Mythopoeia (poem)

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"Mythopoeia" is a poem by

J.R.R. Tolkien.[1] The word mythopoeia means myth-making, and has been used in English since at least 1846.[2]

Origins

mythology and myth-making as a creative art about "fundamental things".[4]
It begins by addressing C. S. Lewis as the Misomythos, who at the time was sceptical of any truth in mythology:

To one who said that myths were lies and therefore worthless, even though "breathed through silver".[3][4]

Tolkien chose to compose the poem in

progress
("progressive apes") on their own turf:

I will not walk with your progressive apes,
erect and sapient. Before them gapes
the dark abyss to which their progress tends—...

The poem refers to the creative human author as "the little maker" wielding his "own small golden sceptre" ruling his

subcreation (understood as genuine creation within God's primary creation
):

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...

The reference to not bowing before "the Iron Crown", and later reference rejecting "the great Artefact" have been interpreted as Tolkien's opposition and resistance to accept what he perceived to be modern man's misplaced "faith" or "worship" of a kind of

Númenorean people, an event analogous with the fall of Atlantis (and The Fall at large).[6]
Tolkien continues:

man ...keeps the rags of lordship once he owned,
his world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artefact.

"Mythopoeia" takes the position that mythology contains spiritual and foundational truths, while myth-making is a "creative act" that helps narrate and disclose those truths:

...There is no firmament,
only a void, unless a jewelled tent
myth-woven and elf-patterned; and no earth,
unless the mother's womb whence all have birth.

Verlyn Flieger writes that the theme of light is significant in the poem, as elsewhere in Tolkien's work, especially The Silmarillion. The light, emanating from the Creator, is, in her view, splintered and passed on through every author's works in the act of subcreation.[7][8]

See also

References

  1. ISBN 9780007105045
    .
  2. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary
    .
  3. ^ a b Dundes, quoted by Adcox, 2003.
  4. ^ a b c Menion, 2003/2004 citing essays by Tolkien using the words "fundamental things".
  5. ISBN 9780547951980
    .
  6. ISBN 9780544363793
    .
  7. ^ MacLeod, Jeffrey J.; Smol, Anna (2008). "A Single Leaf: Tolkien's Visual Art and Fantasy". Mythlore. 27 (1). article 10.
  8. ISBN 978-0-8028-1955-0
    .

External links
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