Nature in Fiction: Tolkien’s Middle-earth
J.R.R. Tolkien created Middle-earth in order to escape the modern world and its increasing mechanization. New technologies were changing the daily life of the average British citizen, and expanding industry was taking over the landscape Tolkien had explored as a child.
Much like the transcendental preferences of Americans Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, J.R.R. Tolkien preferred a simple life. He rejected modern society and its advanced trappings. Good food, a simple home, and green fields were all he needed to enjoy a good life.
Unable to find the simplicity he desired, Tolkien lost himself in his own imaginary world. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s book The Hobbit we were introduced to his personal fantasy— not the heroic dragon-slaying story filled with swords and magic, that part was written for his children: Tolkien’s fantasy was the Shire, the simple life of the Hobbits.
Tolkien never sought fame and wealth with The Hobbit. It was purely a self-indulgence meant for himself and his kids, nothing more. The Lord of the Rings is a different story (literally and figuratively). With popularity and criticism weighing on his shoulders, Tolkien’s world darkened. Its people and places became corrupted. Middle-Earth was undergoing the same changes Tolkien sought to escape in the real world.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Each aspect of J.R.R. Tolkien’s storied life can paint a picture by itself. Most of us know him as the creator of Middle-earth, of hobbits and powerful rings. We can picture him toiling away in his study, a room with a simple desk and chair, the walls lined with the literature of the ages. I can see him right now with pen in hand as he explored and defined his fantasy world. But, even though this is how most of us define Tolkien, this was only a part of his life.
In another time Tolkien served as a British Army lieutenant in World War I. He commanded troops in the Battle of the Somme against the German Empire and lost many dear friends in the conflict. He returned from the war and raised three sons who decades later would go on to fight in the second World War against Hitler and Nazi Germany.
Looking further back we can picture Tolkien as a child born at the end of the 19th century in South Africa. His family moved to England when he was still just a babe in arms. As a toddler he lost his father to fever, and then at the age of twelve his mother passed away from diabetes. He was taken into the care of a family friend and raised as an orphan in the English countryside.
As a youth Tolkien attended King Edward’s school for boys. He met the love of his life at age sixteen and married her several years later.
He went on to work as an etymologist for the Oxford English Dictionary and continued to further his studies in constructed language, later becoming a professor at Oxford University.
Friends and relatives remember John Tolkien as a simple man who appreciated simple things. He loved good bread and wine, adored objects made of wood and stone.
The natural world was close to the man’s heart. It dominates the landscape of all that is good across Middle-earth. He held an intense hatred for the effects of industrialization. Business and industry had taken over much of the English countryside during his lifetime. To Tolkien, the beauty of the world was in its flowers and its trees. The beauty of man was in his humanity, his appreciation of the natural world.
Machine VS Nature
Our world, Earth, is what Tolkien referred to as the primary world. Living his life during a time when two world wars ravaged our planet and Henry Ford’s moving assembly line brought mass production to the industrial age, Tolkien yearned for the simpler times that, as appeared to him, were being left behind. The modern world was not to his liking, and envisioning the future was a frightening prospect.
To Tolkien, the machine was the enemy of all things good in the world. Literal machines polluted the air, made lots of hideous noise, and caused unsightly congestion. The figurative machine was an even larger threat. By filling the world with new technologies and producing them at increasing rates, the human machine clamored for resources to meet the demand. We stripped forests bare like the orcs of Mordor. We mined the mountains to the point of collapse, not unlike when the dwarves delved too greedily and too deep into the darkness of Khazad-dum, awakening a terrible evil within the Mines of Moria. We were dominating the natural world. We were killing each other over control of the land.
To escape the ever-changing primary world Tolkien envisioned Arda, Middle-earth, or what he called his secondary world, the one which existed solely in his mind.
Calling back to his childhood and the natural world, Middle-earth was made of green shires and misty mountains. It is where the Hobbits live, where they make things of wood and stone, where they enjoy bread and wine. They worry little of events outside of the Shire. Hobbits keep to themselves. As the rest of the world is much too big for them.
“…fairy-stories deal largely with simple or fundamental things, untouched by Fantasy, but these simplicities are made all the more luminous by their setting. For the story-maker who allows himself to be “free with” Nature can be her lover not her slave. It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.”
-Tolkien from his essay On Fairy Stories
In many ways our world was much too big for Tolkien. He was not fond of travel. Trains, planes, and automobiles were a luxury he felt the world did not need. A bicycle was enough to help with his commute to Oxford and he chose to walk just about everywhere else he could.
Middle-earth was his escape, his way of traveling to a far off land. Though it’s nice for us to imagine that Tolkien created Middle-earth to share with all of us, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. His secondary world was a personal project for many years. As stated earlier, Tolkien wrote The Hobbit for his children, never intending for the outside world to learn of Bilbo Baggins and his adventures. Years passed after writing his book before a woman by the name of Susan Dagnall caught wind of the story and convinced Tolkien to publish it. The book became a hit with children and adults alike, creating a wave of fandom which demanded more hobbits and dragons from the writer.
A Corrupted Vision
In response Tolkien began working on the Lord of the Rings, initially intending for the story to keep to a similar tone as the Hobbit, but it grew dark and more serious over the time he spent writing its narrative. Tolkien spent twelve years constructing the Lord of the Rings. Over its course he abandoned his originally intended audience. Many of the same fans and critics who adored The Hobbit would come to criticize the Lord of the Rings upon its initial release because it was considered too dark and detailed for a fantasy world.
While writing the Lord of the Rings Tolkien turned inward, focusing on his own beliefs and memorializing them forever in Middle-earth’s narrative. He was creating the story for himself, but he also had something to prove to his colleagues. During the mid-twentieth century fantasy literature was kind of a joke, something for mothers to read to their children. Great works such as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland existed in popular culture, but to many they were thought of as nothing more than glorified nursery rhymes. Tolkien wanted to change that. His world was more than an adolescent wonderland. He was determined to show his Oxford colleagues and the rest of the literary world that his work was important, that a fantasy story could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the greatest literary works of all time.
Middle-earth may have been born of Tolkien’s own sense of wonder, but it’s depth and nuances were constructed around his desire to impress intellectual minds, to dismantle modern prejudices of fantasy and literature. The opinions of the notable literary scholars of Tolkien’s time weighed heavily on his mind.
And it was an uphill battle for him. After Lord of the Rings was released it was criticized as a dubious work of popular culture rather than “real literature”. It wasn’t until near the end of his life that academics truly began to respect Tolkien’s works as quality literature. Instead of garnering interest in his intended audience, Tolkien found his initial following in a crowd he knew little about, the American hippie.
The Hippies Take Over
We know well the mindset of the hippie movement from the 1960s and 70s. Love, peace, and tranquility were intertwined with extensive drug use and loud rock and roll music. Fashion consisted of long hair and bell-bottomed jeans. Young people wanted to preserve the natural environment and take down the polluting corporations. Anti-war protests often turned violent. People were not only upset with, but angry at their government. This counter-culture embraced Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings because of its critique of materialism, its anti-war themes, and its call for environmentalism.
Likewise, Lady Eowyn of Rohan was a feminist icon of the time, a female character who struggled to overcome the limits of a patriarchal society. “What do you fear, lady?” asked Aragorn of Eowyn. “A cage,” she replied, “until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.” These lines resonated among feminists of the 1960s.
It is possible that the drug culture in Middle-earth served as the initial hook that drew interest from the hippie generation. Hallucinogenic plants such as the Shire’s pipeweed were sought after by the lovable protagonists of the stories. The drug references even made it into Peter Jackson’s Fellowship movie in scenes like the one where Saruman scolds Gandalf, saying to him, “Your love of the halflings’ leaf has clearly slowed your mind.”
Middle-earth pervaded the hippie counter-culture to the point that slogans such as “Frodo Lives” and “Gandalf for President” became popular graffiti tags and bumper stickers. Top tier rock bands like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Genesis all had Lord of the Rings-themed songs on the billboard charts. Hobbits had made their mark in the unlikeliest of places.
But hippies and feminists were not the types of people Tolkien wanted to be associated with. He didn’t understand them. In his distaste for the fandom which built around his books he referred to his fans as ‘deplorable cultists’ and openly spoke of his disapproval of fan art and fan fiction. Even The Beatles attempted to put together a film version of Lord of the Rings starring themselves, but Tolkien himself put a stop to that.
The hippie generation and Tolkien shared a disenchantment with modern life that reverberated through the books, linking them together. But the hippies were further derailing the larger aim of Tolkien’s works, his desire for his world to be taken seriously by academia. The admiration of pot-smoking American liberal low-lifes did not impress literary critics, serving only to fuel the fire of their criticisms.
Agree to Disagree
Tolkien once said, “Many young Americans are involved in the stories in a way that I am not.” This is an important admission that has gone largely unnoticed. Though Tolkien spent the majority of his life crafting his secondary world of Arda, and thus Middle-earth, and though he modeled the world after his own wants and desires, constructing the lore with detail forged to impress the brightest of minds, in the end he came to understand that any person could come to experience Middle-earth in their own unique way. Any person could come to love or hate the characters for their own reasons, could choose to admire or despise any of his created cultures or beliefs.
Once created, the world was no longer his to control. It was left to interpretation by audiences as they saw fit, as they needed it to be. The same could be said of our own world.
In the end, Tolkien preferred working on his creations rather than publishing them. He never finished his “magnum opus” The Silmarillion in his lifetime because it was too large of a task. The world of Arda had grown to a point where keeping consistent with timelines and moral themes over the course of all of Middle-earth’s lore was problematic for Tolkien. During his lifetime, he attempted to rewrite the Hobbit and considered rewriting the Lord of the Rings. He wanted to update the novels to his most current thoughts of Middle-earth and make the texts more consistent with his most-recent version of the Silmarillion. Tolkien never intended to call his world complete, insisting that ending his work on Middle-earth would mean the ending of his life. He continued building and altering Middle-earth until his passing at the age of eighty-one.
Though he enjoyed his time in his imaginary world, Tolkien had ultimately given up on Earth, the primary world. He lived his best life, but in in many ways he also neglected the beauty and simplicity that surrounded him, that still exists to this day. Without travel he was unable to explore. By rejecting technology he restricted his own freedom. He was unable to build his own utopia and keep it pristine. All of Middle-earth, including the Shire— Tolkien’s fantasy, his home— became as corrupted as he believed the real world to be.
Love your analysis. I am with Tolkien, looking for escape from the real world. I have read the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings many times over. I love to escape from the real earth to middle earth. There are more orcs and trolls and evil wizards in the real world then there are in Middle Earth.