Art, Sub-creation and Mortality

Over the past few years I've become quite a fan of The Lord of the RIngs by J.R.R. Tolkien. I admit it took the amazing movies to really get me started (I now own the extented version box set), though I had read the prequel The Hobbit actually more than once before the movies came out and thoroughly enjoyed it. My brothers had read LOTR before the movies came out, my older brother all three books at least three times through thus far. So I finally picked up the book this year (contrary to popular misconception, the book actually is not a trilogy; it's one novel "sometimes published in three volumes" as the preface in my 50th anniversary edition notes) and I really love it. My brothers and others had always talked about rich it is and how much detail there is and how it feels like it could be something out of real history, add a few Elves and Dwarves. As I watch documentaries on Tolkien's life, I can tell why it's so rich: he spent his whole life thinking about it and developing it. He was always pondering things of Middle-earth, whether it be the functioning languages he created or the epic poetry telling the stories of his characters or the lengths of the reigns of his Númenórean kings.

What an inspiring contribution to the art of the twentieth century! As a songwriter, I strive for the kind of depth and beauty Tolkien's work arouses in my heart. This desire reminds of one of our faith community's values: "creative expression." Tolkien certainly valued this as well. In the second edition of The Silmarillion (which my wife got me for my birthday!), Tolkien's book published after his death that provides some of the "vast backcloth" (in his words) to his story in The Lord of the Rings, there is included an excerpt from a letter written by Tolkien to a friend in 1951. This was a few years before LOTR was published, and the letter contains some good explanations about the themes that drove his work. Tolkien disliked allegory; he preferred "history, true or feigned." I think this is cool because it kind of just lets one's art be what it is, with the option of "applicability" (as Tolkien called it) however the reader chooses to interpret it.

Anyway, he said in his letter that one of the themes his "stuff" (writing) is concerned with is "Mortality." He says "[It is concerned] With Mortality, especially as it affects art and the creative (or as I should say, sub-creative) desire which seems to have no biological function, and to be apart from the satisfactions of plain ordinary biological life, with which, in our world, it is indeed usually at strife. This desire is at once wedded to a passionate love of the real primary world, and hence filled with the sense of mortality, and yet unsatisfied by it. (The Silmarillion, 2nd ed., p. xvii)"

I'm going to close this post now because it's getting quite long, but I just want to end with asking you to ponder how interesting it is that this desire we have to create (or truly "sub-create" as Tolkien says, which acknowledges the fact that everything we see has been created by Someone else) gives us pleasure that cannot be credited to any biological function, and that helps show us the beauty of the world around us, and that yet leaves us wanting to find deeper satisfaction in something other than this mortal place.

(In Tolkien's stories of Middle-earth, the mortality of Men was said to be the "Gift of Men," given by the Creator so that men would not be confined forever to the "circles of this world," as the Elves were. It was called by the Men who possessed it, however, the "Doom of Men." How often do we live only for the circles of this world, calling death our doom, when all the while we've been given life that goes beyond the here and now?)