The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 2: Reader’s Guide PART 1. Christina Scull
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and is presented as straightforward narrative without reference to ‘ancient sources’. Some of the material from the 1951 Ainulindalë was incorporated in ‘Of the Beginning of Days’, the first chapter of the *‘Quenta Silmarillion’: the account of the early conflicts in Arda and of the establishment of the Valar in Valinor, and in the final paragraphs, the words of Ilúvatar concerning Elves and Men, and comments on their differing fates. Two editorial changes made to the published Ainulindalë by Christopher Tolkien are noted by him in The Lost Road and Other Writings, p. 164, note 9, and in Morgoth’s Ring, p. 40.
Although Tolkien wrote no later version of the Ainulindalë, towards the end of the 1950s he began again to consider whether myth and science could be reconciled. In one of several texts he wrote that in ‘the oldest forms of the mythology’ which were ‘intended to be no more than another primitive mythology … it was consequentially a “Flat Earth” cosmogony (much easier to manage anyway): the Matter of *Númenor had not been devised.’ He had considered whether the best solution was to consider the earlier cosmology as representing confused and incorrect Mannish tradition, rather than truth known by the Elves:
I was inclined to adhere to the Flat Earth and the astronomically absurd business of the making of the Sun and the Moon. But you can make up stories of that kind when you live among people who have the same general background of imagination, when the Sun ‘really’ rises in the East and goes down in the West, etc. When however (no matter how little most people know or think about astronomy) it is the general belief that we live upon a ‘spherical’ island in ‘Space’ you cannot do this any more. [Morgoth’s Ring, p. 370]
CRITICISM
Several critics have remarked on the important role of *music in the Ainulindalë as in other Creation myths. In ‘The “Music of the Spheres”: Relationships between Tolkien’s The Silmarillion and Medieval Cosmological and Religious Theory’ in Tolkien the Medievalist (2003), Bradford Lee Eden writes:
As a medievalist, Tolkien knew and recognized the importance of music as an anthropomorphic reality and creational material in many mythologies. The medieval concept of the ‘music of the spheres’ was grounded in ancient and classical philosophy, discussed and theorized by Plato and Aristotle, through the early Christian writers and the third-century pagan philosopher Plotinus, up to the eventual standardization by Boethius in the early sixth century … as a classicist and medievalist, the ‘music of the spheres’ concept would have been deeply ingrained in his educational training, and his Catholic background would also have influenced his thought and creative processes. [p. 181]
Eden also finds recalled in the Ainulindalë ‘the medieval depiction of the various hierarchies of angels singing continuously around the throne of God’ (p. 185).
Other commentators have suggested that Tolkien’s Creation myth reflects ideas found in the writings of St Augustine. In ‘Augustine and the Ainulindalë’, Mythlore 21, no. 1, whole no. 79 (Summer 1995), John Houghton compares the Ainulindalë with Augustine’s interpretations of Genesis:
This is, I submit, an Augustinian account of creation. … In both cases, God first creates the angels and then reveals to them the further elements of creation; the angels’ own knowledge reflects ideas in the divine mind. In both cases, as well, after the revelation, God gives real existence to what the angels have perceived, upholding that existence in the void; yet that real existence has only the undeveloped potential of what it will become in the unfolding of time, and God reserves to God’s self the introduction of elements unanticipated in the basic design.
Granted these similarities, however, the two schemata do contrast in two ways. First is the fact that the predominant musical images function in the Ainulindalë in the way that speech and light, taken together as intellectual illumination do in Augustine’s reading of Genesis. Second is the way the Ainur act as sub-creators, developing the themes proposed to them by Eru Ilúvatar, whereas Augustine focuses on God as the sole creator. [p. 7]
Jonathan McIntosh in ‘Ainulindalë: Tolkien, St. Thomas, and the Metaphysics of the Music’, in Music in Middle-earth, ed. Heidi Steimel and Friedhelm Schneidewind (2010), rejects earlier interpretations of the Ainulindalë, especially, in his opinion, ‘the marked tendency in the Tolkien literature to read his creation-drama and the Music of the Ainur in particular in terms of the emanationist logic of the Neoplatonic philosophy. On this understanding, later stages of the creation-process and world-history are seen as metaphysically inferior to, and thus a “tragic” falling away from the supposedly more authentic and pure reality represented by the primeval Music.’ Instead, he argues that ‘the Ainur’s Music – along with the oft neglected … image … [of] the Vision of the Ainur – give mythic expression to the much more positive, comic, or rather “eucatastrophic” metaphysics of creation Tolkien inherited and adapted from his greater Catholic theological forbear, St. Thomas Aquinas’ (p. 53).
In The Power of the Ring: The Spiritual Vision behind The Lord of the Rings (2005) Stratford Caldecott asserts that ‘Tolkien drew upon many legends that were known to him, and upon the Jewish and Christian traditions that he believed to be true. He was trying to write an account that would be complementary to, while not contradicting, the Genesis story. … For Tolkien, as a Catholic, God is the Creator of the World ex nihilo (“out of nothing”)’ (p. 71).
Anne C. Petty in her Tolkien in the Land of Heroes: Discovering the Human Spirit (2003) draws attention to the voice of the narrator of the Ainulindalë: ‘Anyone looking for biblical parallels within The Silmarillion should make note of the highly formal, King James-style diction.’ She also points out that this Creation myth ‘is where the seeds of discord are first sown and where all the difficulties, conflicts, sorrows, and heroic efforts that infuse Tolkien’s fantasy originate. Here’s the starting point for the main theme of The Fall, as well as the first use of the signature imagery of music and water, light and shadow, that Tolkien used to carry this theme through all three of his major works’ (p. 39). Tolkien himself commented in a draft letter to Rhona Beare, written in October 1968, concerning his placement of Melkor’s rebellion during Creation:
I suppose a difference between this Myth and what may be perhaps called Christian mythology is this. In the latter the Fall of Man is subsequent to and a consequence (though not a necessary consequence) of the ‘Fall of the Angels’: a rebellion of created free-will at a higher level than Man; but it is not clearly held (and in many versions is not held at all) that this affected the ‘World’ in its nature: evil was brought in from outside, by Satan. In this Myth the rebellion of created free-will precedes creation of the World (Eä); and Eä has in it, subcreatively introduced, evil, rebellions, discordant elements of its own nature already when the Let it Be was spoken. The Fall or corruption, therefore, of all things in it and all inhabitants of it, was a possibility if not inevitable. Trees may ‘go bad’ as in the Old Forest; Elves may turn into Orcs, and if this required the special perversive malice of Morgoth, still Elves themselves could do evil deeds. Even the ‘good’ Valar as inhabiting the World could at least err; as the Great Valar did in their dealings with the Elves; or as the lesser of their kind (as the Istari or wizards) could in various ways become self-seeking. [Letters, pp. 286–7]
More expansively, Craig Bernthal states in Tolkien’s Sacramental Vision: Discerning the Holy in Middle Earth (2014):
This is Tolkien’s mythopoeic variation on John 1:1–5, the Music that was in the beginning. It is a retelling of and commentary on key creation and wisdom texts. It offers a short mythic explanation of the origin of free will and its relation to the fixed frame of God’s order. It identifies the origin of evil as an expression of the free will that God allows. Significantly, Tolkien associates the first sin with the act of creation. Melkor’s frustrated desire to create with the power of God makes him an envious destroyer – or attempted destroyer – of God’s creation. Ilúvatar’s gift of sub-creation, because it entails a powerful grant of freedom, has an equally powerful potential to be abused, and it is the tendency of sub-creation to go wrong, because the sub-creator can grow envious of the works of others and fall idolatrously in love with his own. This misdirected love becomes the archetypal