On the Art of Subcreation

Tolkien and Using Creative Expression as a Window to Eternity

[Greetings, friends, from Omaha! I’m not the first person to say this, nor will I be the last, but there is something about flights—10,000 feet removed from the noise on the ground—that creates favorable conditions for both productivity and creativity.

Part of the creativity, I suspect, comes from the stillness of being (somewhat) disconnected from the firehose of content consumption. As for the productivity, some of that is no doubt owing to the fact that flights give us fewer choices—we are forced, for example, to select one or two books to keep us company, rather than having a whole library at our fingertips. (This selection process is always the hardest part of packing.) Too many choices make us lazy.

This has the curious effect of often making me look forward to flights. Of course, what I really look forward to is the ability to concentrate on one of the books that has long been stuck in my “to read” queue.

For my flight from Austin to Omaha, I chose to re-read a book I first read about a year ago. It’s a book called “Leaf by Niggle”, written by the man whose name is now synonymous with Lord of the Rings: J.R.R. Tolkien. “Leaf by Niggle” is different from much of Tolkien’s other works in that it does not take place in or involve the realm of Middle Earth. But it does inspire meditations on similar themes: the meaning of life, the inevitability of death, and the hopes of man. As something like an autobiographical allegory, it also inspires reflection on Tolkien’s view on the transcendent aim of artistic expression—sub-creation.

To the story and what it teaches us we devote the rest of today’s essay.]

Leaf by Niggle

“There was once a little man named Niggle, who had a journey to make,”¹ writes Tolkien in Leaf by Niggle’s opening lines, reminding us of the opening lines of The Hobbit: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” The first two things that we learn about the character known as Niggle are (1) that he is a somewhat cranky and irritable painter living in the countryside (though also relatively modest and reasonably kind-hearted), and (2) some mysterious journey that will interrupt his work once and for all is swiftly approaching.

Probably the most important things to remember about Niggle’s painting are that he “was the sort of painter who can paint leaves better than trees” and there was one particular painting he became obsessed with finishing… a painting we’ll call the Tree.

[The Tree] had begun with a leaf caught in the wind, and it became a tree; and the tree grew, sending out innumerable branches, and thrusting out the most fantastic roots. Strange birds came and settled on the twigs and had to be attended to. Then all round the Tree, and behind it, through the gaps in the leaves and boughs, a country began to open out; and there were glimpses of a forest marching over the land, and of mountains tipped with snow. Niggle lost interest in his other pictures.

Slowly, Niggle continued to add to the Tree. One day, he thought, “the picture would have to stop just growing and get finished.” At one point, Niggle steps back to observe the entire canvas and reveals a core yearning of his (and every artist’s) heart:

What he would have liked at that moment would have been to see himself walk in, and slap him on the back and say (with obvious sincerity): ‘Absolutely magnificent! I see exactly what you are getting at. Do get on with it, and don’t bother about anything else! We will arrange for a public pension, so that you need not.’

The problem for dear Niggle was that he never seemed to make very much progress on his painting. Much of his days seemed to always be eaten up by the “Interruptions” of his bothersome neighbor, Parish, along with life’s daily distractions and duties. And what time he did dedicate to his painting was soon lost in his attempts to perfect the leaves. Niggle very quickly started to sense that his biggest fear—never finishing the Tree—was becoming increasingly likely.

One fall day, as Niggle starts to sense his departure is imminent, he gets a knock at his door. His neighbor, Parish, arrives with yet another request for Niggle’s aid. This time, the wind had blown off half of Parish’s roof and his wife had fallen ill from the cold and rain… the limp and lame Parish had come to ask Niggle not only if he had any canvas to spare (eyeing Niggle’s painting) but if he would bike to town and fetch a doctor for him.

Niggle doesn’t give up his precious canvas, but he does, reluctantly, agree to bike to town on Parish’s behalf. When Niggle arrives back home, he finds himself ill from the journey and bedridden for a week, unable to do any of the painting he’d hoped to.

Just as Niggle recovers and begins to get into his painting once more, fate intervenes in the form of another knock at the door. This time, it’s a tall man and total stranger—the Inspector of Houses—come to convict Niggle for not doing his neighborly duty and repairing Parish’s house with the canvas he was now painting on. Before Niggle can fully protest, a second stranger arrives: the Driver.

‘Driver? Driver?’ [Niggle] chattered. ‘Driver of what?’

‘You, and your carriage,’ said the man. ‘The carriage was ordered long ago. It has come at last. It’s waiting. You start today on your journey, you know.’ …

The Driver gave him no time to pack, saying that he ought to have done that before, and they would miss the train…

At this point, the scene of the story changes as Niggle boards a train that passes almost at once into a dark tunnel. When Niggle wakes up, he is in a large and dim railway station. There, Niggle is a greeted by a Porter who takes him to the “Workhouse Infirmary,” a sort of Purgatory-like place where Niggle spends at least a century in quiet reflection and hard labor, slowing curing the lack of diligence, focus, and time management that plagued him in life.

[After an unknown amount of time in the Workhouse,] He could take up a task the moment one bell rang, and lay it aside promptly the moment the next one went, all tidy and ready to be continued at the right time. He got through quite a lot in a day, now; he finished small things neatly. He had no ‘time of his own’ (except alone in his bed-cell), and yet he was becoming master of his time; he began to know just what he could do with it. There was no sense of rush. He was quieter inside now, and at resting-time he could really rest.

One night while lying in the dark (for hours or years, he could not tell), Niggle heard a conversation between a pair of disembodied Voices that were evaluating Niggle’s life on Earth. One Voice, stern but just, wants to hold Niggle accountable for “the time he wasted, not even amusing himself! He never got ready for his journey...” The Second Voice, compassionate and merciful, points to his aid of Parish without expectation of return in advocating that Niggle move on to the next stage. Eventually, the Voices decide that Niggle has earned “a little gentle treatment.”

When Niggle wakes the next day, his little cell is full of sunshine, and he finds comfortable clothes where once there was only a hospital uniform. Niggle sees a doctor who heals his weathered hands and sends him on his way back to the Porter and the railway station. Arriving at the station, Niggle is greeted by the Porter, who ushers Niggle on board and shuttles him to a gate with a bicycle labeled “Niggle.” Recognizing the bike, Niggle pushes open the gate and rides downhill in the spring sunshine until he comes upon something that takes his breath away… a perfect rendering of the Tree he’d been trying to paint in life.

A great green shadow came between him and the sun. Niggle looked up, and fell off his bicycle. Before him stood the Tree, his Tree, finished. If you could say that of a Tree that was alive, its leaves opening, its branches growing and bending in the wind that Niggle had so often felt or guessed, and had so often failed to catch… All the leaves he had ever laboured at were there, as he had imagined them rather than as he had made them… The Tree was finished, though not finished with…

Sensing that while the Tree needed no altering yet could use some continuing, Niggle knew he needed Parish to complete the job. “Niggle hailed him. ‘Parish!’ he called.”

Parish appeared, and the pair were reunited in their efforts. Niggle, who was less orderly in life, had now become more so; Parish, ignorant of beauty in life, had now developed a habit of soaking it in fully. Together, the two marveled at the mysterious way in which the Tree was enriched by both their efforts… a place that would come to be called Niggle’s Parish in honor of the two who first dwelt there.

Finally, the day of completion came. “‘We shall finish this evening,’ said Parish one day. ‘After that we will go for a really long walk.’” They set out the next day until they reached the Edge… an invisible boundary that did not need lines or fences to tell them they had come to the end of a territory. “They saw a man, he looked like a shepherd; he was walking towards them, down the grass-slopes that led up into the Mountains. ‘Do you want a guide?’ he asked. ‘Do you want to go on?’”

The look on their faces told the story: Niggle would go on, but Parish would wait for his wife. The time for them to part ways had come. They shook hands, exchanged apologies and goodbyes, and then Niggle went off with the shepherd. “[Niggle] was going to learn about sheep, and the high pasturages, and look at the wider sky, and walk ever further and further towards the Mountains, always uphill.”

From here, the story ends with two cut scenes. The first returns to Earth, where a scene reminiscent of Dicken’s Christmas Carol follows a conversation of men from the town nearest Niggle’s home. The topic? The perceived uselessness and meaninglessness of poor old Niggle’s life. The second cut scene returns to the two disembodied Voices doing something like a post-game review.

‘[Niggle’s Parish] is proving very useful indeed,’ said the Second Voice. ‘As a holiday, and a refreshment. It is splendid for convalescence; and not only that, for many it is the best introduction to the Mountains. It works wonders in some cases. I am sending more and more there. They seldom have to come back.

Here ends the story of Niggle.

The Dangers of a Deferred Life and the Art of Subcreation

In more than one letter, Tolkien reported that Leaf by Niggle came to him in a fever dream, and when he awoke “with it already in mind,” he wrote it down over a few hours. Tolkien calls it a dream, but we get the feeling after reading Leaf by Niggle that it may have been more akin to a nightmare. Anybody who has had a dream (or recurring dreams) of missing an exam because they overslept or, if you’re like me, of failing a class because they came to the end of the semester and realized they’d forgotten to show up each week… anybody who has had such a dream recognizes this anxiety this dream must have caused.

The haunting at the heart of Leaf by Niggle is one that many artists and achievers also harbor: that of failing… of never finishing… of dying with an unsung song stuck in their throat.

Niggle knows he has a deadline—it is obviously death, the journey we all have to take—he has a painting he desperately wants to finish, but he puts things off, and when he finally buckles down to it, first there is a call on his time he cannot refuse, and then he gets sick, and then an Inspector turns up and condemns his painting as scrap, and as he starts to contest this the Driver turns up and tells him he must leave now with no more than he can snatch up.²

What we learn in the Workhouse Infirmary is that Niggle, himself, is partially to blame for leaving his work unfinished… for not “preparing” for the journey, as the Voices reveal. In Tolkien’s version of Purgatory, Niggle must learn focus and time management. His story tells us something similar to Seneca’s first letter to Lucilius and reminds us all: Hold every hour in your grasp!

[S]et yourself free for your own sake; gather and save your time, which till lately has been forced from you, or filched away, or has merely slipped from your hands…

The most disgraceful kind of loss, however, is that due to carelessness. Furthermore, if you will pay close heed to the problem, you will find that the largest portion of our life passes while we are doing ill, a goodly share while we are doing nothing, and the whole while we are doing that which is not to the purpose.

What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years be behind us are in death’s hands…

[H]old every hour in your grasp. Lay hold of today’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon tomorrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by.³

The journey that Niggle must make is, of course, the journey we all must make: Death. His struggle with his own deferring tendencies is our struggle. Niggle knows death is on its way and still he can’t bring himself to focus. He is every man divided against himself, locked in a war between desires of the spirit and impulses of the flesh. As St. Paul puts it: “For the good that I desire, I do not do; but the evil that I do not want, this I practice.”⁴

There is another theme of Leaf by Niggle that does not come fully into focus until the last few pages. In the cut scene, the Second (disembodied) Voice says that Niggle’s Parish, for many others, is “the best introduction to the Mountains.” That’s about the best description of art’s highest aim and hope that I can think of.

Once we understand that the Mountains here represent Paradise, we can read this line as the equivalent of Tolkien saying that Niggle’s beautiful work of art offered the best introduction to Heaven. Despite being imperfect, often interrupted, and incomplete, Niggle’s painting was not futile. Like all beautiful things, it was a window on the winding, ill-lit staircase of life “through which we catch sight of another and brighter world—a world to which we belong but which we cannot enter.”⁵ “[B]eauty is the visible form of the good”⁶ that leads us to contemplate “whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable…”⁷

All art, in so much as it expresses Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, seems, in some mysterious way to embody the transcendent. As John Paul II puts it, “Every genuine [artistic] inspiration... contains some tremor of that ‘breath’ with which the Creator Spirit suffused the work of creation from the very beginning.”⁸ To summarize Simone Weil: Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity.

This is subcreation by us, the Sub-Creators… the highest form of creative expression that aims to follow in the footsteps of the Creator and work as much of eternity into their art as they can manage.

Artists, the more conscious they are of their ‘gift’ are led all the more to see themselves and the whole of creation with eyes able to communicate and give thanks, and to raise to God a hymn of praise. This is the only way for them to come to a full understanding of themselves, their vocation, and their mission.⁹

Whether we identify as creative or not, the truth is… whoever we are and whatever we do, we are all artists, entrusted with a gift and given the task of making our lives into masterpieces… of making our way to the distant Mountains and leaving as many lights along the path as possible.

We are all given a finite amount of time with unknown balances that are always diminishing. “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

1. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes in this essay are taken from J.R.R. Tolkien, Leaf by Niggle.

2. Afterword to Leaf by Niggle by Tom Shippey.

3. Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, Letter 1: On Saving Time.

4. Romans 7:19.

5. Sir Roger Scruton, Effing the Ineffable.

6. Pope John Paul II, To Artists, 1999 (“To Artists”).

7. Philippians 4:8.

8. To Artists.

9. To Artists.