The Origins of Creativity and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Imaginative World
Faculty Editorial
In writing “The Lord of the Rings,” J. R. R. Tolkien cultivated entire worlds populated with strange and fanciful creatures. Beyond his fiction, Tolkien’s theoretical writings address fundamental questions about human creation — questions like: What is art?and Why do we make it? Settling on any final answers to these questions can be difficult, but Tolkien sheds some welcome light on them. Indeed, as a creator himself, Tolkien offers a clear and an eloquent explanation of the human impulse to create.
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.
–J.R.R. Tolkien
In his captivating but little — read essay “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien sets the table for a discussion of literature’s value. He observes that when humans create, whether by carving a figure from a marble slab or constructing and populating entire worlds from linguistic material, their art is a secondary creation. When artists take the world’s primary materials and reconfigure them “new form is made; Faërie begins; Man becomes a subcreator.” God is The Creator, and it is from His handiwork that all art is composed. Tolkien articulates this notion colorfully in his poem “Mythopoeia,” a poetic treatise on myth-creation. In it, Tolkien sets human art squarely within the context of divine creation. Humans are fallen, but they have not entirely lost the image in which they themselves were fashioned:
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned, and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned, his world-dominion by creative act: not his to worship the great Artefact, 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.
All human creation, according to Tolkien, is an echo of God’s own creative impulse. God is “the single White,” the fountainhead, the source of all that is and all the matter out of which humans create in their impoverished way. In the act of creation, we, as sub-creators, perceive the “single White” and we refract some small part of it, bending it toward some derivative art object. It is hard for anyone to trace the refracted light’s origins, but they proceed from the prime-Creator, the source of all that exists and through whom all things, even art, live and move and have their being.
For Tolkien, then, art is a small, broken piece of God’s beauty and creative activity. Human art is as distant from the “single White” as refracted light in a prism is from the rays of the sun. It is nevertheless beautiful in its own way because it participates, however remotely, in the life and creation of God. But what of the question, “Why do we make it?” One of Tolkien’s own fictional explorations of this question is instructive. In his mythological cycle of stories, The Silmarillion, Tolkien tells of Aulë, a quasi-angelic being. The ultimate creator of these beings is called Ilúvatar (a name that means ‘father of all’), the supreme deity of Tolkien’s mythology. The story in question takes place after Ilúvatar has created various orders of spiritual beings, but before he has made any creatures to populate the world. In his impatience, Aulë presumes to make the race of creatures known as the dwarves without the permission of Ilúvatar. Aulë is a smith and “master of crafts,” a description that connects him neatly to all artists. The notion of art as the product of skill and craft emanates from medieval aesthetic ideas, and Tolkien was, among other things, a formidable medieval scholar. Tolkien writes that Aulë, “wrought [the Dwarves] in secret.” In preempting the creative work of Ilúvatar, Aulë has erred. Ilúvatar intended to create the Elves first, and so Aulë’s creation is an act of pride. Ilúvatar immediately confronts the smith. He asks, “Why hast thou done this? Why dost thou attempt a thing which thou knowest is beyond thy power and thy authority?” In this line of questioning, one detects a possible anxiety that Tolkien himself may have felt about his own artistic creation. Could not these same questions be posed to anyone who presumes to tinker with fictional worlds? Aulë expresses regret but also offers this defense: “The making of things is in my heart from my own making by thee; and the child of li&le understanding that makes a play of the deeds of his father may do so without thought of mockery, but because he is the son of his father.” In contrition, Aulë lifts his hammer to dash his illicit creation, and the Dwarves cringe away from the blow. Seeing this, Ilúvatar has compassion on the smith and on the Dwarves themselves, who have revealed some vital principle within them by flinching. Ilúvatar accepts Aulë’s repentance and permits the dwarves to have a place in Middle Earth, at which Aulë, delighted, cries, “May Eru bless my work and amend it!”
“Human art is as distant from the ‘single White’ as refracted light in a prism is from the rays of the sun. It is nevertheless beautiful in its own way because it participates, however remotely, in the life and creation of God.”
Aulë’s creation of the dwarves is a significant moment in Tolkien’s cosmogony, but it also reveals his views concerning artistic production. For Tolkien, art is tied to the creative act of God insofar as we use created things in the production of new, if derivative, sub-creations, and the creative impulse itself is also tied to God’s original act of creation. Aulë is the archetypical artist — a maker. We, too, are made in the image of a maker, and the desire to create is stamped upon our hearts by the very fact of our creation. The child who wields her father’s hammer wields a dangerous tool. It is too heavy for her to use with precision. In her hands it may injure as easily as it may construct. But her desire to wield the hammer is no sin, and, indeed, she has some right to use it. As Aulë phrases it, his act of creation merits no ridicule simply because “he is the son of his father.”
Tolkien’s Aulë story shows that he was sensitive to the perils of sub-creation, but he was also enticed by the possibilities of the sub-creative act. The strongest vision Tolkien has concerning this possibility was his theory of the fairy-story’s happy ending. In the happy ending Tolkien saw not immature wish fulfillment, but a striking glimpse of the very core of the gospel — the resurrection of Christ. He called this “eucatastrophe,” not a sudden turn for the worse, but “the sudden joyous ‘turn.’” In this sudden good turn, Tolkien sees not a denial of “sorrow and failure” but a denial of “universal final defeat.” At the heart of the gospel (and the heart of human artistic creation) is joy — “Joy beyond the walls of the world.”
Tolkien believed that in this joy the subcreator and the Creator shared a common desire. As he concludes his treatise, Tolkien reveals one final hope for his own artistic creation when he suggests that the writer of fairy tales may dare to hope that he “may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know.” Tolkien’s answers to the questions I raised at first are insightful, but theydo not absolve artists from error. What more could be expected from the product of a fallen creature? Perhaps Tolkien, like Aulë, held out hope that his creation, like himself, would one day be redeemed. It is easy to understand how artists might be dissatisfied with Tolkien’s answers. It is not pleasant to imagine that the best of your work is only a derivation of God’s creation. But in this relationship there is also a hope. Human creativity, with all of its diverse aims and motivations, is ultimately but a piece of refracted light. In creating, we may go astray, but we can trust in the hope of God’s reconciliation. That reconciliation is not solely between ourselves and God, but between Him and all our aims and purposes. One day these too may be caught up in God’s creative purpose, and every part of the artist and the artists’ creation may, on that day, be redeemed.
Author’s Bio
Dr. Matthew Bardowell is an assistant professor at Missouri Baptist University. He specializes in medieval literature, specifically Old English Poetry and the literature of the Vikings. His research interests also include the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, the Inklings, aesthetics, and the study of emotion. Bardowell received his Ph.D. in English from Saint Louis University, M.A. in English from Florida Atlantic University and B.A. in English from Florida International University. He has written for numerous academic publications and presents at academic conferences.
1. J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” The Monsters
and the Critics and Other Essays, ed. Christopher
Tolkien (London: Harper Collins, 1997), 122.
2. J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (London:
HarperCollinsPublishers, 2001), 87.
3. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, ed. Christopher
Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 336.
4. The Silmarillion 318.
5. There are linguistic connections between
medieval terms for ‘art’ and the work wrought
by blacksmiths, painters, even sheep-shearers.
Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages,
trans. Hugh Bredin (New Haven: Yale UP, 1986), 93.
6. The Silmarillion 43.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. “Eru” is another appellation for Ilúvatar
The Silmarillion 44.
10. “On Fairy-Stories” 153.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. “On Fairy-Stories” 156–7.
