‘I have kindled you with the Flame Imperishable’ could almost belong to a liturgy of Pentecost or Confirmation, yet it does not. It is Ilúvatar commanding the Ainur to sing in ‘Ainulindalë’, the creation story that opens Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. Much could be said of the role of fire in this myth. On one hand, we have Melkor, the antagonist, who seeks in ‘the void… the Flame Imperishable’, never finding ‘the Fire, for it is with Ilúvatar’. 1 Despite not having the Flame, ‘malice… burned in him’, and he is ‘crowned with smoke and fire’.2 On the other hand, we have Ilúvatar, with whom the Fire is, who kindles the Ainur with the Flame, and who truly creates a world ablaze:
And I will send into the Void the Flame Imperishable, and it shall be at the heart of the World, and the World shall Be… And suddenly the Ainur saw afar off a light, as it were a cloud with a living heart of flame; and they knew… that Ilúvatar had made a new thing: Eä, the World that Is.3
When some of the Ainur descended into this cloud of fire and became the Valar, the Powers of the World, they realised that ‘the World had been but foreshadowed and foresung, and they must achieve it’.4
Fire, then, is everywhere in this myth: it is with Ilúvatar, within the Ainur, at the heart of the World, and nowhere to be found by Melkor; it is creation and destruction; it is One, and there are many. But I am less interested in fire in itself than what it reveals about creation: concerning the World and the Valar, recipients alike of the Flame Imperishable, what does it mean that Tolkien imagines an incomplete world entrusted to creatures to fulfill? What does it say of Tolkien? How does it speak to theology? How does it impact our lives?
In Genesis, God spoke the world into being and brought it to completion: ‘so the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the furniture of them’ (Gen 2:1).5 In Tolkien, by contrast, Ilúvatar begins creation by bringing the Flame into the void, but it is the Valar who must fulfil, furnish and finish it.6
But before interrogating the significance of the Valar’s involvement in creation, it helps to consider their identity in the first place.
The Valar, According to Tolkien
The Valar are quite a contested subject. The Ainur singing before Ilúvatar immediately evokes the angelic choir, the heavenly host that sings ‘Glory to God in the highest’ (Luke 2:14). In fact, ‘Ainulindalë’ means song of the angels. Yet their role in the creation of the world is nothing like that of the angels of Christianity, leading some to argue against this angelic reading and instead consider them gods, although this has its own limits. Ilúvatar is ‘the One’, who made ‘the Ainur, the Holy Ones, who were the offspring of their thought’.7 They are then created creatures, not generated, not consubstantial with the One: ‘they lack divinity as an intrinsic element of self-existent natures’.8
Tolkien’s own understanding of these beings is more nuanced.9 For him, the Valar ‘take the imaginative but not the theological place of “gods”’;10 that is, from a narrative point of view, they are ‘meant to provide beings of the same order of beauty, power, and majesty as the “gods” of higher mythology’.11 At the same time, he says that the Valar are best seen as ‘of high angelic order… reverend, therefore, but not worshipful’.12 Tolkien triangulates what the Valar are by comparing the relationship that people in Middle-earth have with the Valar to that which ‘a Catholic might’ have with ‘a Saint, though no doubt knowing in theory as well as he [the Catholic] that the power of the Valar was limited and derivative’.13 His explanation focuses on one thing: the Valar’s power is derivative; they do not create ex nihilo on their own, but only work creatively on their Lord’s land, fulfilling what had been foresung. In fact, they do not hold the power to create Life. When it comes to the Children of Ilúvatar, Elves and Men, it is He who creates them directly, as the most special part of His creation. When Aulë, in a later part of The Silmarillion, impatient for the arrival of the Children, tries to create the Dwarves, he succeeds only because Ilúvatar ‘had compassion’, for Aulë lacks the ‘authority and… power’ to create true life.14
Tolkien did not only have ‘a theologically robust understanding of what an angel is’ but also lived this theology and was deeply aware of the Communion of Saints.15 All Catholics, according to the Catechism, must believe in angels, and they ‘also believe that every human being is assigned a guardian angel’.16 But this belief, inculcated in children, is often not part of an adult faith. Not so for Tolkien, who reminded his son Christopher to remember his angel.17 He also had a spiritual vision that brought him consolation about how his guardian angel is God’s personalised direct attention, not an independent being, but God’s conduit.18 The world Tolkien inhabited, then, was not one ruled directly by a single power, but one in which God generously shared His graces, allowing saints and angels to participate in that sharing, emphasising ‘the derivative quality’ of their intercession.19 The Valar, therefore, stand in purposeful relation to the Catholic image of the world, in which there is not only God but also a celestial cohort, both angelical and human.
Thus far, we have seen that the Valar serve an imaginative role akin to that of gods while their actual roles and capacities may align more closely with those of angels and saints. We can now ask: what is the theological significance of Tolkien’s changes to the creation story? Why make the Valar fulfil the creation so explicitly from the second after the very beginning?
Theology of Creaturely Making
We are used to reconciling different accounts of creation or, at least, we are used to living in a world with several options. In fact, this has been the case since the beginning of the Abrahamic faiths, as Genesis itself contains two creation stories. Nowadays, of course, the leading theory is the Big Bang, while in the Middle Ages people tried to reconcile Genesis with Plato’s Timaeus. In fact, Houghton argues the ‘Ainulindalë’ would perfectly ‘fit alongside the other cosmogonies known to the early medieval West’ were it not, precisely, for the role of the Valar.20 For Augustine, angels are seen as ‘God’s gardeners and as agents to whom all Creation is subject’, but they are not such powerful (sub)creators.21 In his time, due to Manichean ideas, ‘too much talk of angels as contributors to Creation could seem to contradict not only the belief in one God but also the declaration that the Creation is good’.22
The times of Manicheism have passed, and the importance of angels in Creation no longer seems automatically suspicious of heresy. In fact, it may well be that Tolkien is bringing forth some good theological insight. Freeman sees in the Valar shapers (not creators) of reality ‘empowered by the Holy Spirit’, which would be the Flame Imperishable.23 Instead of creating without an intermediary, Ilúvatar lets ‘his angels carry out and even augment’24 the World, in a harmonious variety always ‘obedient to God’s purposes’.25 As Creation is achieved, Elves and Men will take charge, in lieu of the Valar, of continuing the creative act.26 Creation in Genesis seems to be good (settled) on the seventh day, when God stops creating. Creation in the ‘Ainulindalë’ is a long process that derives from God and is carried out first by the Valar and then by the Children. To summarise the theological claim, ‘the cosmos as Tolkien envisions it is not a solitary and finished act but an ongoing communal process’.27 It is radically communal from the very beginning, and always derivative from God.
However enriching intellectualising faith may be, ‘one must not “break” the legends of Tolkien’s mythology as a means by which to extract a theological treatise’.28 Thus far, I have done so: I ask forgiveness. Let my repentance be taking yet another approach to answer the final question: what does Tolkien’s deviation from the Bible mean for our lives?
Spirituality of Sub-Creation
Tolkien does not merely propose theology: he calls us to live it. ‘The theologians’ task is not de-mythologizing but mythopoesis’, recovering stories grown dim through familiarity.29 This task can take the form of telling new stories for old ideas, which is what Tolkien does. In fact, he does so from the profundity of his faith, for ‘Tolkien perceived mythmaking to be… a Christian responsibility’.30 Myth is then not meant to be broken, but to be read as myth, as it offers ‘a restorative virtue to creation’31 through sub-creation, an idea Tolkien advances in On Fairy Stories.
In Thomistic terms—a framework likely shaping Tolkien’s life32—a virtue is ‘a “good quality of the soul”, in that it is an ability to act from a stable disposition and always for the good’.33 In writing the Valar’s role as he has, Tolkien proposes a spirituality: a virtuous way of living rooted in religion. This virtuous spirituality is one of sub-creation, understanding this concept beyond art towards embodied life: ‘the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation’, that is, our desire to create does not limit itself to literarily imagining other worlds, but moves us towards action in our own very world.34 Christians may now dare to believe that they can ‘actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation’.35
Art and Life blend and influence each other. Tolkien’s myths are called to influence life. Life is called to be sub-creation.
This is the spirituality that the role of the Ainur in ‘Ainulindalë’ proposes. By allowing creatures on the same ontological level as Men to play such a significant role in Creation in discordance with the Scriptures, a spirituality arises in which readers are called to participate in that sub-creation towards Goodness.36 A sub-creation that is portrayed as necessarily communal, for the Valar ‘laboured together’, and upon which we cannot claim propriety, ‘for many others have laboured here no less than thou’.37 A spirituality that claims beauty, for there is not ‘any music like to this music’ that first foresung the world in harmony.38 A spirituality that arises from love, for the Valar are those among the Ainur who ‘had “fallen in love” with the vision’.39
A spirituality that… I am breaking the myth once again. I shall not. Instead, I will just say: ‘those of you that will may go down into it’.40
