Genesis 1	Ainulindalë	Valaquenta
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.	There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought,and they were with him before aught else was made. Then those of the Ainur who desired it arose and entered into the World at the beginning of Time; and it was their task to achieve it, and by their labours to fulfil the vision which they had seen. Long they laboured in the regions of Eä, which are vast beyond the thought of Elves and Men, until in the time appointed was made Arda, the Kingdom of Earth. Then they put on the raiment of Earth and descended into it, and dwelt therein.	In the beginning Eru, the One, who in the Elvish tongue is named Ilúvatar, made the Ainur of his thought; and they made a great Music before him. In this Music the World was begun; for Ilúvatar made visible the song of the Ainur, and they beheld it as a light in the darkness. And many among them became enamoured of its beauty, and of its history which they saw beginning and unfolding as in a vision. Therefore Ilúvatar gave to their vision Being, and set it amid the Void, and the Secret Fire was sent to burn at the heart of the World; and it was called Eä.

Where to begin, since the three sources at first seem vastly divergent? Perhaps the best way to begin is to question that very premise – that the three sources are vastly divergent.

Over a number of years of working with Tolkien and observing Christian objections to his work I have noticed that many believers think inside a very “wooden” box-like concept of biblical inspiration.

That is, an extremely powerful but quite unliterary understanding of “the literal interpretation of the Bible” tends to control their thinking, especially about issues of creation. I make no apologies for saying up front that this variety of literalism must be understood as both a product of and a reaction to the prevailing intellectual winds of evolutionary theory that have for so long captured our general cultural mindset.

Now it may very well be that when all the necessary interpretive factors are well taken into account we will find that Genesis does in fact teache that the universe as we now observe it was created very recently, on the order of 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. It may very well be that humankind is therefore a very young race, and that all the unpleasantness of whatever kind that we see about us through all of our recorded history are simply and finally the result of the Fall of man in the Garden. It may be very well be that the waters of the Flood covered every square inch of the planet. And so on.

Items like this are typically what the type of Christian I’m referring to here means when he speaks of “interpreting the Bible literally.” And it is usually in the grip of such thinking that objections to Tolkien’s creation account as found in The Silmarillion arise. For on the basis of such thinking, isn’t it just obvious that Tolkien’s writing contradicts the Bible?

Well, er, no, it’s not obvious. Or rather, it’s only obvious if this type of Christian is allowed to simply beg the question about what exactly”the literal interpretation of Scripture” consists. This is far too big an issue to diverge into in this essay, but I will note (with the caveat that much further explanation must be given) that the Bible, though coming to us from God and so constituting the only infallible rule of our faith and practice, essentially is a piece of literature written in human languages, and so the interpretive task must follow the established conventions of literary interpretation.

The Bible is indeed sui generis (it’s own unique thing) in terms of its origin, but it is not so in terms of how it is to be read. The Christian who has not had his mind significantly shaped in literary manner – including the serious study of history, at least one or two languages other than the English he reads the Bible in, and a wide variety of genres of literature – is just flat not in a position to lecture those who have had such formation as to what “literal interpretation” must mean.

But let me return to the parallel texts above. Are the creation accounts given in the second and third columns (The Silmarillion) contradictory to that given in the first (Genesis 1)?

No, because contradiction means “opposite” or “conflicting,” and disallowing that wonderfully begged question about so-called “literal interpretation” it’s going to turn out to be pretty difficult to prove Tolkien’s words have those two qualities as compared with Genesis. Let’s take just a few of the fronts of argument that must be worked through.

First, Genesis 1 states that in the beginning God “made the heavens and the earth” while The Silmarillion states that in the beginning God made some spiritual beings called the Ainur as “the offspring of his thought.” Now the hasty reader will jump to “Contradiction!” without realizing that if God made the heavens and the earth He certainly made the beings contained in it – and these Ainur are nothing more than a species of those created things. There is no contradiction here, though there is certainly a difference.

And herein we see one major way that the wooden literalism I noted above infects the interpretation of Scripture, particularly the first 11 chapters of Genesis. The so-called “literal” interpreter gratuitously assumes that if the Bible doesn’t say a thing exists or happened in very clear and exact words, well, that thing cannot be real or true. (A pastor’s wife I knew once claimed, on the grounds of such illogical, universal negative reasoning, that because the Bible never mentions the word “aliens” we can know that there is no such thing anywhere in God’s created universe.)

So the problem with asserting contradiction between Genesis and The Silmarillion appears right in the beginning of the compared accounts, and is rooted in nothing more than the assumption that “heavens and the earth” can’t be expanded, even if only as a literary device, and the expansion treated only in terms of mentioning a few items not mentioned by Scripture.

But this is just simplistic and flatly unreasonable, since “heavens and earth” are catch-all terms necessarily implying all the vast array of individual beings contained therein. The Bible never mentions hamburgers or art galleries or tyrannosauruses or laptop computers, either. Perhaps sentences in fictional works that speak of such things are therefore “contradictory” to Scripture?

Second, purely textually, Genesis 1:3 tells us that “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” The hasty so-called biblical literalist again jumps to “Contradiction!”, for he has apparently not noticed that the Ainulindalë specifically states, “Ilúvatar made visible the song of the Ainur, and they beheld it as a light in the darkness.” Whereas Genesis speaks in the third person singular of God Himself, “God separated the light from the darkness,” the Ainulindalë speaks in the third person plural from the point of view of God’s creatures, “and they beheld it as a light in the darkness.” Moreover, somewhat later than the part I cited above, Iluvatar tells the Ainur that He is going to make their song about the world a reality: “Therefore I say: Eä! Let these things Be!”

It would take a particularly obtuse reader – or at least one who has an agenda not related to what the text itself says – not to see the parallel ideas and language in the two accounts. “Let there be light!” / “Let these things Be!”, and so forth. The Ainulindalë does not here “contradict” Genesis 1 so much as it expresses the same truths about the all-powerful, eternal God’s unilateral creation of the finite world in language different from that of Scripture. Difference is not necessarily the same thing as contradiction. The burden of proof lies here on the so-called “literalist,” not on the literary reader of both the Bible and Tolkien.