Tolkien's account of creation opens with the Ainulindalë, the Elves' telling of how the world was sung into being. The passage that describes this moment reads:
Then the voices of the Ainur, like unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and organs, and like unto countless choirs singing with words, began to fashion the theme of Ilúvatar to a great music; and a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights, and the places of the dwelling of Ilúvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void. (Tolkien, The Silmarillion, ed. Christopher Tolkien [Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014], 15)
What stopped me in this passage is the final clause: and it was not void. The Void is, by definition, empty. And yet. What the Ainulindalë does in that final clause is let us see, for a moment, that Tolkien’s work as a philologist and his work as a myth-maker are part of the same story. Read against Tolkien’s philological work, the Ainulindalë stops being a work of fiction and starts looking like scripture.
The surprise, when you read the biblical texts alongside the Ainulindalë, is how much Tolkien didn’t have to invent. In Job 38:4-7, God answers Job out of the storm with a series of rhetorical questions about creation, one of which slips in a strange detail:
4 “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
5 Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
6 On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone—
7 while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels [NIV note: Hebrew the sons of God] shouted for joy? (Job 38:4-7 NIV)
The morning stars singing, the sons of God shouting for joy—Tolkien’s Ainur are already here, in embryo. The difference is structural: in Job the angels sing while God creates; in the Ainulindalë, the Ainur sing, and the singing is the creation itself. That difference matters: in Job the angels are witnesses to a creation they do not make, while in the Ainulindalë the Ainur are sub-creators whose song is the thing itself. This is Tolkien’s own word, ‘sub-creation’, and he means it theologically: to make is to participate in the Maker’s making. And Job is the generous account here; the other accounts say less, not more.
Genesis is the starkest example. The opening verses gives us creation in its quietest form; there is no music and no chorus—only God’s voice:
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day. (Genesis 1:1-5 NIV)
There are no singers here. No morning stars, no sons of God, no chorus, only the voice of God moving over the deep. And yet the tradition knows they were there. Job tells us the morning stars were singing; other texts, such as Jubilees, fill in what Genesis leaves out. What Tolkien does in the Ainulindalë is put everything in one place. The scattered tradition: Genesis's formless deep, Job's singing stars, Jubilees's angelic orders, is gathered into a single account. This is what compilers and commentators have always done: gather the scattered fragments of scripture into a single telling. Tolkien is doing the same work, in the same register. And this move is not only something Tolkien does at cosmogonic scale. He does it with single words, single names, single lines of Old English poetry.
The clearest example is Eärendil. The name comes from a single line in Crist I, an Old English religious poem Tolkien read as an undergraduate at Oxford:
Eala Earendel engla beorhtast ofer middangeard monnum sended
[“Hail Earendel, brightest of angels, / sent to men over Middle-earth.”]
(Crist I, lines 104-5)
From this one line, Tolkien grew his entire mythology. Tolkien took the word and imagined. What makes his move scholarly genius is in the transformation of Earendel into Eärendil. To scholars of Old English, the meaning was unimportant; to Tolkien it was the beginning. Tolkien created a half-elven hero sailing the heavens carrying a Silmaril, who becomes the Morning Star, Venus. This is the work of a philologist at the highest level, taking the inherited tradition of Old English poems and scripture, understanding and iterating upon them, to create a mythology that is our own. The work Tolkien does to create the story of Eärendil is of the same type he does to tell the story of creation in Ainulindalë. Tolkien draws upon the writing itself. Look to the Ainulindalë passage we started with, which features four clauses beginning with ‘and’, piling up like the verses of Genesis 1. These stylistic features create a new story that immerses the reader in totality. From this, his work stops being fiction and starts looking like scripture. The understanding of “Whose mythology is this?” is shaped to really be our own as we travel deeper into Faerie.
- BN
No comments:
Post a Comment