I've started reading Paradise Lost, which I'm pretty sure I've not read before. As expected, I'm coming across many familiar quotations.
Tolkien doesn't necessarily have to been drawing on Milton -- there could well be older sources on which he and/or Milton drew -- but this passage from Paradise Lost reminded me of the angelic beings in Tolkien:
... spirits when they please
Can either sex assume or both, so soft
And uncompounded is their essence pure,
Not tied or manacled with joint or limb
Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones
Like cumbrous flesh but in what shape they choose,
Dilated or condensed, bright or obscure,
Can execute their airy purposes
And works of love or enmity fulfill.
(I.423-31).
In Middle-earth, the Valar are a subset of the Ainur – the “offspring of [Ilúvatar’s] thought (S 15) – who have chosen, at the beginning of Time, to “put on the raiment of Earth and descend[] into it” (S 25). Tolkien elsewhere described the Ainur as “angelic immortals (incarnate only at their own will)” (Letters 411). They may “[take] to themselves shape and hue” (S 21), but their “unclad” form defies physical description. It is characterized both by “majesty” as befitting the “immeasurable vastness” of the universe, and by the “terrible sharpness” needed to shape all things in the universe with “minute precision” (S 18). The Maiar apparently share these qualities with somewhat “less power and majesty” (Letters 411).
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Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. Gordon Teskey. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000.
---. The Silmarillion. 2d ed. 1999. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001.
