Why did Tolkien do this?

The Five-Minute Silmarillion, part 1

A considerable portion of the intro to THE SILMARILLION focuses on correspondence between Tolkien and a colleague, wherein he explains why he went to such great lengths to write the story and what it really meant.

Tolkien was a philologist. He loved languages. Indeed, The Lord of the Rings and everything connected to it wouldn’t exist without Tolkien making up his own languages just for the fun of it.

One can’t have an affinity for languages without naturally being in the habit of thinking backwards, learning which conjugations and declensions came from which infinitives and root words. It is the same with stories, as everything happens due to the actions of something else. Being a man of devout Roman Catholic faith, Tolkien regularly thought backwards to the point of humanity’s divine origin, understanding the relationship between the temporal and mortal things and their immortal Creator.

It’s no wonder that his faith is such a crucial influence in how he built this story either. If The Lord of the Rings is about mortal beings caught up in the fight for good over evil, THE SILMARILLION is about where that good and that evil come from. This takes us to The Fall.

While there are many interpretations of The Fall in Christendom, the sects at least generally agree there was one, and that while God is Father to all of us, we are not completely like Him because we are mortal and imperfect. As the Christian sects offer different explanations as to how and why this is for mankind, Tolkien offers up an explanation as to how the Elves and other races of Middle-earth fell distant from their creator, Eru Ilúvatar.

That said, I have to stress that in writing THE SILMARILLION, Tolkien wasn’t writing an allegory, because he hated allegory. He offers up the following wisdom instead.

“In the cosmogony there is a fall; a fall of Angels we should say. Though quite different in form, of course, to that of the Christian myth. These tales are ‘new’, they are not directly derived from other myths and legends, but they must invariably contain a wide measure of ancient wide-spread motives or elements.

“After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of ‘truth’…long ago certain truths and molds of this kind were discovered and must always reappear.

“There cannot be any ‘story’ without a fall—at least not for human minds as we know them and have them.”

—J.R.R. Tolkien, preface to THE SILMARILLION.

It helps to think of the mechanical component to The Fall, and how any story of a fall would have similar mechanics, and could tell that story without being an allegory. The Elves may not have been offered the forbidden fruit while in the Garden of Eden, but they did transgress the will of their maker, putting them at odds with him, yet he could still turn their works to his benefit and find a place for them in his larger, grander design.

Thus the divine would work in story as it does in relation to us in real life. The names and immutable attributes might look different according to the setting, and that’s fine. No matter what the overweight purple-haired multigender kiddie mutilator at the book fair might tell you, the story doesn’t have to be about you in order for you to see something about you in it.

The first time that I tried to read this book in 2003, I thought it was effectively the Bible for Middle-earth, in that it covered everything from the creation onward. While that’s still a generally accurate assessment, it would be better to say that it’s more like the Old Testament, because it’s more comprehensive for the world of Arda (the world where Middle-earth is just one continent) than the Bible is for ours. Once the book of Genesis establishes the creation and the Fall, from there it’s mostly the story of Abraham and the nation of Israel. THE SILMARILLION is far broader.

It starts with the existence of Eru Ilúvatar, the god of Arda—who he is, what’s his relation to the world, and so on. Lesser gods—his children—enter the fray and have their own dominions, with one of them being the most contrarian because he’s the most self-interested. Later the world is created, and populated, with races being spawned by different members of this “minor god” caste, and thus they have different loyalties.

Once enough time has passed and named characters appear on the mortal roster, the stories get more specific, and bound to more exact dates in the entire chronology. But that’s getting ahead of the scope here; this is an examination of why Tolkien wrote this book, and the purpose it served in holding up the rest of his legendarium.

There’s more to the preface. You should read it. I think this is just the most pivotal point.

In the next installment, we will meet this Eru Ilúvatar, as well as his lesser gods, and see them create the world of Arda.

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