A key concept operating in Tolkien’s works is that of subcreation. For some years I have found persuasive almost to the degree of self-evidency this explanation and defense of Christian imaginative writing. My high degree of confidence has come in no small part from considering that fiction writing is an art, a skill, a capacity for seeking the good in a given domain of reality. And the good that fiction writing seeks is to image – or perhaps to reimage – the world in words that imitate the Creator’s own achievements. 

However, in recent months I’ve become aware of a serious-minded attempt by some Christians to attack all manner of literary and other media works that in one fashion or another use (with varying degrees of fidelity to its Christian origin extending from “high” to “no”) the idea of subcreation. Though this mode of critique seems to be currently under development and expansion, enough of it has been voiced for me to have felt, as a Tolkien afficionado and history and literature teacher of many years, to scribble out a few items of a hopefully constructive nature.

In this article, I’d like to focus on on what subcreation is for Tolkien, and I’ll start, appopriately, with a brief quote from him that defines the term:

…liberation ‘from the channels the creator is known to have used already’ is the fundamental function of ‘sub-creation’, a tribute to the infinity of His potential variety, one of the ways in which it indeed is exhibited, as indeed I said in the Essay.  I am not a metaphysician; but I should have thought it a curious metaphysic—there is not one but many, indeed potentially innumerable ones—that declared the channels known (in such a finite corner as we have any inkling of) to have been used, are the only possible ones, or efficacious, or possibly acceptable to and by Him!

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, pp. 188-189

When Tolkien speaks of “the fundamental function of subcreation” in terms of “liberation from the channels the creator is known to have used already,” what does he mean? 

From the start Tolkien gives us two crucial features of subcreation: (1) it doesn’t use the “channels” which we know the creator has actually used, and (2) it is a tribute to, and really a manifestation through us, of God’s own creative potential.

Tolkien was a Trinitarian Christian: committed to the orthodox Christian belief in the Trinity and all that this doctrine means for theology and life. This means that whatever heights to which he allowed his imagination to run, he did not feel free to let his imagination run wild, apart from all metaphysical, theological, philosophical, or moral constraints. Indeed, in a letter that has been numbered 153 by his editors, he explicitly denies that he did so:

Great harm can be done, of course, by this potent mode of ‘myth’—especially wilfully. right to ‘freedom’ of the sub-creator is no guarantee that it will not be used wickedly as is Free Will. I am comforted by the fact that some, more pious and learned than I, have found nothing harmful in this Tale or its feignings as ‘myth’.

Letters, pp. 194-195

When evaluating Tolkien’s notion of subcreation, especially for whether it contradicts known revelation (whether special or general), it is also essential to consider Tolkien’s stated purpose for deploying the device in the creation of specifically mythological tales. Although Tolkien always denied that his Middle Earth mythology was to be taken allegorically (as symbolically standing for analogues found in our own world), he did nevertheless intend the tales to illustrate something very profound about Free Will:

…having mentioned Free Will, I might say that in my myth I have used ‘subcreation’ in a special way…to make visible and physical the effects of Sin or misused Free Will by men…in this myth, it is ‘feigned’ (legitimately whether that is a feature of the real world or not) that He gave special ‘sub-creative’ powers to certain of His highest created beings: that is a guarantee that what they devised and made should be given the reality of Creation.  Of course within limits, and of course subject to certain commands or prohibitions.  But if they ‘fell’, as the Diabolus Morgoth did, and started making things ‘for himself, to be their Lord’, these would then ‘be’, even if Morgoth broke the supreme ban against making other ‘rational’ creatures like Elves or Men.  They would at least ‘be’ real physical realities in the physical world, however evil they might prove, even ‘mocking’ the Children of God.  They would be Morgoth’s greatest Sins, abuses of his highest privilege, and would be creatures begotten of Sin, and naturally bad…. 

Ibid, pp. 194-196 (emphasis mine)

This is a fascinating passage on multiple levels. What Tolkien here states is that his intention in writing his mythology was to illustrate in quite a different storial context than what we find in Scripture a central truth of the Christian religion in terms of how sin and misused creaturely freedom warp God’s good world.

Although some Christians balk, for instance, at Iluvatar using apparently angelic beings to perform some of the physical work of creating the world (apparently believing the Valar are little better than a thinly-Christianized variety of polytheism), Tolkien here explains that this is a literary device designed explicitly for the purpose of illustrating the theme of sin and misused free will. Subcreation appears here quite literally as subcreation – under God, rational, free will-bearing creatures created by Him and using or misusing their wills to perform His purposes such that even their sin gets transformed by Him into glory in the end.

It would be difficult to find a more thoroughly biblical idea than this, though it is here dressed up in mythological garb. But this brings us to another crucial point regarding the meaning of Tolkien’s subcreation idea: the simple fact that despite many places where his mythology seems to “contradict” something the Bible says, it’s not even appropriate (!) to bring the Bible into the picture as the judge because the story takes place completely outside the biblical framework.

Specifically, whereas the Bible deals with the creation, fall, and redemption of mankind, Tolkien’s mythology deals with entirely different types of creatures inhabiting a world that predates the entire biblical story of mankind. It’s best to hear Tolkien himself on this point, here discussing the Silmarillion’s description of human death as “the gift of Iluvatar”:

…mythically these tales are Elf-centered, not anthropocentric, and Men only appear in them, at what must be a point long after their Coming.  This is therefore an ‘Elvish’ view, and does not necessarily have anything to say for or against such beliefs as the Christian that ‘death’ is not part of human nature, but a punishment for sin (rebellion), a result of the ‘Fall’.  It should be regarded as an Elvish perception of what death—not being tied to the ‘circles of the world’—should now become for Men, however it arose. 

Ibid., p. 178 (emphasis mine)

I assert – though it will be left to other articles on this site to demonstrate my assertion – that careful reading of The Silmarillion—the grander and broader mythology that lies behind The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings—reveals striking parallels with Holy Scripture, not only in basic motifs such as creation / fall / redemption, but also in the progression of the overall story.

Such reasoning can be (and will be) disputed, as many interpretations of literature are. The arguments pro and con will have to stand on their own merits – and also their quite relative persuasive power for individual readers! – but no matter how that analysis turns out one point already mentioned returns here at the end to guide the arguments:

At the foundational level and all throughout the stories, Tolkien meant his subcreated world to be in keeping with the actual world we know God has made. It may be that authorial intention isn’t everything in interpreting books, since authors can be mistaken in all manner of ways both in the actual words they write and in their own grasp of the deeper implications of them.

Nevertheless, we mustn’t approach literature cynically, seeking ruthlessly to pull at its seams and dissect its patterns and so rigorously “see through” it to its supposed “real” meaning that by the time we’re done there isn’t anything left to which we could point as what we are aiming at because all there is to point at is our own grand “meta-literary” theories.

This is, after all, what the so-called “Higher Critics” have been doing to the Bible for several centuries, not to mention to the great works of the Western canon such as the Iliad and Odyssey. The purpose of literature is not to provoke cynical deconstruction, but constructive reflection – and this Tolkien’s works have the power to do for us in spades.

I am far from attempting to defend every word that Tolkien wrote in his mythology as being unproblematic and perfectly spiritually healthy. Tolkien was just a man as we are, and more, just a sinful man as we are. No doubt there are problematic areas of theology and philosophy in his books that ought to be found and thoroughly discussed. But we must never simply dismiss an author’s stated intentions as a substantial key to interpreting his work – and Tolkien’s stated intentions regarding subcreation in his literary works were quite evidently Christian.