Some critics fault Tolkien for rejecting much of the substantial philosophy of his own era. They see him as the one who takes the easy way out, and they accuse him of rejecting ideas that he has not fully considered. One of the most dramatic of those critics is Catharine R. Stimpson, who declared in her 1969 study, “Tolkien is bogus: bogus, prolix, and sentimental. His popularization of the past is a comic strip for grown-ups . . . to those who have studied over the ambiguous texts of twentieth-century literature in the classroom, he offers a digest of modern despair: The Waste Land, with notes, without tears.”3 In her view, Tolkien rejects the modern, both as it exists in the real world and as an artistic approach, without first wrestling with it. She sees him ignoring the challenge that modernism throws before us all, the challenge of finding our own truth in a world where there is no capital ‘T’ truth available. She perceives him as offering an impossibly simple answer. She proposes that he glamorizes many of the elements that our contemporary world has appropriately discarded: hereditary kingship, a stubborn faith that supernatural powers will resolve human crises, and a sense that the darker and shorter peoples of the South are generally pagan evil-doers. Stimpson regards The Lord of the Rings as a fad—although it is now more popular than ever, more than a generation after she made her claim—and she cannot imagine that future audiences will turn to Tolkien for any kind of inspiration.
To be fair, though, Tolkien wanted his stories to serve as an imaginary history for the modern world. As the appendices to The Return of the King make clear, he understood his Middle-earth as our earth at a much earlier time. With the end of the War of the Rings, Aragorn ushers in a new golden age, but it is only a temporary one. His descendents gradually lose the nobility that they inherit from him and, as ages pass and people forget the glory that was the kingdom of Aragorn, lesser humans come to power and forget the “Truth” that was the secret weapon for the heroes of the War of the Rings. In other words, The Lord of the Rings is, in part, a history of how modern discontent came to be. As Tolkien puts it in a letter about why he abandoned the only story he sets in the Fourth Age, adventure is very different when it begins and ends with decisions that humans make. He started the story but stopped, explaining, “I could have written a ‘thriller’ about the plot and its discovery and overthrow—but it would be just that. Not worth doing” (L, p. 344). Story functions differently for him when there are no superhuman evils remaining. What evil there is, apparently an “orc-cult” of young boys who try to revive interest in the now extinct orcs, comes from humans, and it falls to humans to wipe it out. There are great truths and great powers over the Sea, but they no longer act in visible and defined ways. The world is different, sometimes thrilling still, but it is somehow diminished, changed so that we can see that it really is our own world.
In the end, Tolkien seems to explore a middle ground in his flight from contemporary crises back to his imagined origins for them. He does not address the twentieth-century conditions that caused modern ideas to have such widespread acceptance. Instead, he invents a crisis for Middle-earth that forces his characters to confront some of the same intellectual challenges as his readers. His characters have to make some of the same difficult decisions that we do about what to believe, but they have the good fortune to live in a world where there is a right answer. Their crises seem familiar, but their triumphs and successes can never be anything more than fantasies to the rest of us. One reason The Lord of the Rings works for so many contemporary readers is that it provides a world in which we can glimpse an authentic and powerful truth, one that we know is correct even though great powers of evil and error threaten to overwhelm it. His heroes seem like authentic heroes because doubt and despair—the great threats of the modern world—are legitimate enough threats that they claim would-be heroes such as Saruman and Denethor.
Tolkien may have little to tell us about what modernism is, but he does provide one key insight into how it works. He knows that, in a world of ambiguity, his readers crave certainty. He himself is saddened to find that the intellectual and cultural traditions he prizes seem as if they are fading away or under attack. In the world that he invents, such traditions are better than our own because they are the Platonic originals of the ones we know in our own lives. His gods send out angels, such as Gandalf, whom we can touch and with whom we can talk. His messiahs really do return to establish their kingdoms on earth. Tolkien acknowledges that he is creating a fiction, something that he hopes will entertain his readers, but something that he hopes as well will give them a place of temporary retreat from the modern world. The same wisdom that his heroes use to escape from the evils of Middle-earth serves as a story that lets his contemporary readers escape, briefly, from the challenge of the modern. Middle-earth has enough landmarks to tell us that it will one day develop into our own, but it remains more magical. In it, Tolkien imagines what it would be like if we could know what was good and right without having any doubts, and yet he still presents the good as threatened by evils that seem dimly familiar to our own. Through his works, he offers us the fantasy of a world heading toward modernism but not quite there yet, a place where we still have the power to reject what threatens to overwhelm us.
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1 All that Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), p. 15.
2 All that is Solid Melts into Air, p. 15.
3 J.R.R. Tolkien (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 43.
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Tolkien’s Green Time: Environmental Themes in The Lord of the Rings
ANDREW LIGHT
I’m talking to my friend Julia who asks what I’m working on at the moment. Somewhat sheepishly I tell her that it’s an essay on The Lord of the Rings for a book in a series that has included collections on Seinfeld, The Simpsons, The Matrix, and other bits of popular culture. I’m somewhat embarrassed because she’s a serious art historian and I worry that she’ll mistakenly think I’m dabbling in cultural studies.
Her response, however, surprises me: “Tolkien is wonderful!” she says. “Seriously, I read The Lord of the Rings twice as a kid and his writing made a huge impression on me. For years I forbade my brother from reading it because I wanted to have this world all for myself.” For many people like Julia, Middle-earth is a world of importance to them, not simply a fictional realm; it’s a safe haven of sorts that they visit over and over again to find re-enchantment and renewal.
But Julia and I both agree that my assigned task, to write a chapter on the environmental elements in The Lord of the Rings, is a daunting one. Isn’t the entire series about the environment, or nature, and aren’t all the characters in the novel representations of some part of nature? Scholars such as Patrick Curry have argued that Tolkien’s works are thoroughly infused with a strong environmentalist message.1 Curry goes so far as to claim that The Lord of the Rings served as a kind of clandestine environmental manifesto that was later most appreciated during the rise of the radical environmental movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Tolkien himself, who disliked allegory, would have demurred if offered such a characterization of his own work. When faced with comparisons between the plot of The Lord of the Rings and the events of World War II, he insisted that there was no intended connection to any contemporary events.
Yet it is impossible to ignore the strong environmental themes in the book, especially in the devastations wrought by Sauron and Saruman, keepers of the fictional two towers. For example, at the end of the cycle when the hobbits return to the Shire to find that Saruman has transformed their pastoral Eden into a nineteenth-century industrial wasteland (a kind of Middle-earth version of turn-of-the-century Manchester or Pittsburgh), don’t we get a clear critique of the ravages of industrialism pulling apart the traditional connections between people and the land? Couldn’t this be used as a launching pad for a discussion of sustainable development or globalization today and the struggle to prevent what happened in the industrialized North fro
m happening in the rural South?
Probably. But it is a virtue when appreciating any text to try to respect the unique integrity of a work and what it does differently from other texts. Discussing this issue with Julia I hear myself saying that if I wanted to write something about the representation of struggles for sustainable development in novels or films I wouldn’t choose Tolkien as my focus. The reason is not because we can’t distill such a message from The Lord of the Rings but because such a claim seems more peripheral to the power of these texts to create a world where other more unique things are happening. This is not to pander to Tolkien’s wishes on how he should be read, but to try to do justice to the very real magic that these works have played in people’s lives.
This chapter, then, will not go so far as a reading like Curry’s but will still highlight one important aspect of the environmental associations to be found in these works: the representation of a kind of geologic or naturally scaled time in The Lord of the Rings. Though not literally a representation of geological time as we know it (which measures the billions of years of existence of the earth from its primordial birth to the present through the geologic record), The Lord of the Rings nevertheless embodies a time scale attuned more to the natural world and upon which the main drama of the cycle of the story is played out. Especially through the characters of Tom Bombadil and the ents, The Lord of the Rings makes comprehensible a sense of the past through which “nature” sets the context for events in the present. From this long perspective, which I will call “green time,” Tolkien helps us understand the importance of nature as the foreground and background of all events of any significance to us, while at the same time encouraging our responsibility for it. Once we recognize this part of the text we may be in a better position to appreciate how it can help us to overcome our current environmental problems, whether those solutions were intended by Tolkien or not.
Who Stands for What?
On a first pass it is tempting to take the various peoples of Middle-earth, especially the nonhuman ones, as stand-ins for various parts of nature. According to such a view, appreciation of those peoples should in turn help us to appreciate different parts of the natural world. We might see elves as embodying the forest, dwarves the mountains, and hobbits the domesticated countryside. After all, each of these peoples almost exclusively occupies these places. While they will venture between these locations in the course of the story, they appear to feel truly at home only in their own environment.
Gimli the dwarf, for example, is the only one in the Fellowship who seems to relish the idea of taking a route through the Mines of Moria underneath the Misty Mountains. While this is partly because he hopes to find his relative Balin still holding the dwarf fortress there, he also seems the only one truly unbothered about being underground. Later, in The Return of the King, we are given a description of the passing of Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, and others underground through the Paths of the Dead from the perspective of Gimli. This is done to impart to us how unusual it was for him to be so disturbed by a place under a mountain and so magnify how terrifying it must have been for the rest of the party.
Humans, in contrast, are interlopers in Middle-earth, as too many environmentalists see them today in our world, living in all of these environments as well but not intimately connected with them in the same way as the elves, dwarves, or hobbits seem to be. We know, too, that after the end of the Third Age, which concludes with the War of the Ring, the Fourth Age will see humans as the dominant people in Middle-earth, much as they are now the dominant species on our own planet. With the passing into memory of the other peoples of Middle-earth we have a possible allusion to the evolution of humans from only one among equals of other species in our prehistoric past to our current state as undisputed master of all.
But a view connecting Tolkien’s peoples to their environments confronts a significant hurdle: the existence throughout the narrative of other characters and peoples who are more direct extensions of parts of the natural world itself. Take the example of the forests. Throughout The Lord of the Rings, as well as in The Hobbit, the elves are strongly associated with the forests of Middle-earth, especially Mirkwood, home of Legolas’s kin, and Lórien, where Galadriel and Celeborn dwell. There is a constant fascination with forests, evinced for example by Legolas’s desire to see Fangorn, the mysterious wood near Isengard. Just as with Gimli and Moria, Legolas is the only one of the Fellowship who seems genuinely interested in visiting Fangorn, another place with a bad reputation. While it is true that elves live in other places as well, there is nonetheless a temptation to see them as more closely connected with this environment than the others they inhabit.
A bigger problem with such an association however is that Fangorn, at least, is home to another people entirely. In The Two Towers we are introduced to the ents, another of the “free peoples” of Middle-earth by their own reckoning. They are first encountered by Merry and Pippin after their escape from the Uruk-hai, the powerful subspecies of orcs bred by Saruman. Merry and Pippin have escaped by hiding in Fangorn and there meet Treebeard, leader of the ents, who goes on to play a critical role in the overthrow of Saruman.
Upon meeting Merry and Pippin, Treebeard is confused. He cannot figure out what sort of thing they are since he has never encountered one of their kind. When they tell him they are hobbits, Treebeard realizes that he must amend the “old lists” which each ent commits to memory. The lists include descriptions of other peoples of Middle-earth such as the elves, described as the “eldest of all” peoples. Indeed, it is the elves, we are told, who awakened the ents and trees in the early days of Middle-earth. “The Elves cured us of dumbness,” according to Treebeard, and even though we know that the ents were not literally created by the elves, in some sense they helped to animate them (TT, p. 75). What does Treebeard mean by this? Apparently that the elves helped to nurture in the ents a capacity for reason and eventually for speech. But the ents were not bred by the elves in the same way that “the Dark Power of the North” originally bred the orcs (RK, p. 457). The elves enlightened, if you will, part of the raw material of the earth that was there before them. Though the ents are not trees themselves, we know from Treebeard they are very close to them. Treebeard says that many of his kinsmen were barely moving at all now, essentially becoming trees, and perhaps in some sense returning to their primordial state. The ents are represented as thinking much as one would imagine trees would think—slowly and methodically and unhurriedly—and they act essentially as anthropomorphized trees.
If we were to argue that the elves personify the forests of Middle-earth, for something along the lines of the reasons offered earlier, we would be confronted with a hurdle in explaining the ents. Do they also stand for the forests along with the elves? And if so, who stands for the forests more? Treebeard certainly has an opinion, telling Merry and Pippin that “nobody cares for the woods as I care for them, not even Elves nowadays” (TT, p. 75). But what he and the other ents do is not simply care for the forest as much as they serve as a narrative device that allows part of nature to speak for itself. In the end it is the ents, not the elves, who best represent the forests. The same could be said for the relationship between the mountains and the dwarves even though the latter do not have as clear a competitor as the ents for representation of one of their preferred environments. Though at home in underground places, the dwarves share these places with other races as well and do not personify them as such. In this sense no one stands for anything in Middle-earth, but the place itself is fully animated so that it stands for itself, and even speaks for itself at times.
Green Time
But if parts of Middle-earth stand and speak for themselves, what makes such representations of natural entities and places different from other anthropomorphic representations in other forms of literature? One significant difference is that the ents, Tom Bombadil, and other primordial inhabitants of Middle-earth either implicitly or explicitly acknowledge a different time scale than the other
peoples and characters in the story. If what they offer is not literally a different time scale (for remember that the elves are immortal and certainly exist in a different temporal perspective than humans), then at least it is a time scale more attuned to the rhythms of the natural world.2 Most striking, in terms of the main events of the story, we can see this point in how this set of characters appears largely indifferent to the outcome of the War of the Ring. Though drawn into one side or another at times, most often their participation in the War is more a matter of circumstance than anything else.3 Though they can be harmed by the other peoples of Middle-earth, they are largely indifferent to the events of the story, just as the earth is to us.
In The Fellowship of the Ring we find this perspective expressed most clearly in the character of Tom Bombadil. Tom is first encountered by the four hobbits on their journey from the Shire to Rivendell. Along the way, the party travels through the mysterious Old Forest. As we learn later, this is just a small fraction of a once tremendous forest described by Elrond as a place where “a squirrel could go from tree to tree from what is now the Shire to Dunland west of Isengard” (FR, p. 297). There they fall under the spell of Old Man Willow, an ancient, conscious tree that tries to devour Merry and Pippin by trapping them in its trunk. Just in the nick of time Tom happens by and sings a song that compels the tree to free the hobbits. Tom invites the four to his nearby house on the edge of the forest and the Barrow-downs where he lives with his lady, Goldberry, the “river daughter.” The hobbits experience the stay with Tom and Goldberry in mystical and magical terms, reveling in a kind of trance of natural purity, wanting for nothing and for a time fearing nothing. When the hobbits ask Goldberry who Tom is, she answers first simply that “He is,” and then adds, “He is the Master of wood, water, and hill” (FR, p. 140). This is not to say that he is master over the things themselves (“the trees and the grasses and all things growing or living in the land belong each to them”), but that he thoroughly understands them. Part of the reason is that, as he explains, he is “eldest . . . here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn” (FR, p. 148).
The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy Page 17