For those interested in his libertarian/agrarian views, a great book is -The Hobbit party the vision of freedom that Tolkien got, and the west forgot by Jonathan Witt and Jay W. Richards Ignatius Press San Francisco 2014
His Life
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born to Arthur Tolkien, who was of German ancestry and third generation English and English woman, Mabel Suffeld on the night of Jan 3 1892. Arthur and Mabel had been married on April 16, 1891. Tolkien would later say, “I am in fact far more a Suffeld than a Tolkien and English than German.”
As a baby in South Africa, Tolkien was once stolen by a black boy named Issac. The boy stole him so he could show off with pride a white baby to his village. He was also once bitten by a tarantula; luckily a nurse grabbed him and sucked out the poison, saving his life. [he would later say that this did not have any effect on how spiders are viewed in the Hobbit or LOTR]. In the spring of 1895, his mother,Mabel, took him and his brother back to England, leaving his father for some time in South Africa to visit family. Soon after, in February of 1896, Tolkien’s father, Arthur, dies. Mabel then returns for good to England with Tolkien and his younger brother Hilary. After living for a short time in Birmingham, they move south and rent a cottage in the town of Sarehole mill. Tolkien was raised in poverty.
In 1900, Mabel converted from Anglican to Catholic and they moved into the city. Tolkien and his brother then attend King Edwards School. When his mother joined the Catholic Church, their extended family was resentful and most cut off all their funds and support. Most of their family had been Baptist/Anglican and Unitarian. Tolkien’s fathers had been an Anglican and his father’s side of family was mostly Baptist. At age 10, Tolkien attended St. Phillips School[catholic] where Father Francis Xavier Morgan had a big influence on his life. He [Father Francis] smoked a large cherry wood pipe,Tolkien stated that “my own later addiction to the pipe derived from this.” In 1904, Mabel is found to have diabetes and dies in November, at the age of 34. Before his mother’s death, she gaveFather Francis guardianship of her sons. By 1908, the boys move to Mrs. Faulkner’s house on duchess road. This is where Tolkien met Edith Bratt, his future wife. Edith was an Anglican and conservative, actively attending party meetings.
Tolkien’s first diary entry of the new year read, “God help me, feel weak and weary, New Years Day, 1910.” Later, in 1911, while at King Edwards School in Birmingham, Tolkien, Rob Golson, Geoffery Smith and Christopher Weisman formed TCBS “Tea Club and Barrovian Society.” TCBS was designed to testify for god and truth. Tolkien’s bestfriend Chris Wiseman said regarding Tolkien, “he was by nature cheerful...with a great zeal for life.” Wiseman, a staunch Methodist, said they would argue religion without bitterness. Tolkien excelled with languages and words. He studied and learned many languages while at King Edwards. These included German, French,Greek, Latin, Anglo Saxson, Middle English, Spanish, Welsh, and Gothic. He even started to invent his own language by the age of 16. Later in his life, he would also learn more languages as well as inventing his own. A lover of words and languages, Tolkien once said, “as if something had stirred me, half awakened from sleep,there was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind these words.”
Tolkien attended oxford in 1911 where he played rugby. He also joined the collage essay club and dialectical society. He took part in the debating society and started his own club, “Those devoted to self indulgence.” During this time, there were papers, discussions,debates, dinners, and plenty of tobacco. Tolkien was viewed as being very humble, having a good sense of humor and easily making friends. He would often pull pranks in school and was a bit of a troublemaker. He once dressed as an anglo-saxson warrior, complete with axe, and chased astonished neighbors down the road.
After converting to Catholicism, Edith Bratt was married to Tolkien by Father Murphy on Wednesday March 22, 1916. Shortly after being married, Tolkien was sent to war in 1916. In France, the terrors of trench warfare hit Tolkien hard. Many of his friends lost their lives during the war. Tolkien contracted “Trench fever” and was sent to the hospital on Friday October 27th. The fever did not relent and he was sent to England on November 8th. While in hospital, Tolkien started his epic and writings/stories that would make up the Silmarillion. While on sick leave in Birmingham, Edith became pregnant. She gave birth to a son on November 16, 1917. During this time, Tolkien had been discharged from hospital and was residing at the military camp. Because of this, he could not be there to see his newborn son and wife until almost a week after he was born. The child was named John Francis Reul Tolkien, in honor of father Francis Morgan, who came from Birmingham to baptize the baby. After being promoted to full lieutenant, he was not sent back oversees. When on leave, at home with Edith, he would work near growth of hemlock. This location was used in the story in the Silmarillion, the tale of a mortal man, Beren, who loves an immortal elf, Luthien Tinuviel, who is dancing among hemlock in the woods.
In November of 1918, Tolkien and his family moved to Oxford and received a job working on the new English dictionary. During this time he also taught Anglo Saxon. He later became a professor at age 32 at Leeds University. He was the youngest professor as reader of English language at the university. He and Edith went on to have three more children; two sons, Micheal Hilary Reuel and Christopher Reuel, and a daughter, Priscilla Mary Reuel. His son Micheal won a medal in WW2 as anti aircraft gunner. His other son, John, became an ordained priest in Catholic Church. In 1925, a professorship at Oxford of anglo-saxson opened; Tolkien applied and got the position. A professorship at Oxford required 36 lectures or classes a year.Tolkien felt that was too few. During his second year he did 136. Teacher Jim Stewart said this of Tolkien, “he could turn a lecture into a mead hall in which he was the bard and we were the feasting listening guests.” By adulthood, Tolkien was well versed in many languages, these include: Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian,Spanish, Old and Middle English, Finnish, Gothic, Old Norse, Modern and Medieval Welsh, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Lithuanian,Russian, Swedish, Lombardi, Middle Dutch, Middle High and Low German,Old High German, and old Slavic.
Tolkien believed that we live in a fallen world and he saw himself as a weak man. He had a profound christian attitude towards life and was very humble. He could hold no opinion half heartily and could not be uncommitted about any topic that interested him. He stated about himself, “I have a simple sense of humor, which even my appreciative critics find tiresome.” He hated cars and fast travel; he rode a bike to get around. If he did have to use a car,he was daring not skillful. When accelerating across a busy main road in Oxford to get to a side street, he would ignore all other vehicles and cry “charge ‘em and they scatter,” and scatter they did. Tolkien was a storyteller, often telling stories to his children. Every Christmas he would write a letter with pictures from “Father Christmas” to his children. He authored many poems, and many went unpublished. Late in life he lived quietly, mostly at home. The change in the upcoming generation at Oxford [less christian] also caused his withdrawal from the public. He suffered from boredom and depression late in life as a result in him being removed from men groups such as the inklings.
He grew up poor his whole life up until LOTR. After LOTR, for the first time he was wealthy. Tolkien was very generous, giving to children and the local parish church. His dress and behavior was ordinary, as well as his house. He had no electronics gadgets in the house even though he could have easily afforded them. He enjoyed wine and a pipe, as well as grand-parenting later in life. He lived an ordinary middle class conservative life. Edith died on Monday November 29,1971, at age 82. Tolkien died Sunday September 2, 1973, at the age of 81. Tolkien and Edith’s grave marker says “Edith Mary Tolkien Luthien 1889-1971 John Ronald Tolkien Berern 1892-1973.”
His writings
“Ina hole in the ground there lived a hobbit, eventually I thought I’d better find out what hobbits were like. But that’s only the beginning”
- J.R.R Tolkien
Tolkien spent endless hours writing personal letters to friends, family, and fans. He also wrote many short stories and poems, but he is most well known for Lord of the rings, a vastly popular book with over 150 million copies sold, and the Hobbit, a book with over 100 million copies sold. By the mid sixties, the books prompted a large cult following in America. LOTR and the Hobbit sold ¼ billion copies world wide; second only to “A Tale of Two Cities” in all time novel sales. He never intended to write a sequel to the Hobbit; he had thought all his good ideas were used in the Hobbit. In a letter,Tolkien said that “he would not write a bio of himself as his nature “expresses itself about things deepest felt in tales and myths.”
LOTR was written to entertain and to create a mythology for England. Tolkien said that LOTR was primarily to be enjoyed not as an allegory, but “fairy story has its own mode of reflecting truth that other ways cannot, some of the authors own reflections and values will be worked in, not the same as allegory. We all exemplify principles but do not represent them.” He gave many different reasons as to what the Lord of the rings was all about: the fall of man, morality, god, religion, the machine, life, power, death, words, languages and politics. When writing his epic tales he did not see himself as an inventor but instead that “I had the sense of recording what was already there somewhere, not inventing” and “I ceased to invent, I wait till I seem to know what really happened, or till it writes itself.” When talking to the inklings he said, “A new character has come on the screen, I did not invent him, I did not want him, though I like him.” Tolkien wrote to a publisher on August 31, 1939 saying, “Following along and getting quit out of hand.... progress towards quite unforeseen goals.” When asked a question about LOTR, he would answer something like, “I don't know, I will try to find out.” He was not an inventor but a discoverer. He said the true writer of the story was Eru [God], “that one ever present person who is never absent and never named.” He told the inklings it was god who was the true inventor since god created man and mans mind, so it all originated with god; He believed man was only a sub creator.
He saw Middle Earth as real history that did take place in a period of the actual old world of this planet. He said, “To me it is not an imaginary world...the theater of my tale is this earth.....but the historical period is imaginary.” He wanted people to take in his writings as actual history. Tolkien did not care for Disney or cartoonist depictions of LOTR. Tolkien created the Hobbit for kids, but later on regretted some of the childish aspects of it. Tolkien said he would have went back and changed the Hobbit to be more like the LOTR if he could, and that LOTR had priority; his favorite and “best” work. Tolkien was a perfectionist in his writings. Nothing hit the press unless revised,reconsidered and then finally published. Lewis said his friends had“hoped for a final text of an old work, what they actually got was the first draft of a new one.”
Tolkien felt himself most like his character Faramir. He made many connections from his personal world to the world created in his books. Tolkien said, “My Sam Gamgee is indeed a reflection of the English soldier of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as far superior to myself.” There are many other connections as well; such as between Bilbo and Tolkien, and The Shire and England. He said that bag end was like his Aunt Jane’s Worcestershire farm. Hobbits reflected rustic English people with small imaginations, great courage, and the able to survive against all odds such as in WW1. An example of an event taken from his real life and put into LOTR was when Tolkien was chased by an old farmer for picking mushrooms.
His friends Friendship between C.S Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien and the Inklings
Tolkien enjoyed the company of friends and clubs [common in England of the day] that would follow him from high school through adult life. Tolkien co-started a club called T.C.B.S at King Edwards School tha toutlasted him.
C.S Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien first met in 1926. They talked for the first time as Oxford professors on Tuesday May 11, 1926. Tolkien founded a club at Oxford in the spring of 1926 named the “coal-biters.” This club was created to read Old Norse sagas and myths. Tolkien enrolled Lewis in the coal biters club to join in Icelandic saga readings. Lewis and Tolkien both loved all things “northerness,”such as Norse poetry/sagas, etc. Both authors loved William Morris. They would stay up late into the night talking on Norse gods and giants. They gathered a group around them of many Oxford dons that would read their works to each other. Some such works read were LOTR and the screw tape letters.
The group, “The Inklings,” owe their existence almost entirely to Lewis. The Inklings members were all male, all Christian, and all conservative. They entered literary history; not just Lewis with Narnia and Tolkien with LOTR, (although C.S Lewis was the nucleus of the group) but other members included Warren Lewis [brother of C. S.Lewis], R.E. Harvard, Owen Barfeild, Hugo Dyson, Charles Williams,Nevil Eaghill and Charles Wenn.
They generally meet Tuesday mornings at a pub they nicknamed “The bird and baby,” and then again on Thursdays met in Lewis's big magdalen sitting room. The Inklings enjoyed “highly intelligent and experienced debate.” Lewis’ magdalen room was a “man cave;”with cigarette ash on floor, not particularly clean, ink stains,tobacco burns and beer bottle imprints. Often they would move their meetings to a pub. Reading would start the discussion; they woul dread poems or stories, giving praise and criticism, and talk of all kinds. Sometimes, this would turn to heated debates, lasting into the late hours of the night. These discussions always involved enjoying tea, beer, pipe tobacco and rum, but always started with the tea. Tolkien, when reading or talking, was not always understood; he often was with a pipe in his mouth or waving one around as he talked.
The Inklings writings were influenced by the idea of a pre fallen Adam and Eve and original paradise on earth. All the Inklings recognized that they were fallen men; paradise and the fall was a subject that greatly influenced much of Tolkien and Lewis’s own works. Tolkien played a large part in Lewis’s conversion to Christianity. Lewis,who would later become a Christian apologist, who said as a youth that “I believe in no religion;” and Lewis believed man had invented god. At this time, he also told a friend he should be emancipated from the old beliefs in Christianity. However, on many occasions Lewis argued with Tolkien and other inklings on the subject of religion. In a discussion one night on the subject of the cross of Jesus, Tolkien compared Christianity to a story, where god is the author, who used real men and real history to tell the story. After becoming Christian, Lewis spoke of becoming a Christian and of that night saying, “My long night with Dyson and Tolkien had a great deal to do with it.” After Lewis became a Christian, Tolkien said that Lewis was “a lover, at last, after a long pilgrimage of our lord.” Lewis would grow to become what many today consider the greatest Christian apologist ever. Lewis became a northern Irish protestant, but he became more catholic as time went on. Lewis purposely avoided being labeled Anglo-catholic or evangelical because he hated those terms. But he did think in terms of not liking“liberals” and liberalism within the church. Like Tolkien, Lewis believed that great truths [Christianity] did not need reinterpretation in each age, but needed to be championed and defended.
The friendship grew between Tolkien and Lewis. Tolkien said, “Friendship with Lewis compensates much.” Lewis and his brother, along with Tolkien, took long hikes in the woods on holidays, talked about theology, and enjoyed and discussed beer. Lewis and Tolkien would meet for a hour on Mondays and end their meeting with a beer. Sometimes they would also go on afternoon walks together. Warren,Lewis's brother, became jealous of all the time they spent together. They wrote good reviews for each other’s books and Tolkien even gave and recommended “Out of the Silent Planet” to his publisher after Lewis publisher rejected it.
The two were very similar in their worldview. Lewis and Tolkien wereboth strongly conservative in their politics and both feared the riseof communism and the growing power of the left. The whole Inklings group was conservative politically. Tolkien, like all the Inklings,was against Marxism and progressivism. Lewis’s enemies were“progressives.” Like Tolkien, Lewis disliked modern thoughts and was described as being very Old Testament about sexuality and beliefs against homosexuality. Lewis and Tolkien shared a dislike of newspapers and journalist, feeling they are inaccurate. Like his friend Lewis, Tolkien viewed “new” [newspaper] as on the whole trivial and fit to be ignored. Both were strong advocates of Biblical creation care and Stuarts of God’s green earth. Both were strongly in love with the natural world and strongly against the industrial revolution. Lewis called the mechanized world the post christian world.
Part of what inspired Lewis and Tolkien to write was when Lewis wrote to Tolkien [tollers], “Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves.” Lewis and Tolkien both felt myth could convey truth in a way that no abstract argument could. “The unplayable debt I owe to him…sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea my “stuff” could be more than a private hobby,” said Tolkien of Lewis. Treebeard's booming voice was even modeled after C.S. Lewis.
His conservatism
“Tolkien was a lifelong enemy of big government in every form, not just the harsher forms we find in soviet communism, German Nazism, or Italian fascism, but also as it manifested itself in British democratic socialism”
-Jonathan Witt and Jay W The Hobbit Party: The vision of freedom that Tolkien got and the west forgot.
“A thinker far out of step with the rank and file intellectuals of his time and ours, the intellectual establishment of his day hated god and loved big brother. Tolkien loved god and hated big brother. Unlike many self appointed “radicals” in lockstep with spirit of the age, he was the true radical- the round peg in the square hole of modernity”
-Jonathan Witt and Jay W The Hobbit Party: The vision of freedom that Tolkien got and the west forgot.
Tolkien was an old-time catholic conservative, from a modern American perspective a libertarian. His political leanings were toward anarchy (abolition of control). He said, “The most improper job of any man, even saints, is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it and least of all those who seek the opportunity.” He hated socialism, communism, and progressivism; he thought totalitarian governments and control were evil. Tolkien said that the evils of the world are mechanism, scientific materialism, and socialism. “It goes by many names but always ends in greater centralization political authority at the expense of individuals, families and the church.” He warned that if England and others were to adopt the up and coming socialism “It would reduce each nation to nothing more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as shepherds.” Tolkien viewed all men as fallen, including politicians we might elect and hope to bring about a better society. Tolkien said that in contrast to the politicians, “I am not a socialist in any sense....most of all because the planners when they acquire power become so bad.” He felt that as a devout traditional catholic, the lust for ultimate power in government was to try and place oneself in gods place. Tolkien was a strong advocate of creation care and a lover of God’s green earth; this is just part of the reason he hated totalitarian governments.
“Diluting their followers with images of paradise in the future, a modernist utopia, but what one often gets... are the blasted landscapes of eastern Europe (Eastern European socialist countries that tried to obliterate private property), strip-mined, polluted, and even radioactive.”
-Tom Shippy, author of “J.R.R Tolkien: Author of the Century
In communist Russia they banned LOTR. 1991, in Moscow, anti-communist Russians held up a banner that read, “Frodo is with us” as Russian tanks closed in. Tolkien, his son said, “could not speak of income taxed without boiling over.” He was a strong supporter of private property. He agreed with the American founders that the need for moral culture to maintain freedom; believing only moral Christians could maintain freedom. He liked limited government and free society. He thought sin is the main reason we need government, yet also the reason to limit government. Tolkien did not like newspapers because they print false info. He was however, a former liberal. He said of his early life, “liberal darkness out of which I came knowing more about bloody Mary than the mother of Jesus.” However, starting in his 20's and until his death, he “was socially and politically conservative even by hobbit standards, and his conservatism was closely bound up in his deeply Christian and specifically catholic vision of man and creation.”
Conservatism in the Lord of the rings
The shire
Tolkien said that the importance of the political significance of LOTR was second only to the religious significance. The Shire was portrayed as being a favored form of government and of old time England. As a libertarian, he created the Shire with no government or active police. The only force would be volunteer sheriffs, who carried no weapons, and wore regular clothes. They did not police the shire, but guarded boarders; mostly returning stray animals. In the shire’s government “families for the most part managed their own affairs.” The shire was a libertarian society, Tolkien’s preferred government system. The Hobbits enjoyed total freedom from any authoritarian government control. This is one of the main reasons for the attractiveness of the shire to modern readers and watchers of the movie.
“No department of un-motorized vehicles, no internal revenue service, no government officials telling people who may and may not have laying hens in their backyards, no government schools lining up hobbit children in geometric rows to teach regimental behavior and group think, no government controlled currency, and no political institution even capable of collecting thrifts or foreign goods”
-Jonathan Witt and Jay W The Hobbit Party: The vision of freedom that Tolkien got and the west forgot
Scourge of shire government gone bad
Left out of the movie is the last section of the LOTR, the scourging of the Shire. It contains much on Tolkien’s view of government. It is a section that “conservatives and progressives alike have recognized this final portion of LOTR as a critique of modern socialism.” When the hobbits return, they find there libertarian paradise controlled by an oppressive government led by Saruman, with Orcs and local evil men to help. No longer is it a peaceful happy paradise, the Shire and Hobbits are under government control. Those now controlling the Shire are referred to as “sharkey and the ruffians.”
“The character of government is totally altered while its forms are not markedly changed. Before, the shire enjoyed easy going with max freedom and min government interference, the new regime operates through expanded restrictive rules, enforced by equally monstrously expanded military and para-military forces…the purpose of government is plainly to maintain, consolidate, and expand its own power.”
-Robert Plank, author of “The Scouring of the Shire: Tolkien’s view of fascism”
During the scourge there are groups of “gatherers and sharers...going around counting and measuring and taking off to storage, supposedly for “fair distribution.”” Yet it just ends with, as one hobbit says, “Them getting more and we get less.”
Tolkien, the lover of all things green, showed that when liberty and private property were secure in the Shire, the landscape was beautiful and gardened. But that was “all gone” due to “The gatherers and sharers.” The new government in the Shire controlled more and more; land, taxes, and regulations. The government killed off the hobbit farming community and replaced it with industry.
Ring of power and control
“A free society isn't something nice if you can get it, it’s worth laboring, fighting and dying for. The reason free people of the west fight Mordor to preserve their freedom.”
-J.R.R Tolkien
The good guys in the book are called the “free peoples.” Tolkien knew that complete power corrupts completely. Even Gandolf, with the power of the ring, would try to do good; but knew that good could turn into a evil, greater than that of Sauron. A warning to the people of his day and today is that even good intentions can end with evil when there is too much power and control. At the council of Elrond the “good guys” chose to destroy the ring rather than use its power; they reject the power to dominate. Tolkien said “the supremely bad motives, domination of others free wills.”
Fall of Numonor and Gondor
Tolkien, the traditionalist, was of the opinion that society at large was falling away from faith and morality; this was reflected in his book. Gondor, he said, “was a more primitive culture, less corrupt and Noble.” What led to the fall of Numonor was its form of government and its stance against life. The government no longer served its people as it should, but it became a place where the people were instead forced to serve the government. The kings of Numonor became “Proud men eager for wealth.” “They appeared now rather as lords and masters and gatherers of tribute than as helpers and teachers.” In time, “They hunted men and took their goods and enslaved them.”
The cultural decline in the third age of Gondor resulted in lower fertility rates. Just as what was happening in England with the increase hostility to life during Tolkien’s time. Tolkien, who was pro life [Sam Gamgee had 13 kids], warned of the danger of such philosophy. Gondor’s decline was because of the lack of children. Gandalf said that Minis Tirith was already lacking half the men that could dwell at ease there and that many houses of great families “Were silent.” “For more than a thousand years the Dunadain grew in wealth and power, yet the signs of decay had than already appeared, for the high men of the south married late, and their children were few....childless lords sat in aged halls and the last king of the line of Anario had no heir.” The Ents are another example of what happens with lack of fertility due to culture decline.
His environmental vision
“If you really want to know what middle earth is based on, it’s my wonder and delight in the earth as is, particularity the natural earth”
-J.R.RTolkien
"He was an unapologetic defender of nature before environmentalism had yet been made into a cause"
–RalphWood in “The Gospel According to Tolkien
"Tolkien felt no kinship with the 20th century and its terror regimes, mass genocides and overwhelming, conformist technologies and industries."
-[http://www.zenit.org/en/articles/j-r-r-tolkien-s-sanctifying-myth]
Tolkien was a strong lover of Gods green creation. He was a creation care advocate and an agrarian; that is influential and noticeable in his books. He was against the industrial revolution and what it did to God’s creation. He said the industrialization of both the shire and Isengard were what happened to England in his time. He would see rolling hills/trees and farmland destroyed by a ever growing city and industry machines;"evil" destroying "good.” He saw the roads of England destroyed by automobiles and chose to instead ride a bike. He was a man who loved the scenery of nature and a simple life. Tolkien was known for spending time in his own garden; he could name every flower and vegetable and even the kinds of grass in his garden. He was known for taking long hikes. He also loved birds, but it was trees that Tolkien loved best. Tolkien perhaps speaks for himself when he has Treebeard confess that "nobody cares for the trees anymore."
But as the authors of “The Environmental Vision of J.R.R Tolkien”said, “Is Tolkien an environmentalist, our answer is no,” who also said, “We came to environmentalism through Tolkien.” He does not fit into the modern environmental fold. In fact, he spoke out against the modern environmental [political] movement. In his view, creation has value apart from human usefulness; it had value before humans were created. The world was created by a god of love and has value. Tolkien understood mans biblical role as stewards of the earth; not lords to rule over, but stewards to care for it. He contrasts the two views of steward in Denathor and Gandalf; proper stewards are meant to serve not rule over. As a child, Tolkien would watch his father in his garden tending vines or planting saplings,grows of firs, cypresses, cedars, etc.; he had a “passionate love of growing things.”
Tolkien liked drawing and playing on trees as child, and even talked to them;he loved trees above all. Treebeard expressed his love of trees in his books. Tolkien implied in all his works to “take the part of trees as against their enemies.” Tolkien stated, “I am obviously much in love with plants and above all trees, and always have been, I find human maltreatment of them as hard to bear as some find ill treatment of animals,” and, “The savage sound of the electric saw is never silent wherever trees are still found growing.” Fangorn forrest was tense with hostility; threatened by a machine loving enemy.
Tolkien was a supporter of locally grown food. He had a love for landscapes and gardens. In LOTR, hobbits were like man but more in touch with nature. In the books, the hobbits best rooms in the house are not the biggest or the ones with the best furniture, but the ones that have best view of the landscape and garden. Hobbits live close to earth [in the earth hobbit holes], wear no shoes, love growing things, and name their female children after flowers. In Lothlorien it was beautiful because “there the trees were loved.” Beorn,from the Hobbit, loved animals as his children. Also Tolkien did not see population control or loss of technology as answers to environmental problems, but rather a solution could be to build and live in harmony together, like Lothlorien, Rivendall, and the shire.
Mordor assault on middle earths creation and industrial revolution
The environment of Mordor is described as “dreadful,” “loathsome,”“gasping,” “chocked,” ”sickly,” ”poison stained,””obscene,” ”desolation,” ”dark,” ”defiled,” ”disease beyond all healing;” nearly everything is dead. The trees, river,and air are all polluted. Further into Mordor it is completely barren; devoid of all vegetation. There are large scale slave operations and it is control by totalitarian government, which[Sauron] leads to decay. The picture painted of Mordor is in contrast to that of the Shire, where small communal farming and private land ownership leads to a good environment.
Isengard,Gandalf says, went from “green and fair” to “pits and forges”with the development of mines and industry. Sauromen tells his orcs to clear cut Isengard to feed the furnaces; “No trees grew there.” Treebeard says Sauromen has a “mind of metal and wheels and does not care for growing things.” Orcs were cutting trees for no useful reason; just so they would rot. In the scourging of The Shire, the waters are poisoned by factories, all the way to the Brandywine. In the poisoned areas, cut down trees were also“rampant.” Of the real world industrial revolution, Tolkien said that labor saving machines “just cause endless and worse labor.” Because of the fall of man, the machine devises not only don’t meet the expectations, but turn to new and horrible evil. “Look at how we have “progressed” from daedalus and i carns to the giant bomber...I’d go back to trees,” Tolkien states. His friend Lewis said, “We have “progressed” to universal suburbia; we need to know when to stop.” Tolkien called WW2 the war of the machines.
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