Here Be Dragons

by Stefan Ekman

The only city proper that the reader encounters in Tolkien’s novel is Minas Tirith, the Tower of Vigilance, main city of Gondor after the fall of the original capital, Osgiliath. The city’s central importance is stressed by the capital C that has been bestowed upon the word City whenever it refers to Minas Tirith in the text. There is what Tolkien calls a “basic opposition” between Minas Tirith and the Dark Tower of Barad-dûr,30 noticeable from the first time the city is mentioned at the Council of Elrond (FR, II, ii, 238). Minas Tirith is a city that defends itself, most manifestly from the forces of Mordor but also from the wilderness. Onionlike, the cultural center of the city, the great hall of the rulers of Gondor, is surrounded by ring upon ring of defenses. With each ring closer to the center, wild nature is further removed and the superiority of culture affirmed; and at the middle, in front of the hall, sits what must have been the ultimate symbol of a culture devoid of nature for Tolkien: an ancient, dead tree. Inside the hall, another symbol of similar meaning appears: a throne under a flowering tree—carved from stone.

  Minas Tirith is set in a wilderness that is kept from the city by its outermost defense work and by the tame nature of the Pelennor fields. To the south are the mountains and vales of Lossarnach, and to the north lie Anórien and the Druadan Forest. The text indicates that Lossarnach has been slowly tamed over the years and partly turned into farmland; but it is still a forested country, and Minas Tirith’s citizens plainly associate it with wilderness (RK, V, i, 754; viii, 845–46). The Druadan Forest, on the other hand, used to be under Gondor’s control but has now gone feral. The wain-road running through it has been forgotten and overgrown, a road known only by the woses who live there (RK, V, v, 814–816). The woses offer a mirror image of the cultural Gondor citizen. Paul H. Kocher points out that Faramir refers to the woses as the lowest class of human civilization—the Wild Men, or the Men of Darkness—in a scale on which the men of Gondor are at the top.31 If, as it seems to Merry, the woses are indeed related to the Púkel-men statues at Dunharrow that they so much resemble, they have lived unchanged in this part of Middle-earth since the Years of Darkness, more than six millennia earlier (RK V, v, 813–14, 816; iii, 777–78; Appx B 1058). In other words, they have lived in this area longer than the people of both Gondor and Rohan (the “High” and “Middle” Men of Faramir’s taxonomy) who are now its masters. The forest is clearly the true element of the woses; clad in grass skirts, they move silently and almost invisibly through it, a part of their natural surroundings. Their willingness to aid the Riders of Rohan despite having been dehumanized and hunted as beasts by the Rohirrim adds the woses’ voices to Treebeard’s in defense of the wilderness (RK, V, v, 815). From that position, the woses also function as criticism of Gondor’s society. The men of Gondor, who style themselves as High, have forgotten their own history (the old wain-road); moreover, they have forgotten to live with nature in their City, which the woses refer to as the “Stone-houses.”

  Letting the wain-road be forgotten along with the woses of the Druadan Forest is part of shutting the wilderness out, a role more palpably played by the outer defense wall. When Pippin arrives at Minas Tirith, his first encounter is not with the city itself but with Rammas Echor, the twenty-league-long wall that surrounds the Pelennor townlands. This great structure is part of the defense of Minas Tirith, although it actually slows down the enemy forces by less than a day (RK, V, iv, 799–800). What the encircling wall does, however, is surround the urban center with tamed nature. All around the city, apart from right at its back, the land is “rich, with wide tilth and many orchards, and homesteads […] with oast and garner, fold and byre” (RK, V, i, 734). Control over the land is evident from the list of features that tame—or imply the taming of—the natural land, from the growing of crops to animal husbandry. The havoc caused to this farmland by Sauron’s armies recalls the ravaging of the gardens of the entwives in an earlier war (see TT, III, iv, 465) and foreshadows the destruction that the hobbits face on their return to the Shire.

  Tame nature goes no farther than the Minas Tirith city walls, however. These walls are meant to keep the enemy out; but only nature at its wildest could breach them, and it is implied that even furious wilderness stands no chance of tearing them down. While the city and the Tower of Ecthelion that crowns it are built of white stone, the outward face of the outer defense walls is hard, dark, and smooth. The strength of Minas Tirith’s walls is such that it would require “some convulsion that would rend the very earth on which [they] stood” to cast them down (RK, V, iv, 804). The walls’ power to withstand enemies from Mordor parallels their ability to withstand natural assault. The black surface recalls a very similar substance that covers Orthanc,32 and during Treebeard’s attack on Isengard, the hard surface even defeats the might of the enraged ents. In her insightful article “Taking the Part of Trees,” Verlyn Flieger observes that “[w]hat happens at Orthanc is not merely like the work of great tree roots, it is the work of great tree roots”33—but even when those roots can tear up rock like bread crust, they can do no more than scratch and chip the black surface of Orthanc’s walls (TT, III, x, 553; ix, 563). Minas Tirith’s walls share this imperviousness to even the wildest nature with the tower of Isengard.

  Inside the walls, the city is portrayed as a place of cultural supremacy. To hobbit eyes, it is vast and beautiful but mainly made of stone, giving the impression of being “carved by giants out of the bones of the earth,” an image echoed by the leader of the Wild Men, who explains that Gondor’s founders “carved hills as hunters carve beast-flesh” (RK, V, i, 734; v, 814). Not only physical “carving” brings the hills under cultural control. In the descriptions of the city, Mindollouin, the mountain on whose side it is built, is anthropomorphized, with metaphors giving it not only body parts like head, knee, face, and heart but also garments such as skirts, helm, and cloak (RK, V, i, 734–36, 743). Rather than encountering the mountain as a feature of the natural landscape, the reader is asked to consider it in terms of the human and artificial. Minas Tirith thus becomes further distanced from the surrounding wilderness even when that wilderness is, in fact, a mountainside to which the city clings like an artificial outcrop of white stone. In this respect, Minas Tirith is markedly different from the capital of Lothlórien. While both cities are strong and beautiful, and while their building material is repeatedly remarked upon by narrator and characters, the elven city is not distanced from the nature surrounding it. It is a city of trees, organic and “weightless,” likened to a green cloud (FR, II, vii, 344), whereas the stone city is heavy and artificial.

  In Minas Tirith, what little of the natural domain is present only emphasizes its general absence. Given the differences between elven and human cities, Legolas’s first observation when he and Gimli enter the city is hardly surprising. “They need more gardens,” the elf observes. Through him, we are presented with a city consisting of dead houses and lacking things that, as he explains to Gimli, grow and are glad (RK, V, ix, 854). In the white-paved court at the very heart of Minas Tirith, a fountain plays under the branches of a withered tree. The bright green lawn that surrounds the fountain and sets off the tree’s stark deadness is one of only three lawns that the characters come across in this city of stone. The only garden the reader is told of belongs to the Houses of Healing (RK, V, vii, 837). It is an empty garden, indeed, and far from the verdant profusion of Lothlórien, Ithilien, or even the Shire. During their stay, Faramir and Merry once walk across grass; once they sit under a tree. Nature, then, is evoked by its absence as much as by its presence: when the Ring is destroyed, the reader is told that neither birdcall nor rustle of leaf is heard (RK, VI, v, 940–41), enhancing the impression of sterility and a place in want of things that grow and are glad.

  The separation of wild nature and culture is bridged by Aragorn. He comes to Gondor as chieftain for the rangers from the northern wilderness, and one sign of his rightful claim to Gondor’s throne is that the herb athelas has healing properties in his hands (RK, V, viii, esp. 842, 844)
. Aragorn thus becomes a symbol of nature rather than culture, especially in opposition to the steward of Gondor, who sits at the center of a stone city, behind a dead tree and in front of a tree of stone. The ranger comes from the wild lands and can heal with an herb that the city’s herb masters think has no healing properties (RK, V, viii, 847). Aragorn’s use of athelas powerfully and positively evokes both wild and tame nature. When he uses it to heal Faramir, Éowyn, and Merry, the herb’s fragrance is described in similes that conjure the wonders and beauty of nature; it is, for instance, likened to “the scent of orchards, and of heather in the sunshine full of bees” (RK, V, viii, 851). The intensity of these descriptions, forcefully brought out by the use of the herb to combat the deadly affliction caused by Sauron’s servant, links Aragorn to a pristine, natural life-force. The fragrance evokes impressions not just of nature but of nature undefiled, the very antithesis of evil. The vibrant descriptions contrast sharply with the terms employed to describe the fragrance of athelas when Aragorn uses it in the wilderness. There, its smell is simply strong and refreshing, not evocative of unsullied nature (FR, II, vi, 327; I, xii, 193). The powerful connection with nature that comes with Aragorn’s application of the herb in the culture-dominated Minas Tirith suggests that the ranger’s accession to Gondor’s throne closes the divide between nature and culture in the White City.

  Aragorn’s ascent to the throne removes the barrier between the domains and provides the city with more tamed nature. Flowers are brought into the city for the coronation (RK, VI, v, 944); and Legolas makes good on his promise that if Aragorn comes into his own, the elves shall bring “birds that sing and trees that do not die” to the city (RK, V, ix, 854; VI, v, 947). As a final step toward healing the city, the dead tree is uprooted and replaced by its scion. A living tree grows at the center of the city, brought from the wilderness high on the slopes of the mountain, just as Aragorn, a ranger from the wild, assumes his position at the very center of Minas Tirith’s culture.

  The separation of nature and culture maintained in Minas Tirith is thus brought to an end by the return of the king. The return of nature in the city’s culture also signifies the healing of the long-divided people of Númenor. The wilderness that was once the kingdom of Anor, and the rangers who represent it, are brought together with the culture of Gondor, as represented by the city and people of Minas Tirith. The proper order of things, it is implied, not only involves the rightful leader but also a closeness and mixture of nature and culture. This implied order is confirmed by the only other city that is described in any detail in The Lord of the Rings, the capital of the Galadhrim. The elven city, similar to Minas Tirith in that it is defended by a wall, is not as markedly cut off from the surrounding nature. The defenses that are mentioned are a moat spanned by a bridge, a circular wall, and, where the wall’s ends overlap, tall, strong gates hung with lamps (FR, II, vii, 344). Unlike the defenses of Minas Tirith, which are given great attention, Caras Galadhon’s walls are mentioned in passing (and the moat can be inferred only by the presence of the bridge). Instead, this is a city where nature and culture are woven together.

  The predominant reason for the nature–culture interweaving of the elven capital is the way in which elven culture is defined by a close relationship to its natural surroundings. Cultural adaptation to the natural environment is one of the main elven traits, not only in The Lord of the Rings but also in the other Tolkien works set in Arda. It thus becomes problematic to say whether the mallorn forests of Lothlórien are tame or wild, as well as to identify where the Galadhrim’s adaptation to their natural surroundings ends and their control of those surroundings begins. The land’s forests are suffused with the power of Galadriel, and the elves have built platforms in the mallorn trees. Whether the capital and the surrounding forests of the Naith of Lórien differ by anything but degree cannot be determined, as the Company is blindfolded for much of its journey from the Silverlode to the capital. The city, however, gives the impression of being a well-tended forest or parkland. In Flieger’s words, it is “a city that is its own garden”;34 among the trees, there are paths, stairs, and green lawns, and in the middle of the city, a fountain from which flows a stream. Even the halls of the rulers of Minas Tirith and Caras Galadhon stand in sharp contrast to each other. The lord and lady of Lothlórien sit in a hall in a tall mallorn tree, with their backs to the bole and the crown of the living tree spreading its boughs over their thrones (FR, II, vii, 344–45). In the great hall of Minas Tirith, a crowned helmet of white marble is set over Gondor’s throne, with only a carved image of a tree behind it (RK, V, i, 738). Whereas a cultural artifact canopies the center of power in Minas Tirith, nature canopies the elven rulers.

  With rightful rulership in Middle-earth follows a blending of culture and nature. Galadriel and Celeborn are certainly the rightful rulers and, in fact, the founders of the realm. In their city, culture and nature flow into each other, blending seamlessly, a condition toward which Minas Tirith appears to move once Aragorn accedes to the throne. The ideal relationship between nature and culture in the cities echoes the ideal relationship between people and the natural world, a relationship expressed in terms of stewardship. Summing up their chapter on stewardship in Middle-earth, Matthew Dickerson and Jonathan Evans observe that “[a]s stewards and tenants, the Children [of Ilúvatar] are given authority over the world, but not to do with what they will. Rather, theirs is an authority accompanied by the responsibility to care for and nourish Ilúvatar’s good creation.”35 In The Lord of the Rings, the elves of Lothlórien are held up as good stewards of their land, and the brief description of the wonders, beauty, and peace of Caras Galadhon thus anticipates the changes that will occur in Minas Tirith once the rightful king displaces the failed steward. Good cities, the reader is told, must be ruled by the right people in the right way, allowing culture to mix with (tame) nature.

  NATURE, MAGIC, AND MISFITS: WILDERNESS WITHIN NEWFORD36

  Canadian writer Charles de Lint’s city of Newford is, according to the blurb of the collection Moonlight and Vines (1999), a “quintessential North American city,” seen as Canadian by some and as American by others.37 It is the setting for more than a dozen novels and several collections of short fiction. The stories are set under the looming shadow of social failures in Western urbanism: child abuse, homelessness, prostitution, and drug abuse. The fantastic elements range from the clearly impossible to the almost possible, from Faerie creatures and dreamworld journeys to vague suspicions and doubt.

  The city culture in Newford is challenged in three ways: physically by the wilderness it contains but cannot control; ontologically by the existence of fairies, the Otherworld, and magic; and socially by an alternative culture that comprises those who, voluntarily or involuntarily, lead a life in contravention of social norms: criminals, prostitutes, and the homeless, but also artists, poets, and street musicians. The three sets of domains in Newford intersect and overlap, and de Lint’s stories are predominantly about people who find themselves on the border between one or more domains. Newford is a city dominated by culture rather than nature, by mundanity rather than magic, by those who fit into society rather than those who do not; but in the stories, these hegemonic domains are constantly challenged by their subjugated opposites. Rather than merely examining the relation between nature and culture, we can benefit from looking at the three divisions that cut through the city.

  The first division is that between nature and culture. Just as with Minas Tirith, a clear distinction exists between wilderness and (cultured) city, with tame nature separating wild nature from culture. When police officer Thomas Morningstar drives up to the Kickaha reserve in From a Whisper to a Scream (1992), he observes how the landscape changes around him “from the crowded city streets to blocks of [industrial and commercial estates], the suburbs and finally farmland” and up into the hills, which are “heavy with pine, cedar and hardwoods.”38 The transition happens in stages from the center of cultural control, the crowded streets o
f central Newford, to the wild nature beyond the city’s periphery. The suburbs and farmland recall the tilth, orchards, and homesteads of the Pelennor. Although one need not pass through a wall in order to leave Newford, there is a distinct difference in feeling inside and outside the city. Having left the city behind, Thomas feels reborn; and to the artist Jilly Coppercorn, the most frequently recurring of Newford’s many characters, the air outside the city “tastes like it’s supercharged with oxygen and everything smells as fresh as a sweet Sunday morning.”39 The dominant picture of Newford is that of a city that keeps the wild at bay, outside and generally quite a distance beyond the city limits.

  This external, wild nature is contrasted with the parks, gardens, and other pockets of tame nature that can be found within Newford. These places of controlled nature are few and mostly only implied or mentioned in passing. In this respect, Newford is similar to Minas Tirith. Unlike Tolkien’s city, however, Newford encompasses bubbles of wilderness. These bubbles appear all over the city and come in various sizes. The largest is a section of urban blight covering several blocks, but most are as small as a riverbank or a plot of bushes and weeds. Some, like the grounds of the artists’ colony Kellygnow in Forests of the Heart (2000),40 are untouched nature, wilderness left uncontrolled but contained by the city culture around it; but most are the result of parts of the city being released, ignored, no longer controlled. Nature is allowed to go feral—the wild percolates into the city.

  Wilderness is also found beyond the city in quite a different respect, namely as part of the mostly mythical and always magical worlds accessible only to a few of the city’s inhabitants and created by even fewer. The existence of this Otherworld is just one of several indicators of the second division in Newford: the division between the domain of everyday life, very much like our primary world in its mundanity, and a domain of magical places, beings, and events. In Widdershins (2006), one of the magical characters explains how Newford is “built on a nexus of time and spirit zones, which means the spiritworld rubs shoulders with this one more than it normally would otherwise[,]” and that this accounts for the great number of unusual events in the city.41 In the stories, the magical domain actually consists of two settings: the multifarious Otherworld, where time and space behave quite differently from the mundane world, but to which some characters can travel;42 and the magical part of Newford’s reality, sharing time and space with the domain of everyday life. Various human users of magic, who can straddle the border between the domains of magic and mundanity, appear frequently in the Newford stories. The two largest and most prevalent groups of the magical domain’s denizens, however, are the native animal people, who can change between human and animal shape, and the various Faerie beings of the Seelie and Unseelie courts, who arrived with the European settlers. Both groups belong to a category of magical beings that have their origin in myth and legend, a category that in Newford also includes, for instance, a few vampires, Bigfoot, a unicorn, and the Devil. Other inhabitants of the magical domain include: spirits that find new abodes (including the powerful entity in Spirits in the Wires [2003] that takes up residence in the Wordwood literature website, and the so-called numena that take on physical life through Isabelle Copely’s paintings in Memory and Dream [1994]); personifications of abstract concepts (for instance, the spirit of the city itself as the eponymous Tallulah and a character’s Jungian shadow come to life); and ghosts of dead people that have not yet passed on.