J. R. R. Tolkien: Saying Something

Few people dominate their field quite as much as J. R. R. Tolkien dominates the fantasy genre. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings have captured countless imaginations with their vivid worldbuilding, their gentle balance of grand themes and familiar feelings, the rich stories and characters, and the timeless struggle between good and evil. All these years after their initial publication, we keep returning to Tolkien's Middle Earth, in books, films, games, and recently Amazon's The Rings of Power TV series, reportedly the most expensive ever financed ($58 million per episode). Tolkien's stories seem timeless, always relevant and fresh. To have created such a rich world (with its own languages and histories) that has sparked so manyother people's creativity is a fantastic legacy, and in my opinion, cements Tolkien as one of the most brilliant artists of the last century. 

With all this in mind, I was fascinated to come across an interview with Tolkien that briefly touches on his outlook on the creative mind. John Bowen of BBC's Bookstand (1962) conducts the interview, linked below:

The dialogue stood out to me as intelligent and professional, especially given its general audience. Tolkien seems humble and amiable, holding his ground without seeming cantankerous. Rather than discuss how the interview was conducted though, I wanted to highlight a few things from Bowen and Tolkien's conversation.

Bowen asks why someone would create something as expansive as Tolkien's world, saying there would have been a point when "like God" Tolkien set about his work. Tolkien responds:

"Because, being made by a creator, one of our natural factors is wishing to create, but since we aren't creators we have to sub-create - let's say rearrange - the primary material in some particular form which pleases, which isn't necessarily be a moral pleasing, it's partly an aesthetic pleasing."

This attests to man being made in God's image. Our human desire to create, to add to and arrange Creation, is rooted in God as a Creator, who commissioned man to "be fruitful" (Gen. 1:28), and create in turn. As Tolkien acknowledges, however, man's creativity is not ex nihilo (from nothing), but we must 'sub-create' or 'rearrange' what God has already put there. This includes the formation of new ideas, crystallizing elements of creation into new, useful forms. I unpack this more in my Culture in the Christian Worldview series.

The "primary material" Tolkien refers to includes all that has come before, which in his case might include the literary genres he builds on, but also what he calls an author's "private stock". The Lord of the Rings, for example, compounds Tolkien's expertise on Saxon verse, his ear for the musicality of language and knowledge of its history, the horrors of the First World War, and the system of values inherited from his Catholic upbringing. This isn't to say that art is deterministic, that every song or painting can be reduced to the sum of its parts or the artist's sociocultural background, but acknowledges that in their pursuit of beauty, artists have to build on what has already come before in Creation.

Tolkien also touches on the object of these acts of subcreation: to seek a form "which pleases", either in a moral or aesthetic sense. This perhaps recalls God who 'saw that it was good' as he made the world. By declaring something as good, we can detect that there are ultimate metrics by which creation operates; we live in a moral universe, and our human output is no exception. There is an ultimate good, and ultimate beauty (God), and the best art is in pursuit of this. Part of this idea comes through in Bowen's question, that by creating a fantasy world, is Tolkien suggesting how worlds "ought to be"?

Tolkien correctly doesn't buy this premise wholesale, saying that just by creating a world does not mean he recommends that world as a model; the artist is not obliged to tailor his imagination to political ends about an ideal society. Tolkien gives the example of kings, which appear in Middle Earth, saying he chose them because "it makes for a better story". However, there is a sense in which, on a much more fundamental level, this act of creation does suggest how the world is. Narrative, morality and beauty only make sense if the world is also moral, beautiful, and has some sort of narrative endpoint. Of course Tolkien isn't arguing that people should burrow into holes in the ground like hobbits, but he is arguing for truths, such as the importance of friendship, of fighting against evil no matter how unlikely the consequences, of what good leadership looks like, etc. The world he created is tremendously rich, in this sense, giving glimpses of God's good design.

Here the question turns naturally to a discussion of good and evil, forces that are so inescapable in Middle Earth because they are so inescapable in the real world. Tolkien does not shy away from moral complexity, but as Bowen identifies, his stories have absolute evil and absolute good. Tolkien counters that he does not believe in 'absolute evil', but does in 'absolute good'. This seems perfectly in line with Christianity. Redemption and forgiveness are open to all; no one is beyond God's grace. Jesus, however, perfectly models in his love and obedience, 'absolute good', and imitating Christ is the ultimate moral rule.*

Bowen is determined to read the One Ring (from The Lord of the Rings) as "a kind of allegory for the H bomb", articulating what people considered absolute evil to be in the 1960s. Tolkien seems baffled by this link, saying, brilliantly, that man's susceptibility to corruption is a truth acknowledged across cultures and time periods, before the H bomb, and before the World Wars. I think this demonstrates to us the enduring relevance of The Lord of the Rings, and how Tolkien's creation really hit the nail on the head. It will last as a captivating story because the truths it touches on, and the way it communicates these in its motifs, symbols and plots, reveal unchanging truths about the human condition, both the redemptive and the condemning.

This brings us to Bowen's final question: "Would you rather be remembered as a man who has said something, or a man who has made something?" Tolkien marvellously responds: "The made thing, unless it says something, won't be remembered".

Perhaps that can be our working definition of what makes art endure, and what sets Tolkien's books as a benchmark not just for the fantasy genre, but for storytelling at any scale. He has told a story for the ages.

* A brilliant article by Alec Ryrie (Professor of Christian History, Durham University) in BBC History Magazine argues that after World War II, Hitler and the Nazis became the West's central moral figures, which accounts for how often they come up in conversations about morality. This negative example has displaced the positive example of Christ as the central moral tale in our social consciousness. You can read this article here.