaginary world.”30 He penned these words in response to Robert Murray’s remark that what he had read of LOTR seemed to have, “a positive compatibility with the order of Grace.”31 One should expect as much from a devout Catholic such as Tolkien, given the theology of sub-creation laid out heretofore. As in the letter cited above, it works best for the inner consistency of Secondary Reality if the explicit forms of religion in Primary Reality do not appear as such. While there are more clearly religious elements of ritual and practice appearing in manuscripts documented in The History of Middle-earth and a few trace elements in LOTR and The Silmarillion, explicit religion is generally absent. Indeed, he sees the religious element absorbed into the structure, characters, and other elements of the story and the symbolism contained therein. The elements were not apparent to Tolkien at first because he was not conscious in inscribing them. The transcendent nature of Primary Reality comes through in Tolkien’s Secondary Reality because he had lived by the Catholic faith for decades at this point in his life.32 As such, the religious elements have been absorbed implicitly in the sub-creation because they were so absorbed by the sub-creator. It is a fundamentally religious and Catholic work at its foundation because it is reflective of Primary Reality, particularly the transcendent qualities Tolkien knew in Catholicism, but it is so in that its Secondary Reality reflects the truth in its own way, so that there is a continuity of nature and grace that characterizes Catholic theology.
Letter #153 (draft: September 1954 to Peter Hastings)
This unsent draft to Peter Hastings provides among the most extensive epistolary expositions of his thoughts on sub-creation. Hastings was a manager of the Newman Bookshop in Oxford and while he was enthusiastic about LOTR, he expressed several metaphysical concerns to Tolkien. Among the problems he found inconsistent with a Catholic worldview were the apparent notion—which he took from Treebeard—that the Dark Lord could create beings (or that there could be any tendency to good in such creatures), the metaphysical character of Tom Bombadil (which Hastings thought treated him as God), and (especially) the reincarnation of Elves. To Hastings, all of these elements detracted from—though he does not use the phrase—the inner consistency of reality because Tolkien had been, “over-stepping the bounds of a writer’s job.”33 Tolkien never sent this response because, “It seemed to be taking myself too importantly.”34 Even so, no other correspondence to a reader does more to clarify Tolkien’s concern for reflecting Primary Reality and having an inner consistency of Secondary Reality in his theology of sub-creation and how it works in his own sub-creation.
It seems that in the case of readers like Hastings, Tolkien’s spell of sub-creation has worked. They treat it seriously to the point that Tolkien wonders if they have treated it too seriously. Each reader who has corresponded with Tolkien has treated it particularly seriously according to their different interests and thus at times have criticized for being unrealistic or vague, “Its economics, science, artefacts, religion, and philosophy are defective, or at least sketchy.”35 But the fact that readers have examined these aspects of Tolkien’s world—and continue to do so in essays, books, online articles, lectures, and so on—is a testament to Tolkien’s success in casting a spell of historical depth and three-dimensionality.
He reiterates what he has written in Letter #131 that the whole mythology fundamentally concerns the relation of creation to sub-creation (though he explicitly notes this time that a subsidiary matter is that of mortality). It is entirely possible for aspects of the sub-creation to be wrong in relation to the Primary World of creation, but as such it is incoherent to say they are wrong in relation to the Secondary World. Even when properly understood—and Hastings has made errors in interpretation—these aspects simply are part of the sub-creation and how it is made.
The divergence between Hastings’ concerns and Tolkien’s beliefs about his sub-creation stems from the fundamental difference in how they view the relationship between sub-creation and creation. While Hastings seems—from this limited evidence—to resemble something close to the Arthurian perspective that attempts to be both overly derivative and not derivative enough (by imitating the logic of creation in sub-creation but in its own secondary form), Tolkien insists that,
liberation ‘from the channels the creator is known to have used already’ is the fundamental function of ‘sub-creation’, a tribute to the infinity of His potential variety, one of the ways in which indeed it is exhibited, as indeed I said in the Essay. I am not a metaphysician; but I should have thought it a curious metaphysic – there is not one but many, indeed potentially innumerable ones – that declared the channels known (in such a finite corner as we have any inkling of) to have been used, are the only possible ones, or efficacious, or possibly acceptable to and by Him!36
This statement is reminiscent of what Tolkien wrote more than twenty years prior in “Mythopoeia,” “man, sub-creator, the refracted light / through whom is splintered from a single White / to many hues, and endlessly combined / in living shapes that move from mind to mind.”37 It is the duty of the sub-creator to be explorative, to draw out the possibilities of what could have been if the Creator had created differently and how it could have been. It is a way of bearing the finite image of the infinitely creative One. Given a particular disposition, such exploration could be a form of worship (which, if humans are image-bearers of God, would be the fulfillment of the sub-creative faculty). It declares that God was not limited to the actual—Primary—channels of creativity, but actively chose those channels to serve particular purposes that other channels, for one reason or another, did not serve. The Creator upholds this variety by endowing humans with the gift of imagination and by hallowing the sub-creation (in anticipation, in Tolkien’s view, of the eschatological kingdom in which Secondary Worlds will have an ontological character that it is not possible for them to have now. But if the Creator does such, it is not proper to reject its logic out-of-hand before trying to understand it (though there is of course place for naming incoherence through criticism).38 Indeed, for Tolkien it has taken on such a life of its own that some parts seemed revealed through him than by him.39 Even then, just as the God who creates and reveals has left many things a mystery, Tolkien leaves mysteries about his sub-creation when he knows the answers (such as, in LOTR, what the wizards are and where they came from).40
While there are similarities between the human (or Elvish or Ainurean) act of sub-creation and the divine act of creation, the fact remains that the former is imitative of, derivative from, and of a lower order than the latter. Tolkien affirmed this point in both the Primary World and the Secondary World. Even in his sub-creation, only Eru Ilúvatar creates, but others can make. It is thus important that Treebeard—in the alluded passage—does not say that the Dark Lord “created” anything. Rather, he says that the Dark Lord “made” the Trolls in counterfeit.41 But Tolkien only says that this statement is possible and half-true in that the Orcs were not made in counterfeit, but are corrupted rational incarnate creatures, comparable perhaps to some humans one might meet.42
Tolkien admits that his world is not entirely coherent as he struggles to explain how counterfeits like Trolls can have the power of speech. But even Primary Reality does not appear to be wholly coherent and he wonders if, “though in every world on every plane all must ultimately be under the Will of God, even in ours there are not some ‘tolerated’ sub-creational counterfeits!”43 It is unclear what Tolkien has in mind here—if anything in particular at all—but it is an attempt to illustrate a further dimension of realism to Tolkien’s project if Eru Ilúvatar allows on the level of Secondary Reality what God allows on the level of Primary Reality. What is also noteworthy about this quote is how Tolkien perceives some measure of ontological reality and significance for his own Secondary World and others that they should be under the sovereign will of God. If one believes that God is Sustainer and that all things exist simply because God creates and sustains them by power according to God’s will, then Tolkien’s statement implies that there is something that God does to hallow and to sustain the existence of these Secondary Worlds.
In response to Hastings’ overarching concern of Tolkien overstepping his bounds, he questions if there are any bounds except the bounds of reality itself in the laws of contradiction and bounds of the writer in mere finitude.44 Even so, there is need for writers to be self-limiting in humility before the power God endows humanity with in the capacities of sub-creation. With the divinely granted freedom of sub-creation, there is clear potential and precedent for use of freedom for the sake of harm and other wickedness. Similarly, sub-creations may be imperfect reflections and extensions of reality, but therein lies a risk of proclaiming and explaining “truths” that are not true and providing guidance in morality by what is not moral. Given that Tolkien agrees that good stories (myths in particular) can be well-suited for teaching religious and moral truths—though in some lesser light than the divine radiance of the gospel—it is not surprising that this proper end is corruptible. But Tolkien also insists that he needs convincing that he has run afoul here and written something truly harmful before he is willing to recant or rewrite anything.
He closes the letter with reflections on free will in relation to the divine will and the corresponding relation of sub-creation to divine creation. One of the ways Tolkien has used the term “sub-creation,” is, “in a special way to make visible and physical the effects of Sin or misused Free Will by men.”45 He has already referred in this letter to sub-creational counterfeits, but it could also refer to how Saruman and Sauron—in their own ways—have used Magic and Machine to corrupt and destroy the earth and living creatures around them. Like sub-creation—good or bad—volition is derivative and limited by circumstance. But for it to exist, Tolkien insists, “it is necessary that the Author should guarantee it, whatever betides: sc. when it is ‘against His Will’, as we say, at any rate as it appears on a finite view. He does not stop or make ‘unreal’ sinful acts and their consequences.”46 In other words, for volition to be real and effective, it must have real consequences, whether the choices or consequences are good or evil. In the Primary World, the capacities designed to aid humans in the vocation of image-bearing are not removed even when humans use them for sin (even for grievous sin on massive scales). In the Secondary World, even Morgoth does not have his ability to make removed, despite the most perverted use to which he puts it, such as corrupting Elves into Orcs in order to make them his fearful slaves who acknowledge him as lord and creator. Eru Ilúvatar allows such things into existence as an extreme upholding of volition, even though his corruptions must be naturally—though not irredeemably—bad.47 Still, volition is limited and cannot make what is impossible possible. There are many powers that God in the Secondary World—like God in the Primary World—has not delegated, such as making spirits. Hence, Orcs are corrupted pre-existing creatures, not actual creations by Morgoth.
Letter #163 (7 June 1955 to W. H. Auden)
This letter addresses W. H. Auden, one of the most favorable literary critics to Tolkien at the time of LOTR’s release. He had been asked to give a talk on the BBC Third Programme in October about LOTR and he wrote to Tolkien to get his input on what he should talk about and about the genesis of the story. Tolkien’s response is filled with how he thinks his life has influenced the story and the need to write it. As a philologist, Tolkien naturally gives much attention to linguistic interests and how they gave rise in his interest to write such stories. In the process, he provides insight into how he thinks of his sub-creative project.
His love of language ultimately gave birth to his own stories. As is often noted, the origin of The Hobbit—and LOTR by extension, though it was more substantially mixed with the earlier elements of his mythology—was from the sentence he wrote on a blank sheet of a student’s exam paper: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”48 As Tolkien relates to Auden after summarizing his extensive philological background, “All this only as a background to the stories. They are and were so to speak an attempt to give a background or a world in which my expressions of linguistic taste could have a function.”49 Even as words are the source of this Secondary World’s existence and purpose—as, in a related fashion, it is through the Word that the Primary World exists and has its purpose—it is the Secondary World and the story of it that gives the words their sense and significance.
When he focuses on Hobbits and their importance in his storytelling, he states,
Anyway I myself saw the value of Hobbits, in putting earth under the feet of ‘romance’, and in providing subjects for ‘ennoblement’ and heroes more praiseworthy than the professionals: nolo heroizari [I do not wish to be a hero] is of course as good a start for a hero, as nolo episcopari [I do not wish to be a bishop] for a bishop. Not that I am a ‘democrat’ in any of its current uses; except that I suppose, to speak in literary terms, we are all equal before the Great Author, qui deposuit potentes de sede et exaltavit humiles.50
Of course, Tolkien’s description of the Hobbit heroes paints in broad strokes. Bilbo, Sam, and Frodo each have an interest in adventure beyond the Shire, but it is only there deep down and it is Gandalf and the sense of necessity that have to excite it to the surface beyond the initial denial they have been conditioned to by lifetimes spent in the Shire. But it is precisely because they are not “professional” heroes—like Gandalf, Aragorn, or any other non-Hobbits of the Fellowship—and do not even see themselves as the hero types that they are best suited to be the heroes of Tolkien’s story. The quote from the Magnificat (specifically, Luke 1:52) in the Latin he had heard in Mass for most of his life puts a fine point on the character of Tolkien’s story as one of ennoblement. It is a story that imitates God’s action as Creator, Judge, King, and Redeemer in humbling the exalted and exalting the humble (cf. 1 Sam 2:1–10; Pss 9:11–14, 17–20; 10:1–4; 12:1–5; 14:6; 18:25–29; 22:26; 25:9, 16–18; 37:14; 69:30–33; 140:12; 147:6; 149:4; Isa 11:4; 29:19; 61:1; Zeph 2:3).51
Letter #165 (30 June 1955 to the Houghton Mifflin Co.)
Tolkien penned this letter to his American publisher in response to how a columnist named Harvey Breit—writing for the New York Times Book Review—had handled his correspondence in reply to questions about him and his work. It serves as a clarification and expansion on the answers he had given. It also serves to give some implicit hints on how Tolkien thinks of his sub-creation.
As in the last cited letter, Tolkien insists that his entire work is, “fundamentally linguistic in inspiration.”52 It is an expansion on what he wrote in the previous letter that, “I am a philologist, and all my work is philological.”53 On the one hand, this fact befits a work produced by a professor of philology. On the other hand, because of those professional interests, others could easily think of Tolkien’s work in storytelling as a creative outlet, a diverting hobby taken up when professional responsibilities are not of concern. But Tolkien insists that—because he is a philologist with interests in the relation of philology and myth who has written stories as an extension of his professional work—his stories are not results of hobby, even if they are part of his private amusement (amusement that he takes in his professional work, meaning that he does not consider himself a man of hobbies at all).54 The fact that there is deep continuity between his professional work and his stories shows itself in his reiteration, “The invention of languages is the foundation. The ‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse.”55 As a grand linguistic construction, Tolkien claims that it, “is not ‘about’ anything but itself.”56
Furthermore, he gives clarification on the religious nature of his sub-creation against the claim that it contains no religion. He has already indicated in other letters that he does not regard it as proper for a Secondary World to contain the explicit forms of religion in the Primary World. Rather, “It is a monotheistic world of ‘natural theology’. The odd fact that there are no churches, temples, or religious rites and ceremonies, is simply part of the historical climate depicted….I am in any case myself a Christian; but the ‘Third Age’ was not a Christian world.”57 The world’s seeming lack of religion, at least insofar as the world is disclosed through LOTR, is simply due to Tolkien’s attempt at being realistic about the character of this world. After all, it is an imaginative history meant to take place in an earlier time of this planet.58 LOTR (and even much of The Silmarillion) takes place at some imagined time between the Fall and the Incarnation.59 As such, revealed theology and its attendant religion have yet to arrive.
The last noteworthy matter of this letter for the purposes of this analysis comes in Tolkien’s reflections in what especially moves him within his own story. He reaffirms the special place he has in his heart for the ennoblement of the ignoble. And there are individual aspects of his story that he finds especially moving, such as the description of Cerin Amroth, the arrival of the Rohirrim at the Battle of Pelennor Fields, and Gollum’s near-repentance on the Stairs of Cirith Ungol, which Sam unthinkingly thwarts by his faithfulness to his friend and master. Tolkien singles out this last event as a way in which the Secondary World has a reality reflecting the Primary World: “this seems to me really like the real world in which the instruments of just retribution are seldom themselves just or holy; and the good are often stumbling blocks.”60 In instances such as this one, Tolkien shows that the moral and providential picture of his world is more complicated than it is often given credit for being and it is thus more reflective of the Primary World in both of these ways.
Letter #181 (drafts: January or February 1956 to Michael Straight)
This text is actually the combination of several unfinished drafts of what Tolkien intended to send to Michael Straight, the editor of New Republic, who had asked him a few questions about LOTR before he wrote a review. Though he did not ask about Tolkien’s notions of sub-creation, his question about Gollum’s role in the story and Frodo’s failure at the climax prompts Tolkien to give depth to how he thinks of his fairy-stories and the most important events in them.
As Tolkien had written previously in “On Fairy-Stories,” he insists that, contrary to popular opinion, they are properly for adults—though naturally children can benefit from them. It is for all because it reflects truth in its own fashion. But in order to fulfill that purpose, the story has to fulfill obligations of quality and coherence. And to address adults in such a way such as to engage them at a deep level it is necessary to remember, “they will not be pleased, excited, or moved unless the whole, or the incidents, seem to be about something worth considering, more e.g. than mere danger and escape: there must be some relevance to the ‘human situation’ (of all periods). So something of the teller’s own reflections and ‘values’ will inevitably get worked in.”61 This description is the reality with which he contrasts the common thoughts of allegory in LOTR. Its resemblances to the Primary World at the points where some think it is allegorical are implicit simply because the author is from the Primary World and because that author has certain beliefs and values. Such are the externals that the aspects of the story refer to, but not intentionally, since those externals only resemble the Secondary World’s exemplification.
In reference to the dyscatastrophe and resultant eucatastrophe of the climax, there is a particular exemplification of a primary truth Tolkien sees at work: “Forgive us our debts even as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.” In particular, it exemplifies the first clause of the second verse. Frodo, as the Ring-bearer, is led deeper into temptation than others in order to accomplish a goal of delivering the world from the evil one. It is a sacrificial situation in which,
the ‘good’ of the world depends on the behaviour of an individual in circumstances which demand of him suffering and endurance far beyond the normal – even, it may happen (or seem, humanly speaking), demand a strength of body and mind which he does not possess: he is in a sense doomed to failure, doomed to fall to temptation or be broken by pressure against his ‘will’: that is against any choice he could make or would make unfettered, not under the duress.62
It is a truth of the Primary World exemplified in the Secondary World that makes Frodo’s failure realistic and even inevitable. He may be a Christ-like figure in his enacting of a priestly and suffering servant role in direct confrontation of evil and temptation, but he is clearly not Christ, the only one who could overcome this inevitability.63 In this sense, the story of this Secondary World is praeparatio evangelica. But it is only anticipatory because the deliverance brought about by the eucatastrophe was in spite of Frodo and happened by the providential provision of Gollum’s presence at the crucial moment (an outcome which was in turn influenced by the pity of Frodo and, on one occasion, Sam). This complicated, but clear, moral, providential, and salvific picture reflects Primary Reality while having the inner consistency of its own reality, meaning that it enables the sub-creation to fulfill one of its purposes to which Tolkien has returned constantly.
Letter #183 (notes on W. H. Auden’s review of The Return of the King [1956])
This letter is another unsent document from Tolkien addressing W. H. Auden’s review “At the End of the Quest, Victory” for the New York Times Book Review (January 22, 1956). While Tolkien is appreciative of Auden’s praise, he has comments to make about Auden’s thoughts on the political nature of the Quest (which he sets in contrast to Erich Auerbach’s criticism of medieval quests that they are random feats not fitting into a politically purposive pattern). This point gives Tolkien occasion to expand on the Secondary Reality of his sub-creation and how it reflects (or exemplifies) Primary Reality. After all, “Middle-earth is not an imaginary world. The name is the modern form (appearing in the 13th century and still in use) of midden-erd > middel-erd, an ancient name for the oikoumenē, the abiding place of Men, the objectively real world, in use specifically opposed to imaginary worlds (as Fairyland) or unseen worlds (as Heaven or Hell). The theatre of my tale is this earth, the one in which we now live, but the historical period is imaginary.”64
Even though the point Tolkien addresses is political, he ultimately offers moral and metaphysical reflections that inform his sub-creation. In his contrast between good and evil causes (which he states is not determined so much by the conduct of groups on either side but by principles that extend beyond the particular conflict), he notes that, “In my story I do not deal in Absolute Evil. I do not think there is such a thing, since that is Zero. I do not think that at any rate any ‘rational being’ is wholly evil.”65 Even his most villainous characters—Morgoth and Sauron—were originally good beings (even simply by virtue of their existence). Sauron himself began as a being who desired order and even as one who considered well-being of others within this order. However, this desire became corrupted into a desire for domination and enslavement of others to his will. This same story seems to fit the pattern of many tyrants, even as Sauron is more like a fallen angel. As such, his fall is more extreme and of greater consequence. Because of Sauron’s nature and because of the influence of his master—who wished to find a way to steal the Flame Imperishable and become the Creator himself—his aims and desires go beyond politics and into metaphysics. As such, the conflict in LOTR that Sauron instigates is not about freedom so much as it is about, “God, and His sole right to divine honour. The Eldar and the Númenóreans believed in The One, the true God, and held worship of any other person an abomination. Sauron desired to be a God-King, and was held to be this by his servants; if he had been victorious he would have demanded divine honour from all rational creatures and absolute temporal power over the whole world.”66
Tolkien’s sub-creation thus reflects the Primary World in its central conflict and primary sin (idolatry or pride) according to a Christian vision. Sauron was one of the original sub-creators, but sub-creation was not enough for him and he attempted to be a usurper and to be worshiped as Creator, much like the beings made in the image of God who attempted to be usurpers and become like God against God’s order. Thereafter, both sins—though Sauron’s was subsequent and to on a smaller scale than Melkor’s—came to define the sin of the world as a whole as the usurpation of idolatry mars and upends the order, function, and purpose of creation and gives rise to the need for holistic redemption (taking the form of new creation in both Secondary and Primary Worlds).
Letter #192 (27 July 1956 to Amy Ronald)
In this short letter Tolkien addresses the issue of Frodo’s heroism and failure at the crucial moment. He argues that Frodo does in fact deserve the hero’s honor because of his perseverance and integrity in the face of immense temptation that few (if any) could have matched. He bore the Ring even into the heart of Mordor, where its power and temptation were strongest, and came within steps of casting the Ring into the fires of Mount Doom. As Tolkien has insisted elsewhere, this situation is realistic, but still extraordinary. It has the inner consistency of reality that features Hobbits, including an exceptional Hobbit like Frodo. What would have been unrealistic—and would have thus ruined the spell of sub-creation—is Frodo’s impeccable perseverance and actually casting the Ring into the fires. No one—except Christ presumably—is made of strong enough stuff for that end.
He also deserves honor for his treatment of Gollum. If he had taken Gollum’s life, the Quest would have well and truly failed. But at the point of catastrophe, Tolkien writes, “The Other Power then took over: the Writer of the Story (by which I do not mean myself), ‘that one ever-present Person who is never absent and never named’ (as one critic has said).”67 In the end, the eucatastrophe—as is appropriate, given Tolkien’s description of the term—came about by astonishing providence. The sub-creator thus imitates the providential action of the Creator, including with its complexities of unforeseen effects of actions and unexpected people involved in the outcomes guided by an unseen but never absent hand.
Letter #211 (14 October 1958 to Rhona Beare)
This letter is Tolkien’s reply to some questions Rhona Beare, a student at Exeter at the time, asked in anticipation of a meeting with other devotees (though it seems Tolkien was late in responding due to prior commitments). This letter and its unsent continuation examined below gives, inter alia, insight into Tolkien’s theological perspective on his work. As such, there is also insight into how he theologically related sub-creation to creation.
For example, his response to the question about Sauron’s “defeat” at the hands of Ar-Pharazôn shows his thoughts on power and evil as they manifest in both the Primary and Secondary Worlds. Of course, Sauron surrendered voluntarily to Ar-Pharazôn because his subjects had fled and it was a prime opportunity to dominate Númenor from within by the power he had poured into the Ring. Of the Ring, Tolkien writes, “If I were to ‘philosophize’ this myth, or at least the Ring of Sauron, I should say it was a mythical way of representing the truth that potency (or perhaps rather potentiality) if it is to be exercised, and produce results, has to be externalized and so as it were passes, to a greater or less degree, out of one’s direct control. A man who wishes to exert ‘power’ must have subjects, who are not himself. But he then depends on them.”68 In a way, this statement about the Ring also indicates that it is a corruption of sub-creation proper. It goes back to Tolkien’s statements about the fundamental matters of his mythology and how Magic and Machine represent corruptions of the basic sub-creational desire. Sub-creation, if its spell is to work, must also be externalized from the mind so that the mind is able to interact with it like something real. But it is not a corruption and therefore does not fall into the paradoxical trap of domination outlined here in which one makes subjects but thereby becomes dependent on them. This trap is set for beings who do not so much desire to imitate God’s creative action, but desire to usurp God’s position.
Sauron was actually defeated when Eru Ilúvatar destroyed the Númenor Sauron had expended enormous power in corrupting in the changing of the world (along with any possibility of Sauron ever taking a fair form). However, the incident only diminished Sauron—and the Last Alliance attacked before he and his domination were fully rehabilitated—it did not truly destroy him, even as the destruction of the Ring over 3,000 years later did not destroy him, but rendered him impotent in the world. Tolkien explains that this fact of the Secondary World was not his fault because it is a fact of the Primary World and one he had to take account of if his own sub-creation was to attain Secondary Reality. It is simply a derivative form of the problem of evil, particularly of the demonic kind. That such powers should persist in existing or even influencing the world subsequent to an outpouring of divine wrath actually gives this Secondary World a deep realism that is as sorrowful as it is for the Primary World. If the Primary World features indestructible spirits with volition (including abused volition), it is inevitable that a Secondary World with Secondary Reality that features similar spirits will also have them as indestructible.69
In response to Beare’s question of the identity of the Elder King to whom Bilbo refers, Tolkien notes that it cannot be the One because, “The One does not physically inhabit any part of Eä.”70 He then proceeds to close the letter with notes that clarify the nature of his Secondary World. He makes the regular note that Middle-earth is not so much an imaginary world disconnected from the Primary World, but an imagined history within the Primary World.71 But as for his religious picture, he claims it is not a new alternative he is offering. It is, rather, an imaginary rendition that expresses some of his beliefs in Secondary World form. Naturally, the Secondary World forms extend from the actual religious beliefs of the Primary World author, but they are neither overt nor allegorical representations of those beliefs per se. Tolkien does not expand on these points because he regards himself neither as a qualified preacher or theologian, whatever the theological merits of his work may be.72 In any case, the major theological themes he cites are not about power—which is essentially the catalyst of the story instead of the primary matter—but, “Death, and Immortality; and the ‘escapes’: serial longevity, and hoarding memory.”73 Indeed, though they have different forms in a world with Elves alongside Men, magic rings alongside swords and cities, and physical habitations of angel-like beings exist alongside (broadly speaking) the realms of others, these themes and their attendant problems are common to the experiences of both Primary and Secondary Worlds.74
Letter #212 (unsent draft of a continuation of #211)
It is no surprise that Tolkien’s sub-creation prominently features sub-creation from the beginning of its story. The difference here is that the Ainur are sub-creators working according to a different pattern than sub-creators in the Primary World: “They interpreted according to their powers, and completed in detail, the Design propounded to them by the One. This was propounded first in musical or abstract form, and then in an ‘historical vision’.”75 While there is a sense in which Tolkien has described sub-creators being imitative—with varying degrees of intention—of God’s creative activity, there is a definite pattern and instruction to follow here. Furthermore, the work of the sub-creators is of such a scale that they can see their contributions being taken up into the grand primary design (whereas for sub-creators of the Primary World such a vision is eschatological).
Even at the point of the historical vision the One showed to the Ainur, Tolkien states that it had only the ontological quality (or “validity” in his words) like a story. Simply put, “it ‘exists’ in the mind of the teller, and derivatively in the minds of hearers, but not on the same plane as teller or hearers. When the One (the Teller) said Let it Be, then the Tale became History, on the same plane as the hearers; and these could, if they desired, enter into it.”76 Such is ultimately what separates creation from sub-creation: the fiat of the Creator.77 While words have sub-creative power too, only the Creator has the power and authority to speak things into “primary existence” (the phrase “Let it Be” closely resembles the words of God in Gen 1). Only the Creator has the ability to hallow sub-creations and to take them up into the Primary Creation by fiat. At this point, sub-creations are no longer engaged with by imagination (such as the historical vision), but by every faculty.
Letter #269 (12 May 1965 to W. H. Auden)
The occasion for this short letter is that W. H. Auden had written Tolkien asking him if he thought that his views about the Orcs were heretical, since they seemed to be a completely evil and irredeemable race. Orthodox Christian ontology has held that existence is itself good being created by God.78 In a previous unsent letter to Auden (#183 cited above), Tolkien had affirmed that there is no such thing as absolute evil in his tale because there is no such thing period (since pure evil could not have the good of existence). Also in a previous letter (#153), he stated that he does not believe the Orcs to be irredeemably evil because they are not evil in origin. In any case, he does not consider himself qualified to appraise the quality of his notion of Orcs, whether it is heretical or not. But he asserts a sub-creator’s right in relating to the Primary World. He sees no obligation to conform his sub-creation to established Christian theology, though he aimed to be consonant with it.79 There is a strong emphasis on freedom here and the explorative character of sub-creational activity. Even as the sub-creator surely believes in the importance of reflecting and conveying their “primary” beliefs and thereby maintaining consonance with the Primary World, he/she understands that the Secondary World must have its own inner consistency of reality, therefore it need not conform to the Primary World per se.
Letter #328 (draft: Autumn 1971 to Carole Batten-Phelps)
The last relevant letter to this analysis is another draft, though this time he focuses on sub-creation and sub-creator as divine instruments. Carole Batten-Phelps has given to Tolkien only his most recent example—if he could only imagine how many more there would be—of people expressing profound appreciation and love for what he has done in LOTR. This outpouring has led him to believe that his work has become a vessel of light that has proven redemptive in the deprived, dark world of modernity. Though he has described this effect of fairy-stories in his essay many years prior to this letter, he has only reluctantly, and with goading from others, thought of his own work in this way on occasion (note that he refers to another fan who inspired him to think of the effects of his work in this way in Letter # 87). What helped him “turn a corner” in this regard was a man who showed him pictures and asked if he had seen them prior to writing LOTR given the similarities. Tolkien said that he had not seen them before and the man—in Gandalfian fashion—asked him, “Of course you don’t suppose, do you, that you wrote all that book yourself?”80
He had since no longer been able to suppose otherwise, but the thought of providential use of him and his work as a divine instrument was not an instigation for pride. He is one learned in the stories of Scripture, the stories of the saints, and the stories from many other sources, which has led him to realize, “the imperfections of ‘chosen instruments’, and indeed what sometimes seems their lamentable unfitness for the purpose.”81 As with the letter he received in 1944, his response is deferential and grateful that he has thus been used. It is perhaps another sense of the “sub” in “sub-creator” that one must remember one’s subordination to the Creator and that one is thus subject to the Creator’s providential use for creative purposes. He reflects this Primary World belief also in his Secondary World, particularly in that quintessential story of the relationship of creation and sub-creation in the Ainulindalë.82
Whatever beams of transcendent light there may be in his story, Tolkien attributes it to that transcendent source. It is a light that shines through him, not from him. At the same time, he notes that people such as the woman who wrote this letter would not be able to observe the sense of “sanity and sanctity” in it unless they also had it.83 Hence, there is a sense of God preparing at least some to receive the divine work through human sub-creations.
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000).
Ibid., 24.
Ibid., 98.
Ibid., 100.
Ibid., 101.
Ibid., 101.
Ibid., 100.
VI/4.
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, 2nd ed., ed. Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 16–17.
Tom A. Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 65–68.
Tolkien, Letters, 120–21.
I/2.
I/8.
II/2.
As he writes in a letter to Milton Waldman analyzed below, “They are made small (little more than half human stature, but dwindling as the years pass) partly to exhibit the pettiness of man, plain unimaginative parochial man – though not with either the smallness or the savageness of Swift, and mostly to show up, in creatures of very small physical power, the amazing and unexpected heroism of ordinary men ‘at a pinch’” (Letter #131, p. 158; emphasis original).
Gandalf says that Bilbo was “meant” to find the Ring by something operating beyond the design of Sauron. (I/2) Gandalf refers to Frodo as the one “chosen” to carry the Ring, echoing Frodo’s question of why he was chosen. (I/2) There are several references to sudden sensations, instincts, occurrences, and other such things that make the characters more or less passive recipients in their own minds, though sometimes the narrator more directly identifies the sources. Elrond refers to chance, as well as “calling” and “it is so ordered” as he opens the Council. (II/2) Frodo finds himself surprised to speak as if some other will is using his voice and Elrond thinks that Frodo’s task is “appointed” for him. (II/2) Galadriel thinks that perhaps the paths of the Fellowship are “already laid” before them. (II/8) Frodo thinks that he and Sam were “meant” to go together. (II/10) Gandalf describes the enemies as ones who have contrived in helping bring Merry and Pippin to Fangorn Forest, where they have a part to play. (III/5) Frodo says that Sméagol is in some way “bound up” with his quest. (IV/6) And of course the eucatastrophe itself is a demonstration of providence in which Gollum, because of his overwhelming desire to possess the Ring, had a part to play in destroying the Ring when the Ringbearer scorned his heavy responsibility at the last moment.
Peter J. Kreeft, The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind The Lord of the Rings (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2005), 54–61. For a different angle on this point, see Benjamin Saxton, “Tolkien and Bakhtin on Authorship, Literary Freedom, and Alterity,” Tolkien Studies 10 (2013): 167–83.
Tolkien, Letters, 121.
Ibid.
Cf. Letter #163, p. 212.
Ibid., 128.
For more on the story of the conflicts Tolkien had with Allen & Unwin and then with Collins, see Humphrey Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography, (London: Allen & Unwin, 1977), 211–16.
Tolkien, Letters, 144.
Ibid., 145.
Ibid., 145–46.
Though there are no details for it, “Athrabeth Finrod Ah Andreth,” preserved now in Morgoth’s Ring, indicates that even in the First Age there was something resembling the Fall in the Primary World in the unspoken history of Men before they came into Beleriand.
II/7.
Tolkien, Letters, 146.
Of course, in the case of Melkor, the fundamental desire is even more bent toward evil.
Ibid., 172.
Ibid., 171–72.
Letter #215: “But long narratives cannot be made out of nothing; and one cannot rearrange the primary matter in secondary patterns without indicating feelings and opinions about one’s material.” (p. 298)
Ibid., 188.
Ibid., 196.
Ibid., 188.
Ibid., 188–89.
Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, 87.
Tolkien regarded perhaps his heaviest problem in terms of the inner consistency of reality as the biological one of having Elves be immortal yet still able, rarely, to produce offspring with Men.
Tolkien, Letters, 189.
Ibid., 190.
“But Trolls are only counterfeits, made by the Enemy in the Great Darkness, in mockery of Ents, as Orcs were of Elves.” (III/4)
He is not even committed to the idea that all Trolls are counterfeits.
Tolkien, Letters, 191.
Ibid., 194.
Ibid., 195.
Ibid.
He makes this important qualification because, “by accepting or tolerating their making – necessary to their actual existence – even Orcs would become part of the World, which is God’s and ultimately good.” (Ibid.)
Ibid., 215.
Ibid., 214.
Ibid., 215.
It is also interesting that Tolkien speaks of his storytelling as involving discovery of his world and not having it all thought out beforehand (Ibid., 211–212, 216–217).
Ibid., 219.
Ibid., 218.
Ibid.
Ibid., 219.
Ibid., 220. It is curious how this claim is reconcilable with his previous statements about the fundamental matter being the relationship between sub-creation and creation in Letters #131 and #153. Perhaps Tolkien has the same meaning here since the story itself is a sub-creation and the overarching story of the world concerns that matter.
Ibid.
Ibid. Cf. Letters #183, p. 239; #211, p. 283.
Letter #297, p. 387.
Ibid., 221.
Ibid., 233.
Ibid.
Clyde S. Kilby, Tolkien and the Silmarillion (Wheaton: Harold Shaw, 1976), 55–56.
Tolkien, Letters, 239.
Ibid., 243.
Ibid., 243–44.
Ibid., 253.
Ibid., 279.
Ibid., 280. There is, of course, a growing trend, with some roots in early tradition, to believe in conditional immortality or annihilationism. It is understandable that Tolkien learned a tradition in which such spirits, including human spirits, were truly immortal and indestructible so that even the Creator would or could not end their existence and thus he believed that such was a reality of the Primary World. However, it seems that the stronger logic and arguments favor conditionalism/annihilationism, including for angelic beings. If so, this particular statement, though not the overall claim about the problem of evil, actually presents a discontinuity with the Primary World.
Ibid., 283.
Ibid.
Ibid., 284.
Ibid.
Cf. Letter #208, p. 267.
Ibid., 284.
Ibid.
Though The Silmarillion, 20, 25 also mentions the Flame Imperishable as that which vivifies Eä, Tolkien does not reference it here. Tolkien either forgot to mention it, did not think of it as relevant, or had thought of them as unified.
Augustine, Enchiridion 3–4.
Tolkien, Letters, 355.
Ibid., 413.
Ibid.
The Silmarillion, 17: “And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.” Ibid.: “Behold your Music! This is your minstrelsy; and each of you shall find contained herein, amid the design that I set before you, all those things which it may seem that he himself devised or added. And thou, Melkor, wilt discover all the secret thoughts of thy mind, and wilt perceive that they are but a part of the whole and tributary to its glory.”
Tolkien, Letters, 413.