Tolkien's Views on Creation and Evolution

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Originally Posted by R.R.J Tolkien

I than reread the letters of Tolkien and it seemed he and Lewis were open to and likely accepted at various times the earth was old [not my view]. It seems now to me that they both either old earth creationist, or some form of intelligent design. It is to bad the modern creation movement did not start earlier, I would have like both Lewis and Tolkien's opinions on it, though I think they both may have held this view as well.

Does anyone have information on this subject?

I'm really not more than very casually informed about creationism and its various forms and I'm not too interested either so I don't exactly know where you are coming from. But have you read the later volumes of the History of Middle Earth? If I remember correctly, the 10th one, Morgoth's Ring, includes an ambitious but ultimately futile attempt to rewrite the Silmarillion to be more in sync with scientific facts that were well known in the mid 20th century. Such as the vast timespan geological processes need to form the land, the unlikelihood of plant-life before the sun and not least the silliness of a flat earth.

Tolkien wanted the story to resonate true even to us modern people I believe, that we should be able to imagine the stories to really come out of a mythological past in our world. And that this would be hard if it ignored well known scientific facts such as the above mentioned and others.

The old stories where better and the rewrite-attempt was rightly scrapped but it should make it clear that Tolkien accepted the strong scientific evidence that the Earth was very very old and that the surrounding space is vast and even older. I'd suppose he did believe that God created Man in one way or another.