Environmentalism in The Lord of the Rings

"[3] Baratta comments that Tolkien clearly intended the reader to "identify with some of the problems of environmental destruction, rampant industrial invasion, and the corrupting and damaging effects these have on mankind.

[7] The Tolkien critic Paul Kocher stated that Middle-earth was meant to be the Earth itself in the distant past, when the primeval forests still existed, and with them, a wholeness that is also now lost.

[7][8] The free peoples of the West of Middle-earth, including the Hobbits of the Shire, live in definite harmony with their land; Lucas Niiler describes the whole area as "a largely pastoral setting with an agriculturally-based economy",[9] and the Hobbits as "caring farmers, green-thumbs; beer-barley, rich tobacco and beautiful flowers spring up out of their fields and gardens with just the gentle prod of a hoe.

"[9] In the foreword to the Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien wrote that while the work had no "allegorical significance ... whatsoever",[T 3] it did have a basis in his personal experience.

He stated that "The country in which I lived in childhood was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten", as Birmingham grew and spread houses, roads and suburban railways across the Warwickshire countryside, and he lamented "the last decrepitude of the once-thriving corn-mill beside its pool that long ago seemed to me so important".

[12][13][14][T 4][T 5] The underground factories, and the contrast with how the area was before Saruman's day, are described by the narrator in "The Road to Isengard":[T 5] Once it had been green and filled with avenues, and groves of fruitful trees, watered by streams that flowed from the mountains to a lake.

The shafts ran down by many slopes and spiral stairs to caverns far under; there Saruman had treasuries, store-houses, armouries, smithies, and great furnaces.

[T 5]Saruman thus stands for the exact opposite of the sympathetic stewardship of Middle-earth shown by the Hobbits of the Shire and by Treebeard of Fangorn forest.

After the destruction of the One Ring, Aragorn gives wide lands for new forest; but, Kocher writes, Tolkien gives "ominous hints that the wild wood will not prosper in the expanding Age of Man" that will follow.

[T 7] Tolkien noted in a letter that he had created walking tree-creatures [Ents and Huorns] partly in response to his "bitter disappointment and disgust from schooldays with the shabby use made in Shakespeare's Macbeth of the coming of 'Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill': I longed to devise a setting in which the trees might really march to war".

One of the first to note this was Paul H. Kocher, who wrote "Tolkien was an ecologist, champion of the extraordinary, hater of 'progress', lover of handicrafts, detester of war long before such attitudes became fashionable.

[22] Plank describes the chapter's emphasis on the "deterioration of the environment" "quite unusual for its time",[23] with the Hobbits returning to the England-like[24][25] Shire finding needless destruction of the old and beautiful, and its replacement by the new and ugly; pollution of air and water; neglect; "and above all, trees wantonly destroyed".

Pastoral vision of an unspoilt England : the Old Mill at Hobbiton , reconstructed for the filming of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings
Mines, ironworks, smoke, and spoil heaps: the Black Country , near Tolkien's childhood home, has been suggested as an influence on his vision of Mordor . [ 1 ]
Primeval forest : sunlight streaming through undisturbed beech trees
"...hammers thudded. At night plumes of vapour steamed from the vents, lit from beneath with red light". [ T 5 ] Steam hammer at work, England
The "industrial hell " [ 15 ] of Isengard, in Tolkien's words "tunneled .. dark .. deep .. graveyard of unquiet dead .. furnaces". [ T 5 ] Medieval fresco of hell, St Nicholas in Raduil, Bulgaria
Macbeth at a wild Birnam Wood , by John Stoddart, 1800
The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey suggests that Tolkien wished he had the Hobbit Merry 's magic horn to rouse people to environmental action in England. [ 19 ] Illustrated is a French 15th century hunting horn.