Jim Deutch
Well-Known Member
“On Fairy Stories” and other writings of JRRT more or less define his concept of subcreation, and I’m not going to try to even summarize it here; it has been discussed by Professor Olsen many times. But I have never seen it defined or discussed in literature by any other author before, and I want to bring this remarkable example to everyone’s attention.
The book is The Last Viking trilogy, vol III, The Sign of the Raven (1981) by Poul Anderson. And the discussion of subcreation is actually in dialog!
Elliseph speaking to her husband Harald Hardrede, King of Norway, in the year 1066, on why she thinks longships and weapons the most beautiful things made by men, rather than, as he would have expected, illuminated manuscripts and art:
“God fashioned man and the beasts and the world itself for a purpose, not only the aim of salvation but the common purpose of eating and walking and working, of staying alive. And wondrously did He wreak: naught of ours can compare to a mountain or a sunset or a blooded horse. Yet He did not gild it, or cover it with twined serpents. In his own tiny way, man has done likewise when making his tools.”
I don’t know how familiar Poul Anderson was with Tolkien, but I would certainly guess “very”, since he was a founding member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. But I find this a unique example of a character in a subcreation speaking on the very topic of subcreation! And I also find the substance of this remark very interesting; Elliseph feels that subcreation is most effective when it is least self-conscious. A pragmatic, hard-headed axemaker is a better sub-creator than a monkish scribe, no matter how beautiful the illumination of his manuscript.
Does the fact that a full one-third of the stanzas of Bilbo's poem about Eärendil focus on his weapons and the construction of his ship hint that Tolkien -- even though he was an avid practitioner of subcreation through storytelling, and decidedly NOT weaponmaking -- might have felt something similar?
The book is The Last Viking trilogy, vol III, The Sign of the Raven (1981) by Poul Anderson. And the discussion of subcreation is actually in dialog!
Elliseph speaking to her husband Harald Hardrede, King of Norway, in the year 1066, on why she thinks longships and weapons the most beautiful things made by men, rather than, as he would have expected, illuminated manuscripts and art:
“God fashioned man and the beasts and the world itself for a purpose, not only the aim of salvation but the common purpose of eating and walking and working, of staying alive. And wondrously did He wreak: naught of ours can compare to a mountain or a sunset or a blooded horse. Yet He did not gild it, or cover it with twined serpents. In his own tiny way, man has done likewise when making his tools.”
I don’t know how familiar Poul Anderson was with Tolkien, but I would certainly guess “very”, since he was a founding member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. But I find this a unique example of a character in a subcreation speaking on the very topic of subcreation! And I also find the substance of this remark very interesting; Elliseph feels that subcreation is most effective when it is least self-conscious. A pragmatic, hard-headed axemaker is a better sub-creator than a monkish scribe, no matter how beautiful the illumination of his manuscript.
Does the fact that a full one-third of the stanzas of Bilbo's poem about Eärendil focus on his weapons and the construction of his ship hint that Tolkien -- even though he was an avid practitioner of subcreation through storytelling, and decidedly NOT weaponmaking -- might have felt something similar?