Giuseppe Pezzini, ‘Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation’ (CUP 2025)

Ring, then, wherever you may be, for I am the Lord of the Rings said he, and I'll write it down, creative mystery, and I'll write it down re: the Rings said he

This is a study of Tolkien’s creative praxis, dense with supporting quotations and citation-clogged footnotes of this sort: ‘cf Pearce 2000; Dickerson 2003; Wood 2003; Purtill 2003, 2006; Garbowski 2004; Rutledge 2004; Caldecott 2012; Dickerson 2012; Bernthal 2014; Pearce 2014; Mosley 2016 , Kilby (esp. chapters 4 and 6). For analogous, but more theoretical investigations, cf Hart and Khovacs 2007; Milbank 2009; Coutras 2016; Mosley 2016; McIntosh 2017; Halsall 2020; Dickerson 2007; Kerry 2011 esp. introduction 17-56; Holmes 2011’ [151], or ‘See IV.2.1 and cf West 2003; Shippey 2005: 292-6; Garth 2003:262-6; Beal 2014 (also discussing possible literary influences); cf also duPlessis 2019 esp. 39-41).’ This citationarrhea is a tendency that creeps up from footnotes into the main body of the text, as here:

Comparative analysis of Tolkien’s works and their contextualization within past (especially medieval) literary landscapes [includes] biblical narratives (Whittington 2007) and classical mythology (Williams 2021, 2023, Paprocki and Matz 2022, Williams 2023) to Nordic and medieval literature (Chance 2003, 2004; Chance and Siewers 2005; Burns 2017[2005]; Solopova 2009; Atherton 2012; Ryan 2013; Lee and Solopova 2016; Lee 2022a (Part 4); Gallant (2024 etc.) and Romanticism and Modern(ist) literature (Simonson 2008a; Fisher 2011; Hiley 2011; MacLachlan 2012; Vink 2012; Eden 2014 (Part III); Wood 2016; Eilmann 2017; Ordway 2021; Sherwood and Eilmann 2024; Reid and Elam 2016; Honegger and Fimi 2019; Fimi and Thompson’s chapters in Lee 2022a; Bueno-Alonso, 2022; Sherman 2022; Groom 2022; Kascakova and Levente Palatinus 2023; Reinders 2024.) [9]

It's like a Homeric catalogue of the ships, and as dull to read. There’s a lot more secondary criticism on Tolkien out there than you think, and Pezzini has clearly done his homework, labouring through it all. Yet given how much secondary criticism he has consulted, and how well he knows all of Tolkien’s primary texts, it is remarkable how thinly contextualised, overall, his argument is, and how little this more-than-400-page volume adds to the larger critical debate. The project becomes an exercise in trying to find something to say about Tolkien that none of these myriad prior critics have said before. When he lights on something, he flags the fact up. For instance: after quoting that bit of Lord of the Rings when the eagles come to rescue Frodo and Sam from Mount Doom (‘there came a great Eagle flying, and he bore tidings beyond hope from the Lords of the West’) Pezzini says ‘at least to my knowledge, this reference has not been properly spotlighted [by other critics]’—his point is that critics assume ‘the Lords of the West’ are Aragorn and other ‘Captains of the West’, where he thinks the reference is to the Valar. Could be, but a minor point; and moreover one somewhat anticipated in Sean McBride’s Tolkien’s Cosmology: Divine Beings and Middle Earth (2020), as Pezzini himself concedes in a footnote. His larger argument is that there is a ‘hidden Divine narrative’ running through Lord of the Rings, which is true, but not original. Elsewhere, Pezzini suggests that Tolkien may have been influenced by Manzoni’s The Betrothed (1840), not because he has evidence that Tolkien was influenced by Manzoni’s The Betrothed, or even that he read it, but, one suspects, because no other critic has yet suggested that Tolkien was influenced by Manzoni’s The Betrothed. Moments like this apart, and given the sheer quantity of prior literary criticism of JRRT, most of this book is about stuff other critics have previously worked at. What Pezzini brings is depth, or density. Dense, denser, densest.

The main throughline argument of Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation considers three chief aspects of Tolkien’s own theory of creativity, with detailed readings of passages from The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings (chapter 2 is an intricate, somewhat over-egged account of the ‘Red Book’ as a narrative conceit: that Bilbo and Frodo, and perhaps Sam, wrote the stories of The Hobbit and LotR which Tolkien only edited and translated—and chapter 5 is a 50-page close-reading of Gandalf’s fall in Moria), a little less on The Silmarillion and a detailed and in-depth knowledge of the whole raft of posthumously-published Tolkieniana.

Those three main aspects are: Tolkien’s originary nominalism, his theory of ‘sub-creation’ and his belief that artistic creation is a kind of discovering or uncovering something already extant, rather than confecting novelty from first principles. These three are inter-connected. Other topics are addressed at various places.

Nominalism is Tolkien’s storytelling practice of starting with a name, and then fleshing-out or accreting a character or identity, and thereafter a legend or narrative, around it. Chapter 1 dives deep into Tolkien’s delight at the name Eärendil (which he discovered in a fragment of Old English verse recorded in Grein and Wülker’s Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Poesie [1883-98]: Éala Éearndel engla beorhtost/ofer middangeard monnum sended) and the process by which he evolved this into his myth of Eärendil the Mariner.¹ The chapter also covers Tom Bombadil’s nonsense singing, and dives deep, deeper than ever did plummet sound, into one throwaway reference in Lord of the Rings, where Aragorn reassures his companions that Gandalf, though absent, will find his way back: ‘he will not go astray—if there is any path to find … he is surer of finding the way home in a blind night than the cats of Queen Berúthiel’ [Lord of the Rings 2.4.311—throughout this book, Pezzini indulges the irksome habit of putting words in bold, rather than italics, for emphasis]. Who she? Tolkien had no idea. In letters to friends after the publication of Lord of the Rings he said that everything in the novel had a comprehensible relationship to the larger lineaments of his legendarium—on which he’d been working, of course, since the 19-teens—‘except only the “cats of Queen Berúthiel”.’ But a name or referent that meant nothing to Tolkien was often the way his creativity worked: a starting point, a seed. Tolkien himself compared writing LotR to a ‘seed growing in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind’ [quoted in Carpenter, J R R Tolkien: a Biography (1977), 171]. Pezzini quotes (more than once) Tolkien’s letter to W H Auden:

I knew nothing of the Palantíri, though the moment the Orthanc-stone was cast from the window I recognized it … and knew the meaning of the ‘rhyme of lore’ that had been running in my head: seven stars and seven stones and one white tree. These rhymes and names will crop up; but they do not always explain themselves. I have yet to discover anything about the cats of Queen Berúthiel. [Letters 163:316]

In first chapter Pezzini traces such thoughts as Tolkien did have about the feline-possessing Queen, —which weren’t many, and were not part of any of the works he published during his life—which is interesting, if minor. This chapter ends with him quoting entire the paragraph Tolkien wrote, late in life, giving us her story in brief, which was published by Christopher Tolkien in Unfinished Tales.

What does Tolkien mean when he says he ‘discovers’ his legendarium rather than inventing it? Here Pezzini is not wholly on-song. I do not suggest he is ignorant—the cliff-face of citations and references, between a fifth and a half of every single page devoted to footnotes, all the hiccoughing ‘cf. Letters 163:311[211] and Letters 257:486[347]; also Letters 276:505[361]. Cf. LotR 6.5.962’ [56], ‘cf also Murray, 1999; Shippey 2000:161-74; Flieger and Shippey 2001; Weidner 2002; Geier 2008; Segura 2010; Honegger 2011; Maillet 2020; Ordway 2023b among many others’ [237] notation throughout, does not bespeak ignorance. Yet the main lines one might expect to find in a monograph on Tolkien’s aesthetics of literary creation are either only glancingly mentioned, easily lost amongst the swarming quotations and references, or else are not mentioned at all.

So: there are a number of ways we could theorise, or explain, Tolkien’s belief that he was not inventing but actually discovering, or uncovering, his Fantasyland. A Freudian might say that he was cathecting material from his subconscious mind, which felt, to his conscious thought, as if it pre-existed and was ‘realer’ than anything he could deliberately invent—and, as a corollary, the things he thought of as discoveries had to do with the structure of subconscious apprehension and repression. We do not, after all , consider ourselves the deliberate authors of our dreams, though in a strict sense we are: dreams feel somehow external to us, things that come to us from some other realm. Pezzini makes a passing reference to Freud, including a slightly baffling reference to Lacan as well (‘in contrast [to Freud] Lacan describes the “I” in more relational terms, as embedded in an intersubjective relationship with the Other’ [65]—a frankly jejune and indeed erroneous² summary of Lacanian theory). But he does this only to dismiss its relevance to his project.

Tolkien’s dynamic journey of creation involves, at all of its stages, a degree of ‘unconsciousness’ … although all this certainly has fascinating psychoanalytic implications, it would be a mistake to interpret Tolkien’s emphasis on ‘unconsciousness’ only in personal psychological terms, as if artistic creation were for him a purely individual, irrational emergence from the subconscious. [65]

In that Tolkien would not have recognized Freud’s as a legitimate description of his creative praxis, I think this is correct—though of course a Freudian might suggest that Tolkien was not best placed to understand his own psychoperation. But OK: not Freudianism. How about Heidegger, whose artistic theory—not ‘aesthetics’, a term to which he was consistently hostile—saw the true work of art as an ‘unveiling’ of truth, a means of apprehending a more-than-individual, extrasubjective being, the operation of history? Was Tolkien, in ‘building’ Middle Earth, working like the Greek architects who constructed the beautiful temple Heidegger gives as a prime example of great art? Was JRRT’s making a poesis in the Heideggerian sense? Pezzini, who at no point mentions Heidegger, is not the person to answer these questions, though veiling and unveiling are the subjects of his nearly 60-page third chapter, ‘Cloaking, Freedom, and the Hidden “Divine” Narrative’.

Not Heidegger, then. So: what about a Platonist, or Christian Neoplatonist argument, something Tolkien would have found much more amenable, one might think:—that the artist mimics or shadows the ‘true’ eternal form of art. In its Christianised form this is, in effect, what Coleridge argues in the Biographia Literaria—his way of distinguishing between good and bad artists (for Plato all artists are bad, except perhaps composers of stirring martial music, to assist in the mustering of the army of Kallipolis.) God creates reality. An artist ‘sub-creates’, in a ratio inferior to the way God creates. ‘Sub-creation’ is Tolkien’s term for doing this, not Coleridge’s, and on it Pezzini gives us much from Tolkien’s letters and several lengthy engagements with his allegorical autobiography, and a long reading of the short-story ‘Leaf By Niggle’. What he doesn’t do is cite Coleridge, from whom this idea originates.

The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phaenomenon of the will, which we express by the word Choice. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association. [Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 13]

For Coleridge, the great artist—Homer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth—creates great art because he is imaginative rather than fanciful, which is to say he possesses the secondary imagination that is echoic of God’s primary imagination, the great I AM. And weak or bad artists, lacking this ‘vision and faculty divine’ (a phrase Coleridge repeatedly quotes: it is from Wordsworth, and the emphasis is on its last word) can only shuffle around pre-existing fixities, clichés from other writers, second-hand pieces. Their art can never fully live. Tolkien certainly knew this passage, and though he prefers his own terminology, and is less interested in the ‘fanciful’, it radically informs his understanding of art. As with Coleridge, it is important that the true artist’s creative power differs from God’s only in degree, not in kind (hence: ‘sub-creator’) and that the image-making, hence imaginative, potency of ‘art-making’ powers Fantasy, the fairy tale and Gothic modes in which Coleridge also worked. It is a Romantic view of art, this, and as such removed from Platonism—really, before the Romantics, people didn’t tend to think of God as an artist-creator (He was conceived, rather, in terms of King, Judge, Father and so on). God as the great artist, Browning’s conception of the divine artistry of the world, ‘no blot, nor blank, it means intensely, and means good’, is a Romantic and post-Romantic invention, one Tolkien shares. His long poem ‘Mythopoeia’ (1931) reutilises an image from another Romantic, Shelley’s resonant final stanza of Adonais, to construe the artist as a lens refracting light from the divine source:

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 (‘Mythopoeia’ 61-8)

Pezzini mentions this passage a couple of times—I’m not sure there’s a single work by Tolkien he doesn’t mention, actually—but he under-serves its point, what I would argue is this crucial context for Tolkien’s creativity. There’s a line near the end of the book waving away these contexts: ‘it would take another book to discuss the many parallels and possible sources of this “mystic” conception of artistic creation, from classical literature and medieval mysticism to romantic and modernist literature’ [320]. Too sweeping and dismissive, this: Tolkien is not, as in the classical conception, a mouth through which the ‘Muse’ speaks; nor do I understand the ‘modernist literature’ reference. His theory of literary production is Coleridgean, inflected by George Macdonald’s own perspective on Coleridge.

Not to get cranky. Pezzini is, I’m quite sure, well acquainted with all the stuff I’m talking about. He is manifestly extremely well-read. He chooses not to range too far outside Tolkien’s own writings, and some of the work of his circle, to develop his argument. And there he has interesting, if not necessarily entirely original, things to say about Tolkien’s ‘eucatastophe’, on the relationship between determinism (predestination, for instance) and free-will, ‘gratuitousness’, in Tolkien’s world-view and in his sense of what a writer does. He is good on his titular term ‘mystery’ in the sense of ‘that which is cloaked, or hidden’—Tolkien not knowing exactly how he made his art, such that literary creation was something of a mystery to him. He doesn’t address the other sense, mystery as a religious term: a truth not understandable by human reason alone, requiring the grace of divine aid, which sense is linked—the word comes from Ancient Greek μυστήριον (mustḗrion, ‘a secret rite’, from μύστης, ‘initiated one’)—to the doctrine of the sacrament. But, see, this latter sense was something absolutely crucial to Tolkien as a Catholic and therefore as a writer. As he wrote to his son, ‘out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament.’ Related is the older, pagan sense of ‘mysteries’ as rites into which initiates would be admitted, such as the Eleusinian mysteries, or the Mysteries of Mithras. Pezzini does not entirely ignore these things, but he is clear that he is not reading Tolkien Catholic beliefs into his works, though many critics have. Pezzini says (he adds a cliff-face of citations to each of the following specific points, including the ‘and so on’, which I do not here repeat):

Scholars have highlighted the supposed Christ-type figure of characters such as Gandalf, Sam. Frodo, and Aragorn; the Eucharistic symbolism of the Elvish way-bread lembas, the chronological correspondences between the novel’s time-frame and the liturgical year, the Marian characterization of Galadriel and Elbereth, and so on. More generally a range of supposedly Christian ‘values’ or ‘concepts’: friendship, self-sacrifice, redemption, mercy, metaphysical beliefs and environmental concerns, to name a few. [152]

Such an approach amounts, Pezzini says, to ‘reading Tolkien as catechism in disguise’, and as such is ‘problematic’.

In any case, this is not the approach I will take in this chapter [ch 3, ‘The Unnamed Authority in The Lord of the Rings’] and in this book in general. My subject is neither the Christian God of Tolkien’s ‘primary reality’ nor the theological or moral doctrines allegedly related to Him; instead it is the ‘God’ within Tolkien’s ‘secondary plane’, the ‘God’ of Middle-earth.

And so he does. But these specific Christian parallels are less pertinent, I’d say, than the question of the sacramental praxis of art as Tolkien conceived it. Pezzini, rightly, highlights Tolkien’s ‘cordial dislike’ of allegory, and it is, as he says, a mistake to read Lord of the Rings as an allegory. It is also a mistake to read Lewis’s Narnia novels as allegory, though many more people do this—Aslan allegorises Christ and so on—distracted, perhaps, by the fact that Lewis wrote whole books on medieval and renaissance allegory. But this is to miss, precisely, the Christian valence of the books. For Christians, like Lewis or Tolkien, Christ came into the world as God. He was not a human-being who ‘stood-in’ for God, who symbolized, or figured, or allegorized God: he was God, just as God was him. Christ was God incarnated—made flesh, as a human being—in the world. This is a central Christian belief, one of supreme importance to the faith. Both Narnia and Lord of the Rings are tales of incarnation, not allegories. For Lewis, Narnia is the narrative development of the postulate: in our human world, Christ incarnated as a human; in a world of talking animals he would incarnate as a talking animal. For Tolkien, I would say, this question of incarnation is less deictic and more about the action of divine creativity itself. There are no entries in Pezzini’s index for sacrament, incarnation, or, surprisingly given the book’s own title, mystery.

Pezzini is far more knowledgeable about both Tolkien’s texts and the secondary criticism than am I: impressively so. As a summary of extant scholarship and criticism on Tolkien, and as a thorough-going trawl from primary texts and letters for certain key terms and arguments, this is a valuable book. But otherwise I found it frustrating.

I don’t mean to be too down on it. Though I found reading it a sticky process, and though Pezzini’s refusal to theorise his reading in any larger, extra-Tolkienian sense, I did learn things I didn’t know before from reading Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation. For instance: discussing the ‘paradox’ of the juxtaposition of pagan and Christian elements, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, in Tolkien’s texts as an expression of degrees of paradox in their author, Perezzi quotes a letter from Fr Murray, a ‘close aquaintance’ of the man, which I hadn’t seen before (it has only recently—2019—been published): ‘Tolkien was a very complex and depressed man and my own opinion of his imaginative creation is that it projects his very depressed view of the universe at least as much as it reflects his Catholic faith’. Perezzi goes on to reject the idea that there is a notable paradox, or as he puts it ‘schizophrenia’, in Tolkien’s makeup and therefore in his art; but I was very struck by the judgment of the priestly Murray. Is there something depressed, depressive, in the texture of the legendarium Tolkien created? It’s possible to see the man himself, with various shaping griefs and bereavements in his early life, with what we can assume was some degree of PTSD (as we would now say) associated with his wartime service, his introverted and obsessive, or at least tightly focussed, mode of being-in-the-world, his fondness for a drink, as manifesting elements of depression. The hope, which the Holy Sacrament offers, and which is at the heart of the eucatastophe as vision of the logic of life, is, by that very eucatastrophic logic, deferred; and we all know what hope deferred maketh where the heart is concerned.

Of course, the second half of that Bible verse (Proverbs 13:12, as if you didn’t know) is: ‘but when the desire cometh it is a tree of life.’ Tolkien loved his trees, and saw in them life and beauty, hope and light. But the notion of Tolkien as a kind of Sylvia Plath of Fantasy is an intriguing one.

1. Isn’t ‘Grein and Wülker’ a great pairing of names? It sounds like a deepcore electronica duo. Or crimefighters.

2. As it might be: which Other, big or little? In what sense is there, in a Lacanian sense, a stable ‘subject’ to operate intersubjectively? Really, this is how you summarise one of the most opaquely complicated thinkers of his generation?