Tolkien’s Vision of Ecological Catastrophe and Restoration

*The Lord of the Rings* Reading Challenge, week nine, and a Vaughan Williams Update

The ecological devastation that the hobbits find when they return to the Shire, as pictured by Alan Lee in the Centenary Edition.

If you were a reader of Tolkien in the late 1950s and early 1960s and you felt moved to write him a letter with questions about his work, he may well have responded to you at some length if he found the questions interesting. A perusal of his published letters, for example, will yield answers to questions from readers regarding Elvish languages, runes, whether Shadowfax took the ship with Gandalf, what would have happened to Frodo had Sauron caught him, what would have happened to Gollum had he repented, whether or not orcs are "irredeemable," when the hobbit custom of giving gifts on one's birthday developed, who were the other two wizards not named in the tale, etc., etc. In each case, Tolkien answers in apparent good faith and with sincere consideration. In some cases (as with the two unnamed wizards) he doesn't know the answer but finds the question interesting.

He had made his best attempt to tie up loose ends in his narrative and to answer many questions preemptively. As we discussed last week, the book goes on for a hundred pages after the climax, and then there are the appendices with all sorts of further information for the curious. Indeed, his avoidance of loose ends is such that he even provides a conclusion for Bill the Pony's story, who finds his way back to Bree and, eventually, to Sam, and who even gets to take a kick at Bill Ferny as the scoundrel runs away.

I think that many of Tolkien's early readers, like Tolkien himself, were, on the one hand finifugal, in that they didn't want the narrative to end, but on the other hand, they wanted all possible narrative answers to be provided.

My office door.

Of course, the most pressing question for the first-time reader approaching the end of the text is: what are the hobbits going to find when they return to the Shire? Several hints along the way have suggested that not all is well at home.

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In a movie theater in New Orleans just before Christmas in 2003, I sat, flabbergasted at the conclusion of Peter Jackson's film adaptation of The Return of the King. When the hobbits returned to the Shire, nothing had changed. It was just as green as it had been when they left; Bag End was in good order; there were no smoking mills or factories; there was no Lotho, no Sharkey, no Wormtongue.

In my estimation, these absences cheapened Jackson's entire project—almost irrevocably. Imagine if you watched a film about English soldiers in the Second World War, and when they got back to England, nothing had changed. While there were good things in Jackon’s film, to me this gross omission was unforgivable—even more so than the omission of Tom Bombadil from The Fellowship of the Ring. "The Scouring of the Shire" is an essential part of the narrative.

Tolkien said so himself in the Foreword to the Second Edition: "It is an essential part of the plot, foreseen from the outset, though in the event modified by the character of Saruman as developed in the story without [. . .] " (xxiv). And this is especially the case if you read LOTR from an ecological perspective—a perspective also invoked by Tolkien in the same Foreword:

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. I never liked the looks of the Young miller, but his father, the Old miller, had a black beard, and he was not named Sandyman. (xxv)

This is, of course, what has happened to the Shire in the interim. There are new "rules," lots of "orc-talk," deforestation, and industry—though what the industry is for, other than domination and deprivation, is unclear. Farmer Cotton sums it up nicely:

Take Sandyman's mill now. Pimple knocked it down almost as soon as he came to Bag End. Then he brought in a lot o' dirty-looking Men to build a bigger one and fill it full o' wheels and outlandish contraptions. Only that fool Ted was pleased by that, and he works there cleaning wheels for the Men, where his dad was the Miller and his own master. Pimple's idea was to grind more and faster, or so he said. He's got other mills like it. But you've got to have grist before you can grind; and there was no more for the new mill to do than for the old. But since Sharkey came they don't grind no more corn at all. They're always a-hammering and a-letting out a smoke and a stench, and there isn't no peace even at night in Hobbiton. And they pour out filth a purpose; they've fouled all the lower Water, and it's getting down to the Brandywine. If they want to make the Shire into a desert, they're going the right way about it. (1013)

This is the corruption of the "promise" of technology and industry for Tolkien: it foretells improvement but only brings about pollution and destruction. And the attentive reader has guessed the identity of "Sharkey" already. Way back in Book Three, Treebeard says of Saruman: "He is plotting to become a Power. He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment" (473).

The extended version of Jackson's film devises a gruesome death for Saruman much earlier in the narrative, and so he doesn't survive to make his way to the Shire, along with Wormtongue. In the book, however, he has fallen far from his ambition to supplant Sauron. He has been given every chance to reform and repent, but he prefers to exercise his desire for power and domination on a smaller scale—to become a petty tyrant in a land made squalid by his intentional ecological destruction.

And so it is fitting that he dies with a whimper rather than a bang, murdered by the degraded Wormtongue. And it is also appropriate that it is relatively easy for the returning hobbits to defeat his efforts to dominate the Shire, since he has been deprived of his powers and retains only some of his persuasiveness of voice, to which Frodo and company are, of course, immune by this point. He has become, simply, a bully, which he has been throughout the narrative—but now on a smaller scale. He is now a pathetic bully rather than a frightening one.

His nickname is also suitably petty, as Tolkien helpfully explains in a footnote that "Sharkey" is "probably Orkish in origin: sharkû, 'old man'" (1018). He is no longer a respected wizard or a great power; he is an old man and nothing more. This descent into irrelevance is emphasized by the implied rejection of his spirit by the powers in undying lands to the west:

To the dismay of those that stood by, about the body of Saruman a grey mist gathered, and rising slowly to a great height like smoke from a fire, as a pale shrouded figure it loomed over the Hill. For a moment, it wavered, looking to the West; but out of the West came a cold wind, and it bent away, and with a sigh dissolved into nothing. (1020)

This may be an inverted echo of the end of Beowulf: as the hero's body burns, "heaven swallowed the smoke" ("Heofon rece swealg," line 3155), which the poem's Christian audience may have read as an implicit acceptance of Beowulf's spirit by God. Not so for Saruman. The rejection is clear.

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The difference, however, between the post-war Shire and the countryside of Tolkien's childhood as he describes it in the Foreword is that in the imaginary world, restoration is possible. And this restoration completes the author's ecological vision, as Sam travels around planting trees, with the aid of Galadriel's box of elvish soil. It is not enough to bemoan ecological destruction: we must do what we can to reverse it.

In our own present world of massive deforestation, rapid extinction of species, and catastrophic climate change, Tolkien's ecological vision is more important than ever.

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Vaughan Williams Listening Challenge

In this penultimate week of the RVW challenge, we turn to a choral work: Dona Nobis Pacem from 1936, a sort of requiem for the First World War and an implicit warning about the forthcoming Second. Its texts incorporate the Agnus Dei from the Latin Mass, the Bible, and the poetry of Walt Whitman (whose verse he set also in the Sea Symphony). Our recording is conducted by David Hill, with the Bach Choir and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. The soloists are Christina Pier and Matthew Brook.

Next week: one more RVW symphony.

Here are links to our playlist on Apple Music and Spotify:

RVW Listening Challenge on Apple Music

RVW Listening Challenge on Spotify

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours. (Note the brand name,

A. Jay Adler

.)

Photo by Sebastien LE DEROUT on Unsplash