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2 results

  • VII - Epilogue

  • Giuseppe Pezzini, Corpus Christi College, Oxford
  • Book:
    Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation
    Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    08 May 2025, pp 378-389

  • Summary

    Chapter VII, an Epilogue to the book, consists of a very short introduction to the Ainulindalë – the cosmogonic myth opening The Silmarillion. This myth can be interpreted as Tolkien’s archetypal and most elaborate reflection on the problem of the relation of Art and Primary reality. According to this myth, Eru created the world, employing the collaboration of the Ainur, invited to adorn His music with their “own thoughts and devices”. Eru is not merely a passive, detached observer, but constantly participates in the process of sub-creation, by continuing to inspire and correct the Ainur’s sub-creating activities, harmonising them with each other, and maintaining the freedom to introduce “new and unforetold” entities into the eventual unfolding of their Music, which remains under His ultimate control. As Eru says to the rebellious artist Melkor, in a passage encapsulating Tolkien’s vision of the mystery of literary creation: “no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite”.

Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation
  • Giuseppe Pezzini
  • Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    08 May 2025
  • Taking his readers into the depths of a majestic and expansive literary world, one to which he brings fresh illumination as if to the darkness of Khazad-dûm, Giuseppe Pezzini combines rigorous scholarship with an engaging style to reveal the full scale of J. R. R. Tolkien's vision of the 'mystery of literary creation'. Through fragments garnered from across a scattered body of writing, and acute readings of primary texts (some well-known, others less familiar or recently published), the author divulges the unparalleled complexity of Tolkien's work while demonstrating its rich exploration of literature's very nature and purpose. Eschewing any overemphasis on context or comparisons, Pezzini offers rather a uniquely sustained, focused engagement with Tolkien and his 'theory' on their own terms. He helps us discover – or rediscover – a fascination for Tolkien's literary accomplishment while correcting long-standing biases against its nature and merits that have persisted fifty years after his death.