Music in Middle-earth (review)

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 Ilúvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void

(“Ainulindalë” S 15).

Heidi Steimel and Friedhelm Schneidewind, along with their collaborators, have produced a very good book on a topic that, from a scholarly perspective, is crucial to the study of Tolkien’s literary project and overall mythology. Readers interested in the central and serious subject of music in Tolkien will want to add this volume to their shelves. It covers the vast terrain of music, song, and instruments carefully and judiciously and fills an important space in the scholarly discussions of Tolkien’s fiction.

Steimel and Schneidewind offer us a wide-ranging treatment of the foundational concept of Tolkien’s entire universe, which begins with the creation myth cited above. The core idea is that before substance there is sound, or something like unto sound as we conceive of it, something that is heard and, at the same time, beyond hearing, something that has essence but precedes form and, simultaneously, causes form to be. Ilúvatar and the Ainur, including Melkor, inhabit the insubstantial Void before creation and, from there, create Arda (the world Tolkien’s Elves, Men, Hobbits and others will inhabit) from a vision that is expressed as sound and by virtue of powers that are ineffable, except synaesthetically and by analogy with music. The universe that is accessible through the senses—Valinor, Tol Erreseä, Númenor, Middle-earth, and the sundering sea—becomes that which “is not void” and subsequently contains within it traces of this original divine expression. Beauty and horror, hope and despair, good and evil, harmony and dissonance, purity and corruption all emanate from Ilúvatar and the Ainur’s initial musical themes: in the beginning, love, freedom, and wisdom are intertwined with, and set off against, Melkor’s malice and his desire for power. These conflicting principles enter the world at the moment of its conception. They make Arda not just a physical home for the Firstborn Elves and for Men, the Followers, but also a locus for conflicts that will endure across all ages and which have their origins outside of the created world itself. The “Ainulindalë,” then, does more than express how Arda came to be; it imbues it with potential and sets it on a historical path. In the silent (to us) music of the Ainur, therefore, we discern that Arda has an ontology and an eschatology. In this place, life is made and given impulses, nature is given intellect, and time is driven forward by the forces of history and destiny. The inexpressible void gives shape to a world whose motif is conflict and whose end is fundamentally uncertain.

This topic can be difficult to handle. In fact, it can at times become disorienting because the parallels with the creation story of the primary world, as Tolkien, English and Catholic, would have known it, are both illuminating and elusive. In “On Fairy-stories” Tolkien draws this analogy deliberately when discussing authorship. Sub-creation is not the same as Creation, but it does require a Maker and a World. It employs a kind of literary stand-in for divine expression that is like and unlike God’s creative utterances which, in the book of Genesis, caused the world and everything in it to be. From the standpoint of the author, providing the secondary...