Isaiah Langford - Man as Sub-Creator - 2/5/2026

  In his poem “Mythopoeia,” J. R. R. Tolkien attempts to provide his dear friend C. S. Lewis with a way to conceptualize the Christian faith as both myth and historical reality; this trend in thought or pattern of thinking clearly influenced Lewis’s “Myth Became Fact,” as it provides the necessary ideas which Lewis in that essay delineated.

To me, however, the most interesting part of the poem has more to do with Tolkien’s understanding of the role of humanity; near the end of his work, he uses the phrasing “man, sub-creator,” and this gives great perspective to what influenced both Tolkien and Lewis. The two, especially following Tolkien’s successful conversion of his friend to Christianity, saw their works of fiction as a way to participate in the divine creation, since from the perspective of Christians, man was created in God’s “image and likeness,” and God was the first creator. Thus, by inventing cultures and crafting their own mythologies, the two men experienced creation from the perspective of the Creator, rather than solely from the perspective of the creation.

This harkens back to a discussion we had in class concerning the authorship of one’s own life. The idea there was that we control our actions and therefore write the narrative we live, because it is in our nature as humans to take all events and conform them to the concept of the story; at our core, we are storytellers. Tolkien and Lewis, then, took this concept and applied it to their work, becoming not just authors of their own lives but of physical books which we can now read and learn from. However, because the two were aware of a greater Author–that being the Christian God they both believed in–they were ready to accept their work as flowing from the divine reality they were caught up in. Thus, the two authors of such magnificent masterpieces in the fantasy genre understood intrinsically how they were capable of authoring not just the stories of fictional characters but their own lives as well.

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