sub-creation n.

J. R. R. Tolkien’s word for: the action or process of creating a fully realized and internally consistent imaginary or secondary world n.

SF Criticism

  • 1947 J. R. R. Tolkien On Fairy-Stories in Essays Presented to Charles Williams 51 page image J. R. R. Tolkien

    This aspect of ‘mythology’—sub-creation, rather than either representation or symbolic interpretation of the beauties and terrors of the world—is, I think, too little considered.

  • 1947 J. R. R. Tolkien On Fairy-Stories in Essays Presented to Charles Williams 67 page image J. R. R. Tolkien

    Art, the operative link between Imagination and the final result, Sub-creation.

  • 1951 J. R. R. Tolkien Letter in H. Carpenter Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1995) 145 J. R. R. Tolkien

    It is, I suppose, fundamentally concerned with the problem of the relation of Art (and Sub-creation) and Primary Reality.

  • 1956 J. R. R. Tolkien Letter 14 Jan. in H. Carpenter Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1995) 231 J. R. R. Tolkien

    I am old enough (alas!) to take a dispassionate and scientific, properly so-called, interest in these matters, and cite myself simply because I am interested in mythological ‘˜invention’, and the mystery of literary creation (or sub-creation as I have elsewhere called it) and I am the most readily available corpus vile for experiment or observation.

  • 1974 J. Mobley Toward a Definition of Fantasy Fiction in Extrapolation (vol. 15, no. 2) May 123 page image Jane Mobley bibliography

    To venture into this world the reader does not give up his experience of the Primary World entirely, for his own imagination participates in the sub-creation utilizing sensual experience and associations to make incarnate the words which create the Other World.

  • 1990 Mythlore 63 8/1

    This seems an appropriate moment to acknowledge my debt to…my son Ian for teaching me the difference between procreation and sub-creation.

  • 2005 J. Pearce Literary Giants, Literary Catholics iv. xxxii. 253

    Thus, in Tolkien’s view, there is a hierarchy of Creation. At the top is God, as Creator; then comes Creation,…finally there is subcreation, whereby man partakes of the image of the Creator through the gift of creativity.

  • 2015 J. Parker in N.Y. Times 1 Nov. a10

    Dimensions open up, speculation is invited, and what Tolkien called ‘sub-­creation’ occurs: People begin to tell their own stories about him [sc. Sherlock Holmes].


Earliest cite

J.R.R. Tolkien, 'On Fairy-Stories'

Last modified 2021-02-09 04:41:46
In the compilation of some entries, HDSF has drawn extensively on corresponding entries in OED.