The LegendariumPart III

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee.© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Myth-making and Sub-creation

Carl Phelpstead

5

In a much-quoted letter that J. R. R. Tolkien wrote to Milton Waldman in 1951 he described his desire to create “a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story” (Letters 144). Though this corpus was never to appear in print in the form in which he hoped Waldman would publish it, Tolkien’s writings on Middle-earth – The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, together with the posthumously published The Silmarillion and associated texts in the History of Middle-earth series – comprise an interconnected body of myths, legends, and fairy-tales of a richness and complexity one might imagine to have been created by a whole people rather than a single individual. Tolkien has been described as “perhaps the quintessential contemporary mythmaker” (Garbowski 2004, 5), yet he was not only a maker, but also a theorist of myth. Tolkien’s intellectual develop-ment as a professional philologist and literary critic was nurtured by a scholarly tradi-tion stretching back at least as far as the early nineteenth century in which mythology and philology, the study of myth and of language, had been pursued together by scholars who saw the two as intimately related. This chapter explores the biographical and intellectual context for Tolkien’s thinking about mythopoesis (myth-making), drawing on his letters, his poem “Mythopoeia,” and his essay “On Fairy-stories.”

Myth, Fantasy, and Fairy-story

The term “myth” resists a definition capable of commanding universal consent. A narrow definition of myth would limit it to a story primarily about divine beings.

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Though common, such a definition would exclude very nearly all of Tolkien’s writing and is clearly not what he meant when he wrote of creating a mythology and not what readers and scholars of his work have meant by referring to “Tolkien’s mythology” (if one were to accept a definition of myth as stories of the gods, then the alternative designation of Tolkien’s creative work as a legendarium might be thought more appropriate). Many definitions of myth require that the story must once have been believed to have happened: this too would exclude Tolkien’s work, although Tolkien did write in a letter that “I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there’ some-where: not of ‘inventing’ ” (Letters 145). Other associations of myth prove more appo-site to Tolkien’s major creative writings: they are narratives set in the far distant past; they involve supernatural beings; and they convey or embody understandings of the nature of reality in narrative form.

Greek muthos means simply “story” and if the definition of modern English “myth” is problematic, its demarcation from the cognate narrative genres of fairy-story and fantasy is no less so. Garbowski writes that “according to Tolkien there exists a con-tinuum between high myth and fairy story” (2004, 11). One sees that Tolkien slips easily between myth, legend, fairy-story, and fantasy more generally both in his letters and in his essay “On Fairy-stories”: while ostensibly limited by its title to one specific type of fantasy that essay makes much larger claims about imaginative literature, including myth.

Tolkien’s Myth-making

As we shall see below, Tolkien’s scholarly approach to myth grew out of philological and anthropological work of the nineteenth century; the mythological focus of his creative writing, on the other hand, can be related to both Romantic and modernist strands of English literary tradition. The preeminent inventor of a “private mythol-ogy” before Tolkien was William Blake (1757–1827), though as Verlyn Flieger points out, Blake’s mythology has very much remained private and has never engaged any-thing like Tolkien’s readership (Flieger 2002, xv). Blake took refuge from industrial modernity and its “dark satanic mills” in the invention of mythology; in the early twentieth century modernist writers including James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and David Jones looked to mythologies of the past for ways to bring order to the chaos presented to them by their experience of modernity. Like these writers, Tolkien responded to modernity by turning to mythological and legendary narratives from the past, but he went beyond using such narratives to organize representations of contemporary reality and instead created from them and from his imagination a new world and a new mythology (cf. Hiley 2004, 841–847). In the connected series of works comprising The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings Tolkien takes motifs and patterns from classical, medieval, and later mythological traditions, but transforms them in combination with a wealth of wholly original material into a comprehensive new mythology of his own.

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Tolkien claims in a letter written in 1955 that the original impulse behind his myth-making was a desire to provide narrative contexts for the languages he had begun to invent: “The invention of languages is the foundation. The ‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse” (Letters 219). In his 1951 letter to Milton Waldman he reflects on an early desire to create a mythol-ogy he could dedicate to his country. Explaining that he had long regretted that England possessed no mythology of its own comparable to those of the Greeks, Celts, Scandinavians, Finns and other peoples, Tolkien writes that:

. . . once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story [.  .  .] which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our “air” (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe: not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East). (Letters 144)

Five years later Tolkien drafted a letter to a Mr Thompson in which he similarly recalled setting himself “to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own” (Letters 231). Tolkien’s biographer Humphrey Car-penter was inspired by such statements to write of Tolkien’s “desire to create a mythol-ogy for England” (Carpenter 1977, 97–98). Although Tolkien’s published writings do not use precisely that phrase, talking instead of dedicating or restoring a mythology to England, Carpenter’s formulation has proved popular with later writers.1 Tolkien’s determination to make good England’s lack of a mythology has been compared to the work of the Brothers Grimm in Germany and to Elias Lönnrot’s creation of the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, in the nineteenth century (ch. 18). In both cases, national mythologies were created from existing materials but those materials were given shape and coherence by individuals motivated by patriotism or nationalism.2

Tolkien’s patriotic impulse, and its gradual waning as his crest fell, explains the importance of the evolving frame narrative with which Tolkien attempted to link his Elvish mythology with England: very early drafts of material later incorporated into The Silmarillion feature Eriol the Mariner as a reteller of tales heard on Tol Eressëa; in later versions he is transformed into Ælfwine, an Anglo-Saxon translator of annalistic material from Elvish into Old English and later still Tolkien experiments with a time-traveling link between modern England and the legendary past (on these frame narratives and their development see Flieger 2005, 87–118, and ch. 11). Each of these narrative devices can be seen as an attempt by Tolkien to link his creative work with the particular country for which it was at that time intended.

When Tolkien writes in letters of his original desire to dedicate a mythology to England he claims to have renounced such a grand plan, implying that the patriotic motive may no longer be primary. The composition of his poem “Mythopoeia” and the connection established there, and subsequently reinforced in his essay “On Fairy-stories,” between imaginative writing and Christian anthropology and theology

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appear to have led Tolkien to the realization that his work might aspire to a universal rather than merely national resonance: he came to believe that myths and related forms of story-telling can, to a degree, embody the truths revealed in Christianity. This conviction provides him with both a kind of skeleton key to pagan myths of the past, a means of recuperating them for Christianity by seeing them as prophetic of the Gospel, and also the starting-point for a justification for the making of new myths. Indeed, when Tolkien goes on in his study of fairy-stories to develop ideas of more general scope about the relationship between primary and secondary worlds as part of a theory of sub-creation, he develops an explicitly theological imperative for mythopoesis: as God is a creator, so human beings, made in his image, are sub-creators.

One of Tolkien’s clearest statements of his view of the relation between myth and reality is in the long letter to Milton Waldman, noted above, from 1951:

I believe that legends and myths are largely made of “truth,” and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear. (Letters 147)

Several years previously this view of the relationship between myth and truth had been developed in a poem published in full only posthumously, “Mythopoeia.”

“Mythopoeia”

Tolkien not only made myths; he also defended myth-making, a defense which broad-ened into an apologia for fantasy, or non-realistic imaginative writing more generally. This defense is mounted primarily in his poem “Mythopoeia” and in the essay “On Fairy-stories,” described by Clive Tolley (2002, 93) as an expansion of the poem, though perhaps it is truer to say that part of the essay expands on and clarifies the ideas expressed in the poem.

In “Mythopoeia” Tolkien gives sustained expression to his understanding of the relationship between non-Christian myth and Christian truth. In doing so, he creates a permanent record of the arguments he and Hugo Dyson had deployed against C. S. Lewis on the evening of September 19, 1931, during a momentous perambulation of Addison’s Walk in the grounds of Lewis’s Oxford college and later in his college rooms. The circumstances of this peripatetic debate have been retold many times by biographers of both Tolkien and Lewis; Humphrey Carpenter imaginatively recon-structed the discussion in his biography of Tolkien (1977, 150–152) and in his book on The Inklings (2006, 42–45). Lewis gives his own accounts in letters to his friend Arthur Greeves written on September 22 and October 18, 1931 (see Lewis 2000, 970, 976–977). In his letter of October 18 Lewis writes that Tolkien and Dyson had helped him to see that:

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. . . the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with the tremendous difference that it really happened [. . .] it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths. (Lewis 2000, 977)

Besides its immediate role in removing an obstacle to Lewis’s conversion, this discussion went on to inform the understanding of (pagan) myth and its relationship to Christian truth to which Lewis gave expression in several of his popular theological writings.

“Mythopoeia” was first published posthumously in the second edition of Tree and Leaf in 1988 (see Tolkien 2001a), edited by Christopher Tolkien. This edition added the poem to the combination of “On Fairy-stories” and “Leaf by Niggle” which Chris-topher’s father had issued together in 1964. The fifth manuscript version of the poem carries the dedication “J. R. R. T. for C. S. L.”; in the sixth version this becomes “Philomythus Misomytho” (“Lover of Myth to Hater of Myth”) and in the final, pub-lished text there is the dedication “To one who said that myths were lies and therefore worthless, even though ‘breathed through silver’,” with the speaker of the poem identified as “Philomythus to Misomythus” (TL 85). Christopher Tolkien explains that the revision of the poem through seven drafts was mainly a process of expansion. The final text is 148 lines long, rhyming couplets organized into 12 verse paragraphs and occupying nearly five pages of Tree and Leaf (TL 85–90).

According to John R. Holmes (2007, 450) much of the poem was written “within weeks” of the debate with Lewis, but Scull and Hammond (Reader’s Guide 621) say that “It can only be guessed when Tolkien first composed Mythopoeia”; clearly it must have been begun after September 19, 1931 and marginal notes to the final version have been dated by Christopher Tolkien to November 1935 or later; the state-ment in those notes that the poem was “Written mainly in the Examination Schools during Invigilation” (TL ix) suggests to Scull and Hammond a likely date between June 1932 and June 1933, as Tolkien served as an examiner in the Oxford English School between 1931 and 1935.

The poem begins by introducing Misomythus’s materialist-scientific view of the cosmos, against which Philomythus will speak. Misomythus is said to view the cosmos as “cold” (TL 85). Of all the cosmic phenomena Philomythus might choose as an example, he begins with trees. The walk in Magdalen grounds would have taken place surrounded by trees, but Tolkien had a particular affinity with trees: the inventor of the Ents wrote in a letter that “In all my works I take the part of trees as against all their enemies” (Letters 419) and recognized in a marginal note to the manuscript of “Mythopoeia” that:

Trees are chosen because they are at once easily classifiable and innumerably individual; but as this may be said of other things, then I will say because I notice them more than most other things (far more than people). In any case the mental scenic background of these lines is the Grove and Walks of Magdalen at night. (TL viii)

The poem proceeds to enumerate some more of the “endless multitude of forms” created by God (memorably including “the large slow oddity of cows,” TL 86): there

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may be a faint echo in these lines of the Benedicite, a canticle used regularly in Catholic liturgy which exhorts numerous aspects of creation to praise God. Emphasis is put on the fact that these endlessly numerous phenomena are individual, each print-ing the brain “with a separate dint” (TL 86), but they have in common that they are all created by God.

Misomythus’s view of reality is inadequate because “trees are not ‘trees’, until so named and seen” (TL 86). Knowledge is impossible without language. Moreover, language and myth are interrelated. Tolkien’s thinking here and elsewhere on this topic is profoundly influenced by the work of his fellow Inkling, Owen Barfield (on Barfield’s influence on Tolkien see especially Medcalf 1999, Flieger 2002, Tolley 2002). Verlyn Flieger indeed goes so far as to claim that with the exception of the Old English poem Beowulf “Barfield’s theory of the interdependence of myth and language is the primary influence on Tolkien’s mythos” (Flieger 2002, xxi).

Building on earlier accounts of the connections between myth and language, Bar-field argues in his Poetic Diction (originally published in 1928) that the historical sepa-ration of literal and metaphorical meanings of words divided what had been an original semantic unity: words had originally themselves been mini-myths, embody-ing a view of reality in which experienced phenomena were at one and the same time physical and spiritual (Barfield 1988, 77–92).3 Tolkien alluded to the impact of Bar-field’s idea of “ancient semantic unity” on a passage in The Hobbit in a letter written shortly after its publication (Letters 22). His sense that myth conveyed truths will have been reinforced by Barfield’s hypothesis of an age when concrete and abstract mean-ings had not yet been differentiated and words were used “mythically” to convey the truth.

Barfield’s conception of the primordial unity of physical and spiritual, concrete and abstract, is evident in Tolkien’s “Mythopoeia” in the claim that phenomena are named only by humans “digging the foreknown from experience / and panning the vein of spirit out of sense” (TL 86). The epistemology implicit here is a Platonic conception of knowledge as recovery or recollection (anamnesis) of the foreknown.

“Mythopoeia” goes on to claim that one does not truly perceive physical phenom-ena, such as the stars or the earth, if one sees them only in objective, scientific terms: the firmament is “only a void, unless a jewelled tent / myth-woven and elf-patterned” (TL 87). Far from being a deviation from reality, myth enables a truer perception; Tolley (2002, 81) argues that Tolkien’s Platonic concept of “discoverable ideas behind nature” echoes the final section of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism, a model for the heroic couplet form of Tolkien’s poem. It is because myth is too essentially human that it cannot be “lies”:

The heart of man is not compound of liesbut draws some wisdom from the only Wise,and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned,

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and keeps the rags of lordship on[c]e he owned,his world-dominion by creative act. (TL 87)

Humans still “recall” God (in another instance of anamnesis), even if their knowledge of him is imperfect (“some wisdom”) and they are “long estranged” from him and have forfeited his grace (being “Dis-graced”). What ensures (and indicates) man is “not wholly lost nor wholly changed,” that he still possesses “rags” of his former lord-ship, is his creativity: he is “man, sub-creator,” through whom the single white light of truth is “splintered [. . .] to many hues” (TL 87).

The poem explains that because humans are sub-creators it is “our right” to fill the world with Elves and goblins and to invent gods and “sow the seeds of dragons” (TL 87). Tolkien attacks the idea that myth-making is wishful dreaming, suggesting that the capacity for such creativity is proof of its rightness and noting that “All wishes are not idle” (TL 88). Declaring in an echo of the Beatitudes in Matthew 5 that:

Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhymeof things not found within recorded time (TL 88)

the poem asserts that myth provides solace, support, and strength for those who defy evil:

They have seen Death and ultimate defeat,and yet they would not in despair retreat,but oft to victory have turned the lyreand kindled hearts with legendary fire. (TL 88–89)

Philomythus wishes to associate himself with this attitude:

I would that I might with the minstrels singand stir the unseen with a throbbing string. (TL 89)

As for Misomythus’s “progressive apes” on the other hand, those materialist humans who deny themselves the consolations of mythology, “Before them gapes / the dark abyss to which their progress tends” (TL 89).

As the poem ends, a Platonic conception of the relationship between perceived and ultimate reality again comes to the fore with the hope that Paradise may “renew / from mirrored truth the likeness of the True” (TL 90): this world is derivative from the ultimate reality to be experienced in heaven. The speaker foresees that creativity will, moreover, continue to have a function in Paradise:

and poets shall have flames upon their headand harps whereon their faultless fingers fall. (TL 90)

In these lines the biblical figure of the Holy Spirit descending on the apostles in the form of flames at Pentecost (Acts 2:1–4) and the celestial choirs of musical angels

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are linked with the imagery of the minstrel with his lyre employed earlier in the poem.

Sub-creation

Lines from “Mythopoeia” first appeared in print as a quotation in Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-stories” and the two texts are closely related. “On Fairy-stories” was delivered as the Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of St Andrews on March 8, 1939 and later published in expanded form in 1947 in Essays Presented to Charles Williams. It was reprinted in Tree and Leaf with minor alterations; a new edition by Douglas Anderson and Verlyn Flieger including draft texts was published in 2008 (OFS, Tolkien 2008b). In the essay Tolkien reports having written a (verse-)letter to a man who described myths and fairy-stories as lies, though “he was kind enough to call fairy-story making ‘Breathing a lie through Silver’,” and goes on to quote from “Mythopoeia.” In fact, none of the seven manuscript versions of “Mythopoeia” has the epistolary beginning attached to the opening lines as quoted in “On Fairy-stories” and Christopher Tolkien concludes that the letter was “a device” (TL vii). Tolkien has also extended the subject of his poem from the original myth to encompass also fairy-stories.

Tolkien suggested in a letter that his essay “On Fairy-stories” was “quite an impor-tant work” for anyone wanting to understand his creative writing (Letters 220) and Anderson and Flieger describe it as “the theoretical basis for [Tolkien’s] fiction” (OFS 9). Composed after The Hobbit and while he was working on The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s essay develops a theory of fantasy that has been influential not only in Ink-lings scholarship and broader studies of fantasy fiction, but also more widely in literary critical discourse.4

Tolkien’s “On Fairy-stories” sets out to address three questions: “What are fairy-stories? What is their origin? What is the use of them?” (OFS 27). In answering the last of these questions Tolkien introduces the ideas that connect the essay with his poem “Mythopoeia”: that poem had referred to the idea of Man as a “sub-creator” and, after introducing this term in the section of “On Fairy-stories” entitled “Origins” (OFS 42), Tolkien then proceeds to explore the idea in more detail later in the essay. The section on “Origins” concludes that the explanations put forward by comparative philologists and scholars of mythology are not sufficient to determine whether simi-larities between myths are the result of independent invention, diffusion, or inherit-ance (OFS 11). Tolkien’s discussion of the views of philologists, however, leads into his consideration of language, perception, and imagination.

Rejecting both Max Müller’s theory of the origins of mythology as arising from the misunderstanding of names for celestial phenomena as personifications and Andrew Lang’s opposing anthropological approach, which dismissed myths as “primitive” and “savage,” Tolkien puts forward an alternative theory of the relationship between reality and imaginative sub-creation, including myth.5 In contradiction of Müller’s

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understanding of mythology as a “disease of language,” Tolkien writes that “It would be more near the truth to say that languages, especially modern European languages, are a disease of mythology” (OFS 41) and that “To ask what is the origin of stories [...] is to ask what is the origin of language and of the mind” (OFS 38). In opposition to anthropological approaches to myth (exemplified by Andrew Lang) which saw myths and fairy-stories as products of the “childhood of man” appropriate now for a reader-ship only of children, Tolkien maintains in “On Fairy-stories” that these literary forms are neither childish nor escapist, offering personal experience as evidence: he says that in his case “A real taste for fairy-stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war” (OFS 56).

The section headed “Fantasy” is the part of the essay most closely related to the poem “Mythopoeia.” Tolkien states that the faculty of conceiving images of things not present is “or was” known as Imagination, but recognizes that in more recent technical language Imagination is used of a higher faculty than mere image-making, to which the name Fancy (abbreviated from Fantasy) is given. In this higher sense Imagination is “the power of giving to ideal creations the inner consistency of reality” (OFS 59). Tolkien’s reference to more recent technical language alludes to the specialized sense in which Samuel Taylor Coleridge used the term “Imagination” in his Biographia Lit-eraria (Coleridge 1983, 82–88, 304–306). Coleridge had reversed the traditional meanings of imaginatio (the power of recalling images no longer present to the senses) and phantasia (the more active and creative free play of the mind) and inverted their importance (see Coleridge 1983, xcvii; Medcalf 1981, 9), but Tolkien argues that Coleridge’s distinction is philologically and analytically mistaken: the difference between these powers is one of degree of Imagination, not a difference of kind; the inner consistency achieved by Art is the “operative link between Imagination and the final result, Sub-creation” (OFS 59); in other words, sub-creation is Imagination given inner consistency by art. Tolkien calls the sub-creative art which commands or induces Secondary Belief “Fantasy.” Sub-creation, then, is the inducing of Secondary Belief through Imagination allied to the inner consistency achieved by Fantasy.

Tolkien argues that rather than the “willing suspension of disbelief” which Col-eridge famously described in the fourteenth chapter of his Biographia Literaria, suc-cessful sub-creation produces an involuntary suspension of disbelief:

What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator’. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. [. . .] The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken [. . .] You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. (OFS 52)

It is only at that point that a deliberate and willing – or willed – suspension of dis-belief is required. Tolkien’s prolific creation of the languages, peoples, genealogies, and history that give Middle-earth an unprecedented (and unmatched) sense of reality is calculated to prevent such a moment of disbelief by providing the kind of inner consistency which commands Secondary Belief.

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Tolkien argues that Fantasy, in his sense, is best achieved in literature (rather than in other arts), and that to create a world that commands Secondary Belief in this way is difficult and requires much labor, so that Fantasy is a rare achievement. Tolkien recognizes that to many the sub-creative art of Fantasy “has seemed suspect, if not illegitimate” (OFS 64), but he defends its legitimacy by quoting from his own poem “Mythopoeia” (OFS 65), pointing out that Fantasy is founded on a recognition of fact: humans sub-create with materials derived from God’s primary creation.

Towards the end of this section of his essay Tolkien makes a link between literary theory and theology; this informs his final section on “Recovery, Escape, Consolation” in which he argues that the uses of fantasy include the regaining of clear sight (recov-ery), escape (including the escape from death), and the eucatastrophic “sudden joyous turn” which offers consolation (OFS 75).6

In the “Epilogue” to the essay, Tolkien develops the idea that this eucatastrophic sudden joyous turn of fairy-story provides an insight into the nature of reality, as understood in the Christian tradition: “The peculiar quality of the ‘joy’ in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth” (OFS 77).

As Tolkien points out, this underlying structure of the sudden joyous turn is found also at the climax of the Christian Gospels, where the Crucifixion is followed at the turning point of human history by the Resurrection, with its promise of a new crea-tion. But for Tolkien the Gospels, unlike fairy-stories and myths, record a eucatastrophic moment that has actually happened; fairy-story has entered history: “Legend and History have met and fused” (OFS 78). Pre-Christian pagan myths foreshadowed the truth that would be revealed in Christ’s death and resurrection; subsequent myths and fairy-tales have mirrored that truth in imaginative form.

Tolkien nevertheless maintains that even after the revelation of the Gospel there is still a need for imaginative versions of the Truth because sub-creation is fundamental to what it is to be human:

Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker [.  .  .] Redeemed Man is still man. Story, fantasy, still go on, and should go on. (OFS 66, 78)

In “Mythopoeia,” as we have seen, Tolkien envisaged that story-making will go on even after death, and so fundamental to human nature is the telling of stories that he claims in a letter that “There is a place called ‘heaven’ where the good here unfinished is completed; and where the stories unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are contin-ued” (Letters 55).

Tolkien’s Theory in Context

The theory of myth-making and sub-creation developed in “Mythopoeia” and “On Fairy-stories” draws on a very long tradition of reflection upon the connections between

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language and mythology and the ways in which both relate to experienced and ulti-mate reality. The profound influence of Barfield on Tolkien’s thinking has been dis-cussed already. Among other things, Barfield was an expositor of the philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (see Barfield 1971) and Coleridge’s critical terminology is also echoed, but also significantly adapted, by Tolkien. Gary K. Wolfe (2012, 7) points out that a critical debate over the terms “imagination” and “fancy” had been going on since Joseph Addison’s discussion of the relationship between the reader’s imagina-tion and the poet’s fancy in The Spectator in 1712. The fragmentary chapter XIII of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, published in 1817, makes a highly influential inter-vention in this debate by distinguishing between primary and secondary imagination, further distinguishing both from mere fancy.

Tolkien, as we have seen, argues contra Coleridge that Imagination and Fantasy differ in degree rather than kind and transfers Coleridge’s primary and secondary distinction from types of imagination to types of world. However, Medcalf (1981, 56) points out that Coleridge makes a link between human and divine creativity, similar to that made by Tolkien, when he writes in chapter XIII of Biographia Literaria that: “the secondary or poet’s imagination is an echo of the primary imagination or con-sciousness, which in its turn is a ‘repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’ ” (Coleridge 1983, 304).

Tolkien’s theory of myth-making and sub-creation has roots much further back than Coleridge, however. His conception of the world of physical phenomena as bearing witness to spiritual realities is ultimately Platonic, though whereas for Plato imaginative literature was suspect because it peddled imitations of imitations, the Neoplatonists who inherited and modified his views saw imaginative literature as offering valuable insights into truth. Whereas the dominant literary theoretical tradi-tion up to the eighteenth century conceived of literature as a mirror that reflected reality, the Romantic movement recovered something of the Neoplatonic understand-ing, rejecting the imitative view of art and introducing a new understanding of imagination as a lamp illuminating worlds beyond perceived reality (see the classic account of the transition between these two conceptions of the relationship between literature and reality in Abrams 1953).

Owen Barfield (1988, 128) draws attention to Ancient Greek Neoplatonic texts that anticipate Coleridge, and Medcalf quotes a striking passage from On the Gods and the World (circa AD 362) by the late pagan Saturninus Sallustius Secundus, a close friend of the Emperor Julian the Apostate: “For one can call the Universe a myth, since in it bodies and things are apparent, spirits and understandings hidden” (Medcalf 1981, 60). This might almost be Tolkien’s Philomythus speaking.

Tolkien’s theory thus draws both on a Platonic understanding of the primary world of perceived reality as secondary to a more fundamental reality and on a Neoplatonic-Romantic conviction that the human imagination is capable of shedding light on that ultimate reality. His divergences from Coleridge’s theory and terminology demon-strate that Tolkien saw reason to be critical of the Romantic legacy, but his theory of myth-making and sub-creation develops organically from a venerable intellectual

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tradition that stretches back from Barfield through Coleridge and other Romantics to the Neoplatonists and thence to the very beginnings of Western philosophy.

Notes

1 This in turn has prompted extensive critical discussion about whether it is an appropriate or adequate description of Tolkien’s undertak-ing: for a brief summary of the debate with further references see Fisher (2007).

2 On parallels between Tolkien and Lönnrot see, for example, Petty (2004), Flieger (2005, 27–31), Flieger (2012, 179–184), and ch. 18.

3 Barfield’s views strongly echo ideas put forward by the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer in his Language and Myth, a book Tolkien could have read in German, though it was not trans-lated into English until 1946 (see further Gar-bowski 2004, 23). Barfield himself knew nothing of Cassirer’s work when developing his own ideas (and could not then read German), though he remarked in the “Afterword” to the second edition of Poetic Diction that he had since read Cassirer with “admiration, pleasure and profit” (Barfield 1984, 214–215).

4 As, for example, when Tolkien’s friend W. H. Auden called his T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures of 1967 Secondary Worlds, thus echoing the ter-minology employed in Tolkien’s essay and drawing attention to the Tolkienian origin of his lectures’ theoretical framework (Auden 1968).

5 Flieger (2003) provides a useful analysis of Tolkien’s engagement with the theories of Müller and Lang. Barfield’s Poetic Diction is an extended refutation of Müller’s conception of mythology as a “disease of language.”

6 Anderson and Flieger have drawn attention to the fact that newspaper reports of the Andrew Lang lecture suggest that the actual lecture did not include the theological material on eucatas-trophe and the Gospel that later appeared in the published essay (OFS 130, 135).

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