“J. R. R. Tolkien’s Sub-Creation Theory: Literary Creativity As Participation in the Divine Creation”, 2021-04-26 ():
[cf. “A Secret Vice”, 2015] J. R. R. Tolkien is recognized as one of the great literary creators of fantastic worlds.
The English author added to his literary work a reflection on the role of the fantasy writer in his theory of sub-creation. This literary theory—exhibited mainly in his essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’ and in his letters—is based on the author’s own cosmovision, clearly influenced by his Catholicism, and contemplates literary creation as an analogy of divine creation.
This article deals with the Christian foundation present in the idea of participation in Creation that we find in Tolkien’s theory of sub-creation. It proposes an overview of the main theological questions that support this participation, taking especially into account the contribution that Pope John Paul II makes on this issue in his ‘Letter to Artists’.
All artists experience the unbridgeable gap which lies between the work of their hands, however successful it may be, and the dazzling perfection of the beauty glimpsed in the ardor of the creative moment: what they manage to express in their painting, their sculpting, their creating is no more than a glimmer of the splendour which flared for a moment before the eyes of their spirit. Believers find nothing strange in this: they know that they have had a momentary glimpse of the abyss of light which has its original wellspring in God.
[Keywords: literature, creation, sub-creation, Tolkien, artistic creation, John Paul II]