Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, October 4th, 2004.

And today's poem is by J.R.R. Tolkien. It's one of his best-known poems outside of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings trilogy.

It's called Mythopoeia. Poesis is the Greek word for making. So this is a poem about myth making. And it owes some of its fame,

relative fame, I should say. But it owes some of its relative fame to the conditions that gave

rise to it. Tolkien wrote it in 1931 after an emotional conversation with two of his friends,

C.S. Lewis and Hugo Dyson. They went on a long walk one evening in Oxford as they were sometimes

want to do, and they had a bit of a debate about the nature of myth and mythology. C.S. Lewis, to whom the

poem is dedicated, though he's not named, claimed that he couldn't believe or put much value, give much value to myths because they were all untrue.

He called them lies, breathed through silver.

Tolkien went home and composed this poem as a way to sort of express his contrary position to his

friend Lewis.

Lewis would in fact credit this line of discussion between them, in part with his eventual

conversion to Christianity.

In the poem itself, Tolkien develops an argument for the

value of myth based in what he will call in other places, sub-creation, this idea that all

art made by man contains some fragment of the divine creativity that made the world and made man.

God is the great artist that creates man, and man inherits that artistic capability from God.

And so there is this kind of direct descent from God to man to the human art that man produces.

And therefore, even in myths that are full of untruths, there can be an ultimate truth.

You might recognize phrases and references that are also shot through the Lord of the Rings, the idea of the corruption of art and the bowing to the iron crown,

but also the theme of goodness and light, in particular, light and illumination, all through as symbols of what is best about mankind and about what mankind can produce.

The poem is a longer one, so I'll read it just once today.

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