Ainulindalë

The Ainulindalë is a short prose text — barely more than a dozen pages in most editions — placed first among the five parts of the 1977 Silmarillion, ahead of the Valaquenta, the long Quenta Silmarillion, the Akallabêth and the closing account of the Rings of Power. It has no chapter divisions and no internal headings, and runs instead as one continuous movement from a first cause to a finished world. Its scale is correspondingly wide: no place in Middle-earth is named, no people of the later histories appears, and the reckoning of years by which the rest of the corpus is organised has not yet begun. In kind it is cosmogony rather than narrative fiction, closer to a myth of origins than to the chronicle that follows it.

The narrator is unnamed and unplaced. There is no frame, no addressee and no editorial first person; the voice speaks with the settled authority of tradition already received and no longer questioned, which is why the text can state matters no witness inside the world could have observed. The prose favours long coordinated clauses over subordination, so that sentences accumulate rather than argue, and the register is deliberately elevated and archaic. Description is sparse and abstract, direct speech rare, and psychology almost absent: figures act as agents of a pattern rather than as characters with interiors. A reader arriving from The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings will find little of their novelistic texture here, and the section is best read slowly and more than once.

Within the legendarium the Ainulindalë occupies the position everything else presupposes. It supplies the premises and much of the vocabulary that later texts use without explanation, and it is the only part of the published corpus set wholly before the world's history begins, so that the annals, genealogies and tales that follow can be read as working out what it establishes. Tolkien himself, in the long account of his mythology written to Milton Waldman, described the cycle as beginning with a cosmogonic myth and descending from it by stages toward matters more local and more human, with the fall of the rebellious spirit standing at the head of the whole. Christopher Tolkien's Foreword to the 1977 volume sets out the editorial position from which the text as printed was assembled.

The cosmogony belongs to the oldest stratum of Tolkien's legendarium, and its composition is bound up with the beginnings of the mythology as a whole in the late 1910s. Writing to W. H. Auden in 1955, Tolkien traced the first of the tales of the Elder Days to sick leave from the army during the First World War, and described the legends as having been made in odd hours over the decades that followed rather than in any single campaign of work. In the long account of the cycle he composed in 1951 he presented the same material as something that had grown with him since youth, absorbed into his linguistic interests and repeatedly recast. No part of the mythology was left alone for long, and the creation myth in particular was returned to at intervals across some five decades; the version printed in 1977 is therefore the end of a very long chain rather than a text written at one sitting.

The mythology's early attempts at print ran through Tolkien's other books. In the Foreword he added to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings he explained that the sequel to The Hobbit was begun soon after that book was written and before its publication in 1937, and that he had at first wished to complete and set in order the legends of the Elder Days instead, only to find that what readers and publishers wanted was more about hobbits. The writing of the new tale then occupied him at intervals through the years to 1949, and the three volumes appeared in 1954 and 1955. The older mythology, from which the new book borrowed names, allusions and much of its background, remained unpublished throughout.

The nearest the work came to publication in Tolkien's lifetime was the negotiation with Collins in 1950 and 1951, when he hoped to see the legends of the Elder Days and The Lord of the Rings issued together as parts of a single body of work. It was for Milton Waldman of that firm that he wrote the very long letter setting out the shape and sense of the cycle, an unusual document in which he argued for the two works as interdependent rather than as a novel with an optional appendix. The plan came to nothing, and the sequel was published alone by Allen & Unwin. Its success made the older material commercially desirable at last, but Tolkien spent the last two decades of his life revising and reconsidering rather than finishing, and much of that late work moved further from narrative toward questions of cosmology and doctrine.

Tolkien died in September 1973 leaving the work unfinished, and the volume that carries the cosmogony was published four years later, in 1977, edited by his son Christopher with the assistance of Guy Gavriel Kay; George Allen & Unwin issued it in London and Houghton Mifflin in Boston. The editorial problem, as the Foreword describes it, was not scarcity but abundance: a mass of manuscripts in many states, some superseded, some contradictory, some existing in several parallel forms with no clear indication of which his father would have preferred. The published text was accordingly assembled to read as a single coherent work, with choices made between versions and a measure of connective writing where the papers left gaps. The cosmogony as printed represents a late form of the text rather than a final or authorised one.

Christopher Tolkien's method changed after 1977. In the introduction to Unfinished Tales, published in 1980, he set out an explicitly different principle: to print texts as they stood, unfinished and inconsistent as they might be, with commentary explaining their dates and relations, instead of constructing a unified narrative from them. That shift governs everything he published afterwards, and it means that the reader who wishes to see how the creation myth developed must go to those later volumes rather than to the 1977 book, which by design conceals the seams. The 1977 text itself has remained substantially stable in subsequent printings and editions, with corrections rather than revisions.

Read as a shape rather than as a story, the text falls into three unequal movements, marked not by headings but by clear turns of subject: a music that is sung, a vision that is shown, and a world that is made. The first and longest occupies well over a third of the whole. It opens with the origin of the Ainur in Eru's thought, their schooling in song and their habit of singing alone or in small companies, and moves from there to the propounding of a single great theme and to the performance that follows it. The discord, and the further themes raised against it, belong to this movement, as does the rebuke in which the sense of everything still to come is set out in advance. The movement closes with the ending of the Music, and nothing after that point is sung.

The second movement is short and serves as the hinge of the text: the Ainur are shown a vision of the world their music had described, and they watch its history unfold until it is withdrawn from them at the point where the dominion of Men would begin. Into this movement is set the one passage of sustained dialogue in the section, in which Eru answers Ulmo, with Manwë beside him, on what Melkor's malice has unintentionally brought about; a reader looking for the doctrinal core of the piece will find it here rather than in the Music proper. The third movement begins with the word that gives the vision being and sends part of the Ainur down into it, thereafter bound to the world until it is finished.

The final pages change register and work as a bridge. Their matter is no longer the Music but the first labours within Arda: the descent of the Powers, their taking of visible shape, and brief characterising passages on Manwë, Ulmo and Aulë in their relation to the airs, the waters and the substance of the earth. The opening strife with Melkor over possession of the world is sketched rather than told, the detail being left to the chapters that follow. The closing sentence places the dwelling prepared for the Children within the depths of time and among the stars, which is as near as the section comes to a formal conclusion.

In the printed volume the section is approached through Christopher Tolkien's Foreword and handed on at once to the Valaquenta, which supplies the roll of the Powers that the cosmogony names only in passing; the narrative resumes in the first chapter of the Quenta Silmarillion, where the shaping of Arda is taken up in order. The back matter serves these pages only indirectly. The note on pronunciation and the appendix on the elements of Quenya and Sindarin names are where the terms introduced here can be construed, and the index gives their occurrences across the rest of the book. The genealogical tables and the map, concerned as they are with Beleriand and with the houses of Elves and Men, have nothing to offer a reader of this section.

Everything else in the published corpus stands downstream of these pages. The section presupposes nothing that a reader must already know — no place, no lineage, no earlier event — while the texts that follow it draw on its terms as though they had always been available: the One and his thought, the Ainur, the Music and its themes, the Children of Ilúvatar, and the distinction between what is imagined and what is given being. When the Quenta Silmarillion speaks of the Valar shaping Arda against the marring of Melkor, it is continuing a work whose terms were fixed here; when the Akallabêth reaches the point at which Eru intervenes directly in the world's substance, it is invoking an authority that only this text establishes. The dependence runs one way. Nothing later explains the cosmogony, and the cosmogony explains a great deal that is later assumed.

Toward the books Tolkien published himself the relation is one of unstated premise. The Lord of the Rings is set in a world made in this manner and names the Powers freely — Elbereth in invocation, the Valar in the histories appended to the tale — and its account of Númenor's ruin turns on a Ban whose warrant is never argued. Readers before 1977 therefore met the consequences of the cosmogony without its premise, and had to infer the shape of the theology from allusions. The published tale also supplies the only route by which such lore is said to have reached the records of the Shire at all: the note on those records reports that Bilbo's three volumes of translations from Elvish were made from written and living sources at Rivendell and concerned themselves chiefly with the Elder Days.

The canon layer it carries is the awkward one. As printed the text belongs with the posthumous editions rather than with anything Tolkien released, and it is load-bearing in proportion as it is unauthorised: the doctrines most often quoted from the legendarium — that being is Eru's alone to give, that no theme can be played which does not have its uttermost source in him — rest on an edited page. Later chapters test that doctrine rather than contradict it, as when Aulë's making of the Dwarves is resolved by an appeal to it. The other posthumous volume of narrative material offers no counterpart, its earliest matter beginning already within the First Age with Tuor. Tolkien himself, answering a reader who pressed him on the metaphysics of the Valar, was careful to treat such matters as belonging to a feigned history and not as claims made outside it, which is a useful caution for a text so often read as a statement of belief.

The cosmogony reached a general readership only in the posthumous volume, where it stands first, so that it was the page most buyers of that book opened to before anything else. The volume was taken up at once by the awards culture of the genre: The Silmarillion received the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel in 1978, the year after publication. Translation followed quickly, and the German edition, Das Silmarillion, translated by Wolfgang Krege, was issued by Klett-Cotta in 1978. In that edition, as in most others, the Elvish section title was left standing unaltered and only the explanatory subtitle rendered into the receiving language, so that the word itself has travelled unchanged into the languages in which the book is read.

Later editions have changed what surrounds the text rather than the text. The second edition of 1999 prints as a preface the very long letter Tolkien had written to Milton Waldman in 1951, with the result that a document composed to persuade a publisher now stands immediately before the cosmogony and sets out the shape of the cycle in the author's own words before a reader begins it. Illustrated editions have appeared alongside the plain ones from 1998, with paintings by Ted Nasmith, and a further edition of 2021 uses Tolkien's own drawings and paintings instead; these gave the Music and the Vision pictorial treatment for the first time in an authorised volume.

The 1977 text has remained the only form of the creation myth available to the ordinary reader. The single-tale volumes later drawn from the same papers — the Húrin narrative of 2007, the Beren and Lúthien book of 2017 and the Gondolin book of 2018 — take their matter from within the First Age and reprint none of the cosmogony, each opening instead with an editorial preface that assumes it. A reader who wants these pages has therefore had, for nearly half a century, one place to find them.