S3E48 – Bonus – Mythopoeia

We’re extending “Tolkien Month” for just one more week! The hosts of The Tolkien Road invited me onto their show to talk about Mythopoeia, a poem which Tolkien wrote for Lewis following their late-night conversation which ultimately led to Lewis’ conversion.

This episode was posted on The Tolkien Road podcast a few weeks ago, but here it is again, but with some introductory commentary and a recitation of the poem itself.

S3E48: “Mythopoeia” (Download)

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Time Stamps

00:00:00 – Entering “The Eagle & Child”…
00:00:09 – Welcome
00:00:26 – Introduction
00:02:39 – Reciting Mythopoeia
00:10:01 – Commentary
00:15:03 – The Tolkien Road Interview
00:55:04 – Talking Mythopoeia
00:56:09 – Carpenter Biography
01:03:00 – Discussion
01:46:09 – “Last Call” Bell
01:56:15 – Closing remarks

YouTube Version

After Show Skype Session

No Skype Session today!

Show Notes

• Mythopoeia is a poem by J.R.R. Tolkien. The word mythopoeia means myth-making. Tolkien wrote the poem following a discussion on the night of 19 September 1931 at Magdalen College, Oxford with C. S. Lewis and Hugo Dyson. Lewis said that myths were “lies breathed through silver”. Tolkien’s poem explained and defended creative myth-making.

• The dedication is as follows:

To one who said that myths were lies and therefore worthless, even though’breathed through silver’. Philomythus to Misomythus

J.R.R. Tolkien, Dedication of Mythopoeia

“Philomythos” means “myth-lover” and “Misomythos” means “myth-hater”. The “myth-hater” in this context is C. S. Lewis who, at the time, was skeptical of any truth in mythology.

• The first stanza is as follows:

You look at trees and label them just so, (for trees are ‘trees’, and growing is ‘to grow’); you walk the earth and tread with solemn pace one of the many minor globes of Space: a star’s a star, some matter in a ball compelled to courses mathematical amid the regimented, cold, inane, where destined atoms are each moment slain.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Mythopoeia (Stanza #1)

Stanza Comments: Tolkien’s point here is that you can’t simply reduce the world to atoms.

• The second stanza is as follows:

At bidding of a Will, to which we bend (and must), but only dimly apprehend, great processes march on, as Time unrolls from dark beginnings to uncertain goals; and as on page o’er-written without clue, with script and limning packed of various hue, an endless multitude of forms appear, some grim, some frail, some beautiful, some queer, each alien, except as kin from one remote Origo, gnat, man, stone, and sun. God made the petreous rocks, the arboreal trees, tellurian earth, and stellar stars, and these homuncular men, who walk upon the ground with nerves that tingle touched by light and sound. The movements of the sea, the wind in boughs, green grass, the large slow oddity of cows, thunder and lightning, birds that wheel and cry, slime crawling up from mud to live and die, these each are duly registered and print the brain’s contortions with a separate dint. Yet trees are not ‘trees’, until so named and seen and never were so named, til those had been who speech’s involuted breath unfurled, faint echo and dim picture of the world, but neither record nor a photograph, being divination, judgement, and a laugh response of those that felt astir within by deep monition movements that were kin to life and death of trees, of beasts, of stars: free captives undermining shadowy bars, digging the foreknown from experience and panning the vein of spirit out of sense. Great powers they slowly brought out of themselves and looking backward they beheld the elves that wrought on cunning forges in the mind, and light and dark on secret looms entwined.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Mythopoeia (Stanza #2)

Stanza Comments: As Scripture says, the Heavens declare the glory of God. Against the mechanical naturalistic explanation of the world, Tolkien speaks about the unique nature of man and his ability to name and see beyond simple material things and begins to hint at the importance of myth.  

• The third stanza is as follows:

He sees no stars who does not see them first of living silver made that sudden burst to flame like flowers beneath an ancient song, whose very echo after-music long has since pursued. There is no firmament, only a void, unless a jewelled tent myth-woven and elf-pattemed; and no earth, unless the mother’s womb whence all have birth. The heart of Man is not compound of lies, but draws some wisdom from the only Wise, and still recalls him. Though now long estranged, Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed. Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned, and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned, his world-dominion by creative act: not his to worship the great Artefact, Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light through whom is splintered from a single White to many hues, and endlessly combined in living shapes that move from mind to mind. Though all the crannies of the world we filled with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build Gods and their houses out of dark and light, and sowed the seed of dragons, ’twas our right (used or misused). The right has not decayed. We make still by the law in which we’re made.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Mythopoeia (Stanza #3)

Stanza Comments: Tolkien launches into a discussion of myth-making and how it gives meaning.  He uses the analogy of light to speak about subscreation whereby God is the pure light and man is like a prism, refracting the light and revealing some part of it. There are strong allusions here to The Silmarillion and The Music of the Ainur, as well as The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien argues that we’re subcreators because we are made in the image and likeness of a Creator. 

• The fourth stanza is as follows:

Yes! ‘wish-fulfilment dreams’ we spin to cheat our timid hearts and ugly Fact defeat! Whence came the wish, and whence the power to dream, or some things fair and others ugly deem? All wishes are not idle, nor in vain fulfilment we devise — for pain is pain, not for itself to be desired, but ill; or else to strive or to subdue the will alike were graceless; and of Evil this alone is deadly certain: Evil is.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Mythopoeia (Stanza #4)

Stanza Comments: Tolkien responds to the Freudian thought that myths are all just wish-fulfilment dreams. He also responds to this in his essay On Fairy Stories where he says “Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison… he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it.”

Tolkien goes on and says that wishing and the power to dream is a clue we should examine – where does it come from? In Mere Christianity, Lewis says: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.“

Tolkien also points out that we distinguish between the beautiful and the ugly, and the presence of good and evil. Once again, think of Lewis in Mere Christianity when he outlines the problem he had with his atheism: “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet.”

• The fifth, sixth and seventh stanzas are as follows:

Blessed are the timid hearts that evil hate that quail in its shadow, and yet shut the gate; that seek no parley, and in guarded room, though small and bate, upon a clumsy loom weave tissues gilded by the far-off day hoped and believed in under Shadow’s sway.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Mythopoeia (Stanza #5)

Blessed are the men of Noah’s race that build their little arks, though frail and poorly filled, and steer through winds contrary towards a wraith, a rumour of a harbour guessed by faith.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Mythopoeia (Stanza #6)

Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme of things not found within recorded time. It is not they that have forgot the Night, or bid us flee to organized delight, in lotus-isles of economic bliss forswearing souls to gain a Circe-kiss (and counterfeit at that, machine-produced, bogus seduction of the twice-seduced). Such isles they saw afar, and ones more fair, and those that hear them yet may yet beware. They have seen Death and ultimate defeat, and yet they would not in despair retreat, but oft to victory have tuned the lyre and kindled hearts with legendary fire, illuminating Now and dark Hath-been with light of suns as yet by no man seen.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Mythopoeia (Stanza #7)

Stanza Comments: For the next three stanzas, Tolkien gives his own beatitudes: “Blessed are the timid hearts that evil hate…the men of Noah’s race…the legend-makers”. Tolkien blesses those whom the world dismisses, those who see the face of evil and build their arks and aren’t taken in by the world and its promises of progress.

• The eighth and ninth stanzas are as follows:

I would that I might with the minstrels sing and stir the unseen with a throbbing string. I would be with the mariners of the deep that cut their slender planks on mountains steep and voyage upon a vague and wandering quest, for some have passed beyond the fabled West. I would with the beleaguered fools be told, that keep an inner fastness where their gold, impure and scanty, yet they loyally bring to mint in image blurred of distant king, or in fantastic banners weave the sheen heraldic emblems of a lord unseen.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Mythopoeia (Stanza #8)

I will not walk with your progressive apes, erect and sapient. Before them gapes the dark abyss to which their progress tends if by God’s mercy progress ever ends, and does not ceaselessly revolve the same unfruitful course with changing of a name. I will not treat your dusty path and flat, denoting this and that by this and that, your world immutable wherein no part the little maker has with maker’s art. I bow not yet before the Iron Crown, nor cast my own small golden sceptre down.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Mythopoeia (Stanza #9)

Stanza Comments: Tolkien says that he’s going to stand with the minstrels and the Ark-builders who are going to take the “gold” they have received and turn it into a banner for the unseen king. 

In the Stanza which follows he declares that he’s not going to “walk with your progressive apes”. Man might be an animal, but he is not only an animal – he’s a rational animal. Tolkien rails against “progress”, something which Lewis did many times in his writings, such as in The Abolition of Man andThat Hideous Strength. In Mere Christianity Lewis says that most of what we call human history has been “the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy”. Tolkien says he’s not going to walk down this path into a world without whimsy, a world of meaningless, blind determinism. He will not bow before the “Iron Crown” (reminiscent of Morgoth and the Silmarils). He refuses to cast down his own small golden sceptre, his dignity as someone made in the image and likeness of God with the kingly calling to subcreate.

• The final stanza is as follows:

In Paradise perchance the eye may stray from gazing upon everlasting Day to see the day illumined, and renew from mirrored truth the likeness of the True. Then looking on the Blessed Land ’twill see that all is as it is, and yet made free: Salvation changes not, nor yet destroys, garden nor gardener, children nor their toys. Evil it will not see, for evil lies not in God’s picture but in crooked eyes, not in the source but in malicious choice, and not in sound but in the tuneless voice. In Paradise they look no more awry; and though they make anew, they make no lie. Be sure they still will make, not being dead, and poets shall have flames upon their head, and harps whereon their faultless fingers fall: there each shall choose for ever from the All.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Mythopoeia (Stanza #10)

Stanza Comments: The final stanza is like a section from the Book of Revelation. He speaks about Paradise when everything is illuminated when we no longer “see through a mirror dimly”. Our vision and our voices will be clear, creativity will still continue and it will be like a renewed Pentecost when the chaos of our worldly Babel will be undone.

• The original interview on The Tolkien Road can be found here.