Tolkienian Ecology as Living Text

*The Lord of the Rings* Challenge, week two

Let’s meditate over some ruins.

Photo by Chris Curry on Unsplash

The Ruin

In the late stages of Book One of The Lord of the Rings, Strider the ranger is guiding the hobbits through an unfamiliar landscape, making for a hill called Weathertop, which commands a wide view of the surrounding lands. The hobbits are wary of the place, and Strider provides them a history of it:

The Men of the West did not live here; though in their latter days they defended the hills for a while against the evil that came out of Angmar. The path was made to serve the forts along the walls. But long before, in the first days of the North Kingdom, they built a great watch-tower on Weathertop, Amon Sûl they called it. It was burned and broken, and nothing remains of it now but a tumbled ring, like a rough crown on the old hill’s head. Yet once it was tall and fair. It is told that Elendil stood there watching for the coming of Gil-galad out of the West, in the days of the Last Alliance. (185)

Don’t worry if you don’t know this history or these names. Neither do the hobbits, for the most part. But both they and the reader have Strider to explain. Surprisingly, however, it is Sam who responds when Merry asks about Gil-galad. He recites three brief stanzas about the ancient elven king, which he had learned from Bilbo, and which Strider recognizes as a translated fragment from an old poem.

This is an emblematic Tolkienian moment: the contemplation of a ruined structure invokes a lost past and a literary history that goes along with it, with the help of a learned guide who knows both the land and its history. History and poetry are not locked in cloisters or libraries; rather, they are engraved in the very landscape, readable to those who know, who have taken the trouble to learn. The ranger and the lore-master are overlapping roles. Scholars do not isolate themselves in cubicles. One must know the land to know the lore, and one must know the lore to know the land. They are not separable. The poem’s translator, Bilbo, has made his own journeys through this land, and thus poetic transmission is linked to his experience of the landscape.

It is not only the distant past that the reader of the land may decipher, but the recent past as well. Strider is able to interpret some obscure scratches on a rock as a message left for them by Gandalf. From the elevated position, he becomes a living map, giving names to the visible features of the landscape. A chapter later, he is able to tell the identity of an approaching rider by putting his ear to the ground.

This phase of the journey is in marked contrast to the earlier parts of the narrative in the Old Forest and the Barrow Downs, when the hobbits are without a guide and venturing into places beyond their knowledge. They know neither the land nor its history. The Barrow-Wight is literally a ghost of the land’s history, suspended in the landscape—a spirit of loss and despair, haunting his barrow. History here is so ingrained in the land that when Merry awakens from his trance, rescued by Tom Bombadil, who knows the land and the Barrow-Wight, he begins to speak in a voice not his own, a voice from the distant past: “The Men of Carn Dûm came on us at night, and we were worsted. Ah! The spear in my heart” (143). The history of the land is so powerful that it has almost consumed him.

These two episodes recall the poetry that Tolkien spent much of his academic career studying. A source of frustration for him was the loss of so much of the ancient literature in the languages that he studied: Old English, Old Icelandic, Gothic, Welsh, Finnish, etc. Much of what was extant was altered or supplanted by later medieval Christian influence, especially in English. Since much of the literary past that he longed for was not recoverable, he created his own and tied it to the world and the languages that he built.

Furthermore, the sense of a lost past was already embedded in the surviving fragments that he studied. In the Old English elegy known as The Ruin, preserved in the tenth-century manuscript called The Exeter Book, the poet meditates upon the remains of a magnificent structure and imagines a history for it:

Wonderful the stone wall          that wyrd has broken;
the castle crumbles,           work of giants destroyed.
Roofs fallen in,          tall towers collapsed,
barred gate despoiled,          hoar-frost on the mortar,
mutilated houses have been          cleaved, have fallen,
undone by age.          The earth’s grasp,
hard grip, holds these mighty wrights;          they have withered away,
departed.  Since then           a hundred generations
of people have passed. (my translation)¹

The poem’s manuscript itself is damaged and renders parts of it unreadable, creating melancholy metonymy with its subject.

We see this in Beowulf as well, as the poet digresses from the narrative to imagine an unnamed survivor of a forgotten, ancient people, who stows their treasure in a barrow, which the dragon now guards. The treasure has proven a useless curse to those who have possessed it, just as the Barrow-Wight’s treasure does not avail him.²

The Land

Tolkien does not simply imitate these older modes, however. To this sense of a lost past, he adds a sense of regret for the destruction of the landscape itself, as he imagines a decline of a civilization as connected to the environmental damage that it has inflicted upon the earth. As we will see later, Mordor is imagined as a post-industrial, post-apocalyptic landscape, devoid of life and dominated by mechanized power.

The lands through which the hobbits travel from the Old Forest to Rivendell are diminished from what they once were. The village of Bree seems an outpost, a remnant whose inhabitants are only dimly aware of a rich history or of the looming danger that surrounds them. Elrond later recalls that in the past “a squirrel could go from tree to tree from what is now the Shire to Dunland west of Isengard” (265). The forests have retreated, subject to those who enforce the nature/culture binary.

Actual photo of a squirrel attempting to go from tree to tree from what is now the Shire to Dunland west of Isengard. Photo by Tj Holowaychuk on Unsplash

Tolkien himself echoes Elrond in his Foreword to the Second Edition, as he recalls the landscape of his childhood in the rural midlands near Birmingham:

The country in which I lived in childhood was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten, in days when motor-cars were rare objects (I had never seen one) and men were still building suburban railways. Recently I saw in a paper a picture of the last decrepitude of the once thriving corn-mill beside its pool that long ago seemed to me so important. (xxv)

And in 1972, he sent a letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph in response to an article that stated “sheepwalks where you could once ramble for miles are transformed into a kind of Tolkien gloom, where no bird sings.” Tolkien took offense that his name was associated with environmental gloom and pointed out that beauty in his books is largely connected to trees:

It would be unfair to compare the Forestry Commission with Sauron because as you observe it is capable of repentance; but nothing it has done that is stupid compares with the destruction, torture and murder of trees perpetrated by private individuals and minor official bodies. The savage sound of the electric saw is never silent wherever trees are still found growing.

This process of deforestation was old indeed, going back to the early Middle Ages. By the time of William the Conqueror, 90% of England’s forests had been cleared.³ The two World Wars exacerbated the problem, as regulation of forestry was set aside because of the urgent need for resources.

Meanwhile, perhaps the surest mark of righteousness in Tolkien’s universe is ecological care and connection to ecology. Hobbits, or at least the best of them, despite their insularity and ignorance of the wider world, care for the land. Sam, Frodo’s steadfast companion and the favorite character of many readers, is a gardener. The elves preserve their lands and communicate with animals and trees. Gandalf can tame the wildest of horses and may call upon the aid of eagles in need. And then there is Strider the Ranger.

The Ranger

When the hobbits first encounter Strider at the Prancing Pony in Bree, the narrator describes him as “strange-looking” and “weather-beaten.” His boots are “caked with mud,” and a “travel-stained cloak of heavy dark-green cloth was drawn close about him” (156). Butterbur, the innkeeper, regards him with suspicion: he is a mysterious figure, who emerges at irregular intervals from the wilds and is known as a ranger, “one of the wandering folk”—existing in a liminal space between wilderness and civilization.

It is clear, however, that for Tolkien the wilderness/civilization division is a false binary: the culture of the elves, for example, is not separable from the ecology, and, as we have seen, knowledge and lore of the land is part and parcel of knowledge and lore of history, of culture. We learn also that Strider is Aragorn, the heir to the currently kingless throne. His exile and that of his ancestors is a sign of a world falsely divided, which separates ecology from culture. The fact that Aragorn is a master of both implies that the restoration of his crown would bring about a reunification, a preservation of both ecology and culture as inextricably linked.

Until that day, however, he wanders the periphery, performing unheralded acts of service for the very people who hold him in suspicion for his apparent wildness, but as Bilbo’s poem about him insists, “not all those who wander are lost.” This oft-quoted line implicitly erases the division between wilderness and civilization by suggesting that wandering—or leaving the road, which was created by culture to cope with the wild—may have a purpose, a direction, and that we are of the ecology, not separate from it, and free to move through it as natural creatures.

History and Ecology

If travelers have the knowledge, then the land tells its story as they move through it. For example, after Weathertop, the company passes through the same places that Bilbo had, decades earlier, in his own great journey east recounted in The Hobbit. The hobbits are alarmed when they see a group of three trolls, but they turn out to be made of stone:

Strider walked forward unconcernedly. “Get up, old stone!” he said, and broke his stick upon the stooping troll.

Nothing happened. There was a gasp of astonishment from the hobbits, and then even Frodo laughed. “Well!” he said. “We are forgetting our family history! These must be the very three that were caught by Gandalf, quarreling over the right way to cook thirteen dwarves.” (205-206)

The history of Bilbo’s journey is inscribed on the landscape and has become part of it: the trolls turned to stone with the rising of the sun in The Hobbit. Strider points out that one of the trolls “has an old bird’s nest behind its ear” (206); the ecology of the place incorporates these historical markers until, eventually, they too will crumble into ruin.

Tolkien’s illustration of the trolls from The Hobbit.

The centrality of ecology to Tolkienian narrative is such that the long descriptions of landscape, flora, and fauna are essential to the text, not superfluous digressions, as some readers regard them. And this is my advice and you move forward in the book: when you get to these descriptions, don’t skip or skim. Instead, slow down. Join the journey with your mind’s eye. Tolkien is painting you a picture, is creating this world for you, and its history and richness are inherent in the ecology that he describes.

How do you feel about the landscape passages? Are you inclined to skip them? Have you ever been startled by stone trolls in the woods? What strikes you in your reading of the journey from the Old Forest to Rivendell, as the pace of the narrative accelerates until we reach the breathless chase at the end of Book One?

I’ll be back on Friday with a piece for paid subscribers on “The Council of Elrond” and some further questions for discussion.

Meanwhile, thanks for reading, from my fancy internet traveling squirrel to yours.

Photo by Julian on Unsplash

1. For the translated poem in its entirety, see this post.

2. I discuss the unnamed “last survivor” from Beowulf in this post.

3. See Teresa Kwiatkowska, “The Sadness of the Woods is Bright: Deforestation and Conservation in the Middle Ages,” Medievalia 39, 2007, pages 40-47.