Ox Bones and Silver Ladles: The Construction of the Ainulindalë by Dawn Walls-Thumma

Eight years ago, when I first started researching Tolkien's creation myth the Ainulindalë, most of the discussion I encountered, in both scholarly and fan spaces, could be summed up under the heading: Where exactly does the Ainulindalë come from? In other words, what were the myths it was "based on" or that Tolkien drew from as his "sources"? These questions presupposed that there was a source, and indeed, I read articles from scholars investigating roots in the Biblical, Classical, and Northern traditions. In fact, at my very first Tolkien conference, where I argued that there was no single source for the Ainulindalë, I ended up presenting opposite a scholar claiming its source was in Genesis. (I think it may have been his first Tolkien conference too. We pointedly and awkwardly avoided directing any too-hard questions at each other, and our audience mercifully responded in kind.)

Yet when I say that "there was no single source for the Ainulindalë," I don't mean that it doesn't have strong and undeniably mythic roots. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that those roots give the Ainulindalë a lot of its power. Rather, what I mean is that Tolkien held no single myth as a model for the Ainulindalë. And that, too, is part of its power: It is not a subsidiary of another culture's myths, it's not a derivative, but rather it draws from the same deeper mythic source as our real-world creation myths do, giving the Ainulindalë a resonance and meaning apart from that imparted by its connection to another culture's mythology.

And this meaning imparted by the Ainulindalë, independent of its association with a source myth, is important. As a creation myth, the Ainulindalë forms the foundation upon which the rest of the legendarium is constructed. Barbara Sproul calls creation myths "self-fulfilling prophecies" because "they create facts out of the values they propound."¹ In the case of the legendarium—while undoubtedly influenced by Northern, Classical, and Christian traditions—those values are uniquely its own, beginning with its creation myth, the Ainulindalë.

To begin, it's worth considering what Tolkien himself said on the subject. Tolkien’s own sense of the sources of his legendarium are complicated. Even as he lamented in a letter to a Mr. Wrigley that “the search for the sources of The Lord of the Rings is going to occupy academics for a generation or two,” his essay “On Fairy-stories” introduces such concepts as the “Cauldron of Story” and “Tree of Tales” that presuppose a common origin for all stories—and in fact assign some of a story’s power to its intertextuality.² Likewise, his own legendarium is clearly intertextual at points. But again, he is drawing from a more nebulous store of "mythic elements"—archetypes, if you will—and not from a single source. Tolkien himself phrased it best in his 1951 letter to the publisher Milton Waldman: "These tales are 'new', they are not directly derived from other myths and legends, but they must inevitably contain a large measure of ancient wide-spread motives or elements."³ Returning again to the letter to Mr. Wrigley, Tolkien illuminates his method in selecting these elements, noting that "the particular use in a particular situation"—not the element's association with a specific myth—is what imparts meaning to that element's use in the legendarium.⁴

It is with these "ancient wide-spread motives or elements" where my interest lies, specifically in considering how Tolkien selected and assembled "the particular use" of elements to simultaneously root the Ainulindalë in the broader world mythic tradition while allowing it to carry its own meaning and values independent of other myths. In particular, I'm going to consider two specific mythic elements: the deus faber or god-as-artisan motif and how that motif is used in world mythology, because the theme today is Tolkien and the Classics, the demiurgic motif with a specific focus on Plato's Timaeus.

In 1963, the religion scholar Charles Long classified creation myths as five types: creation from nothing, creation from chaos, world parent, emergence, and earth diver.⁵ Tolkien's Ainulindalë, which was first set to paper sometime between 1918 and 1920 as The Music of the Ainur, is perhaps the most enduring text in the legendarium, changing relatively little as the decades brought significant revisions to all other areas of his work. To use Long's system, the Ainulindalë is a creation-from-nothing myth: an important concordance with the Hebraic scriptures, since Tolkien's Christian God and Arda's Eru Ilúvatar are the same being. The ability to create from nothing is a distinguishing characteristic of God (or Eru, if you will) that becomes essential later in distinguishing between Tolkien's concepts of creation and subcreation.

The Ainulindalë contains an essential element that distinguishes it from the Hebraic scriptures: the Ainur, created from the thought of Eru within the universe. Here is where the Ainulindalë begins to align more with the elements presented in Plato's Timaeus. Timaeus presents the creation of the universe as demiurgic: carried out by divine beings themselves created by a monotheistic deity. Much as the Ainur are entrusted to make "a new World made visible before them," the demiurgic gods in Timaeus construct the various beings of the world. This places much of the universe at a one-step remove from the ultimate creator god, which may seem on the surface to lessen the power of that god. However, as Tolkien himself notes in his essay "On Fairy-Stories," the effect is to attach to the creative, artistic impulse the mark of divinity. Because God creates, in other words, so do His creations, a phenomenon that Tolkien terms subcreation, summed up in "On Fairy-Stories" as, "we make still by the law in which we're made."⁶

Building on Long's classification system of creation myths, David Adams Leeming in 2010 further classified world creation myths by motif. The motif described above, at the heart of the Ainulindalë, he terms the deus faber motif, or god-as-artisan. In this motif, the creator god is equivalent to a human artisan, and the creation of the universe, world, or humankind parallels a specific art or craft, such as pottery or tentmaking. Leeming suggests that the deus faber motif adds significance to human creativity by its association with the divine. "The deus faber creation," he writes, "is a celebration of human ingenuity and a justification for what we do. And it turns what we do into something mystical and magical. It makes our crafts microcosmic representations of creation itself.⁷

Interestingly, the deus faber motif is almost nonexistent in Western culture, though it occurs in myths from the Americas, East Asia, Africa, and Oceania. For Western examples, Leeming cites only a passage from the Book of Job where God describes laying the foundations of the earth, making him a builder in Leeming's interpretation—a bit of a stretch in mine—and a Romanian myth where creation is achieved through weaving.⁸ Western myths tend to rely on the creation-from-nothing and creation-from-chaos types—with the exception of the Norse, who in their very Norse way, chop up a giant and use his dismembered parts to make the world. This makes Tolkien's own use of the deus faber motif interesting because it holds no parallels with the myths fans and scholars typically like to credit as sources for the legendarium, and the Ainulindalë more particularly.

Another intriguing deviation is the type of artistry represented in deus faber myths. Almost always, they involve some form of physical craft: pottery, weaving, or smithcraft, for example. But Tolkien's use of art as the vehicle by which the universe is created comes at least initially through the mode of music and song, a mode of creation almost entirely absent from world mythology. There is creation-from-word, a motif associated with the creation-from-nothing type, but that is not exactly what happens in the Ainulindalë either, at least where the Ainur are concerned, leaving the Ainulindalë as a bit of both motifs but wholly neither.

Returning to Tolkien's assertion that "the particular use in a particular situation" of an element or motif is the most interesting consideration, it's worthwhile to consider his particular use of these particular motifs. As noted earlier, they root the Ainulindalë within a broader mythic tradition. Thus, the Ainulindalë feels genuine as a creation myth, which is why I suspect so many Tolkien fans feel like it must "come from" somewhere. However, Tolkien's small deviations from that tradition—namely the use of music as the mode of demiurgic creation—are significant to the meaning of the Ainulindalë, both as a standalone text and as the mythic foundation of the legendarium.

Music and song are significant as modes of creation for two reasons. First, they tie into how the Northern cultures Tolkien loved traditionally represented and made sense of their own history and reality. The Anglo-Saxons, the Norse, the Finns—all of these cultures, in ancient and medieval times, relied on poetry and music as a mode within the oral tradition by which the past was remembered and interpreted for a modern audience. Especially considering Tolkien's original aim to represent a pre-Christian mythology for England—an objective that, while ostensibly abandoned, remained vestigial at points within the legendarium—the reliance of these cultures on music and song makes his choice of song as the creative mode significant. If, in his original imaginings, the Ainur of the 1918-1920 Music of the Ainur were at the deepest origins of English myth, the sacred nature of song as a mode of literally creating reality carries forward and imbues the figurative creation of reality by historical figures such as the scops and skalds of Germanic tradition with the coloring of the divine. This aligns with the power that these figures held within Germanic society: far from mere entertainers, as we tend to think of singers today, but trusted with the power to make sense of the world through their selection and presentation of historical details—the influencers of both kings and their followers.⁹ Perhaps somewhat romantically, one can also imagine Tolkien first encountering the echoes of these songs as written down by Christian scribes and the imaginative universes they kindled for him, in turn represented in a legendarium itself established via a creation myth using song: his concept, described in "On Fairy-Stories," of the Secondary World that becomes akin to reality while one is inside of it.

Secondly, the use of music and song, as Leeming notes of the deus faber motif, associates those arts with the divine. In the context of the Ainulindalë, I'd extend this to narrative. While the Ainulindalë is described as "like unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and organs, and like unto countless choirs singing with words," invoking both instrumental music and vocal song, the introduction of conflict via Melkor and the resolution of that conflict as part of the song itself suggests a narrative structure.¹⁰ This elevates Tolkien's own work as a poet and storyteller to an impulse derived from his Creator. As Leeming notes, deus faber myths offer "justification for what we do": We are not simply fiddling about with clay or paint or music but imitating the same divine mode used by God Himself. Given Tolkien's frequent self-deprecation of his creative work, his choice of song as the artistic mode for creation always feels more than a little self-validating to me: He is, after all, only "making still by the law by which he's made."

Within the deus faber motif, however, Tolkien also uses demiurgic creation—or subcreation, in his own terminology—similar to that used by Plato in the Socratic dialogue Timaeus. Timaeus is, to put it bluntly, a weird text, involving an idiosyncratic and suspect mix of cosmogony, the four elements, physiology, triangles, taxonomy, casual sexism, medicine, more triangles, astronomy, and theology. The translator of the version I used called Timaeus "obscure and repulsive" to modern readers, which this reader found a bit strong but not entirely inaccurate.¹¹ Certainly, there are sections—mostly those where the word "triangle" is used more than three times in a paragraph—that I have struggled unsuccessfully to attend to despite reading Timaeus more times than I can recall over the years. I will focus on just a small part of Timaeus, which concerns the creation of the universe and world. No triangles, promise.

First, the dialogic structure is very similar to Tolkien's earliest work on his creation myth, The Music of the Ainur. There are multiple speakers summoning a distant past that has faded into obscurity for most of its youthful and ignorant audience and which is being rekindled via the oral tradition. Timaeus describes several world-destroying deluges, similar to the multiple cataclysms in The Silmarillion: the overthrow of the Lamps and the inundation of Almaren, the War of Wrath and the inundation of Beleriand, and the destruction of Númenor and the inundation of, well, Númenor. Speaking of which, the origins of the Númenor story—the famous if roundabout result of a creative challenge between Tolkien and C.S. Lewis—can be found in Timaeus as well, where Plato first presents the story of the drowned, overproud isle of Atlantis. Atlantis, of course, was the prototype of Númenor, one of the few instances of an unequivocal source for part of the legendarium. John Cox notes as well that Tolkien's frequent use of series of objects or people, diminishing in each successive iteration, owes to the same pattern seen in Timaeus, where distance from the original, eternal Creator produces increased corruption.¹²

Demiurgic creation is one such succession seen in The Silmarillion: the eternal, omnipotent creator Eru Ilúvatar; the immortal but highly fallible subcreators, the Ainur; and the attempts the Ainur make at creating life, described as imitations in the case of the Dwarves, perversions in the case of Melkor's fabrications, and subcreative footnotes in the case of Yavanna's olvar and kelvar.

There are other cosmogonical parallels as well between Timaeus and the Ainulindalë. Both are monotheistic, involving an eternal creator who sets the universal stage for the work of his demiurges: the Greek gods in Plato and the Ainur in Tolkien. The creator in both texts vacates the world, leaving his demiurges in charge, in contrast to the monotheistic (and highly, wrathfully involved) creator god in the Hebraic tradition. In Timaeus, the creator says to his demiurges, "I will myself sow the seed, and having made a beginning, I will hand the work over to you."¹³ In The Silmarillion, the absence of Eru Ilúvatar is made apparent when Manwë Súlimo must twice pray for Eru's intercession, to grant Lúthien Tinúviel mortality and to unmake the world when Ar-Pharazôn breaks the Ban of the Valar; otherwise, it is understood, the governance of Arda is left to the Ainur who accepted a place within it.

In both texts, the demiurges operate within a structure imposed upon them by the creator. Timaeus describes creation as based "after an unchangeable pattern,"¹⁴ which recalls the structure of the Music of Ainur—and Melkor's introduction of evil in his deviation from it—followed by Eru's words to Melkor that "no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite,"¹⁵ a concept that, though phrased less eloquently, extends back to the earliest draft of The Music of the Ainur. Timaeus doesn't introduce a conflict among the demiurges as Tolkien does between Melkor and the other Ainur; however, the creator does state that "only an evil being would wish to undo that which is harmonious and happy,"¹⁶ which seems to prefigure exactly Melkor in The Silmarillion. Demiurgic creation is the most distinct element of Plato's cosmogony as presented in Timaeus, and many of its features are present in the actors and process of creation in the Ainulindalë.

As with the deus faber motif, however, I am less eager to declare the Ainulindalë as derived from Timaeus than to consider why the demiurgic element of Timaeus may have appealed to Tolkien and met his needs as he [sub]created his own cosmogonic myth. After all, the use of the deus faber motif doesn't require demiurges. Tolkien could have done away with the Ainur and had Eru Ilúvatar step out from behind the conductor's podium and sing the universe into existence himself. John Cox proposes that the appeal of demiurgic creation lies in the "buffer" it provides between the ultimate and eternal Divine and the grosser, more worldly elements of creation, but as noted earlier, if anything, assigning the full creative act to Eru Ilúvatar makes the composition of poems, songs, and stories more closely affiliated with the divine.¹⁷ I would suggest instead that the demiurgic structure possibly appealed to Tolkien for the simple reason that it allowed him to construct a monotheistic Secondary World—essential given his Christian beliefs and the early association of the legendarium with English mythology—that also included the kind of paganistic pantheon so essential, and delightful, in the myth cycles Tolkien most enjoyed.

There is one essential deviation in the demiurgic structure of the Ainulindalë when compared to Timaeus that shows that Tolkien was not engaging in rote imitation so much as selecting and manipulating elements that advanced his purpose. In Timaeus, as noted earlier, the demiurges are the immortal product of the creator god. However, the other organisms of the world—including humankind—are made by the demiurges, not by the creator. The creator justifies this on the basis that "if they were created by me and received life at my hands, they would be on an equality with the gods."¹⁸

It is precisely this equality that, in subverting Timaeus here, Tolkien strives to achieve. Both Elves and Mortal Men are pointedly not created by the Ainur but by Eru Ilúvatar himself; not only that, but they are so firmly in Eru's province that much about them and their fate remains unknown to the Ainur. This change is essential, for Elves and Mortal Men must be the Children of Eru in Tolkien's cosmogony. As noted earlier, since Tolkien imagined Arda as a mythology of our own world, certain theological elements had to remain consistent with his beliefs as a Christian, with the primacy of a monotheistic creator god and humankind as His creations without intermediaries.

In "On Fairy-Stories," Tolkien describes what scholars today would call intertextuality, only he calls it "the Soup" or, more eloquently, "the Caldron of Story." This metaphor, which he carries over several pages, reveals much of what he believes about the use of mythic and other story elements within his own work. He cautions that "We must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled." But, earlier, he asserts that "the Cooks do not dip in the ladle quite blindly,"¹⁹ which implies that Cooks—artists, musicians, storytellers—must by necessity see the bones of the ox. They are, presumably, pardoned for their perverse curiosity in service of their craft.

I hope Tolkien will forgive me for my scholarly interest in ox-bones as well—and the myriad other ingredients mystical and strange within the Caldron of Story that is the realm of creation myth. I have shown how, in his construction of the Ainulindalë, Tolkien dipped the ladle with discerning intent, beginning with a monotheistic creator required by his own Christian faith, overlaid with a pantheon of demiurgic subcreators in the Platonic tradition, and all folded into a deus faber motif as seen in myths around the world. For all of these, Tolkien modified—seasoned, if I may extend his metaphor even further—these ingredients to suit his specific purpose.

Here, I think it's worth returning to Barbara Sproul, whom I quoted at the beginning for her description of creation myths as "self-fulfilling prophecies" from which the details of a myth cycle arise. The Ainulindalë, with Tolkien's careful selection of mythic elements, forms the foundation of the legendarium, with its primacy given to artistic creativity and especially song: where Light derived from Eru himself is sung to life in the form of the Two Trees, where the greatest villain Melkor is subdued not with a sword but a song, where the humble Ringbearers come to understand their purpose not in the role of heroes but as a place within a story, within a song.

Works Cited

1. Barbara C. Sproul, Primal Myths: Creating the World (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 3
2. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, "337 From a letter to 'Mr Wrigley' 25 May 1972."
3. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, "131 To Milton Waldman."
4. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, "337 From a letter to 'Mr Wrigley' 25 May 1972."
5. Charles H. Long, Alpha: The Myths of Creation (New York: George Braziller, 1963).
6. The Tolkien Reader, "On Fairy-Stories."
7. David Adams Leeming, Creation Myths of the World: An Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010), 321.
8. Leeming, Creation Myths, 319.
9. Morton W. Bloomfield and Charles W. Dunn, The Role of the Poet in Early Societies (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1989).
10. The Silmarillion, Ainulindalë.
11. Benjamin Jowett, "Introduction and Analysis" to Timaeus.
12. John Cox, "Tolkien's Platonic Fantasy." SEVEN: An Anglo-American Literary Review 5 (1983): 59.
13. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Benjamin Jowett.
14. Ibid.
15. The Silmarillion, Ainulindalë.
16. Plato, Timaeus.
17. Cox, "Tolkien's Platonic Fantasy," 58.
18. Plato, Timaeus.
19. The Tolkien Reader, "On Fairy-Stories."