J.R.R. Tolkien and the Musical Cosmogony

Some Thoughts on the Music of the Inklings

Antonio Santucci's Armillary Sphere - Museo Galileo, Florence, Italy (source)

The closest of friends, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis showed in some of their literary writings a special preference for a kind of doctrine about the creation of the world that can be named the ‘musical cosmogony.’ This might be a fit and proper name for those ancient mythologies, including some mentioned above, which describe the creation of the whole world through music.

In Lewis’s stories, this type of creation is mentioned succinctly. For example, in The Magician’s Nephew, the sixth book in The Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis describes the beginning of the world, which was created by a sublime song:

Then two wonders happened at the same moment. One was that the voice was suddenly joined by other voices; more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it, but far higher up the scale: cold, tingling, silvery voices. The second wonder was that the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars… If you had seen and heard it, as Digory did, you would have felt quite certain that it was the stars themselves who were singing, and that it was the First Voice, the deep one, which had made them appear and made them sing.¹

Following the same idea, Lewis depicts the creator of all creatures as the majestic lion Aslan—a literary transposition of the Creator God from the Judeo-Christian tradition. His music of origin generates creation:

When you listened to his song, you heard the things he was making up: when you looked around you, you saw them.²

Tolkien has a similar, but much broader, conception of the music that accompanies the magnificent power of the word of God, which creates the universe. In his mythological novel The Silmarillion, Tolkien used the metaphor of a musical cosmogony to describe the origin of the world. Thus, after Ilúvatar created the “Ainur”—also called the “Holy Ones”—He (God) advanced a musical theme around which the Ainur were able to harmonize:

Then the voices of the Ainur, like unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and organs, and like unto countless choirs singing with words, began to fashion the theme of Illúvatar to a great music; and a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights, and the places of the dwelling of Ilúvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void.³

At this point in Tolkien’s story, we can discern the motivation behind the creation through music. This stems from the author’s strong desire to associate cosmogony with Beauty—one of the three classical transcendental concepts representing the sublime names of God: Good, Truth, and Beauty. The reflection of the original beauty over all creation and all creatures depends on the first music composed by the Ainur around Ilúvatar’s musical theme. Following this cosmological moment, Melkor, the diabolical character destined to become the main adversary of God Himself, creates an original theme, different from and in discord with that created by Ilúvatar.

Despite reading Tolkien’s letters multiple times, I could not find any clarification about this literary motif of creation through music. Naturally, such a mystery has attracted the attention of many scholars who have proposed various interpretations regarding the sources of the so-called ‘musical cosmogony.’

Robert DiNapoli⁴ emphasizes certain differences between the Old Testament’s cosmogony and that of Tolkien. He then mentions the possibility of an influence from Pythagoras’ philosophy regarding the musical structure of the world. Concerning Tolkien’s cosmogony, DiNapoli also notes that it shares similarities with that of another member of the Inklings, Charles Williams, who—deeply influenced by Plato’s doctrine on the relationship between ideas and matter—created a novel, The Place of the Lion, based on the Timaeus dialogue and the hierarchical structure of the Byzantine Empire.

In his monograph Tolkien: Man & Myth,⁵ Joseph Pearce opens another avenue for investigating the theological and mythological sources of Tolkien’s cosmogony. After presenting interpretations from various Tolkien scholars such as Thomas A. Shippey, Brian Rosebury, Robert Murray, James V. Schall, and Richard Jeffrey, Pearce quotes passages from The Silmarillion where Melkor’s hubris becomes transparent in the form of his temptation to create a different musical theme. Pearce establishes a link with a famous passage from the biblical Book of Isaiah (14:11-12) where the fall of Satan is described.

In Secret Fire: The Spiritual Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien,⁶ Stratford Caldecott follows a similar line of interpretation, in which the Judaic religious tradition holds a central place. Caldecott considers it almost certain that there is an influence from the Book of Job (38:7): “When the morning stars praised me together, and all the sons of God made a joyful melody?” And, from a perspective associated with potential cultural influences, professor Virgil Nemoianu suggests a different influence on Tolkien’s hierarchical vision, originating in the wonderful music of George Frideric Handel—especially the “Coronation Anthems.”⁷

In addition to all of these plausible interpretations, I will attempt to propose another one that will complete this picture of influences on Tolkien’s work. A strong influence, confirmed by the correspondence of the author himself, is the Platonic myth of Atlantis. In the context of Arda’s history, we can see that Númenor is just a transposition of that mythical continent described by Plato in his dialogue Critias, as Tolkien himself affirms in many of his letters.⁸

Due to this fact, we can suppose that a scholar like the author of The Lord of the Rings knows well not just Critias but other Platonic dialogues like Timaios, Phaidon, and Phaidros. Therefore, inferring that one of the main influences on the musical cosmogony of The Silmarillion could be the famous dialogue Politeia (usually wrongly translated as The Republic) is not a risky hypothesis.

Here, in this masterwork of Plato, we find a very interesting part dedicated to the presentation of the unseen world: the myth of Er. In this myth, Plato portrays the whole world as a harmonic structure, where every planet has its own sphere. Each sphere is associated with a sea-maid who sings a cosmic song, and together they create a wonderful music well known in classical musical tradition as the “Music of the Spheres.” In fact, besides Pythagoras, this is the second ancient source that inspired Clement of Alexandria and Boethius in their speculations on the musica mundana.

Here we can observe a similitude between Plato’s sirens and Tolkien’s Ainur, who were invited by Ilúvatar to create a harmony associated with the whole world, which was then tainted by Melkor’s ‘innovative’ and dissenting creation. Consequently, Tolkien’s perspective, seen in The Silmarillion’s musical cosmogony, represents a synthesis based on two great religious traditions of Western culture: the Judaic and the Ancient Greek.

Beyond all these discussions about Tolkien’s sources of inspiration, the most remarkable fact is the resemblance between his literary vision and that of St. Hildegard. Although I have not managed (yet) to establish whether the English author ever read the letters of the Teutonic saint, I believe that his creative ability to conceive the beginning of the world in a manner similar to her visions indicates the same specific spirit of the Dionysian and Chartrean spiritual traditions that led to the creation of many medieval artistic masterpieces. This would be additional evidence of Tolkien’s success, not only in capturing the spirit of the medieval world but also, like the architect Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, in proving that it can be revived in the midst of modern life through truly inspired works of creative excellence.

1. C.S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew, New York: Collier Books, 1970, p. 99.

2. C.S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew, ed. cit., p. 107.

3. J.R.R. Tolkien, Silmarillion, New York: Ballantine Books, 1979, pp. 3-4

4. Cf. Robert DiNapoli, “The Valar and Byzantium. Vision of Hierarchical Splendour in Charles Williams and J.R.R. Tolkien,” in Maria Kuteeva (ed.), The Ways of Creative Mythologies. Imagined Worlds and their Makers, vol. II, Tolkien Society, 2000, p. 28.

5. Joseph Pearce, Tolkien: Man & Myth, San Francisco: Igantius Press, p. 93.

6. Stratford Caldecott, Secret Fire. The spiritual Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien, London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2003, p. 74.

7. Virgil Nemoianu, “The Great Tolkien,” Foreword at Virgil Nemoianu & Robert Lazu (coordinators), J.R.R. Tolkien. Credință și imaginație (J.R.R. Tolkien. Faith & Imagination), Hartmann Publishing House, 2005, p. 7.

8. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, A selection edited by Humphrey Carpenter with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien, Harper Collins Publishers, 1995, p. 151 & pp. 197-198.