Zack Olander - Being Sub-creators and Tolkien's Silmarillion

 J.R.R. Tolkien talked about humans being sub-creators, that is creators of fictional worlds similar to how God created the world that we inhabit in the Bible. In a certain sense, human beings have the capability to participate in some way in being "divine" by creating fantasy worlds and telling stories in them. Yet, is this the only way that humans can be called sub-creators in this sense?

I think about the creation account of Middle Earth that Tolkien writes in the Silmarillion, the book which chronicles the long history of Middle Earth prior to the events in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. At the beginning of the book, before the creation of the planet Arda upon which Middle-Earth rests, the supreme being that the elves call Eru Illuvatar creates Ainur, basically minor gods, and teaches them to make music. With this knowledge, the Ainur make music and their combined harmony literally sings the world of Arda into existence and gives it its geography.

In a sense, the Ainur are not unlike subcreators like we are. They take knowledge that they learned elsewhere and apply it in an artful way to create worlds. This is why the creation of Arda in The Silmarillion is my favorite one that I've encountered to date.

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