TolkienTide: Elven Sylphs and Sub-Creation
It's funny: I spent a few years reading LotR according to the calendar. I finished it totally at least once, maybe twice, and at least two more times read about halfway through. And where I lived and grew up, it was funny -- our weather patterns would, nearly every time, match up with what Tolkien described. I suppose my area of Appalachia, because of the jet stream and the way it was considered wet enough, but not hot enough, to be rain forest, made us somewhat similar to England's seasonal changes? At any rate, yesterday we had flood level rains, and today the sun is out, shining happily on everything. So we had the Party's weather a day late.
Kortirion
Immortal Elves, who singing on their way
Of bliss of old and grief, though men forget
Pass like a wind among the rustling trees,
A wave of bowing grass, and men forget
Their voices calling from a time we do not know,
Their gleaming hair like sunlight long ago.
This is from the second portion of "Kortirion Among the Trees," or "The Trees of Kortirion" depending on the version you read. The portion is titled Narquelion, and Christopher Tolkien's note explains it derives from the Quenya name for the tenth month: Narquelië, "Sun-fading."
I have seen the idea in Tolkien before, many times before of course, that humans were less and less able to see the elves -- and even the hobbits. But this struck me this time around. It reminds me of what I've read in the past year about sylphs, the Paracelsan spirits of the air, who are detected not strictly by the wind itself blowing, but by the wind blowing in the treetops and the foliage.
CT refers to Paracelsus, via the OED, in his introduction to the Silmarillion, and I know Tolkien was vaguely familiar, as he complained at times about the way the word "gnome" had shifted in popular meaning since he chose it for the band of elves.1 I'm not interested in arguing Tolkien was using Paracelsan ideas; rather, I find it an echo of ideas bouncing forwards and backwards. Paracelsus was very popular for a long time and impacted a lot of culture even once his ideas were either passe.
I've read speculation that Paracelsus's gnomes and sylphs and so on were based in part on folklore, given his travels and his interest in learning local remedies as he went.
The important idea is that the elves become like spirits, the bright and shining sylphs that are helpful to humans if only humans can remember them and call out. But of course they are merry and grieving in turn, rather than the light merry beings out of Pope.
Ainulindale
it has been said that a greater still shall be made before Ilúvatar by the choirs of the Ainur and the Children of Ilúvatar after the end of days. Then the themes of Ilúvatar shall be played aright, and take Being in the moment of their utterance, for all shall then understand fully his intent in their part, and each shall know the comprehension of each, and Ilúvatar shall give to their thoughts the secret fire, being well pleased.
I've been fascinated for a long time with Tolkien's idea of "sub-creation," or the creative act that humans can do perceived as a smaller version of what deity can do. I first ran across it in "On Faerie-Stories," elliptically anyway, when he describes a fantasy or fairy story as set in a "secondary world" in which our rules do not apply, or other rules may apply that do not in what Darko Suvin calls the "zero world" (or what we might conventionally call the "real world"). So, in that model, the writer is making a world, not just asking the reader to "suspend their disbelief" but to enter a new place that is not like the place they usually live. And we can see that idea filter out into fantasy, maybe most notably in Le Guin, who once wrote that if fantasy is escapist then we must consider the plight of the prisoner seeking to escape and realize it's natural to wish to do so when imprisoned or oppressed.
Here in the Silmarillion we get, immediately, an uncut version of "sub-creation" itself, though -- or, rather we see by contrast a description of what it would be like were we to really Create instead of just sub-create. To touch the Flame Imperishable -- which I had forgotten was Melkor's goal when he roamed the empty void before Arda's singing into being -- to truly know Eru's thought, would be to be as Eru Himself, and therefore to create ex nihilo. Writing, as with any art, is simply the closest we can come to doing that without breaching the empyrean.
Letters 239, p.450 revised and expanded ed.↩