Ainulindalëan Thoughts
The ‘Ainulindalë’, the first section of The Silmarillion (1977), is Tolkien’s creation myth, his account of how ‘Arda’, his fantasy realm, came into being. My question today is: does it make sense?
This is where we start:
There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made. And he spoke to them, propounding to them themes of music; and they sang before him, and he was glad. But for a long while they sang only each alone, or but few together, while the rest hearkened; for each comprehended only that part of the mind of Ilúvatar from which he came, and in the understanding of their brethren they grew but slowly. Yet ever as they listened they came to deeper understanding, and increased in unison and harmony.
And it came to pass that Ilúvatar called together all the Ainur and declared to them a mighty theme, unfolding to them things greater and more wonderful than he had yet revealed; and the glory of its beginning and the splendour of its end amazed the Ainur, so that they bowed before Ilúvatar and were silent.
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 Ilúvatar 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 Ilivatar were filled to over- flowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void. Never since have the Ainur made any music like to this music, though 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.
‘Arda’, that is ‘the World’ (where the elves, and later the men, hobbits, dwarfs and so on, all live) has not, at this point, been created. Before that even happens there is a problem with the music.
But now Ilúvatar sat and hearkened, and for a great while it seemed good to him, for in the music there were no flaws. But as the theme progressed, it came into the heart of Melkor to interweave matters of his own imagining that were not in accord with the theme of Ilúvatar; for he sought therein to increase the power and glory of the part assigned to himself. To Melkor among the Ainur had been given the greatest gifts of power and knowledge, and he had a share in all the gifts of his brethren. He had gone often alone into the void places seeking the Imperishable Flame; for desire grew hot within him to bring into Being things of his own, and it seemed to him that Ilúvatar took no thought for the Void, and he was impatient of its emptiness.
Some of these thoughts he now wove into his music, and straightway discord arose about him, and many that sang nigh him grew despondent, and their thought was disturbed and their music faltered; but some began to attune their music to his rather than to the thought which they had at first. Then the discord of Melkor spread ever wider, and the melodies which had been heard before foundered in a sea of turbulent sound. But Ilúvatar sat and hearkened until it seemed that about his throne there was a raging storm, as of dark waters that made war one upon another in an endless wrath that would not be assuaged.
Then Ilúvatar arose, and the Ainur perceived that he smiled ; and he lifted up his left hand, and a new theme began amid the storm, like and yet unlike to the former theme, and it gathered power and had new beauty. But the discord of Melkor rose in uproar and contended with it, and again there was a war of sound more violent than before, until many of the Ainur were dismayed and sang no longer, and Melkor had the mastery. Then again Ilúvatar arose, and the Ainur perceived that his countenance was stern; and he lifted up his right hand, and behold! a third theme grew amid the confusion, and it was unlike the others. For it seemed at first soft and sweet, a mere rippling of gentle sounds in delicate melodies; but it could not be quenched, and it took itself power and profundity.
Soon after establishing this third music, Ilúvatar stops all sound. Then he brings the Ainur into the void to see Arda, the world, that they have co-created with him, using the music as a template — or, perhaps, literalising the music into material creation.
But when they were come into the Void, Ilúvatar said to them: ‘Behold your Music!’ And he showed to them a vision, giving to them sight where before was only hearing ; and they saw a new World made visible before them, and it was globed amid the Void, and it was sustained therein, but was not of it. And as they looked and wondered this World began to unfold its history, and it seemed to them that it lived and grew. And when the Ainur had gazed for a while and were silent, Ilavatar said again: ‘Behold your Music! This is your minstrelsy; and each of you shall find contained herein, amid the design that I set before you, all those things which it may seem that he himself devised or added.’
Then come elves and men into the world, the ‘children of Ilúvatar’; and they, we are specifically told, ‘came with the third theme’. (The point here, I suppose, is to imply that elves and men, though children of Ilúvatar, have also been influenced by Melkor’s dissident melody, and so are capable of falling — of ‘sin’ in the Catholic idiom). The Ainur, or some of them, then pass into the world to be, in effect, gods — Ulmo becomes (as it were) Poseidon, Manwe the god of ‘airs and winds’ and Melkor, on his way to become the dark god Morgoth, a sort of malign deity of ice and darkness and disruption.
Not everyone is a fan of The Silmarillion. Indeed, not even every diehard Tolkien fan loves The Silmarillion. Plenty hate it. But there are some who rate it very highly. Verlyn Flieger is one such, and she namechecks another: novelist John Gardner, who praised The Silmarillion in a long review soon after the book was published. Where many other reviewers were baffled or negative, Gardner praised ‘the eccentric heroism of Tolkien’s attempt’. Says Flieger:
As a medievalist, Gardner was well-equipped to understand the central concepts of Tolkien’s myth and the forces which shape his cosmos. He came very near the mark when he asserted, “Music is the central symbol and the total myth of The Silmarillion, a symbol that becomes interchangeable with light (music’s projection)” [Gardner, ‘The World of Tolkien’, New York Times Book Review (Oct 23 1977), p. 39]. These are indeed the central ideas; Gardner is mistaken only in calling them symbols. It is the essence of Tolkien’s world that they are neither symbols nor metaphors, but actualities to be taken literally. But Gardner knew the medieval background and the medieval world-view, and he reached the heart of Tolkien’s myth when he said:
“What is medieval in Tolkien’s vision is his set of organizing principles, his symbolism and his pattern of legends and events. In the work of Boéthius and the scholastic philosophers, as in Dante and Chaucer, musical harmony is the first principle of cosmic balance, and the melody of individuals — the expression of individual free will — is the standard figure for the play of free will within the overall design of Providence. This concord of will and overall design was simultaneously expressed, in medieval thought, in terms of light: the foundation of music was the orderly tuning of the spheres. Other lights — lights borrowed from the cosmic originals — came to be important in exegetical writings and of course in medieval poetry: famous jewels or works in gold and silver were regularly symbolic of the order that tests individual will.” [Verlyn Flieger, Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World (1983), 20–21]
In her more detailed account of The Silmarillion, Flieger expresses high esteem of Tolkien’s musical cosmology, which she summarises as follows:
The keynote in Tolkien’s vision of the world is his concept of creation. Music is the initiating force and the beginning in which all is contained. Eru propounds a musical theme to the Ainur and invites them to elaborate it and make from it a Great Music. It is the first action, and brings with it the first conflict, for in the making of the Music the first rebellion occurs. Melkor, the greatest of the Ainur and the closest to Eru, is not content to serve Eru’s theme, and counters with a theme of his own. The result is a kind of war in heaven — two Musics in contention with one another, one melodious and harmonic, the other clamorous and discordant … Melkor’s disharmony becomes an active part of the Music, and so the rebellion affects the shape of the world that is to be. For the Music is not the physical act of creation, rather, it is pattern, the world in potentia. The vision evoked by the Music is shown to the Ainur, including Melkor. Their task is to go down into the world and make real the pattern. [Flieger, 55]
But it seems to me Flieger has trouble aligning the way ‘music and light’ (‘neither symbols nor metaphors, but actualities to be taken literally’) actually figure in the created world of men and elves. For instance, she notes that ‘within the mythology, death is called Ilúvatar’s gift to men, a gift whose value is distorted and made to seem evil by the dark powers. Beyond this “gift,” men have another power granted them: the power to act beyond the creational design of the Music.’ But how can one act ‘beyond’ music that (not symbolically, but literally) construes you? A violin in the orchestra of the cosmos, playing the part scored for it by the divine composer, can hardly go ‘beyond’ its music without disturbing and untuning the whole, surely? (Isn’t this precisely what Melkor does in the first place?). Flieger goes on:
This capability unmistakably introduces free will into the design and parallels the light/dark paradox with a fate/free-will polarity which increases the tension of the world. Some confusion may arise here, however, as to just how specific Tolkien intended to be in his allocation of fate, contained in the Music, and the power to change fate which he gives to men. No such power is given to elves, and the Music is plainly described as being “as fate” to all things but men, and thus presumably to elves. Yet at one or two points in The Silmarillion Tolkien describes situations in which elves have a choice between good and evil. A possible distinction may be that Eru has given to men the power to act beyond the Music (that is, to change external events) and to elves the freedom to make an inner choice, to alter some attitude to- ward themselves, or other creatures, or God. While elves may not alter events, they may have power over their own natures. [Flieger, 51]
But it is the composer who has power over the nature of the music, not the orchestra members or the singers in the choir. Beethoven writes the music; we musicians only play it. The dream of Jazz — surely a musical form far from Tolkien’s mind when he drafted The Silmarillion, but still— is that any player-improviser becomes a composer (and Mozart was a brilliant improviser as well as a man able to write notes and rests onto stave-printed paper) but that doesn’t mean that you, or I, am Charlie Parker or Miles Davies. We can be honest.
Flieger is right, of course, that there is a long history styling cosmic harmony of God’s creation in musical terms, as the ‘the music of the spheres’: the Pythagorean notions of musica universalis that were developed in the later medieval period as a way of expressing the harmony of natural law. This remained part of the way of conceiving the universe well into thee early modern period: Shakespeare’s Pericles ends with the hero, blessed, able actually to hear the music of the spheres. Kepler believed literally in it, and John Dryden’s ‘A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687’ sees all earthly music a ratio inferior (Tolkien would say: a subcreation of) celestial harmony:
From harmony, from Heav’nly harmony
This universal frame began.
When Nature underneath a heap
Of jarring atoms lay,
And could not heave her head,
The tuneful voice was heard from high,
Arise ye more than dead.
Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry,
In order to their stations leap,
And music’s pow’r obey.
From harmony, from Heav’nly harmony
This universal frame began.
But this is a description of the operation of the mechanical cosmos, not of human beings. That the planets orbit the sun, that the Earth turns regularly day and night, that gravity operates without failing, that water flows downhill and flowers grow upwards, that all these aspects of material reality work the way they do and without fail, can be styled a quasi-musical harmony. But the apple, breaking from its bough and falling downwards, has no choice in the direction of its motion. Planets do not choose, according to free will, their orbital trajectories. Men and women are different, and it is men and women (and elves, and hobbits and dwarfs — though not, perhaps, orcs, which is in itself a very interesting question) whose free will most directly exercises Tolkien’s writing.
Tolkien’s musical creation — music and light — is modelled in obvious ways upon on the Christian myth of origin. But Tolkien’s version involves, of course, a key difference: for the Bible specifies creation as happening out of the word and light. The first creative act God performs in Genesis 1 is to speak forth light: ‘then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.’ He speaks; he does not sing. The Greek of the Septuagint is καὶ εἶπεν ὁ θεός γενηθήτω φῶς, καὶ ἐγένετο φῶς: where the operative is εἶπον (eîpon) ‘to say, to speak’, itself etymologically related to ὄψ (óps) ‘word’ (εἶπον perhaps relates to the genitive εἶ-ὀπῶν, ‘that which is “of the words”’). I cite the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew original here because this prior creation story is so famously glossed by Saint John’s Koine Greek, the opening of his Gospel:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God … All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. [John 1:1–5]
Word and the light. The word John uses for ‘the Word’ is not ὄψ but Λόγος, a term with a rather broader semantic field: for it means both ‘word’ and ‘reason, rationality’ (on the one hand λόγος is ‘that which is said, a word, sentence, speech, story, debate, utterance, argument’ and by extension, ‘an account, explanation, or narrative’; on the other hand ‘that which is thought: reason, consideration, computation, reckoning’). There’s been a great deal of discussion of λόγος in Greek philosophical and Christian thought, but the crucial thing here is to stress how very unlike it is to μουσική, mousikḗ [‘any of the Muses’ arts, especially music and lyrical poetry set to music’; from Μοῦσα (Moûsa, “Muse”), an Ancient Greek deity of the arts].
To put it simply, words mean in ways that music does not. Music evokes an affective reaction but it does not communicate semantically as words do. I might be the greatest violinist in the world, but I cannot, just by playing my violin, explain to you how to mix a perfect Margarita Cocktail. Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony does not ‘mean’ a story about shepherds in the countryside getting caught in a storm until ὄπες, λόγοι, are added to it saying that it does (in a concert programme, or the sleeve notes to your gramophone record). Words are consecutive, aggregate into deliveries of semantic content; people speak one after the other to form dialogue. Musical expressions (even the musical singing of words, as in opera) can be superposed one upon other without creating the cacophony of lots of people speaking at once; but music, sans words, does not communicate conceptually.
I think this presents us with a problem. The music of the spheres, in traditional medieval thought, is not about the semantic content or meaning of the universe. Planets moving round their orbits, or apples falling, are; they do not signify in the way the words ‘we must love one another or die’ signify, communicate, mean. At the same time it is integral to Christianity that, in Browning’s words, this world’s no blot for us,/Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good. And though the concept of a musica universalis is compatible with the Biblical description of the creation, the Bible itself does not say anything about God music-ing the universe into being. With His ὄψ-Λόγος, God is doing something else: creating a world that means— that means, for instance, morally (‘love thy neighbour’; ‘thou shalt not kill’), but also means significantly, means poetically, means religiously.
Now there are musical theorists who argue that music does contain and communicate semantic meaning. Anthony Burgess, whilst believing that music couldn’t ‘mean’ in the way words mean, nonetheless refused to consign music to meaninglessness. To him music is all form (‘music is tension and resolution over and over again’) but form itself, he thinks, can mean:
When we speak of the ‘meaning’ of a Haydn symphony, we say no more than that it is an auditory symbol of stability. The music means the society of which it is an artistic product. [Burgess, This Man and Music (1983), 75–6]
I have, I must say, my doubts, and have said so: ‘this looks suspiciously like a straightforwardly reactionary point: Haydn simply translates the splendid social harmony and order of the Sun King’s realm into notes on a stave, as — Burgess doesn’t specifically say this, but it’s part and parcel of his larger case — modern rock and roll in its raucous anarchy indexes the decadence and savagery of contemporary life. Elsewhere Burgess praises music as the “abstract symbol of social stability” [74]. I think we’re entitled to respond: bollocks to that.’ [Burgess’s later Mozart and the Wolf Gang (1991) is a much better account of the figuration of music, I think].
The great Austrian-British musicologist Hans Keller insisted on separating out the ‘meaning’ of words and music, and developed his ‘wordless functional analysis’. That didn’t mean he denied that music ‘means’, though his case is the opposite to Burgess’s:
Great music expresses religious facts — or, if you like, metaphysical truths — which words really can’t; whereas words express political facts which music, let’s face it, can’t.
As evidence for this claim, Keller, with rather splendidly offhandedness, says: ‘let the reader who disagrees with me simply examine his own musical experience — all other evidence is, unavoidably, sham, in that it is invented’. Keller does concede that ‘the irreligious will not, of course, accept the sheer possibility of religious facts’, but you get the impression he doesn’t have much time for that crowd.
Tolkien, of course, did believe in religious facts in this Kellerian sense; and we could take Keller’s statement as a gloss upon the Ainulindalë, and Tolkien’s cosmology as a whole. But I don’t know if we can. I think the problem here is that the musical metaphor includes self-contradiction in the way the original Bibical logos-theme doesn’t.
Melkor, in composing his own dissonant music, chooses to thwart (or at least to try to thwart) Ilúvatar — although even here, Tolkien fudges things a little by the use of the passive voice: ‘it came into the heart of Melkor to interweave matters of his own imagining that were not in accord with the theme of Ilúvatar’. Lucifer chooses to rebel against God; Adam chooses to disobey the divine injunction. Free will is at the centre of all this, and of Tolkien’s dramatizations of his legendarium too. The apple breaking from the bough does not choose to fall; it just falls, in perfect harmony with the law of gravity. The harmony of the musica universalis is of this latter kind; but the story of Genesis — and of Tolkien’s writings — is of the former kind. It needs words.
Trying to gloss the austerely quasi-Biblical prose of the opening section of the Silmarillion shows-up the difficulty, I think. So: to begin with, Ilúvatar creates music, which his ‘angels’ (the Ainur) sing for him; but then Melkor introduces music of his own into the mix, which is discordant, disharmonious, which somehow disrupts the divine chorus. Finally Ilúvatar redeems the dissonance with a third musical theme of his own. Can we be more specific, in imagining what is going on here?
The problem is that dissonance is not at odds with musical harmony, but absolutely essential to it. Conceivably the original pre-Melkor music is, as it might be, everyone singing every octave of C, in a continuous note forever. Conceivably this might even be beautiful, after a fashion, but it must surely be an arid, sterile kind of beauty, and assuredly not what we think of a ‘music’ at all. In this scenario we could imagine that what Melkor introduces is, as it might be: C7, F and G, or perhaps some sharps and flats, the whole subtonic and supertonic variety of tenor. Dissonances, yes, but of the kind that all music employs, in order to bring us back to the tonic and dominant. The beauty of music is not raw sound, but rather this aural motion, this passage into dissonance and out again.
Now there might be theological reasoning for treating ‘the problem of evil’ this way: — that God giving his creatures free will, despite knowing that some of them will use that free will to do evil, is Him, as it were, permitting these temporary musical dissonances in order to enable the theme to complexify and enrichen so as to bring it back to the simple harmony of the beginning, because in that movement is the whole-view harmony of the piece. God sings a pure note, Lucifer adds-in subtonics and supertonics, mankind sings the Luciferian — or strictly Satanic — tune, until God brings everything back to the tonic again with the coming of Christ. But to think about this for a moment is to see how unconvincing it is. The tapestry of subtonic and supertonic play is not evil, in music — not ‘bad’ (not cacophonous) but on the contrary, is precisely the beauty and glory of music. Imagining the fall of man in this way is to suggest that there is something beautiful and worthwhile in that fall, which is more than any theologian has had the cojones to do, I think. Felix culpa is quite another thing: the belief that the fall can be considered ‘fortunate’, lucky, in that it leads to the coming of Christ into the world to redeem it, leaving the world better off that it was before. But we get into very dangerous territory if we start arguing that evil is beautiful in its own terms. For after all, evil is not beautiful. There is nothing lovely about lying, about cruelty, about rape and torture and murder.
But dissonance is, in itself, beautiful. Wagner’s chromaticism (and Tolkien’s complex relationship with ‘magic-ring storyteller and Fantasy epicist’ Wagner would require a lot more space than I have here to detail) and the various twentieth century developments away from musical classicism have been all about that fact. We can talk with Keller of music as an articulation of religious ‘fact’, and then we can listen to something as exquisite, and profound, and religious — and as fundamentally dissonant, gorgeously dissonant — as Tavener’s ‘The Lamb’ (1982). This is to understand music as more about lack than fullness. In the words of J H Prynne, ‘Music is truly the/sound of our time, since it is how we most/deeply recognise the home we may not/have’.
There’s another problem, which is that the Ainulindalë happens, we are told, ‘outside time’. Time is the specific habitation of Children of Ilúvatar, not of the Ainur: ‘Elves and Men, the Firstborn and the Followers … amid all the splendours of the World, its vast halls and spaces, and its wheeling fires, Ilúvatar chose a place for their habitation in the Deeps of Time.’ But music is integrally a temporal art. Here’s Tolkien’s friend W H Auden (from his ‘Notes on Music and Opera’, in The Dyer’s Hand, 1963):
What is music about? What, as Plato would say, does it imitate? Our experience of Time in its twofold aspect, natural or organic repetition, and historical novelty created by choice. And the full development of music as an art depends upon a recognition that these two aspects are different and that choice, being an experience confined to man, is more significant than repetition. A succession of two musical notes is an act of choice; the first causes the second, not in the scientific sense of making it occur necessarily, but in the historical sense of provoking it, of providing it with a motive for occurring. A successful melody is a self-determined history; it is freely what it intends to be, yet is a meaningful whole, not an arbitrary succession of notes.
This seems to me true, but it reflects strangely upon Tolkien’s myth-making (which I daresay Auden never saw, since it was published after his death). By this definition there can be no music until free-will enters the frame — which is to say, until Melkor intrudes upon Ilúvatar’s perfect inertness of sound. Or to put it another way, until the universe of time supersedes the timelessness of eternal divine repetition.
This reverts to the question: in what way does Melkor ‘disrupt’ the music of God? I think Tolkien knew that ‘dissonance’ on its own doesn’t address the needs of his musicological mythography; but I’m not sure he was able to articulate an alternative. This is how he actually describes Melkor’s addition to Ilúvatar’s symphony:
It was loud, and vain, and endlessly repeated; and it had little harmony, but rather a clamorous unison as of many trumpets braying upon a few notes. And it essayed to drown the other music by the violence of its voice.
The emphasis here is not on harmony but on tone, timbre, even mere volume. Vain and braying is, it seems to me, Tolkien’s thumb in the balance. His taste might not run to Holst’s ‘Mars the Bringer of War’, or Ligeti’s Études, or that bit in the Beatles’ ‘Day in the Life’ when the orchestra mounts from the lowest to the highest note in that wonderful sliding sound-melange, but it seems to me hard to deny that these are all musically beautiful.
This glancing characterisation of Melkor’s music seems to me a faux pas, an index of Tolkien’s muzziness about what he is actually saying. Its implication is ‘Satan plays God’s music but, like, really loudly and without any tact’, which is a pretty lame position to argue. An alternative would be: ‘God writes Mozart, but Satan starts to insinuate Schönberg into the mix’, which would be saying something rather different. In fact, Tolkien seems, with his reaching for jarring brass loudness, for a correlative to ‘pride’, the traditional failing of Lucifer. I’m not convinced this is a particularly compelling equivalence. The giveaway is the next sentence, where JRRT insists that Melkor’s ‘disharmony’ is recuperated into the divine harmony after all, such that ‘vain’ and ‘braying’ reveal themselves merely as ideologically loaded synonyms for ‘triumphant’: ‘… for its most triumphant notes were taken by [Ilúvatar] and woven into its own solemn pattern.’ Hmm.
A word creation, a λόγος-cosmos, is a place of naming and reason, and therefore of conversation and debate, of agreement and disagreement, of self-fashioning in language and self-expression — which is to say, of free will and self-determination, for good or ill. But a music-creation, a μουσική-cosmos, does not seem to me to afford the same possibilities of freedom, any more than the apple can choose to fall upwards from the bough. And if we scroll through from this Tolkienian creation moment to, let’s say, The Lord of the Rings, the implication is that the swarming armies of orcs, killing and despoiling the landscape — and by extension, all the horrors of the twentieth-century, genocide and rape and slavery and everything, is just a C7 waiting to resolve itself into an F major. To which I think we’re entitled to say: no, just no. No. The Holocaust was more than an out-of-tune cello. Evil is not a too-loud trombone.
