Tolkien's Cosmology

Divine Beings and Middle-earth

Sam McBride

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781631014031
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire anglaise

Demonstrating the unity of Tolkien's created world across Middle-earth's Ages An in-depth examination of the role of divine beings in Tolkien's work, Tolkien's Cosmology: Divine Beings and Middle-earth brings together Tolkien's many references to such beings and analyzes their involvement within his created world. Unlike many other commentators, Sam McBride asserts that a careful reading of the whole of the author's corpus shows a coherent, if sometimes contradictory, divine presence in the world.

In The Silmarillion, an epic history of the First Age of Middle-earth, Tolkien describes the Ainur, angelic beings under the direction of Eru Ilúvatar, the legendarium's god, as creators of physical reality. Some of these divine beings, the Valar and the Maiar, enter physical reality to oversee its development and prepare for the appearance of sentient life forms in Middle-earth: Elves and Humans, Dwarves, and eventually Hobbits. In the early stages of this history, the Valar and Maiar interact directly with Elves and Humans, opposing the work of evil beings led by Melkor.

Yet Tolkien appears, at first glance, to have ignored this pantheon in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, set in the Third Age of Middle-earth. Tolkien's letters, however, suggest the cosmological structure continues. And representatives of the Valar and Maiar can be seen at work, such as Gandalf and Saruman. Tolkien also introduces hints that his divine beings continue to influence events invisibly, as with the prominence of luck in The Hobbit and fortuitous weather conditions in The Lord of the Rings.

In the end, McBride argues, Tolkien's cosmology allows room for everything from poor decision-making to evil, suffering, and death, all part of a belief system that will make the final victory of Good much more powerful.

Chapter 1

Tolkien’s Cosmogony and Pantheon

n the beginning, Tolkien created Middle-earth. Yet three years passed between first writing that world into existence in 1916 and devising its creation story, around 1919. Forty-five years later Tolkien recalled writing his “cosmogonical myth”¹ after the Great War had ended, while employed as an etymological researcher for the Oxford English Dictionary. Thus, drafts of the stories that eventually became The Silmarillion already existed prior to creating the creation story. Tolkien’s cosmogony did not make possible the chronologically subsequent narratives of Middle-earth; rather, the existence of those stories necessitated creating an appropriate cosmogony.

To people his creation myth Tolkien developed a pantheon of gods and goddesses reminiscent of the divine beings in Greek and Norse mythology. Yet Tolkien shaped his gods differently from those of authentic pagan myths. Tolkien’s divine beings eschew control of Middle-earth’s residents, and learn to avoid interfering with the decisions of lower beings.² They avoid the petty wrangling and soap-opera lusts of Greek mythology, and the bitter sense of impotence and impending doom of Norse myth. They are, in Burns’s words, divine beings that “A man like Tolkien, born in Victorian times,” could feel comfortable with: an “improved pantheon.”³

In fact, Tolkien’s gods and goddesses aren’t really gods and goddesses at all; they lack divinity as an intrinsic element of self-existent natures. Tolkien’s gods remain creatures, the “first creations”⁴ of the real god of Middle-earth, Eru Ilúvatar. Little can be said of Eru; one early text describes him succinctly as an incomprehensible prime mover, though McIntosh argues persuasively that Tolkien viewed Eru’s nature through “the biblically informed Christian Neoplatonism of … Augustine and Aquinas” as a “personal agent” rather than a vague life force.⁵ Eru means the One God; Flieger notes the emphasis on one implies one alone,⁶ existing in a category separate from all else. Ilúvatar translates as Allfather, and thus the Elves see Eru as the creator, the source of matter and life. Eru possesses the Flame Imperishable, through which reality can exist independently of Eru, though derived from him. Eru exists outside of time and physical reality, both of which he creates. Yet Elves believe he can enter into his creation, much as a singer might enter his own song, or a storyteller his own story, while simultaneously remaining outside it. Elves describe Eru as beyond measure. Existence stems from Eru, Tolkien explained, and thus is called Oienkarmë Eruo, translated by Tolkien as “The One’s perpetual production” and “God’s management of the Drama.”⁷

God’s, rather than the gods’, management forms a bedrock principle of Tolkien’s invented world; Middle-earth is decisively monotheistic. Yet Eru chooses to remain distant and invisible to Middle-earth, leaving his “first creations” as the visible sources of power; in the apparent absence of Eru Ilúvatar, the Valar play the role of de facto gods.⁸ Thus the cosmology of Middle-earth can be described as polytheistic monotheism. Middle-earth is a monotheistic world in which its creator only rarely appears. While Eru may be omnipresent within the world in some metaphysical sense, he rarely reveals himself. Rather, he is mediated through his representatives, creatures bound within the world, yet powerful and holy enough to be called, in one Tolkien name list, pagan gods.⁹ Residents of Middle-earth learn of Eru Ilúvatar almost exclusively through the gods. This chapter will examine Tolkien’s creation myth and pantheon to establish the self-contradictory concept of polytheistic monotheism as the groundwork of Middle-earth cosmology.

Creation

History parallels music in Tolkien’s imaginary realm. It exists over time, includes overlapping strands, and involves periods of development, punctuated by climaxes. Tolkien uses music as the underlying metaphor of creation in the “Ainulindalë,” “one of the most profound theodicies … ever written,” in Williams’s view.¹⁰ According to the “Ainulindalë,” Eru Ilúvatar creates spirit-beings with musical potential, training and instructing them in musical production, then listening to their ensemble performances, all as background to the creation of a reality completely separate from the purely spiritual realm of Eru and his spirit-beings. The idea of music forming creation goes back to Plato’s myth of Er in Timaeus, but especially to Boethius’s On the Consolation of Philosophy;¹¹ Tolkien directly references the medieval notion of the “music of the spheres,” though “imaginatively and selectively,” according to Eden, adapting it to his own purposes, and adding the biblical accounts of creation in both Genesis 1 and John 1.¹²

Tolkien conceives of creation within his legendarium as a collaborative event encompassed in three distinct but parallel phases:

1. the Music of the Ainur (the Great Music);

2. the Vision of the Ainur;

3. physical creation.

At the same time, the “Ainulindalë,” as with most stories of origins, begs the question of what comes before phase 1. The story implies an ex nihilo creation prior to the beginning of Middle-earth. “There was Eru,” begins the tale, who created the Ainur prior to making anything else.¹³ Thus in a single sentence, Tolkien establishes the a priori existence of just one creator-god, who then devises spirit-beings possessing rationality as his first creation,¹⁴ using a process of pure thought.

While Tolkien’s cosmogony says little about what came prior to the creation of the Ainur, it does offer insight into the Ainur’s activities prior to their collaboration with Eru in creating physical reality. Having thought divine creatures into being, Eru turns to speaking as a means of instructing them. Prior to the Great Music, the Ainur develop their musical skills under Eru’s direction with little knowledge of any purpose behind their training. At first the Ainur sing monophonically. Tolkien’s description of their musical development parallels the history of music within Western culture since the early Middle Ages: monophonic melodies sung solo or by small ensemble, eventually incorporating rudimentary harmony.¹⁵ The earliest heavenly music resembles Gregorian chant at least in its limited complexity; the addition of harmony suggests developments such as organum in eleventh-century Europe, which combines a primary melody with a parallel or contrasting melody.

More important than the sound of the Ainur’s first music is its derivative nature. Not just the Ainur, but the musical themes they sing come from Eru, who implements a surprising pedagogical methodology for teaching music. A typical approach for teaching a song to a choir untrained in reading music involves a leader first singing a phrase or melody with the choir repeating it. Yet Eru gives oral direction, “propounding to them themes,” which they then sing.¹⁶ The Ainur, in other words, provide a musical interpretation, not of a written score, but of a spoken description.

The purpose of this early singing of the Ainur remains obscure. Given the impact of their later Great Music, this early singing may be practice, preparation, rehearsal. Yet the text suggests two further dimensions. First, as the Ainur sing before Eru, he expresses satisfaction and joy; this image parallels Christian descriptions of a heavenly host singing praise to God. The singing implies worship as much as aesthetic pleasure.¹⁷ Second, the singing connects to a broader education. The thought propounded to each Ainu (Tolkien’s singular form for Ainur) reflects but one facet of the mind of Eru. As the Ainur listen to one another, they learn more of the mind of their creator. This deeper understanding underpins and enables the increasing musical complexity of their output.

Eru apparently intends a further purpose behind this slow musical evolution; gathering together before him all the Ainur, Ilúvatar “declare[s] to them a mighty theme,” containing wisdom he has not yet revealed. The content overwhelms the Ainur, reducing them to reverent silence. Rather than silence, however, Eru desires participation. He instructs them to make “a Great Music,” each Ainu adorning the provided theme.¹⁸ The instruction parallels the approach of a jazz ensemble, agreeing on a structure (typically a melody and a harmonic sequence) and who will solo when, but then improvising. Or perhaps more accurately, Eru’s instruction reflects the baroque practice of improvising ornamentation on a prewritten melody, combined with basso continuo accompaniment based on a chart of harmonic progressions. Hart describes such music as “free and spontaneous ornamentation.”¹⁹ Improvisatory musical practices result, in theory, in spontaneous expression such that participants do not know precisely what notes their fellow musicians will play.

Most free improvisation exists within boundaries (limitations of a specific musical instrument; a performer’s ornamentation tendencies; what worked well in rehearsal). Such is the case in the Great Music of the Ainur. The narrator of the “Ainulindalë” implies that the singers’ voices possess individual qualities, some sounding like specific instruments, others contributing to a sound like a vocal choir. Furthermore, Eru instructs his Ainur to suggest their own thoughts by means of embellishments. Since each Ainu’s musical expressions reflect some specific and limited part of the mind of Eru, each Ainu’s contribution to the Great Music is idiosyncratic, limited by his or her own experience. The sum total of the singing provides a more complete reflection of the mind of the creator than that available to any one Ainu. Knight calls the Ainur in their singing “contributors to a great free collective improvisation.”²⁰

Yet to instruct the Ainur to embellish the theme with their individual thoughts implies more at stake than just music. Such a moment foregrounds that music in the narrative serves as metaphor, illustrating a concept that lies beyond the minds of created beings within a space/time continuum. Even given that Tolkien’s is a fictional reality, a secondary world, the Music of the Ainur can hardly be music in the sense that we use the term today (or even in the same sense that Elves or Hobbits use the term in The Lord of the Rings); a later phase of the creation process shows that the Ainur have not yet experienced physical reality. There cannot be music (at least not as a phenomenon Humans can understand) where there is no air (or other physical medium) through which vibrations can transmit. Furthermore, Humans cannot conceive of music without time, and the events of the Singing of the Ainur take place prior to the creation of time (a statement that reveals the limitations of language in describing cosmological reality).²¹ Thus music functions as a trope for something beyond Human (or Elven) comprehension. Naveh notes that “The music of the Ainur is clearly supposed to be abstract, celestial music played in the Void and intended for Ilúvatar’s ears; thus, it certainly does not resemble any music known to humanity today or in any previous era. But despite its abstract nature, the description of the music is full of much more earthly concepts and images.”²²

An early version of “The Music of the Ainur” suggests a divine being told the creation story to the Elves; one can imagine this divine being describing the experience as music to make the experience comprehensible. Such a supposition foregrounds the inability to authenticate creation tales since, by definition, no storyteller could have been present except for the creator(s). As Nagy observes, in Tolkien’s legendarium, “the ultimate authenticating force is always only implied: one can never actually reach it in a text, since it is embedded deep in the texture of culture.”²³

The extramusical dimension of “The Music of the Ainur” reveals Tolkien’s scholarly orientation. As a specialist in languages from Medieval Europe, Tolkien knows the concept of musica universalis, or the music of the spheres. Rather than literal sound, this music serves as metaphor for the harmonious intercooperation of the elements of the universe: the stars, planets, and sun, which were thought to have profound mystical yet mathematical relationships. Tolkien’s friend C. S. Lewis describes the medieval worldview as one in which, celestially speaking, “everything ha...