Tolkien understood that the highest forms of creativity come via alignment with nature, not opposition to it.

This is what distinguishes Elven craft from Sauron’s magic, which seeks to alter the primary world. Unlike Sauron’s Ring, the Elves’ creations enhance one’s participation with original creation, and never seek to transgress or control it.

Humility is the key to working in alignment with nature. To create something beautiful from a tree, for example, you must first accept that whatever you could carve from its trunk could never be as beautiful as the thing itself.

Then, you are in the right frame of mind to create a thing of beauty — to harness external beauty to create a thing of internal beauty.

That is Tolkien’s key to the art of “sub-creation,” and to recovering a state of enchantment…