Many authors have devised fictional gods or mythologies for their fantastical worlds. But fewer have made their invented mythologies the main point of their works, starting from the mythology and writing stories primarily about it, rather than incorporating invented mythology into another story to enhance the depth of its world. I can think of two authors as significant examples who have taken this approach: Lord Dunsany and J.R.R. Tolkien, namely in Dunsany’s The Gods of Pegāna and Tolkien’s Silmarillion. Despite both being examples of books primarily concerned with invented myths, the two authors have differing approaches to writing mythology, and I think these differences are interesting to consider. Here follow a couple brief thoughts on the matter.
Concerning their conceptions of gods, both authors write of pantheons of deities or their equivalents with one supreme creator god who made them, but the characters of these deities and the ways in which they interact with mortals or lesser beings are very different.
Dunsany’s mythology is largely uncaring and amoral; gods and men pursue their own self-interest, bringing them into conflict with one another, and the ultimate purposes of the gods are sometimes inscrutable and sometimes capricious and fickle. In this manner The Gods of Pegāna is almost Lovecraftian in some respects; I cannot help but think that Lovecraft’s Azathoth takes some inspiration from the ultimate creator of The Gods of Pegāna, Māna-Yood-Sushāī, who created the small gods and sleeps, dreaming to the drumming of Skarl, and when Skarl ceases to beat his drum and THE END has come, then Māna-Yood-Sushāī will awaken, “and there will be worlds nor gods no more.”
Following his Catholic faith, Tolkien’s creator god is much more Christian in character than is Māna-Yood-Sushāī, though Tolkien also has a “pantheon,” as it were, equivalent to smaller gods and demigods, in the Valar and Maiar. Eru Ilúvatar and the Valar are fundamentally benevolent and seek the well-being of the Children of Ilúvatar, the Men and Elves, though their dooms or judgments are sometimes harsh and their purposes are not always understood by Elves or Men; and in Melkor/Morgoth there is a Luciferian figure who, through his ambition and pride, falls and tempts other powerful beings to also rebel against Ilúvatar’s will, and whose own purpose is later taken up by Sauron after the conclusion of the First Age.
The structure and details of the stories themselves also show a contrast in the two authors’ approaches to mythology. Dunsany, I believe, is more focused on the atmosphere of the whole, while Tolkien is primarily focused on the narrative.
The stories of Dunsany’s Pegāna mythology in The Gods of Pegāna and to a lesser extent in Time and the Gods are short sketches loosely connected by the gods themselves and by a set of core motifs. Some of the individual details contradict each other, and a theme of the last story in Time and the Gods is that different prophets all have their own interpretations of spiritual matters and that no one can say for certain who is right. In this way I think Dunsany evokes an atmosphere or effect of real mythologies; the stories of Greek or Norse myth, for instance, developed over periods of centuries, and the details of specific myths changed over time. Because of this, The Gods of Pegāna reminds me somewhat of the Poetic Edda, a collection of Old Norse poems and poetic fragments occurring in the same mythological cycle, which sometimes contradict each other.
The Silmarillion, in contrast, tells a continuous narrative with an overarching plot, following in more or less chronological order the events of the First and (to a much smaller extent) the Second Ages. In this way I think it can be compared to the Finnish Kalevala in nature, which is a continuous poetic cycle with individual tales or episodes fitting into a broader narrative. The Kalevala was also one of Tolkien’s early inspirations.
To delve a little deeper into Tolkien’s purpose in writing The Silmarillion, I don’t think he was trying to create a “realistic” mythology, but rather an “idealistic” one. As mentioned above, real mythologies like the Greek or Norse developed over centuries, and their common stories warped and changed over time. The sources we have available to us are often fragmented and sometimes contradictory, such as the various accounts of the story of Sigurd the Volsung and the fall of the Niflungs collected in the Poetic Edda. While the development of Tolkien’s own legends, from his early poems and The Book of Lost Tales to the final Silmarillion, may mirror the development of real mythologies (there is a twelve-volume series by Christopher Tolkien about the development of his mythology and the various drafts and finished or unfinished works which comprise it), the end result was always intended to be a coherent and consistent canon of stories forming one overarching narrative passing from age to age.
I think Tolkien’s approach to creating myth in its ideal, complete form is exemplified in his two poems of Norse myth, “The New Lay of the Volsungs” and “The New Lay of Gudrún,” published together as The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, in which he attempted to reconcile the conflicting and/or incomplete accounts from the Prose Edda, Poetic Edda, and the Saga of the Volsungs into a single internally consistent version of the whole tale. They are also fascinating poems in their own right, since Tolkien wrote them in an Old Norse verse meter which he adapted to modern English. He also drew direct inspiration from this tale as well as the Kalevala for his own stories in the Silmarillion: Túrin, one of the prominent human figures in the First Age, has elements of both Sigurd and the Kalevala‘s Kullervo; and there is perhaps something of the mysterious Sampo in the Silmarils themselves.