Music as incarnated beauty in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion: a neoplatonic reading

Abstract

In this study I examine key conceptual parallels between J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary imagination and a Neoplatonic mythopoetic. Specifically, I discuss how Tolkien’s Silmarillion deploys a transcendental conception of Beauty that, I argue, suggests similarities with the notion of Beauty discussed by Plotinus in his Enneads. Following the scholarship of Lisa Coutras (2016) and Michael John Halsall (2020), this study analyzes key sections from Tolkien’s work to demonstrate a Neoplatonic influence. This influence, I argue, is best understood via an incarnational logic that understands musical harmony and tonal beauty to be signs that signal an ultimate transcendent source in Tolkien’s legendarium. Falling short of arguing for a direct influence of the Neoplatonic tradition on Tolkien, this study seeks to demonstrate only a plausible link between Neoplatonic sources and Tolkien’s work.

In a letter written to his son Christopher on 30 January 1945, J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973) discussed the sustaining and simplistic beauty of “the story”. Specifically, he was commenting on his friend C.S. Lewis’ (1898–1973) claims concerning the truth-value of the Genesis narrative in the Christian Bible. Tolkien wrote, “for the beauty of the story, while not necessarily a guarantee of its truth is a concomitant of it, and a fidelis is meant to draw nourishment from the beauty as well as the truth”.¹ Stories, Tolkien notes here and will argue throughout his life, are nourished by and sustained in their capacity to reflect beauty and wonder in the reader—in this beauty is to be discovered the story’s truth. Beauty is also a fundamental trait of a key concept that guides Tolkien’s literary output: sub-creation.² When the author of a story creates, Tolkien argued, they are sub-creators reflecting a transcendent creating-impulse that compels their work and organizes their output. Tolkien’s sub-creative storytelling urge is fueled by the desire to show the truth of the transcendent and the good of creation via the beauty of the imaginative.

This conception of beauty, as Lisa Coutras persuasively shows in her 2016 book Tolkien’s Theology of Beauty: Majesty, Splendor, and Transcendence in Middle-Earth, organizes Tolkien’s theological and narratival output. The thesis of her work, which comparatively explores the aesthetically grounded theological claims of Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) with Tolkien, is that “transcendental beauty emanates from every aspect of [Tolkien’s] created world”.³ Coutras’ claim has recently received further scholarly agreement in Michael John Halsall’s Creation and Beauty in Tolkien’s Catholic Vision: A Study in the Influence of Neoplatonism in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Philosophy of Life as “Being and Gift” (2020). Tolkien’s legendarium, Halsall and Coutras maintain, is one motivated by the continuous desire to show the transcendently emergent, though immanently grounded, gift of beauty in the presence of created being. While Tolkien’s view of transcendental beauty is certainly Christian in structure, it can also be understood, Halsall convincingly shows, as being Neoplatonic in foundation. In this essay, building upon theirs and other similar scholarship,⁴ I seek to further establish the Neoplatonic notion of beauty that characterizes Tolkien’s work. Unlike Coutras, Halsall, and indeed Alison Milbank, who rightly understand Tolkien’s Neoplatonic themes as emanating from key Catholic theologians, my focus explores more specifically the link between classical Neoplatonic notions of beauty and Tolkien’s legendarium. To accomplish this, I put Tolkien’s Silmarillion (1977) in conversation with The Enneads (third century c.e.) of Plotinus (204–270 c.e.); Enneads 1.6 “On Beauty”, 3.8 “On Nature, Contemplation and the One”, and 5.8 “On the Intellectual Beauty” being the focus of my comparative analysis. My thesis is that we gain in our understanding of Tolkien both as a fictional writer and as a theological thinker if we read his texts as expressing a Neoplatonic conception of beauty. Broadly then, this study supplements the growing body of scholarship that sees a Christian Neoplatonism that derives from a Medieval Catholic foundation as influencing Tolkien’s aesthetic output, by focusing more closely on the parallels that Tolkien shares with thinkers like Plotinus. For Tolkien, like Plotinus, the harmony expressed in the order of his sub-created world is one that speaks to the continual “gift-giving” being of a divine source—a gift that his participatory concept of narratival beauty signifies. The aim of my study is to flesh out this final claim.

Given the limitations of space, I do not intend to exhaustively reflect upon the notion of beauty as characterized by either Plotinus or Tolkien. Instead, only key themes and claims from either writers’ work will be drawn-upon so as to enumerate this work’s thesis. Hence, I proceed as follows: I begin by considering Plotinus’ notion of beauty, specific focus being given to the finite/infinite relational economy that his system offers. Next, I turn to the Silmarillion and consider, first, in broad details the way in which Tolkien utilizes beauty as a literary device in his text; second, several key passages that highlight the more theological and mythopoetic notions of beauty that orient Tolkien’s writing will be considered. I conclude by (a) drawing out the key comparative themes of my analysis and (b) reflect on the notion of beauty that informs Tolkien’s conception of story making in general and theology in particular.

1. Plotinus: beauty and the one

Plotinus, or rather his student Porphyry (233–305 c.e.) from whom was generated the prose which composes the Enneads, notes at the beginning of Enneads 1.6 that “Beauty is mostly in sight, but it is to be found too in things we hear, in combination of words and also in music (ἐν μουσικῇ).”⁵ This is a sentiment which, as will be made apparent below, is also applicable to the vision that guides Tolkien’s sub-created legendarium. For Plotinus, though, beauty is beautiful for its capacity to reveal (φαίνεται) a hidden harmony that both exists and persists within the created and intelligible order of things. One hears, as it were, the eternal harmony that comports the beauty of a proper and orderly melody (καὶ γὰρ μέλη καὶ ῥυθμοί εἰσι καλοί); likewise, when one sees beauty, they see in it a referent that signifies the beautiful object’s participation (μεθέξει) in a higher order of intelligible beauty (τῶν ὐποκειμένων καλά).⁶ There is then a harmony of relation between the phenomena identified as beautiful and the form of beauty; a harmony “which we become aware of even at first glance; the soul speaks of it as if it understood it, recognizes (ἐπιγνοῦσα) it and as it were adapts itself to it”.⁷ Plotinus continues this line of reasoning by suggesting that what compels this attraction is an emergent delightfulness that one feels when one remembers and returns to the beautiful as if it were their “own possession (τῶν ἑαυτῆς)”.⁸ There is thus a shared similitude between the subject who sees beauty in the object and the quality of beauty that the object itself participates in—an intercommunication (κοινωνία) that compels and orients this relational dynamic. In short, beauty for Plotinus signals not simply an immanent aesthetic, but, more importantly, a transcendent order.

Building upon the position enumerated immediately above, it is important to stress the simultaneity of Plotinus’ notion of beauty; that is, beauty is both an immanent as well as a transcendent phenomenon. As he notes, “the beautiful body (τὸ καλὸν σῶμα) comes into (γίγνεται) being by sharing in a formative power which comes from the divine forms”.⁹ There is a showing-forth (φαίνεται) of transcendent beauty within nature; being, or material phenomena, emanates out and gives expression to this communal relationship (μεθέξει) between the divine forms and matter. For Plotinus, this out-flowing beauty that results from the relation between finitude and infinitude, is identified by the soul and is innately drawn towards that beauty.

What, though, motivates the inclination on the part of the subject to desire beauty according to Plotinus? That is, what compels its attraction? One way to answer this question is to begin via a consideration of Plotinus’ notion of the ugly—the dis-harmonious. Jean-Marc Narbonne, in his excellent study of the aesthetic within Plotinus’ thought, provides a quite clear and concise description of this issue. He writes:

But what is ugliness for Plotinus? It is the absence of form in that which is destined to receive one. The ugly, then, is the unformed with which the soul has no affinity, in front of which it can receive no guidance, that which presents itself as the undetermined and unattainable.¹⁰

Continuing further, Narbonne notes that the reason for the soul’s rejection of the ugly is not simply the phenomenon’s “indistinctness” “but it is also that the soul cannot endure the spectacle as if it was facing nothingness, emptiness, an abyss devoid of the least trace of intelligibility from which it must protect itself”.¹¹ It is then, Narbonne suggests, the proximity to the abyss and thus its distance from order that inscribes within an object its status as “ugly” for Plotinus. Likewise, in the same way that the soul rejects the ugly for its proximity to the abyss so too is the soul attracted to beauty for its proximity to the fullness of the Good. Moreover, and key here, the soul is driven towards participating with the beautiful as a result of the harmony-producing relationship between its own inner nature as a beauty-aware-being and the external reality of a beauty-giving (φαίνεται) cosmos. Stated otherwise, the experience of beauty in Plotinus’ philosophy is governed by an economy of similarity—like seeks like. What is it though that compels this relational dynamic?

To answer the above question I want here to reflect on the notion of contemplation and the concomitant claims concerning reason that organizes Plotinus’ anthropology and, indeed, his metaphysical notion of beauty. In book V.3.8 Plotinus notes that the beauty perceived by the subject is not a beauty innate to the subject themselves, for “the soul does not see what it possesses; for it did not even generate (ἐγέννησεν) them, but this soul as well as the rational forming principles (οἱ λόγοι) is an image”.¹² This image (εἴδωλον) which is in the soul of the subject functions as both the desiring component, i.e. the urge to seek out and enjoy beauty, as well as the very capacity to recognize and discern beauty, i.e. the competence to know and see beauty.¹³ Importantly, Plotinus does stress the centrality of immanence within this exchange. That is, beauty is not a simple externalized emanation whose effervescent nature is unchained from finitude. As he writes:

But this [image], if it does not belong to something else and exist in something else, does not persist; for “it is proper to an image, since it belongs to something else, to come to exist in something else”.¹⁴

Here, directly quoting from Plato’s Timaeus, Plotinus stresses the relational component (μεθέξει) of beauty. This dynamic, as Kevin Corrigan notes, places the “delight in seeing inner beauty” within another as fundamental to the operation of the intrinsic nature of beauty: beauty, Plotinus argues, extends itself and shows itself—finitely and infinitely—“for its own sake”.¹⁵

It is significant that for Plotinus the key optic image that orients his work is the radiant and illuminative dimension of light. Light is, for Plotinus, the medium through which is expressed (φαίνεται) the reality of beauty. In seeing and thus participating with beauty, Plotinus argues that one sees the light of the beautiful as it is reflected in the light of the subject—an illuminative process that for him signals the unity between the finite and the infinite. The light of the intellect, that faculty which discerns and make obvious the intelligibility of beauty, he states “sees one light with another (φωτὶ ἄλλο φῶς ὁρᾷ)” therein unifying the subject with the transcendent nature of beauty.¹⁶ Writing further he notes that: “Light then sees another light: it therefore itself sees itself. And this light shining in the soul (ἐν ψυχῇ) illuminates it; that is, it makes it intelligent; that is, it makes it like itself, the light above (τῷ ἄνω φωτί).”¹⁷ When one sees beauty, Plotinus is arguing, one sees in light and via light—an illuminative process that is revelatory in structure and content.

Finally, for Plotinus, his theory of illuminative light is correlated to his theory of the One (τὸ Ἕν). According to Plotinus, the light of the intellect is in communion with the light of the One and manifests itself and is made known in the presence of beauty. It is this transcendent element, an element which ultimately sustains Plotinus’ aesthetic claims, that I want to unpack for the remainder of this section. In Enneads 6.7 Plotinus argues that beauty participates in and emanates from the Good, or the One, a participation that is made known in finitude via the beautiful—a sort of aesthetic vestige reflecting a transcendent excess. The One though, for Plotinus, as John Bussanich notes, is not connected to beauty or the intellect via a causative process.¹⁸ Rather, Bussanich rightly uses the language of procession to capture the force of Plotinus’ thought in this example. This processional movement from the Good to the sensible is a “grace” which “when the soul, receiving into itself an outflow” from the Good is “moved” “with longing and become love (ἔρως γίνεται)”.¹⁹ Going further, Plotinus notes:

Before this it is not moved even towards Intellect, for all its beauty; the beauty of Intellect is inactive until it catches a light from the Good, and the soul by itself “falls flat on its back” and is completely inactive and, though Intellect is present, is unenthusiastic about it. But when a kind of warmth from thence comes upon it, it gains strength and wakes and is truly winged; and though it is moved with passion for that which lies close by it, yet all the same it rises higher, to something greater which it seems to remember.²⁰

It is this animating quality that Plotinus argues infuses the subject who engages in and communes with the Good that I want to stress here. For beauty, in its fullest expressions, is “shown forth” (φαίνεται) in its participatory (μεθέξει) union between finitude and the infinite via the language of desire expressed as beauty. Again, Plotinus writes, “the productive power of all is the flower of beauty (καλοῦ ἄνθος ἐστί), a beauty which makes beauty. For [love] generates beauty and makes it more beautiful by the excess of beauty which comes from it.”²¹ The union, he writes, between the procession of the one as it “flowers forth” and communes with the finite generates a symmetry which is the “principle of beauty” (ἀρχὴ κάλλους)—i.e. a symmetry that reflects a hidden harmony which Plotinus argues weaves itself throughout being. It is evidencing these similar conceptual and theological aesthetic claims in Tolkien’s Silmarillion that this study now turns.

2. The beauty of Arda: Eru and creation

Tolkien’s Silmarillion begins with a creation narrative entitled the Ainulindalë, a word whose meaning in the Elvish language he created means quite literally “holy-song”—aina meaning holy and lin- meaning “sing or make a musical sound”.²² The opening paragraph of the text describes the creation of Arda—Middle Earth—from the one God which Tolkien named Eru-Iluvatar (Eru):

There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Iluvatar; and he made the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made. And he spoke to them, propounding to them themes of music; and they sang before him, and he was glad.²³

The song that emerged from the angelic-like beings Tolkien named the Ainur brought forth a “unison of harmony” that arose from an inner “imperishable flame” innate to the Ainur themselves. The result of this process was a thematic musical outflowing of “great beauty” in what Tolkien would call the “Great Music”.²⁴ This music, Tolkien writes, “went out into the Void, and it was not void”.²⁵ Music here, and in general throughout Tolkien’s legendarium, signals the joy innate to created being itself.

The creation story of Tolkien’s legendarium, then, is one that begins in a musical harmony which expresses itself outwards and into the void of non-being. This tonal expression, emergent as it was from Eru, illumined the void with a harmonious beauty by compelling a musically emergent communion between the Ainur. However, this harmony came to be disrupted by the discord of an Ainur named Melkor who desired “to bring into Being things of his own” and thus sang a song incongruent with the harmony established by Eru.²⁶ In response to this tension, Eru incorporated Melkor’s theme into the musical harmony of creation in such a way that the Great Musical theme “gathered power and had new beauty”.²⁷ Tolkien, we should notice, is describing to us a cosmos that strives to reconcile the incongruous by inclusion, not exclusion. At its heart, this is a good creation; it seeks to maximize unity, even if that means including discord. Beauty and harmony show themselves in their response to this discord—a theme which will be returned to below.

As the account of Melkor and the Ainur unfolds, Tolkien describes a pivotal scene in which Eru shows to the Ainur a sensible vision of the harmony of their song made corporeal. He writes:

[Eru-]Iluvatar said to them: “Behold your music!” And he showed to them a vision, giving them sight where before was only hearing; and they saw a new World made visible before them, and it was globed amid the void, and it was sustained therein, but was not of it. And as they looked and wondered this World began to unfold its history, and it seemed to them that it lived and grew.²⁸

The world, Arda, came into being out of the song that arose from the unified harmony of the Ainur. Though, again, notice that Melkor’s disharmony also fuels the created order. As, in the pursuit of a song all his own, and Eru’s attempt to reintegrate that discordant tune, Melkor helped give rise to the vision of Being that Eru showed the Ainur. This making-productive the discordant qualities that were generated in the creation by Eru is key to understanding a principle theological insight that originates from Tolkien’s thought: eucatastrophe. The word is Tolkien’s own creation and is formed from the Greek prefix εὐ- (good) and the conjugated verb καταστρέφω (I overturn). For Tolkien, what will be made right, or overturned, are those wrongs that pervert the enjoyment of the good, of unity. This word signals, as some scholars have also noted, something akin to the notion of the Felix Culpa, the happy fall.²⁹ I will return to the eucatastrophic element of Tolkien’s work closer to the end of this study, however I want now to consider some of the scholarly engagement with the issues thus far discussed in Tolkien’s work.

2.1 Interpreting Arda’s creation

Numerous scholars have commented on the theological, religious, and mythical nature of Tolkien’s work. One question asked, especially germane to this study, pertains to the theistic structure of Tolkien’s cosmos. Scholars like Ronald Hutton argue that since the Silmarillion begins with the creative act of the One God who, from his word, creates out into the void of non-being, being itself, then it is obviously a monotheistic cosmos. But, because this act results in a cosmology in which various sub-gods perform the will of the high-God, then, it should be understood as a polytheistic Pagan cosmos rather than a specifically Christian monotheistic one.³⁰ Hutton argues that the role of the Ainur in the creation of Middle Earth suggests that Tolkien’s legendarium is governed by polytheistic principles—principles that still cleave to a Neoplatonic metaphysics.³¹ Hutton is not outright in his rejection of a Christian Neoplatonic influence in Tolkien’s work, his position though is that this influence merely represents one strand of a larger conceptual ecosystem.³² It is a claim which puts Hutton in line with Tolkien’s own account of Middle-Earth as a “Monotheistic world of ‘natural theology’”; because, the cosmos that emerges in the Silmarillion is one that is responsive to, develops in concert with, and reflects back, the One—Eru.³³ All of Being emerges from Eru and acts either to unify with, or diverge from, Eru—this structure is something like the principle axiom that undergirds the developmental structure of Arda. The relational dynamic that connects Eru with Arda, Hutton argues, are Christianized understandings of Neoplatonic motifs like harmony and beauty—themes that, for Hutton, sit “side by side” with a Pagan cosmos.³⁴

In contrast to Hutton, there exists a far larger body of scholarship that sees within Tolkien’s work a stronger appeal to Christian theological themes. Works like Ralph Woods’ The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-Earth (2003) or Paul Kerry and Sandra Meisel’s Light Beyond All Shadow: Religious Experience in Tolkien’s Work (2011) are examples of texts that seek to make obvious the Christian structure of Tolkien’s legendarium.³⁵ In these works Tolkien’s Catholicism are discussed so as to underscore the Christian elements of the text. For example, scholars like Glen Robert Gill whose article “Biblical Archetypes in The Lord of the Rings” in Light Beyond All Shadow admirably draw out the obvious biblical parallels between the Christian creation story and Tolkien’s Silmarillion. Deploying literary models of interpretation drawn from Northrop Frye (1912–1991), Gill argues that the Ainulindalë is representative of an archetypical and analogical structure that first arises in Genesis, finds expression in Milton’s Paradise Lost, and is repeated in Tolkien’s own work.³⁶ This is an approach typical of Tolkien scholarship that seeks to show the Christian element of his work. For example, in Catherine Madsen’s excellent article “Light from an Invisible Lamp” she argues that despite the obvious Christian structure and thought of Tolkien’s output, his work does not necessitate a Christian response to the text.³⁷ This is because, Madsen argues, in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings God is not shown forth, nor does he even speak, but acts in history with the greatest subtlety. He does not violate the laws of flesh or of food, but remains the last Other behind all otherness that may be loved.”³⁸ The teleological and eschatological motif in Tolkien’s work is something that scholars like Hutton contest.³⁹ However, as I will argue below, this eschatological principle is indeed a cornerstone of the Christian and the Neoplatonic Christian kernel of Tolkien’s work. It is a theme that governs the narrative of the legendarium. It is my argument that the theme of beauty in Tolkien’s work is one that signals an appeal to a transcendent will that organizes the teleological development of Tolkien’s cosmos. Beauty, music, and harmony are deployed by Tolkien in a way that reflects these Neoplatonic elements. Before unpacking this claim, however, I want now to turn to the theme of music, as both a key element of Plotinus’ work as well as a vital component to the Silmarillion text.

2.2 Music and beauty in Tolkien’s legendarium

As already discussed, Enneads 1.6 draws a comparison between beauty and harmony via music. Numerous commentators have suggested that it is not incidental that Plotinus begins his analysis of beauty with music. In so doing, as Andrew Smith argues, Plotinus wanted to emphasize the centrality of the invisible and transcendent in his work so as to disabuse his students of drawing too tight of a correlation between beauty and corporeality.⁴⁰ Music, though certainly corporeal in origin (e.g. a musical instrument), is unseen in form; it thus functions analogically as a signifier of a higher order that, though imperceptible to the physical eye, moves the subject nonetheless. Indeed, throughout 1.6, Plotinus continually moves his reader up and down, as it were, a conceptual ladder that seeks to make beauty—though certainly a manifestation of and with corporeality—not subordinate to matter. Instead, it is the invisible nature of beauty as an incorporeal and, ultimately, a transcendental quality that Plotinus wants to emphasize. Specifically, he wants to turn (ἐπιστροφή) the attention of his students to this incorporeal element so as to convert their mind to its invisible reality.⁴¹ It is then the harmony of music that makes this invisible reality apparent in the mind of the student. As Elvira Panaiotidi argues, for Plotinus “Music is a mediator par excellence between the sensible world and ideal reality.”⁴² Likewise, as Margaret Miles shows in her study of the notion of providence and music in Plotinus’ work, he used the “ancient metaphor of sound” in his treatise to underscore the notion of an infused harmony that saturates phenomena.⁴³ Deploying the imagery of a musical pipe, Plotinus, she notes, argued that just as the melody that arises from a musical instrument relies upon the unequal distribution of the various pipe lengths, so too does the unequal distribution of phenomenal reality help to give rise to the harmony of providence.⁴⁴ She writes:

If the parts of the universe, [Plotinus] says, are “struck in a particular way”, each responds either with silence or with its own tone. From the mix of all the tones and the silence comes “a kind of single voice of the living creature”. Providence creates the exquisite harmony of the parts.⁴⁵

It is both themes discussed above, i.e. (1) the mediational notion of beauty as shown in the invisible nature of music and (2) the theme of unity in diversity, that I want to now consider Tolkien’s text.

In the opening lines of the Silmarillion, and indeed throughout the Ainulindalë, there is an implicit fusion between the word as spoken by Eru—the cosmos sung into creation—and the emergent beauty that arises as a signifier of the two. As Coutras writes, “In Music, Tolkien presents the primordial light of being and Iluvatar’s creative Word of power as one and the same.”⁴⁶ According to Coutras, there remains a fixed relationship between Eru’s word and the spoken utterance that gives voice to creation. Her intention in so doing is to highlight the link between John’s Gospel, von Balthasar, and Tolkien’s text—a task which she masterfully accomplishes.⁴⁷ That said, as Tolkien himself notes in a letter written in 1951 to an editor at Collins Publishing, he sought to distance his creation narrative both explicitly and implicitly from the “Christian myth”.⁴⁸ Be that as it may, and as already noted, the creation narrative in the Silmarillion does indicate a creating God who “made the Ainur” and who then sung creation into being via the harmony of their song.⁴⁹Eru created Arda by fixing an economy of relation between the Ainur via the melodic order innate to the structure of music. Though this position can certainly can be said to draw parallels with the prologue to John’s Gospel, it is perhaps best thought of in conjunction with a Neoplatonic, Platonic, or even Pythagorean framework. For example, as Halsall shows, there exist strong parallels between the Ainulindalë, where angelic creatures emit a tonal harmony that organizes the heavens, and the Pythagorean claim that the bodies of the planets in motion emit harmonious musical chords whose sounds correspond to their “relative speed and distance ratios” from one another.⁵⁰ As well, links can be made with Plato’s Timaeus in which numerical ratios reflect an “order and structure” that arises from the creator image in that text.⁵¹ On this Platonic resemblance, Halsall writes, “The Manner in which the Ainur’s music antedates and pre-contains the entire history of the [legendarium] resembles Plato’s realm of Forms/Ideals, in which the physical world of sensible things participate” in the invisible world of music—a music that gives forth the beauty of creation in Tolkien’s Silmarillion.⁵² However, it is a specifically incarnate form of relationality that Tolkien’s work continually strives to evidence. That is, this musical element—manifest in harmonious relation—strives to show itself within an immanent system in which differences are overcome and relational bonds are sutured. In short, Tolkien’s cosmos is one that seeks, as its final aim, incarnate communal unity. This unity is given expression by the recapitulated force of music whose leitmotif of beauty reappears throughout Tolkien’s work as a sign of the hope of the reconciliation that Tolkien’s cosmos aims to bring about. Evidencing this claim is where my analysis now turns.

2.3 Participation and beauty: Finrod and the men of the west

In this section, and in light of the above discussion, I want to consider how it is that Tolkien frames the immanent experience of beauty and song within Arda by looking at chapter 17 of the Silmarillion which is entitled “Of the Coming of the Men into the West”. The narrative begins by depicting the meeting of the Elven King Finrod Felagund who, by chance, happened upon a group of men in the forest one evening.⁵³ These were the first men that Finrod had ever encountered and as such he remained apart from them until he could discern who they were and what their nature was. Tolkien writes “Felagund, standing silent in the night-shadow of the trees, looked down on the camp, and there beheld a strange people,” i.e. the men of the west.⁵⁴ However, this strangeness was soon overcome as the men came together in song. They sang, Tolkien writes: “because they were glad, and believed that they had escaped from all perils and had come at last to a land without fear.”⁵⁵ Upon hearing and seeing this, Tolkien writes “Felagund, watched them, and love for them stirred in his heart.”⁵⁶ After the men fell asleep, Felagund went into the camp and played a harp in a way that the “ears of the Men had not heard”.⁵⁷ A full description of their engagement should here be helpful:

Now men awoke and listened to Felagund as he harped and sang, and each thought that he was in some fair dream, until he saw that his fellows were awake also beside him; but they did not speak or stir while Felagund still played, because of the beauty of the music and the wonder of the song. Wisdom was in the words of the Elvin-King, and the hearts grew wiser that hearkened to him; for the things of which he sang, of the making of Arda, and the bliss of Aman beyond the shadows of the sea, came as clear visions before their eyes, and his elven speech was interpreted in each mind according to its measure.⁵⁸

Several noteworthy themes emerge from this account. First, notice that estrangement in Arda is overcome in song. Indeed, in the same way that discord arose from Melkor affirming his own particularity in Arda’s creation narrative via song, here, in contrast, harmony arises with the encounter of musical diversity. That is, Felagund, upon hearing the joy in the song sang by these strange men was moved to love for them: in short, divergent musical expression provided cohesion. Thus, in “the beauty of the music and the wonder of the song” difference was overcome and unity formed. Second, song is here a vehicle that transfers wisdom into the hearts of the men. The spoken word, for Tolkien, when constituted by harmony, conveys an order that is recognizable beyond the confines of everyday speech—as neither the men nor Finrod spoke the same language. Third, in the same way in which Eru created the order of Arda from the invisible beauty of music first and only later gave it shape when presenting the vision of the created world that he gave to the Ainur, so too does Felagund’s song give way to a “clear vision” before the eyes of the men. An invisible beauty, then, feeds the song that imparts a vision of harmony. The result of this exchange is the healing of disunion between Men and Elves, between estrangement and alienation. For Tolkien, song as ordered harmony conveys not simply the beauty of creation that Felagund sung, it also provides the ground upon which estrangement is overcome and communion occurs.

In light of the above analysis, I want to draw out two key elements of the discussion that are important to Tolkien’s work in general, as well as being important to the current analysis—namely, to establish Neoplatonic themes. First, how is language in general being used by Tolkien in the above accounts? Language, for Tolkien, writes Coutras, “is an instrument by which one expresses [the] inner being” of the subject and the world at large.⁵⁹ Throughout Tolkien’s legendarium, language or words in the form of song, are often the climax of this inner desire to make explicit an implicit beauty or order. As Coutras further notes:

For Tolkien, song is the most unified expression of language and therefore of being; song is the fullest expression of one’s own logos. In Tolkien’s writing, the close connection to the law of existence reveals it to be an instrument of power, drawing its strength and potency from the Great Music. In Greek thought, the logos of the human being connected one to the logos. Similarly, in Tolkien’s world, song connects rational beings (both spirit beings and incarnate beings) to the Great Music, formulating “songs of power”.⁶⁰

Coutras argues that a link exists between the inner song of the subject as a form of logos that, when unified with “the law of existence” (i.e. purposeful harmony), unifies the subject with a larger logos (i.e. the “Great Music” instantiated by Eru in the Ainulindalë). These themes, as noted above, are key elements of Ennead 1.6 in which beauty, as an internally persistent ingredient of consciousness, arises from beauty as an external reality of being itself. Likewise, Halsall also argues for the strong parallels between Tolkien’s use of language in his legendarium and a Neoplatonic cosmos. What unifies these various thinkers, within the context of Tolkien’s own cosmos, is the degree to which participation with the One, with Eru, is made manifest around the classical notion of the transcendentals: namely, the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Indeed, in a section of Halsall’s text in which he directly draws parallels between Tolkien’s notion of beauty and Neoplatonism, he writes:

Strictly speaking beauty is the radiance of all the transcendentals united: wherever there is anything existing there is being, form, and proportion: and wherever there is being there is beauty … In contemplating the abundance of God’s goodness, the subject suffers this ecstasy of love in some way: God’s love diffuses into all things a participation of His splendor.⁶¹

It is this notion of participatory beauty, that, via Coutras’ claims concerning the nature of language and the logos, I am suggesting organizes Tolkien’s legendarium. Indeed, and finally here, in a quote that could equally be applied to Tolkien, Narbonne notes of Plotinus:

The thinking of beauty in Plotinus is intimately related to his philosophy, primarily because the very undertaking of a spiritual undertaking of a spiritual elevation is at the same time, for Plotinus, as aesthetic undertaking, an experience of beauty experienced in itself; and, moreover, even prior to the slightest will towards a higher reality, our experience of the world is already, for Plotinus, an experience of beauty.⁶²

For Tolkien, as with Plotinus and indeed many of the Church fathers and Schoolmen, the cosmos is saturated with a beauty that is that from which all things emerge and that to which all yearn.

3. Story as sub-creation: beauty and imagination

The above study has sought to indicate the conceptual parallels that exist between the world that Tolkien describes in his Silmarillion text and the Neoplatonic notion of beauty that Plotinus presents in his Enneads. I have argued that this parallel is mediated by a specifically Christian Neoplatonic influence in which beauty signals an incarnated communal presence. That such a connection exists, as both the primary examples considered above and the secondary scholarship alluded to, should not be surprising. Tolkien was, if he was anything, a writer who sought to give expression to the formative and creative power of beauty as both an external aesthetic reality as well as an internal contemplative urge; this is a tendency that indeed compelled his love of the spoken and written word.⁶³ My study though, again, has not intended to establish “Tolkien the Neoplatonist”—that would be historically and biographically incorrect. Rather, I have sought to indicate the ways in which Neoplatonic thought can be said to have found expression in Tolkien’s Silmarillion.

By way of conclusion, I want to consider the theory of story-making that undergirds Tolkien’s larger project via a Neoplotinian lens. Tolkien’s understanding of beauty is expressed not simply within a story as it unfolded via the characters of his legendarium, but—as noted in this study’s introduction—the very act of story-making itself is infused with a desire to draw “nourishment” from the beauty of the story itself. Exploring this final theme should help to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the link between beauty, narrative, and language, in Tolkien’s work that I am arguing for.

Tolkien’s narratival theology might best be seen as a response to his dissatisfaction with the dominant epistemic and utilitarian premises of modernity. Two central critiques compel this aversion: (1) modernity’s faith in reason as the salve for all of its ills; (2) his suspicion of technological advancement and the mechanization of our world.⁶⁴ This is not to say though that Tolkien was an anti-rationalist luddite.⁶⁵ However, even a cursory reading of the LOTR text makes obvious his distrust of technological advancement for advancement sake.⁶⁶ For this reason, a number of scholars have rightly argued that his writing in general can be seen as a celebration not of reason, but of the imaginative.⁶⁷ However, it must be immediately noted that Tolkien’s vision of reason was one that flowered in the fantastic—indeed, every creative act described in the legendarium is organized by a logical and rational structure.⁶⁸ With that in mind, the text within which this imaginative element is made most conceptually explicit is his 1947 On Fairy-Stories essay where Tolkien very clearly establishes how he saw the productive place of the imaginative in modernity—a position that, for him, is a claim grounded in theological underpinnings. Fantasy, he writes “remains a human right: we make it in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker”.⁶⁹ The creative act that occurs in writing fantasy, he argued, is not simply the immanent by-product of the subject’s cognitive abilities; instead, when the author creates a world like Middle-Earth, they are in effect reflecting God by becoming, like God, (sub-)creators in their own right.⁷⁰ This mythopoetic urge is emblematic of Tolkien’s project; for him, as Kirstin Johnson rightly notes, “sub-creating is actually fulfilling God’s purpose” as “not only the abstract thoughts of man but also his imaginative inventions must originate with God, and must in consequence reflect something of original truth.”⁷¹

Importantly then, via this sub-creative urge, myth and fantasy is one way in which Tolkien argued that thinkers can by-pass the straitjacket of hyper-rationalism and technological functionalism. This is indeed one reason why Tolkien’s literary world is centred around nature—he wanted to fuse imagination with a longing for the productive space that is opened up by the fantastic diversity of, for him, creation. These natural spaces, Tolkien continually reminds his reading audience, shine-forth (φαίνεται) a sort of hidden beauty in every detail. In this way, Tolkien, as Alison Milbank shows, rejected the Weberian “disenchantment” narrative that was so dominant in early twentieth-century Europe and celebrated enchantment.⁷² As Tolkien writes “Enchantment produces a Secondary World into which both designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside [this Secondary World]; but in its purity it is artistic in desire and purpose.”⁷³ This Secondary World is the world opened up by the imaginative urge to sub-create, not as a means to dominate a fictive space, but, rather, as an expression of participation (μεθέξει) in which spectator and designer commune. This theme of sub-creation and participation is made explicit throughout the Silmarillion creation-story.

Similar to Tolkien’s narratival vision is the idea of creative beauty that runs through Plotinus’ work. This is made obvious in Enneads 1.6 where Plotinus argues that beauty arises in the mind of the subject through a process of cultivation. His claim is that by introducing the subject to progressively more robust visions of beauty, from the material to the immaterial, the subject experiences the reality of beauty more fully. Hence although this beauty is immanent in its expression, Plotinus argues, one can be educated to see its transcendent reality. For example, as Smith shows, Plotinus’ artistic vision echoes “the metaphysics of the Symposium, where beauty is traced back to its transcendent cause, and the status of art (poetry) in the Phaedrus, where it is an expression of divine inspiration”.⁷⁴ Indeed, Smith rightly notes that in 5.8 Plotinus begins his evaluation of beauty by considering its artistic basis rather than its natural element.⁷⁵ Smith writes:

This stress on artistic beauty and its explanation in terms of form and apprehension of form is fueled by his own optimistic view of the human ability to reach the level of Intellect and beauty, particularly since for him the individual intellect then becomes one with the universal intellect.⁷⁶

For Plotinus, the artist as creator of beauty reflects a transcendent urge to show-forth the harmony of beauty. It of course must be noted here that, for Plotinus, artistic expression is not a paramount intellectual task—it is simply something one thinks through in order to engage with the larger transcendent themes that organize his work. Be that as it may, the creative vision of beauty that his work does proffer is certainly one that correlates to Tolkien’s own vision of the artist as imaginatively reflecting a transcendent beauty. In the same way, I am arguing, that Tolkien links the desire to create beauty with a transcendent urge—to mimic, as sub-creators, the creators own desire to create—so too does Plotinus infuse the creative urge of an artist with a transcendent quality. The artist, for Plotinus, creates beauty as a response to the transcendent call of beauty that naturally emanates from a world compelled to respond to the One.

Key to the story-telling motif that Tolkien wants to engage his reading audience with, already discussed above, is that of eucatastrophe. This theme is one that incorporates the experience of a temporary loss or disruption into a final gain or positive outcome; for example, Melkor’s discordant song being worked into the final harmony of Arda’s creation. For Tolkien, disaster is always infused with the hope of reconciliation. As Carson Holloway notes, this idea signals the notion that “sub-creative fantasy can aid our contemplation of moral truth, understood, again, as something that exists in the structure of reality and is hence independent of the sub-creator’s mind”.⁷⁷ Writing further, Holloway argues that, for Tolkien:

the best fairy-stories culminate in “eucatastrophe”, the “good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’” whereby the good triumphs contrary to all (merely human) expectation. The fairy story thus “denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal and final defeat”.⁷⁸

The order that organizes the vision of Tolkien’s story-telling motif, therefore, is one in which harmony unfolds in conjunction with an ever-greater urge to show forth the beauty of participation.⁷⁹ The cosmos that Tolkien sub-created is one that speaks to an unfolding of finite-infinite participation; beauty, as unity and harmony, is the force that compels this participation forward by inviting ever-greater degrees of communion with this created and creative process.

Tolkien’s prose then, in summation, is one saturated by the desire to participate in (μεθέξει) and with the presence (φαίνεται) of beauty in the world. This is a conception of beauty whose lineage can be traced to thinkers like Plotinus and is made evident in texts like Enneads 1.6. This Neoplatonic lineage, as Coutras and Halsall’s analysis show, unfolds in latter Catholic conceptions of beauty that theologians like Aquinas and von Balthasar voice in their work. Tolkien, echoing these Neoplatonic and Catholic aesthetic claims, is compelled by a desire to evidence the invisible harmony of beauty as a transcendent reality within the visible structure of finitude. A key image of the incarnation of beauty in finitude, for both Tolkien and Plotinus, is expressed via the formal harmony of musical order; a harmony which compels in the subject a yearning for that from which beauty as such derives. As Tolkien notes in the same letter to his son Christopher with which I began this study, a longing for harmony permeates our being: “We all long for [harmony], and are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature as its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of ‘exile’.”⁸⁰ The “exile from”, and “longing towards”, motifs that Tolkien notes here is that of the Edenic story. A place that, he argues, escapes “recovery” but whose desire to regain it “works spirally and not in a closed circle; we may recover something like it, but on a higher plane”.⁸¹ Beauty for Tolkien, and indeed Plotinus, is a means by which this upward spiral unfolds; it flowers outwards and inwards to the “principle of beauty”, the ἀρχὴ κάλλους, that—as I have argued in this analysis—both thinkers direct their literary, philosophical, and indeed theological imaginations toward.

Footnotes