Timely, again: Tolkien's fantastic ecology.

Abstract

Given the enduring academic and pop-culture acceptance of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, the question of how that work can be read and taught is timely as ever. This article therefore models a process by which instructors can demonstrate the environmental implications of Tolkien's work. We move from theoretical to practical concerns, beginning with a review of the warrants of environmental thinking, a study of the genre in which Tolkien writes, and close readings of key moments in The Lord of the Rings that demonstrate the development of an environmental ethic.

Warrants: Deep Ecology, the Land Ethic, and the Frontier Hypothesis

In teaching environmental literature, I have faced the significant pedagogical challenge of demonstrating the "warrants" of ecological thinking, the grounds upon which environmental consciousness--and, ultimately, action--rest. In Tolkien's work, however, I have found a tool through which students can recognize "environmentalism" as a way of perceiving their ontological positions, both individually and collectively, with respect to the natural world. As Carol J. Verburg has indicated in her excellent reader, The Environmental Predicament: Four Issues for Critical Analysis, we see no real consensus in the media, government, or in some cases scientific communities about environmental practice and policy. Yet here is where Tolkien proves timely. In terms that elegantly transcend whatever problematic connotations "environmentalism" might currently muster, Tolkien demonstrates environmental consciousness as a system of values and model for action.

A "green" teaching of Tolkien can begin by introducing students to some of the key tenets of environmental thought. Fritjof Capra's The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems is an excellent starting point. Capra, an Austrian physicist, names Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess' term "deep ecology" as a way of perceiving the world "not as a collection of isolated objects, but as a network of phenomena that are fundamentally interconnected and interdependent" (7). Contrasting this form with "shallow" ecology, which is anthropomorphic and views the natural world strictly in terms of its value to human culture, Capra notes that Naess understands humans "as just one particular strand in the web of life" (7). Treating Naess' contentions in terms of a "new ecological paradigm," Capra suggests that both the thinking and values of industrialized cultures have diminished the "integrative" and celebrated the "self-assertive" (9-10). If we are to recognize, as per Naess, that all living things have innate value, we must change our thinking and values accordingly. We tend to think rationally, analytically, notes Capra; this thinking works in service to values of "expansion, competition, quantity, and domination" (10). Less self-assertive and more integrative means of thinking might include intuition and synthesis; the values that might direct that thinking are "conservation, cooperation, quality and partnership" (10).

To build on Capra and Naess, instructors should consult the work of American conservationist Aldo Leopold, who in A Sand County Almanac considers the ethical implications of an interdependent worldview. Arguing for a "land ethic," which will "[change] the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it" (xviii-xix), Leopold critiques the values of industry. He notes that the only way "for land to survive the impact of mechanized man" is for humanity to view "land as a community to which [it] belongs" (xviii-xix). Like Capra, Leopold argues for a paradigm shift in our thinking about the relationship between nature and culture. Leopold suggests that land is not a commodity, but instead a part of a community shared with human beings. Leopold, further, has been of enormous pedagogical value to me inasmuch as his appeal, among students, is interdisciplinary. Some biology and geology majors, for instance, are already familiar with his work.

It may also be instructive to draw from the work of nineteenth century American historians, such as Frederick Jackson Turner and William Gilpin. Leopold's work, of course, stands diametrically opposed to Turner's "frontier hypothesis," which neatly distills the spirit of Manifest Destiny. Turner argues that "the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development" (1). Here Turner suggests that the very future of democracy depends upon the availability of open land. Indeed, writes William Gilpin in 1846, "the untransacted destiny of the American people is to subdue the continent--to rush over this vast field to the Pacific Ocean--to animate [its]many hundred millions of its people" (qtd. in Smith 40).

The Role of Fantasy

Having clarified the warrants of ecological thinking, the instructor can begin to position Tolkien within a longstanding tradition of environmental literature. A close look at the genre of fantasy itself can reveal how apt it is in terms of conveying ecologically sensitive motifs. For background, the instructor may wish to consult Tolkien's seminal essay, "On Fairy Stories," from The Tolkien Reader; the essay clearly delineates how fantasy works to help readers "recover" what Tolkien terms "a clear view" of their relationship with the natural world. Ann Swinfen's In Defence of Fantasy, with its rapt attention to the social, political, religious and philosophical ideals embedded in the genre, is also instructive.

Tolkien's fantasy shifts readers away from Gilpin's "animation" and "agitation" toward Naess's, Capra's and Leopold's ethic of conservation, cooperation, quality and partnership. The Lord of the Rings, in effect, demonstrates how well fantasy can work as environmental writing. Fantasy, it should be noted, is often nature writing, heir apparent to the literary tradition of pastoralism. One of the central conflicts in fantasy is a culture's ignorance of, loss of, and subsequent attempts to regain a symbiotic relationship with its environment. Such work, notes Rosenmeyer, allows us to "live with a nature we have abandoned" (118). Indeed, fantasy literature places the reader in the position of gaining a new view of his or her surroundings. Nothing in nature should be seen as trite, or taken for granted, Tolkien notes; the "penalty of appropriation," of becoming too familiar with nature, is the inability to value the ordinary, the everyday, the commonplace (The Tolkien Reader 56).

Tolkien's work further underscores Leopold's, Capra's and Naess' values through its attention to escape of what was for him a society too dependent on industry and technology. In a scathing critique of a developer's proposal to build a road through Christ Church Meadow, Oxford, Tolkien compares the developer to two of his most evil characters, Sauron and Saruman. "The spirit of Isengard, if not Mordor, is of course always popping up" (Carpenter 235). In letters to his son Christopher, Tolkien builds on this conceit by suggesting that World War II is the stepchild of original sin and technological acumen. The machine, he writes, exacerbates humanity's "endless repetitive unchanging incurable wickedness"; machinery "attempts to actualize desire, and so to create power in this world; and that cannot really be done with any real satisfaction ... [add to this] the Fall, which makes our devices not only fail of their desire but turn to new and horrible evil" (Carpenter 87-88).

By contrast, Tolkien's work is life-affirming, even comic, as it celebrates the value of the ordinary (Elgin 58), a natural world too often neglected and abused. Comedy entails humanity reaching the understanding that it is positioned within a cosmos, an infinitely small part of a much gander scheme. In comedy, humanity realizes that it is indeed "part of a system to winch it must accommodate itself and whose survival must be a primary concern if it hopes to continue to exist" (Elgin 16). Meeker, further, notes that comedy stresses a "restoration" of "ecological balances" (191). In Tolkien, the characters responsible for this restoration--like Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee, as we will discuss below--are in fact heroic.

The Development of an Ethic

With a firm grounding in the warrants of Tolkien's environmental sensibilities and an understanding of how fantasy literature helps articulate these sensibilities, students can trace how The Lord of the Rings models a move from a frontier-style ethic of land appropriation to an ethic of deep ecology. What follows, then, is a close reading of two passages--one from The Fellowship of the Ring, the next from The Return of the King--a that enact the theoretical constructs articulated above.

Throughout The Lord of the Rings we see detailed a process by which Tolkien's main characters, the hobbits, complete a paradigm shift in winch they recover a sure sense of themselves as members of a vast ecosystem. The hobbits have "practiced a well-ordered business of living" for generations; they are "sheltered" from the wilderness surrounding them (The Fellowship of the Ring 24-25). The story is set in the "Third Age," a time when much of the virgin forest once covering Middle-earth has been cut down. Wastelands like the Dead Marshes, or the strip-mined countryside surrounding Isengard, figure more prominently in the text. Elves, the "First-born" of Middle-earth once trusted with its stewardship, are an endangered species, while Sauron and his legions thrive in Mordor. Yet the character of Tom Bombadil, guardian of the Old Forest, catalyzes a change within the hobbits. Bombadil, notes Elgin, "seems to be a kind of elemental life force, older and more powerful than the abstractions of time and power that surround him" (39). When Frodo asks ins name, Bombadil answers with a pointed question that speaks to the hobbits' distance from the natural world, their lack of community with nature. "Don't you know my name yet?" he asks. "Tell me, who are you, alone, yourself and nameless?" (The Fellowship of the Ring 182). Bombadil challenges the hobbits' materialism---manifest in their close attention to clothing, food, and the comforts of home--by celebrating wilderness. He enjoys a symbiotic relationship with the flora and fauna within his "territory"; he is a woodsman, not a gardener. "Weaving" a "single dance," Bombadil and his wife Goldberry set the dinner table, "neither hindering the other," as if to enact this symbiosis (The Fellowship of the Ring 183).

At the "center of all queerness" in Middle-earth, Bombadil appears foreign because he models a necessary shift in values for the hobbits. His character indicts a materialistic culture, like the hobbits', that has forgotten its ethical obligation toward land. Bombadil relates a history of Middle-earth, the familiar history of Manifest Destiny. His talk moves from nature to culture: "young streams," "bubbling waterfalls," and "small flowers" to "fortresses," "kingdoms," and concepts like victory and defeat. This is a shift from the pastoral and communal to the fiefdom, the kingdom, the hierarchy. Bombadil's history lesson, moreover, moves us away from the world of the concrete and tangible--the world of comedy, as noted above--to a stage set for tragedy: fighting and dying for great, yet abstract, causes (Elgin 58). As one of the few figures in Tolkien's epic not subject to the power of the One Ring, Bombadil stands removed from the conflict with Mordor. Elgin notes that Bombadil's dismissal of the One Ring signifies that he is "amoral": like nature, a complex organism within a rich ecosystem that can easily be destroyed by the self-interest that the One Ring exacerbates. Bombadil refuses to accompany the hobbits when they leave the Old Forest, claiming that his "territory" has ended. Here Bombadil serves as a "clear corrective" to the notion that nature is sacrosanct, somehow safe from the ravages of future technologies (Elgin 40). His very presence urges the hobbits to carefully reconsider and reconfigure their view of the natural world. Leaving Bombadil, the hobbits understand themselves, like him, as constituents of a land-community that can be treated with love and respect (Leopold xix).

Bombadil, in effect, becomes a camera eye through which the hobbits recover a clearly focused view of their relationship with the environment of Middle-earth. There is even a passing sense of what Tolkien would term "consolation" or "eucatastrophe"--a kind of grace--to the Bombadil episode, as the hobbits celebrate their new shared community with Middle-earth in a quasi-Jungian communion. Bombadil brings the hobbits back to life from a death-like enchantment in a stone tomb in a comic moment evoking the "eucatastrophe" of an Easter morning. Resurrected, they recover the familiar: the feel of soft grass under bare feet, the quiet joy of the rough touch of tree bark. It is from such an awareness of things that Tolkien's work is at its most life-affirming. Here Tolkien realizes, recognizes and celebrates "the wonder of things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine" (The Tolkien Reader 59). Such awareness is the root of the ecological sensibilities shared by Leopold, Naess, and Capra.

Later, having helped destroy the One Ring, the hobbits return home to find their Shire converted from an agrarian economy to industrialism and sharecropping. When Sam Gamgee, a gardener, sows magic seeds from the Elf-kingdom Lothlorien throughout the Shire, he restores its agrarian economy. Bushes, vines and berries flourish; newborn hobbits are "fair to see and strong"; and "Northfarthing barley was so fine that the beer of 1420 malt was long remembered" (The Return of the King 375). Elgin notes that this episode is comic, because it strongly affirms the "continuation of life and the giving of birth" (39). For Tolkien, the episode is heroism of a high order, as it enacts the deep ecological sensibility of "conservation" (Capra 10).

The Call to Action

Tolkien's work makes the point that environmentalism, per se, cannot be grounded on simple actions or policy decisions. Rather, environmentalism comes about as a result of a change of thinking, a reassessment of human values. Additionally, an ecological take on Tolkien demonstrates to students that fantasy is not pure escapism but instead an ethical fiction, one that can challenge them to live ethically within a nature that they may have, perhaps, too often ignored. In such terms, the question now becomes how students can trace and perhaps enact--as per the hobbits--the paradigm shift to deep ecological thinking modeled by Tolkien's text.

My students have responded quite favorably to independent research projects that "read" their local environments in terms of a land ethic: they have completed provocative research projects on ecologically viable methods of firefighting, the benefits of the Army Corps of Engineers' Atchafalya project on the Mississippi River, and problems with recycling, to name three. As interesting as these research projects are, they do not actually involve action on the part of the student. I would therefore suggest that other teachers of Tolkien consider not only placing his work in a rich, ecologically-grounded context, but also consider (as I am) having that reading culminate in service learning projects. Because it would seem, as per Naess, that a revision in how we think about our relationship with nature must result in action.

An interdisciplinary course could provide students with the necessary tools for understanding deep ecological theory, noting the relationship of fantasy to that theory, reading Tolkien's primary text, and then developing an actual project designed to make real change in the community. Those interested in approaching Tolkien in this way may wish to consider what accommodations their home institutions already provide for interdisciplinary studies. For example, all freshman at my institution are required to take a theme-based course in critical thinking; a "green" teaching of Tolkien certainly models such a process. Service learning, moreover, is an institutional priority: a "green" teaching of Tolkien will fit this framework.

Conclusion

Tolkien's epic can be taught in terms of its environmental implications by foregrounding such a study in the work of literary ecologists. Such a study reveals the warrants of the deep ecological sensibilities underlying The Lord of the Rings. I have also shown that the fantasy genre capably highlights the difficult relationship between nature and culture: and here, then, is a space wherein an instructor might build upon the warrants noted above to consider bringing a genre-studies focus to the trilogy. Finally, I have demonstrated that an environmentally conscious take on Tolkien's work invites students and instructors alike to formulate, and act upon, an ethical understanding of the relationship between nature and culture. Tolkien is therefore timely, again, as he elegantly articulates what Barry Lopez has termed "a narrative of determination and hope," a story suggesting the possibility of living "wisely on the land" (xxvii). Should we believe strongly enough in that possibility, we may eventually "imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us" (Lopez xxvii).

Works Cited

Capra, Fritjof. The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1997.

Carpenter, Humphrey, Ed. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

Elgin, Don D. The Comedy of the Fantastic: Ecological Perspectives on the Fantasy Novel. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985.

Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1949.

Lopez, Barry. Arctic Dreams. New York: Vintage, 1986.

Meeker, Joseph W. The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology. New York: Scribner's, 1974.

Rosenmeyer, T.G. "Pastoral and the Theocritical Tradition." The Pastoral Mode: A Casebook. Ed. Brian Loughrey. London: Macmillan, 1984. 110-119.

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1950.

Swinfen, Ann. In Defence of Fantasy: A Study of the Genre in English and American Literature since 1945. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Significance of the Frontier in American History. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, Inc., 1966. Reprint of Annual Report of the American Historical Association for The Year 1893. Washington: GPO, 1894.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Fellowship of the Ring. New York: Ballantine, 1978.

--. The Return of the King. New York: Ballantine, 1978.

--. The Tolkien Reader. New York: Ballantine, 1978.

Verburg, Carol J., Ed. The Environmental Predicament: Four Issues for Critical Analysis. New York: Bedford-St. Martin's, 1995.

Lucas P. Niiler, University of Texas at Tyler 

Niiler is an assistant professor of English. His teaching and research interests include literature of the environment, creative nonfiction, and writing center administration.