J. R. R. Tolkien's Theology of Sub-creation, Part 1 (2024)

(avg. read time: 12–23 mins.)

Human beings desire to make something. It is a broad statement to be sure, but is demonstrable from broad experience. Some people make art—whether visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, gustatory or what have you. Even if it is not art, others construct something. People make technology to address a need or want. They make gardens. They make clothes. They make games. They construct speeches and arguments. They write in personal journals/diaries, on the Internet, in letters/emails, on the walls of bathrooms, in graffiti, in stories, and in the forms of essays/articles, books, and so on. When children play with or without toys they build scenarios and perform actions according to the resources of their imaginations. This desire is also global in scope as virtually every culture has its own variation of the aforementioned forms of making and other forms which have not received mention. This innate desire is naturally a subject of interest in terms of the reason(s) why this desire exists and, much more broadly, why its exercise takes the forms that it takes.

J. R. R. Tolkien’s contributions to such discussions came mostly in addresses concerning language, storytelling, story-making (especially in terms of mythology), and world-making. He articulated his thoughts in the framework—and often the explicit terminology—of sub-creation. What did he mean by “sub-creation”? Why did he consider it significant? What resources did he draw from to construct his doctrine/theology of it? What contributions did this theology of sub-creation make to his own work? What contributions does it make to understanding the dimensions of life he addressed and to those dimensions he left unaddressed?

One can only hope to provide any sort of answer to these questions by studying what Tolkien had to say. In this case, it is a study of what he has written, particularly in the poem “Mythopoeia”, his famous essay “On Fairy-Stories”, and the relevant letters in which he addressed these issues. These works supply the most directly relevant material for this study, though studying the application of these ideas in his work could prove fruitful for understanding as well. Unfortunately, for the most part, such a task lies outside the scope for this study.

Because Tolkien used such diverse ways of expressing his theology of sub-creation, the most appropriate methodology seems to be to proceed for the majority of the study in a diachronic manner, to study articulations in a mostly chronological order. One advantage of this study’s adherence to such a methodology is that it almost neatly divides the three aforementioned sources into sequential units, with one exception. Another such advantage is that it provides encouragement to begin rightfully at “Mythopoeia”, a source which Tolkien himself would draw from in his more detailed exposition in his famous essay.

“Mythopoeia” (1931)

This poem about myth-making originates from a conversation between Tolkien, Hugo Dyson, and C. S. Lewis. This conversation would have profound effect especially on Lewis, who had previously asserted that myths are lies and have no worth but the aesthetic value, since they are after all lies “breathed through silver.” A thirty-nine-year-old Tolkien, who was in the process of writing The Hobbit, had by this point been composing his own mythology for approximately a decade-and-a-half, and had of course studied myths for even longer, coming to the opposite conclusion of Lewis. His belief in the inherent truth of myths in contrast to Lewis justified his use of the respective titles Philomythus (“myth-lover” or “word-lover”) and Misomythus (“myth-hater” or “word-hater”).

Tolkien’s opening stanzas, reflecting the conversation on the night of September 19, draw from two resources as an introduction into the larger discussion of myth: language (especially nomenclature) and the surrounding world. Most people, including presumably Misomythus himself, look at trees, call them such, and think nothing of it. Such people act similarly toward stars. They dimly apprehend the function of the objects of the world and think of them as “just so” (notice the essential repetitiveness of the terms, “petreous rocks,” “arboreal trees,” “tellurian earth,” “stellar stars,” and possibly, “homuncular men”). Yet these names are not inherent to the objects themselves, they were discovered and given. The givers of those names were people participating in invention based on their judgment of what name is fitting for such an object (hence the discovery aspect). For the example of the tree, Tolkien cites its appellative origin in the determination of a fitting title from those people responding to a stirring,

by deep monition movements that were kin

to life and death of trees, of beasts, of stars:

free captives undermining shadowy bars,

digging the foreknown from experience

and panning the vein of spirit out of sense.1

Similarly, stars were not so named except in the context of a myth-woven song articulating their beauty. These names originated from language that is invention about an object. But the purpose of this language is to determine an appropriate title for the object in question around which subsequent language could properly accrete. It is invention, but not deceitful concoction. The implication that becomes explicit in the next section is that myth is invention of the same manner, a way of telling the truth about the world. Indeed, the origins of language and myth belong closely together so that language is ultimately about communicating stories and meanings.

Tolkien uses this background to unpack his foundational points about mythopoeia and thus of sub-creation, which makes its first explicit appearance in the following lines:

The heart of man is not compound of lies,

but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,

and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,

man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.

Disgraced 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

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through whom is splintered from a single White

to many hues, and endlessly combined

in living shapes that move from mind to mind.

Though all the crannies of the world we filled

with elves and goblins, though we dared to build

gods and their houses out of dark and light,

and sow the seed of dragons, ‘twas our right

(used or misused). The right has not decayed.

We make still by the law in which we're made.2

There are several points to note in this excerpt. First, this defense of the heart of man indicates that Tolkien believed the heart to be the fount of mythopoeia. Myths can only be inherent lies if the heart is compound of lies. If it is not, myths contain some truth or at least some grasping for truth. This truth or grasping thereof comes from the fact that humanity still draws wisdom from the only Wise (a reference to the God Tolkien worshiped).

Second, this connection between wisdom from God and mythopoeia potentially involves two foundations. The first inspires more confidence in its veracity as it is a belief Tolkien clearly demonstrates here and elsewhere that there is some divine truth to be found in pagan sources. It is a view he shared with Justin Martyr (1 Apol. 20–23; 44; 46; 59–60; 2 Apol. 8; 10; 13), his disciple Tatian (Or. Graec. 21), Clement of Alexandria (Strom. 1.4–5, 13, 19–20), Eusebius of Caesarea (Praep. ev.), Basil the Great (Address to Young Men) Augustine of Hippo (Civ. 8.1; Doctr. chr. 2.25), some medieval scribes who preserved the written legacy of pagan mythology, the Beowulf-poet, and many others.3

The second possible foundation is not as simple to demonstrate, but it does have some plausibility. That is, the link he makes between wisdom and sub-creation is a derivation of the link between wisdom and God’s action of creation. There is biblical precedent for such a belief in Ps 104:24 in the context of the psalm’s celebration of God’s creative work and in Prov 8:22–31 there is a personified image of Wisdom at work in creation (also see Prov 3:19). In Catholic Bibles, the Apocrypha is also included, featuring books such as Ecclesiasticus/Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach and Wisdom of Solomon. These books further developed wisdom theology and connected the figure of Wisdom, among other divine works, with the creation and sustaining of the world (Sir 1:9–10; Wis 1:7; 7:22, 24, 27; 8:1, 5–6; 9:2, 9). (Also, Tolkien may not have known this much, but biblical scholars have often noted the Wisdom Christology of the New Testament identifying Jesus with Wisdom, as in John 1:1–18; Col 1:15–20; Heb 1:1–4). It is not possible to know for certain if Tolkien had such a theological background for the link between wisdom and creation in mind, especially since he never wrote about it. However, even if it was not part of Tolkien’s thought, this background does provide theological depth to his beliefs via sources he would have accepted.4

Third, Tolkien’s lens for understanding sub-creation and how humanity is capable of it is the divine-human relationship. Humans draw on the resources provided by God, whether realizing it or not. In the act of mythopoeia, humans recall God’s creative activity by imitation. This stream of thought has an identifiable source in the Bible’s picture of humans as the image-bearers of God who thus bear the capacity to represent God. One of the most basic ways of representing God is imitation of one of the most basic modes in biblical theology of understanding God’s identity: as Creator. In fact, in the opening chapter of Genesis, what the audience first learns about this God is primarily that he is the sovereign Creator, that sovereignty and creatorship go hand-in-hand. Sovereignty is the explicit charge to humans as image-bearers, to reflect the divine rule into creation. Just as humans derive their sovereignty from God—and thus could be considered “sub-sovereign”—the implication would be that humans derive something of God’s creativity, since it is essential to God’s unique sovereignty, which he bequeaths in some measure to humanity. Because sub-creation, especially expressed in mythopoeia, is so basic to the capacities of humans as image-bearing creatures, it was not lost in the estrangement from God. Sin could corrupt, but not dislodge, this sub-creative capacity. Hence, humans keep the rags of their lordship.

Of course, one could justly ask how this connection between the human purpose of being an image-bearer of God, the exercise of sovereignty, and sub-creation via mythopoeia works concretely. It seems fairly clear how it works in the process of world-making in the creation of such stories as the sub-creator becomes the originator, preserver, governor, and provider for that world (i.e., as God does for what Tolkien later calls the Primary World, according to the Bible). Perhaps most importantly, at least from a biblical perspective, mythopoeia and the consequent world-making entail the activity of assigning roles and functions for what populates that world.5 This teleological assignment represents the crucial link between creativity and sovereignty so that the latter is contained within the former. Whatever innovation there may be, the sub-creator draws on elements from the world in which he/she lives and thus provides a story which makes some impact upon how one approaches those elements in the Primary World. Since myths are often metaphysical and explanatory in character, they provide the audience with tools for encountering the world according to the myth and the shape of that myth affects the shape of the tools. In Tolkien’s view, myth is invention about truth and so its formation provides ways of grasping the truth of the world and figuring out how to live in it through understanding how other beings and objects function within the world. This narrative-produced wisdom enables humans to exercise the creativity and sovereignty appropriate to their position in creation.

Fourth, the reader can glimpse here a theme which will become more prominent in Tolkien’s later works concerning the place of sub-creation in the post-Fall world. Though the capacity of sub-creation was a divine grant, it has of course been corrupted in this present time into idolatry. Humans have improperly worshiped the great Artefact rather than the true Artificer. Instead of using this capacity to the purpose of our existence as beings created in the image of God, it has been used to fill the world with gods sub-created after our own image and in whose images are found further corruption. It has become a divine right used to devilish purposes.

Yet, despite all of these problems created by the corruption of the right, the right itself still has good and important functions in this post-Fall world. The law by which we make and the law by which we were made remains and in it humans still find the potential to be refractions of the original light. As such, in Protestant circles sub-creation could be understood as a means of prevenient grace held out to all. Since Tolkien was a Catholic, probably a more accurate phrasing of this point is that sub-creation is nigh-sacramental. This underlying law of creation makes sub-creation a bearer of divine grace and thus a mode of transferring it. It is a sign pointing back to the law by which we were made. Though its usage can be corrupted, sub-creation—as the name itself indicates—points back in some way or another to creation (and the vocation for humans instituted therein since sub-creation was to be an expression of lordship and being image-bearers). Furthermore, the reference to human sub-creators functioning as refracted light underscores one of Tolkien’s ultimate points about myth in his conversation with Lewis. For all of its faults and the corruptions caused by the Fall, myth exists to tell truth, to refract the light from the original source of all truth in creative ways.

Fifth, the last half or so of the excerpt indicates that sub-creation is to be an endless combination of refracted colors, an explorative use of the right. While sub-creation is an act that—to varying extents in its character rather than its content—imitates God’s creative action, it also involves exploring possibilities that are not actualized in the Primary World. Sometimes, those possibilities are things that could still be actualized—and perhaps in so doing one finds most clearly what it means to refract the original divine light most powerfully—and sometimes they are simply alternatives to the Primary World that can still have impacts on our perspective of the Primary World. It is in the nature of creativity, the sub-creative gift from God, to explore counterfactuals and possibilities as well as the previously unconsidered (or under-considered) aspects of creation. Of course, as will become even clearer later and is hinted by the above focus on the truthfulness of myth, sub-creation is not free simply to lie and to deny the reality of the fundamental characteristics of the Primary World. All sub-creations and sub-creators are accountable to the Primary Creation and the Creator.6 Properly, sub-creation is an exploration through the divinely granted right of our own imperfect reflections of God’s infinite creative capacity, of things he could have done/made.

At this point, it is worth considering the bases Tolkien had for making such statements about sub-creation and storytelling. Tolkien was a philologist who was a true Philomythus as he believed in the power of language because it derived from the power of God. God created the world by word, as both Gen 1 and John 1 convey in their own ways. While language cannot create ex nihilo—since that power belongs to God alone—it can, especially through sub-creational mythopoeia (both in the telling and in the receiving), form objects, peoples, and worlds in which they make the sense that they do. For Tolkien, myths—particularly the true myth of the Gospel—fulfill this highest function of language and, insofar as they convey truth creatively, they bring humans closer to living out the function for which God created them: to be image-bearers of the Creator. The first person who took on a sub-creative role in exercising some measure of creative sovereignty in assigning names and function—and as Tolkien himself already indicates, assigning names is a key work of mythopoesis and sub-creation—is ha’adam in Gen 2:19–20, who gives names to the animals, participating in God’s own creative sovereign act of naming the creation.

To return to “Mythopoeia,” Tolkien acknowledges another aspect of Misomythus’ argument that myths are but beautiful lies. That is, myths often consist of vain dreams of wish fulfillment. They seem like a coping strategy for overlooking the pain caused by the evil of the world. After all, do not many people speak of fantasy, science fiction, or many kinds of movies in and outside of these genres as, “escapes from reality”? The evil that runs through reality disrupts things, disorients us, destroys what we love, and our deepest wishes and the dreams we hold most dearly strike the wall of evil like a man hoping to push over a skyscraper with a running start. Faced with such obstacles, it can seem that myths and fairy-stories are our opportunities to see wishes come true, because we never see them become so in reality. But therein lies a question: where did such wishes and dreams come from? Could it be that they are such brute facts about humans because they are of a similar character as the ultimate reality, the truth concerning which evil attempts to deceive? Can it be that they are actually signposts to the truths of myths, the means by which myths communicate truths, and the modes in which—and only in which—people learn the truths through participation in the story? Tolkien has already hinted at such conclusions with what has preceded in this poem and they receive more extensive articulation elsewhere as well.

While the sub-creation of myth-making should not deny evil, it should defy it through proclaiming the truths of these dreams and the ways they point to the truth beyond the empirical. In these transcendent truth-telling stories, humans can, “build / their little arks,”7 to provide some measure of deliverance from the oppression of evil, though full deliverance can come only from the true myth. But these arks can navigate toward, “a rumour of a harbour guessed by faith.”8 In a double allusion, Tolkien insists that the makers of legends do not necessarily call for a flight to lotus-isles or the neglect of life to gain a kiss from Circe. Rather, they have looked in the face of Death, “and yet they would not in despair retreat, / but oft to victory have turned the lyre / and kindled hearts with legendary fire, / illuminating Now and dark Hath-been / with light of suns as yet by no man seen.”9 As such, the sub-creator can, in some way like the Creator, be a revealer by sharing the light one has seen with others. And in revelation of the past and present, the sub-creator can, again like the Creator, provide a source of empowerment by which the participant of the myth can derive power from the paean and participate in the victory.

As Philomythus, Tolkien declares that he would rather share the company of such people in the work of sub-creation, whether minstrels, mariners, or beleaguered fools than the contemporaries who insist that they are the educated ones, the grown-up ones, the enlightened ones, the progressive ones. In such a world of “progress” there is given no place for the sub-creator and myth-maker. Precisely because the path—indeed, myth—of so-called “progress” is a deceptive one, it actually calls for humans—who have the universal call to be image-bearers, particularly through sub-creation—to lay down their divine rights, the gracious birthright bestowed on all image-bearers to be able to imitate their Creator in sub-creative action. Such is the essence of selling a birthright for a mess of pottage.

For whoever follows the same road that Philomythus walks, there is an eschatological expectation that Tolkien expresses in the closing lines of the poem:

In Paradise perchance the eye may stray / from gazing upon everlasting Day / to see

the day-illumined, and renew

from mirrored truth the likeness of the True.

Then looking on the Blessed Land 'twill see

that all is as it is, and yet made free:

Salvation changes not, nor yet destroys,

garden not gardener, children not their toys.

Evil it will not see, for evil lies

not in God's picture but in crooked eyes,

not in the source but in the tuneless voice.

In Paradise they look no more awry;

and though they make anew, they make no lie.

Be sure they still will make, not being dead,

and poets shall have flames upon their head,

and harps whereon their faultless fingers fall:

there each shall choose for ever from the All.10

Several points are worth noting here, not least because they appear later in Tolkien’s other expositions. First, in a seemingly retrospective sense, Tolkien claims that even in this eschatological scene one will find the myths and sub-creations of humanity to be revelatory. At least, it will be true of them insofar as they reflect the actual character of Truth. Each are fragments of the true myth reflecting by angled vision what one glimpses in the whole. But the Truth does not dispose of all the fragments and reflections as no longer being of use (as is not the case in the present time either given the innumerable imperfections in our knowledge and the helpfulness of myths to address them). Instead, it takes them up and makes them more fully what they are, renewing them as likenesses of the Truth to which they had been pointing all along. How this will happen remains a mystery after the fashion of the mystery of the resurrection. How will the body be identifiably the person raised, yet also transphysically different and having the qualities of kingdom life? It is unclear how to articulate it, but Jesus has already carved out the path for how it will be.

Second, this point leads into an observation of the divine hallowing of sub-creation. God upholds the sanctity of his human creation and of their sub-creations by making them part of his Primary one. Indeed, this hallowing is a way of making them complete through participation in what fulfills them, namely the Word through whom all things came into being. It is God’s affirmation through sanctification that he created humans to bear his image in subordinate creation. Reciprocally, humans reflect their identity as image-bearers who worship (and facilitate the worship) of the Creator. Insofar as sub-creation is an outworking of this image-bearing identity, it becomes an act of worship dedicated to the Creator as an acknowledgment of his will.

Third, the salvation brought by the new creation fulfills these sub-creational stories and thereby redeems them. The combination of redemption and fulfillment extends in a continuous sense to the capacity as well. In the present world, sub-creation is fraught with imperfections and even lies. But with the redemption of the capacity in which sub-creation finds its root there is no more place for lies in sub-creation and myth-making and the products of the image-bearers become as whole as the image-bearers themselves in the new creation. In this vision, the sub-creators are still at work in the new creation. They still make because they still live and they express the life within them—the divine life that they partake of—through sub-creation. There is a sense here that myth-making is intrinsic to human life so that as long as there is the latter there will be the former. When that life becomes eternal upon the fullness of its redemption (Rom 8:18–23) so too will its sub-creational products that will undergo some similar process of redemption and perfection. These works will become more glorious because the makers will become more glorious, as Tolkien describes them as experiencing the fires of inspiration and empowerment (in imagery reminiscent of Pentecost) and as being able to play perfectly the instruments that accompany their lays. Like in Tolkien’s own Ainulindalë (and its anticipation of the Last Song that will be greater still), each person is called to contribute to the music of the new creation. New creation is the renewal of creation and the full vivification of it to make it more fully itself and it only makes sense that this vivification would include the continuation and consummation of the sub-creation of world-making from the beings who are divine image-bearers and that they would fulfill the participatory vocation that is at the foundation of their identity.

Fourth, this participatory vocation emerges in the protean forms of participation in creation. Participatory creation is in some sense parallel to participatory grace and participatory victory. That is, that humans as sub-creators, when redeemed, will actually be called to participate in the action of creation, namely the new creation. They will in fact take part in fulfilling the beliefs, thoughts, dreams and hopes present in their sub-creations. That work will become hallowed in a way unlike any we know now as it will receive the support of God’s actual creative power. Texts such as 1 Cor 3:10–15; 15:42–49, 58 indicate that the works of the present creation carry over in some mysterious and amplified way to the new creation, but there is a more basic and wide-ranging truth that points to what Tolkien claims here. Is the notion that the works of the present creation—at least the ones that glorify God in their goodness—have some mysterious place in the new creation not part of the underlying logic of resurrection and final judgment? The works of the present have some role in the formation of the heirs of the new creation and the resurrection body is the fitting climax for a life that bears the fruit of the kingdom by the presence and power of the Spirit. As such, they have some role in the final judgment as they stand in testimony to what the Spirit has done in the lives of believers. They stand as evidence and demonstration of the vindication of the justified. The works that have the character of participating in and anticipating the kingdom of God are vindicated in that God confirms that they are of that same character and thus belong in the kingdom. But they do not simply disappear afterwards, they become part of the renewed creation as creation itself undergoes a process similar to resurrection as it remains God’s good creation, has all evil removed from it, and becomes transformed to be eternal and a proper temple in which God becomes all in all. All of these things are the works of God and God calls for humans to participate in them through bearing his image, including how they function as sub-creators. Humans remain creatures, not creators in the sense that God is Creator. They remain subordinate and subservient to God; they are not creative sovereign in the sense that the Creator God is Lord of all. But they are participants when they follow the creative purpose of God, and this function finds its fulfillment in the consummation of creation. These observations serve as a fitting climax to Tolkien’s grand poem about a magnificent action and capacity that comes from the Creator.