When Art Creates the Artist
Tolkien on the Secret of True Creation
We have another post today by Eugene Terekhin, the man and the mind behind the publication Philosophy of Language.
Eugene is a regular contributing writer to The BoldBrush Letter.
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Feature Article:
When Art Creates the Artist: Tolkien on the Secret of True Creation
George MacDonald famously said:
“A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.”
A true piece of art is always larger than it seems. It is a fractal — a never-ending pattern unfolding in similar shapes and forms that repeat themselves at different scales. A creator never fully knows what their art means. It means something to them, but they never know its full meaning until it is revealed.
The truer the art, the more it means. All the artist wants is to capture something that struck them in the moment, but they end up expressing much more than they have captured.
When J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings, his desire was to capture in fantasy the truth about what was going on in the world. He could never have imagined how many more things his art would mean to later generations. We keep gleaning innumerable insights from his works — insights he may never have consciously thought of. He didn’t place them there; all he did was strike one right chord.
An artist strikes but one right chord on the invisible strings of Creation and creates Music that reverberates into all eternity. A poet finds the right words, a painter finds the right colors, a musician finds the right melody, a writer finds the right metaphor — and suddenly that one true thing opens like a celestial rose to reveal innumerable shades of meaning.
Even as I work on this article, I never know what others will find in it — if anything at all. If I succeed in capturing something true, it will acquire a life of its own. We never know how many things we create when we work on just one, provided it is true.
Tolkien expressed this beautifully in his allegorical tale Leaf by Niggle. Niggle was a painter. All his life, he painted one leaf that fascinated him. He worked day and night on his painting but couldn’t finish it in his lifetime. In the afterlife, he boards a mysterious train that takes him to a place he finds vaguely familiar.
Suddenly, he stops dead in his tracks — he sees his own painting alive. His leaf is right there before his eyes — on a tree, the whole tree — not as he painted it, but as “it had budded in his imagination.” Slowly it dawns on him that while he was working on his leaf, he was creating a world.
Tolkien himself indicated that Leaf by Niggle was autobiographical – it arose from his own anxiety that he wouldn’t be able to finish The Lord of the Rings in his lifetime. For example, he wrote:
“…in addition to my tree‐love … it arose from my own pre-occupation with The Lord of the Rings, the knowledge that it would be finished in great detail or not at all, and the fear (near certainty) that it would be ‘not at all’.”
Leaf by Niggle is Tolkien’s answer to himself. Whatever we create in time — baking bread, teaching children, writing articles, building websites, planting potatoes, or cutting grass — someday we will see it come alive. We will find the full meaning of the fractal we created — or rather, the full meaning of the fractal that created us.
The thing that captivates us in time will open into a whole new world of beauty and healing. That is exactly what Niggle found in the afterlife. We think we are creating just one leaf, but that one leaf will become part of The Tree of Healing.
“Through the middle of the city’s street, on either side of the river, stood the tree of life bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” — Revelation 22:2
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We do not use AI images with our writing. We prefer to feature and provide more exposure for human artists. If you know of a great piece of art we should consider, please leave a comment with a link to it. All featured images are properly attributed with backlinks to the artist’s website. You can help support human artists and push back against AI by liking or restacking this piece by clicking the “Like” icon ❤️, by clicking the “Restack” icon 🔁 (or by leaving a comment).
Thank you, that is beautifully said.
Great