have summarized the remarkable breadth of astronomical allusions contained in Tolkien’s work, but a sufficient taste may be found in Tolkien’s published letters. For example, in an April 24, 1944 letter to his son, Christopher, Tolkien recounted how he “struggled with recalcitrant passage in ‘The Ring.’ At this point I require to know how much later the moon gets up each night when nearing full, and how to stew a rabbit!” (Carpenter, 2000, p. 74). In another letter to Christopher dated May 14, 1944, he further explained that his writing was being

hindered by… trouble with the moon. By which I mean that I found my moons in the crucial days between Frodo’s flight and the present situation (arrival at Minas Morghul [sic]) were doing impossible things, rising in one part of the country and setting simultaneously in another. (p. 80)

In a letter to Naomi Mitchison dated September 25, 1954, Tolkien motivated the Númenorean story of the rounding of the world by the fact that “So deep was the impression made by ‘astronomy’ on me that I do not think I could deal with or imaginatively conceive a flat world…” (p. 197). It was this “impression” made by the scientific world which was to haunt Tolkien in his refinement of the grand mythology, collectively referred to as The Silmarillion. Specifically, it will be argued that his alternate myths of lunar creation drew from the ongoing (and sometimes vigorous) debate on the topic in scientific circles during much of Tolkien’s life.

            Readers of Tolkien’s work are generally familiar with the lunar creation myth contained in the published version of The Silmarillion (Tolkien, 2001). Yavanna and Nienna attempted in vain to heal the wounds that the Two Trees of Valinor had suffered at the hands of Melkor and Ungoliant. In response, Telperion, the elder tree, gave forth one final silver flower, and Laurelin, the younger tree, its last golden fruit, before dying. These were hallowed by Manwë and vessels were created by Aulë in order that Varda might set them into the sky as new sources of light – namely the Moon (Isil) and the Sun (Anar). Two of the Maiar, Tilion and Arien respectively, were given the task of driving the vessels, and Varda initially decreed that the two bodies would each be in the sky continually, one “issuing from the west as the other turned from the east.” However, Tilion was “wayward and uncertain in speed, and held not to his appointed path; and he sought to come near to Arien, being drawn by her splendour, though the flame of Anar scorched him, and the island of the Moon was darkened” (p. 112).  Because of Tilion’s erratic driving and ensuing complaints by Lórien and Estë (and astronomers, no doubt), Varda decreed that the two bodies would each be in the sky one at a time, passing under the Earth between setting and rising. But Tilion kept to his own design, and “went with uncertain pace, as yet he goes, and was drawn towards Arien, as he ever shall be; so that often both may be seen above the Earth together, or at times it will chance that he comes so nigh that his shadow cuts off her brightness and there is a darkness amid the day” (p. 113).

            Despite the obviously mythological nature of this tale, it does an excellent job of trying to explain many of the observed behaviors of the real Moon; namely its phases, its ever-changing apparent distance from the Sun in the sky, the fact that the Moon is sometimes visible during the day, and finally, solar eclipses. One final astronomical phenomenon was included in Tolkien’s most famous lunar creation myth. After the rising of the Moon and Sun, Melkor “assailed Tilion, sending spirits of shadow against him, and there was strife in Ilmen beneath the paths of the stars, and Tilion was the victor; as he ever yet hath been, though still the pursuing darkness overtakes him at whiles” (Tolkien, 2001, p. 113). Christopher Tolkien noted in his commentary to “The Annals of Aman” that this “evidently refers to eclipses of the moon” (Tolkien, 1993, p. 133).

            Although The Silmarillion was published as a unified work, Christopher Tolkien demonstrated through his ten volumes of the History of Middle-earth series the fact that what had appeared in print was his editorial interpretation of what had been his father’s (unfinished) life work – namely a grand mythology of Middle-earth. Multiple versions of individual myths existed, some in direct contradiction to each other. The origin of the Moon and Sun was first broached between 1910-1930 in the lengthy and detailed “The Tale of the Sun and Moon” (The Book of Lost Tales Part 1). In fact, Christopher Tolkien found the legend so long that he “shortened it in places in brief paraphrase, without omitting any detail of interest (A note of my father’s refers to this tale as ‘in need of great revision, cutting down, and [?reshaping]’)” (Tolkien, 1984a, p. 174).

As in the published Silmarillion, they were derived from the dying trees, and sailed in ships created by the Valar. There was a different explanation for the cycle of lunar phases as caused by the need for the ship of the Moon to be repeatedly “refreshed and watered with its watery dew” in order to combat its natural lack of buoyancy (Tolkien, 1984a, p. 193).  The blotchy surface features of the Moon were explained as wounds inflicted on the Moon flower when it fell from the withered branch of the silver tree (called Silpion here). As a result “some of its dewy light was roughly shaken from it, and here and there a petal was crushed and tarnished…. Despite its hurts its glory and fragrance and pale magic were very great indeed” (p. 191). However, there was no explanation for eclipses, either solar or lunar, contained within this text. Christopher Tolkien reflected on “how major a place was taken in my father’s original conception by the creation of the Sun and the Moon and the government of their motions: the astronomical myth is central to the whole. Afterwards it was steadily diminished, until in the end, perhaps it would have disappeared altogether” (p. 228). In Morgoth’s Ring, he further noted that “As the Quenta Silmarillion evolved and changed the myth had been diminished in the scale and energy of its presentation; indeed in the final form of the chapter, and in the Annals of Aman, the description of the actual origin of the Sun and Moon is reduced to a few lines” (Tolkien, 1993, p. 372).

As part of his reworking of the mythology of Middle-earth, Tolkien sometimes experimented in radical ways, perhaps none more so than in what his son called Ainulindalë C*. Christopher Tolkien argued that this “devastating-change” in the creation myth was written before the completion of The Lord of the Rings, probably circa 1946-1948 (Tolkien 1993, pp. 3-6). In brief, the Sun and Moon were created very early in the cosmological history, and the Earth was round from the start (rather than being flat until the destruction of Númenor). Melkor, ever the troublemaker, “took the Earth, while it was yet young and full of fire, to be his own kingdom,” but was initially rebuked by the Valar (p. 40).  After regrouping, Melkor

Summoned all his might and his hatred, and he said: ‘I will rend the Earth asunder, and break it, and none shall possess it.’

But this Melkor could not do, for the Earth may not be wholly destroyed against its fate; nevertheless Melkor took a portion of it, and seized it for his own, and reft it away; and he made it a little earth of his own, and it wheeled round about in the sky, following the greater earth wheresoever it went, so that Melkor could observe thence all that happened below, and could send forth his malice and trouble…. (pp. 41-42).

As one might assume, the Valar eventually “assaulted the stronghold of Melkor, and cast him out, and removed it further from the Earth, and it remains in the sky, Ithil whom Men call the Moon” (p. 42). As Christopher Tolkien recounted, circa 1948 his father sent a copy of this tale (which he called the “Round World” version) as well as a “Flat World Version” to Katherine Farrer, wife of Dr. Austin Farrer, the chaplain of Trinity College. She replied that she preferred the “Flat Earth versions best” (pp. 5-6).

            On the face of it, this radical revisiting of the lunar creation myth reflected significantly more scientific realism than merely having a round Earth rather than a flat one. Firstly, the early Earth was accurately described as being “full of fire.” This was commonly known from before Tolkien’s time. For example, an 1882 article in Knowledge described the early Earth as being “so heated as to be quite soft, even if not actually molten” (Ball, 1882, p. 332).  Secondly, the Moon’s distance from the Earth was significantly increased from its initial position. This, too, was an undisputed scientific fact determined long before Tolkien’s birth. In the eighteenth century, astronomers had noted that a comparison of current and historical eclipse records suggested that the Moon’s orbital velocity had changed. In order to conserve the angular momentum of the Earth-Moon system, this so-called “secular acceleration” had caused the Moon to recede further from the Earth at a rate of about 4 cm per year, and the Earth’s rotation to slow by approximately 0.00000002 seconds per day (Moore, 2001, p. 29). The root causes (the tidal interactions between the Sun, Earth, and Moon) were discerned through the work of a number of astronomers[2], culminating in the seminal work of G.H. Darwin (which will be discussed in detail later in this paper).

            A final item of startling realism can be found in Tolkien’s description of the surface of the Moon after Melkor’s defeat. Not only did it correctly “become a mirror… catching the light of the Sun, when she is invisible” (Tolkien 1993, p. 42), but its surface had “both blinding heat and cold intolerable, as might be looked for in any work of Melkor, but now at least it is clean, yet utterly barren; and nought liveth there, nor ever hath, nor shall” (p. 42). Again, this description, although couched in poetic tones, accurately reflected long-known facts about the real Moon. An 1869 textbook in astronomy described that during each lunar month, for two weeks “the sun pours down its rays unmitigated by any atmosphere to temper them. To this long, torrid day succeeds a night of equal length and polar cold…. What a bleak waste! A barren, voiceless desert!” (Steele, 1869, p. 150). Fisher’s The Story of the Moon (1943), a popularized work published closer in time to the writing of Ainulindalë C*, cited the temperature extremes of the Moon as between -243°F to 214°F, nearly identical to modern accepted values (p. 202). Fisher described the Moon as a “desolate world plunged in eternal silence, with no blue sky, no twilight or dawn… no rainbows, and no life” (p. 203).

            Given Tolkien’s well-documented interest in the sciences and working popular knowledge in that area, the scientific realism of Ainulindalë C* might not arouse undue interest by critics and readers, except that the myth itself, by its very nature, was so jarringly different from the mainstream mythos of The Silmarillion. Three obvious questions can be seen to arise, and will be tackled in the remainder of this work: 1) What drove Tolkien to attempt such a radical rewriting of his lunar myth; 2) Given the scientific realism already noted in this new myth, was there a deeper kernel of truth still to be discovered; and 3)  Did Tolkien create other alternate lunar myths also deeply influenced by scientific theory and knowledge of his day?

            It is clear that at some point before the writing of Ainulindalë C*, Tolkien apparently became concerned with the scientific realism of his cosmology, including what he later called “the astronomically absurd business of making the Sun and Moon” (Tolkien, 1993, p. 370). He approached this problem from two primary angles: alterations to his cosmological models,[3] and using a “Númenórean model” for the mythological framework (Noad, 2000, p. 65). Christopher Tolkien summarized the latter as the acknowledgement that the “astronomical myths of the Elder Days cannot be regarded as a record of the traditional beliefs of the Eldar in any pure form, because the High-elves of  Aman cannot have been thus ignorant; and the cosmological elements in The Silmarillion are essentially a record of mythological ideas, complex in origin, prevailing among Men” (Tolkien, 1993, pp. 370-371). Both approaches appeared in The History of Middle-earth volumes, most notably the section of Morgoth’s Ring entitled “Myths Transformed.” Although he apparently wrestled with this issue for a number of years (until the late 1950s or beyond), in at least one note Tolkien did accept the fact that these “Mannish” myths could still be utilized in his writing without leading to a “great upheaval in the essential ‘world-structure’ of The Silmarillion, but on the contrary provided a basis for its retention” (p. 371).  He referred to his cosmological myths (such as the Two Trees) as a “‘creative error’ on the part of its maker, since it could have no imaginative truth for people who know very well that such an ‘astronomy’ is delusory” (p.371).

Regardless of this solution to the problem, during the late 1950s Tolkien experimented with at least two additional alternate explanations for the Moon’s origin which differed significantly from the origin proposed in Ainulindalë C*. These are found in the “problematic” text Christopher Tolkien dubbed II in “Myths Transformed” (Tolkien, 1993, pp. 375-385). The first (referred to here as IIa) was part of “a discussion, with proposals for the ‘regeneration’ of the mythology” and the second (IIb) an “abandoned narrative.” IIa affirmed that “the cosmogonic mythology should represent Arda as it is, more or less: an island in the void ‘amidst the innumerable stars’. The Sun should be coeval with Earth, though its relative size need not be considered, while the apparent revolution of the Sun around the Earth will be accepted” (p. 375). A new myth was then outlined, in which Melkor and the Valar battled during “supposed primeval epochs before Earth became habitable. A time of fire and cataclysm” (p. 376). In order to provide light by which to watch Melkor, the Valar then created the Moon “Out of earth-stuff or Sun?” (p. 376).

In IIb, it is written that the Valar “resolved to alter the fashion of Arda and of Earth, and in their thought they devised Ithil, the Moon. In what way and with what labours they wrought in deed this great device of their thought, who shall say…. Some say that it was out of Earth itself that Ithil was made, and thus Ambar was diminished; others say that the Moon was made of like things to the Earth and of that which is Eä itself as it was made in the Tale” (p. 382). The manuscript evidently became hard to read further on, and the interesting fragment “For some have held that the Moon was at first aflame, but was later made [?strong]” was one of the last legible (p. 383). Although these two additional lunar creation myths, and that of Ainulindalë C*, were abandoned by Tolkien, given his reason for constructing them (to represent the world “as it is”), they should be analyzed in order to discover their presumed scientific source. It is posited here that all three “myths” reflected the ongoing scientific debate concerning the origin of the Moon circa 1930-1960.

Before the Apollo moon missions, all scientific theories of lunar origin fell into three broad camps, somewhat crassly referring to the Moon as Earth’s sister (born nearby out of material similar to Earth), daughter (born from the Earth), or wife (born elsewhere in the solar system out of unrelated material and later captured into its current orbit).[4] The earliest versions of all three theories had been proposed by 1930, and in “the next twenty-five years there was neither any major progress in developing theories of lunar origin nor any clear agreement on the existing theories” (Brush, 1982, p. 892). In fact, all three theories suffered from such problems that famed planetary researcher Harold Urey had once stated that “science had proved that the Moon cannot exist!” (Moore, 2001, p. 27).

            The “sister” theory (more scientifically referred to as co-accretion or binary accretion) was an outgrowth of Laplace’s famed Nebular Hypothesis for the creation of the solar system. In 1756, he had proposed that the solar system had begun as a huge swirling cloud (or nebula) of gas. As it collapsed under its self-gravitation, the central mass became the sun, while rings of material were spun off in succession (from the outer regions first) which then coalesced to form the planets. Although it was widely accepted in the first half of the nineteenth century, and a modified version of Laplace’s model is generally accepted today, Laplace faced widespread criticism beginning around 1860 because of one undeniable fact – his theory predicted that in order to conserve angular momentum, the sun, being the clear center of mass of this rotating system, should spin much faster than it actually does (Struve, 1956, p. 349). The apparent contradiction was explained in the mid-twentieth century by the breaking action of the sun’s magnetic field. In 1873 Edouard Roche gave credence to the idea that the Moon might have simply been formed from a ring of material spun off the Earth (analogous to the Sun’s birthing of the Earth), and in the 1890s geologist Grove Karl Gilbert added that the “leftover” particles would have formed the Moon’s craters (Brush, 1982, p. 891).

It is possible to draw a connection between this model of lunar creation and Tolkien’s  IIb myth where the Moon was “made of like things to the Earth and of that which is Eä itself as it was made in the Tale” (Tolkien, 1993, p. 382). However, this draws attention to one of the main criticisms of the co-accretion model. It predicts that the composition of the Moon be much closer to that of the Earth than it is in reality.[5] Given that the Earth and Sun were seen to derive from the same solar nebula, it is also possible to draw a possible connection to myth Ia, where it was said that the Moon might be made of solar material (p. 376). However, an alternative to the Laplacian theory of planetary formation might also be referenced here. In 1900, T.C. Chamberlin and F.R. Moulton of the University of Chicago proposed that the planets (and by analogy the moons) formed from material that was ripped off the Sun by the action of a passing star. Similar models were later proposed by Sir James Jeans and Harold Jeffreys. These so-called “tidal models” enjoyed popularity between 1900-1935, and as late as 1943 were called by one popular-level astronomy book “the prevailing theory for the origin of the solar system” (Fisher, 1943, p. 22).

The “daughter” model of lunar formation first appeared not in a scientific paper, but a lengthy poem, The Botanic Garden, completed in 1792 by Erasmus Darwin, famed grandfather of evolutionary scientist Charles Darwin. A noted scientist and poet, Darwin made contributions to atmospheric physics, geology, and botany, and published his own version of evolutionary theory. His poetry, while “much derided” today, was a noted inspiration for Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Shelleys (Percy and Mary).[6] In The Botanic Garden, Darwin sought to expose the general public to various topics in science through the framework of a poem in which the Goddess of Botany addressed various mythical creatures. In his note to Canto 1, line 73, Darwin explained that

The Rosicrucian doctrine of Gnomes, Sylphs, Nymphs, and Salamanders affords proper machinery for a philosophic poem; as it probable that they were originally the names of hieroglyphic figures of the Elements, or of Genii presiding over their operations. The Fairies of more modern days seem to have been derived from them, and to have inherited their powers. (E. Darwin, 2003)[7]

Canto II lines 11-16 of the poem described how the “whirling sun this ponderous planet hurl’d,” explained in the author’s notes as the birth of the planets by expulsion from volcanoes on the sun. The source of Darwin’s theory is unclear, but he made reference to the 1769 discovery by Alexander Wilson, Professor of Practical Astronomy at the University of Glasgow, that sunspots were apparently cavities in the solar surface. Darwin interpreted these as “the cavities from whence the planets and comets were ejected by explosions” (E. Darwin, 2003, note to Canto II, line 14). In lines 73-84, Darwin then described what was apparently his own novel theory of lunar creation:

Gnomes! how you shriek’d! When through the troubled air

Roar’d the fierce din of elemental war;

When rose the continents, and sunk the main,

And Earth’s huge sphere exploding burst in twain, –

Gnomes! how you gazed! when from her wounded side

Where now the South-Sea heaves its waste of tide,

Rose on swift wheels the Moon’s refulgent car,

Circling the solar orb; a sister-star (Darwin, 2003).

In his author’s notes, Darwin explained that part of the cataclysmic events that wracked the newborn Earth would be the expulsion of the Moon, apparently from what is now the Pacific Basin. He further explained how conservation of momentum would cause the Moon and Earth to recoil from each other and eventually set up a mutual orbit which would slowly increase in distance due to tidal forces. This was apparently Darwin’s explanation for the secular acceleration of the moon described earlier.

            Although Erasmus Darwin is widely recognized as the first to clearly articulate the possibility that the Earth directly gave birth to the Moon, this idea was apparently not widely circulated among the scientific community of his time, perhaps because of the literary vehicle in which Darwin chose to discuss the model.[8] It cannot be assumed that Tolkien read The Botanic Garden. One could, however, make a strong case that, as a resident of Birmingham in his youth, Tolkien would have at least been aware of Erasmus Darwin. Darwin was one of the fourteen members of the famed Lunar Society, a group of scientists and industrialists who met monthly in homes around Birmingham on the Monday afternoon nearest the full moon from 1765 – 1813 (Schofield, 1963, p. 2).

A detailed model of lunar fission was first developed by George H. Darwin, great-grandson of Erasmus and son of Charles. By the end of the nineteenth century, G.H. Darwin was not only a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge, but he had become “the world’s leading authority on the tides, and his book The Tides and Kindred Phenomena in the Solar System (1898) – a semipopular account of nearly the whole compass of his scientific work… -- rapidly became a scientific bestseller…” (Kushner, 1993, p. 206). Beginning in 1878, G.H. Darwin began a highly mathematical analysis of the history of the Earth-Moon system and its tides. Taking into account the current secular acceleration of the Moon, he traced the evolution of the system backwards to a time (he estimated as much as 100 million years in the past) when the two bodies were actually touching and the Earth was spinning much faster than in the current day (perhaps as fast as once every three to five hours). Taking into account the well-accepted fact that both the Earth and Moon were initially semi-fluid (molten), Darwin utilized previous studies of the theoretical behavior of rapidly rotating fluid objects and came to “irresistible” conclusion that “if the Moon and Earth were ever molten viscous bodies, then they once formed parts of a common mass” (G. Darwin, 1878, p. 581). Darwin understood fairly early on that the newborn Earth might not have ever spun fast enough to spontaneously fission off the Moon, so he suggested a second mechanism. Because the early Earth was “molten and plastic… the Sun must have produced tidal oscillations in the molten rock, just as the Sun and the Moon now raise tides in our oceans” (G. Darwin, 1898, p. 445). This, he believed, would have triggered the fission process.

            Darwin’s work was well-accepted by many of his scientific colleagues, and over the next two decades found wide readership in the popular press through articles by Darwin himself and R.S. Ball, Royal Astronomer of Ireland. In 1882 Osmond Fisher suggested that the force of the Moon’s birth cracked the Earth’s surface in ways that never healed, thus giving rise to the ocean basins (including the Pacific and Atlantic), and “explain the rude parallelism which exists between the contours of America and the Old World” (Fisher, 1882, p. 244). American astronomer W. H. Pickering popularized the idea of the Moon’s birth creating the Pacific Ocean in 1903, and it became a standard addition to Darwin’s theory in the popular mindset. Although the idea is now understood to be without scientific merit, it temporarily provided an alternate (and catastrophic) explanation for the same features noted as evidence for Alfred Wegener’s continental drift theory (Brush, 1996, p. 197).

In his preface to Volume 2 of his collected Scientific Papers, Darwin (1909, p. vii) affirmed that “I would maintain that we may now hold with confidence that the moon originated by a process of fission from the primitive planet….” His self-confidence in the veracity of his theory was widely shared by his colleagues (and the popular press) in the early twentieth century. For example, in his encyclopedic The Outline of Science, J. Arthur Thomson accepted Darwin’s theory as fact, stating that “Earth and Moon were once one body, but the high rate of rotation caused this body to split into two pieces…” (Thomson, 1922, p. 292). A U.S. Office of Education script for a children’s radio program circa 1936 explained that

Once upon a time – a billion or so years ago – when the Earth was still young – a remarkable romance developed between the Earth and the Sun – according to some of our ablest scientists…. In those days the Earth was a spirited maiden who danced about the princely Sun – was charmed by him --- yielded to his attraction, and became his bride…. The Sun’s attraction raised great tides upon the Earth’s surface… the huge crest of a bulge broke away with such momentum that it could not return to the body of mother Earth. And this is the way the Moon was born! (Brush, 1986, p. 9)

This is not, however, to say that the fission model had been universally embraced by the scientific community. Serious questions began to be raised about its feasibility almost immediately[9], mainly on dynamical grounds. In 1930, Harold Jeffreys, one of the model’s earlier supporters, began to criticize the theory based on new calculations which he believed showed that the Sun could never raise high enough tides in the infant Earth to cause fission. Although directing readers to his own tidal theory of planet formation, in which a rogue star actually collided with the Sun, he admitted that “The formation of satellites on this theory is not understood as yet, but at all events it seems unlikely that the moon will offer any difficulty not presented by any other satellite” (p. 173). Jeffreys’ optimism proved unfounded. By the 1950s, the fission theory was considered as problematic as any other of the three classic models of lunar origin. Despite this, as late as 1952, Harold Urey wrote that it was “widely assumed by well-informed people that the Moon came out of the Earth, presumably from what is now the Pacific Ocean” (p. 55).

Returning to Tolkien’s alternate lunar origin myths, we find an obvious correlation between all three and the fission theory, as in each it was suggested that the Moon might be made from the Earth. The language of the Ainulindalë C*  seems closest to the scientific model, as it not only has the Moon “reft” from the Earth, but it refers to the molten state of the early Earth, and the secular acceleration of the moon’s orbit over time. Given the widespread acceptance of the fission model outside of the scientific arena well into the mid-twentieth century, its clearly catastrophic nature (including the now-ridiculed notion that it could explain the ocean basins and avoid the necessity of slow continental drift), as well as the reputation of G.H. Darwin himself, it is all but certain that Tolkien was well aware of this theory, and not unreasonable that he would have incorporated it into his alternate myths of lunar origin.

The capture (“wife”) model of lunar origin had been suggested by several authors in the nineteenth century but was largely ignored until eccentric American astronomer Thomas Jefferson Jackson See openly attacked the work of G.H. Darwin. For example, in an editorial printed in a 1909 issue of Scientific American, he flatly stated that “the moon never had a terrestrial origin, and all this terrestrial speculation is without foundation…. All the bodies of the solar system have been captured, and not one of them formed from the central masses which now govern their motions” (See, 1909, p. 91). Although later authors proved that it was exceedingly difficult to capture a satellite as large as the Moon into a regular orbit, and that the theory predicted that the Moon might have a much more diverse composition as compared to the Earth, the capture model was revived in the 1950s by Harold Urey and Horst Gerstenkorn (Brush, 1996, p. 179). For whatever reason, it appears that Tolkien did not find this theory useful in his experimentation with science-based lunar creation myths.

Although it appeared that in the 1950s Tolkien had reached a (perhaps barely) palatable compromise in the “Númenórean model” in his search for balance between mythological aesthetics and scientific realism, he apparently continued to worry about the matter. Noad (2000) suggested the possibility that Tolkien could have solved his problem by implementing the concept of “secondary planes or degrees” explored in The Notion Club Papers. He cited a 1964 interview with Tolkien in which he “seemed to say that Middle-earth was not our world at a different era, but at a different stage of imagination” (Noad, 2000, p. 51). In the end, the problem seemed to be that Tolkien had approached his acts of sub-creation in a perhaps too scientific manner. Noad (2000) suggested that The Silmarillion was never completed because Tolkien “judged the texts of which it was composed with the same scholarly discipline he brought to real texts and found himself a stern judge, one very hard to please” (p. 32). Tolkien’s struggles have illustrated well the implicit danger in creating ‘scientific myths’:

Myths are not about truth. Myths are about the human struggle to deal with the great passages of time and life…. They meet a need in the psychological or spiritual nature of humans that has absolutely nothing to do with science. To try and turn a myth into a science, or a science into a myth, is an insult to myths, an insult to religion, and an insult to science. (Shermer, 130)

In the 1960s and 1970s, scientists struggled with their seemingly inadequate theories as well. In light of the analysis of Apollo data, a new scientific model of lunar origin was independently suggested by Hartmann and Davis (1975) and Cameron and Ward (1976). In this so-called Impact-Trigger Hypothesis (affectionately nicknamed “The Big Whack”), the Earth was struck by a Mars-sized asteroid while its outer layers were still semi-molten, and much of its iron had already sunken to its core. A mixture of asteroid debris and iron-depleted material from the Earth’s mantle and crust coalesced in orbit to form the moon. This model adopted pieces of all three of the classic lunar origin, and computer models have shown that it appears to be dynamically reasonable. Although the Impact-Trigger model has been included in astronomy textbooks as a matter of course, its acceptance is not as solid as that for the Big Bang (formation of the universe) or even the modern version of the Nebular Hypothesis (origin of the solar system). One can only speculate what Tolkien would have thought about this new catastrophic model of lunar origin.

In conclusion, just as none of his lunar creation myths seemed to be absolutely successful to Tolkien, astronomers circa the 1970s were faced with the reality that “the body with the most mysterious origin in the solar system dominates the night sky” (Hammond, 1974, p. 911). As recently as twenty years ago, lunar astronomer John A. Wood (1986) summarized his review of scientific lunar origin models with the following: “How the Earth’s moon was formed is still not known. Perhaps it will never be” (p. 47). Once cannot help but think that Tolkien would offer a sympathetic smile to the astronomical community – and perhaps even a wry “I told you so.”

References:

Ball, R.S. (1882). Birth of the Moon by Tidal Evolution. Knowledge, 1, 331-2, 352-3.

Brush, S.G. (1982). Nickel For Your Thoughts: Urey and the Origin of the Moon. Science, 217 (4563), 891-898.

Brush, S.G. (1986). Early History of Selenogony. In W.K. Hartmann, R.J. Phillips, & G.J. Taylor (Eds.), Origin of the Moon: Proceedings of the Conference, Kona, Hawaii, 1984 (pp. 3-15). Tucson: Planetary Institute.

Brush, S.G. (1996). Fruitful Encounters. Cambridge: Cambridge University.

Cameron, A.G.W. & Ward, W. (1976). The Origin of the Moon (abstract). In Lunar Science VII, (pp.120-122). Houston: The Lunar Science Institute.

Carpenter, H. (Ed.). (2000). The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Darwin, E. (2003). The Botanic Garden, Part 1. Retrieved June 7, 2005, from http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext06/8bot110.txt

Darwin, G.H. (1878). On the Precession of a Viscous Spheroid. Nature, 18, 580-582.

Darwin, G.H. (1898). The Evolution of Satellites. Atlantic Monthly, 81, 444-455.

Darwin, G.H. (1909). Scientific Papers, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University.

Duriez, Colin. (2001). Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings: A Guide to Middle-earth. Mahwah: Hidden Spring.

Fisher, O. (1882, January 12). On the Physical Cause of the Ocean Basins. Nature, 243-244.

Flieger, V. (1997). A Question of Time. Kent: Kent State University

Hammond, A.L. (1974). Exploring the Solar System (III): Whence the Moon? Science, 186 (4167), 911-913.

Hartmann, W.K. & Davis, D.R. (1975). Satellite-sized Planetesimals and Lunar Origin. Icarus, 24, 504-515.

Jeffreys, H. (1930). Resonance Theory and the Origin of the Moon. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 91, 169-173.

King-Hele, D. (1998). The 1997 Wilkins Lecture: Erasmus Darwin, The Lunaticks, and Evolution. Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 51(1), 153-180.

Kushner, D. (1993). Sir George Darwin and a British School of Geophysics. Osiris, 8, 196-223.

Larsen, Kristine (2002, November 23). “The Astronomy of Middle-earth.” Talk presented at RingCon, retrieved from http://www.physics.ccsu.edu/larsen/astronomy_of_middle.htm.

Lewis, A. & Currie, E. (2002). The Uncharted Realms of Tolkien. Weston Rhyn: Medea.

Manning, Jim (2003, December). “Elvish Star Lore.” Planetarian, 14-22.

Moore, P. (2001). On the Moon. London: Cassell.

Noad, C.E. (2000). On the Construction of “The Silmarillion.” In V.Flieger & C.F. Hostetter (Eds.), Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth (pp. 31-67). Westport: Greenwood.

Owen, Richard (1857). Key to the Geology of the Globe. New York: A.S. Barnes & Co.

Quiñonez, J. & Raggett, N. (1990, July). “Nólë i Meneldilo: Lore of the Astronomer,” Vinyar Tengwar, 12, 5.

Schofield, R.E. (1963). The Lunar Society of Birmingham. London: Oxford University.

See, T.J.J. (1909). The Terrestrial Origin of the Moon – a Protest. Scientific American, 101, 91.

Shermer, M. (1997). Why People Believe Weird Things. New York: W.H. Freeman.

Steele, J.D. (1869). Fourteen Weeks in Descriptive Astronomy. New York: A.S. Barnes & Co.

Struve, O. (1956, June). On the Origin of the Solar System. Sky and Telescope, 349-352.

Thomson, J.A. (Ed.) (1922). The Outline of Science, Vol. 1. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

Tolkien, J.R.R. (1984a). The Book of Lost Tales, Part 1. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Tolkien, J.R.R. (1984b). The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Tolkien, J.R.R. (1993). Morgoth’s Ring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Tolkien, J.R.R. (2001). The Silmarillion, 2nd ed. NY: Ballantine.

Wood, J.A. (1986). Moon Over Mauna Loa: A Review of Hypotheses of Formation of Earth’s Moon. In W.K. Hartmann, R.J. Phillips, & G.J. Taylor (Eds.), Origin of the Moon: Proceedings of the Conference, Kona, Hawaii, 1984 (pp. 17-55). Tucson: Planetary Institute.