Environmentalism in The Lord of the Rings

, near Tolkien's childhood home, has been suggested as an influence on his vision of Mordor. J. R. R. Tolkien was brought up as a boy first in rural Warwickshire at Sarehole, at that time just outside Birmingham, and then inside that industrial city. An art exhibition entitled "The Making of Mordor" at the Wolverhampton Art Gallery (2014) claimed that the steelworks and blast furnaces of the West Midlands near Tolkien's childhood home inspired his vision of Mordor, and the name that he gave it, meaning "Black Land" in his invented Elvish language of Sindarin. This industrialized area has long been known as "the Black Country". Philip Womack, writing in The Independent, likened Tolkien's move from rural Warwickshire to urban Birmingham as "exile from a rural idyll to Mordor-like forges and fires", The critic Chris Baratta notes the contrasting environments of the well-tended leafy Shire, the home of the Hobbits, and "the industrial wastelands of Isengard and Mordor." 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." Tolkien was acutely sensitive to encroachments on the English countryside; during the Second World War, he was, like W. G. Hoskins, horrified by how much land was taken up by aerodromes. Later in life, Tolkien became obsessed with the growing threat to the countryside as cities grew and roads cut across fields and woods. == Pristine creation ==

Wild nature : sunlight streaming through undisturbed beech trees Tolkien makes use of wild nature in the form of forests in Middle-earth, from the Trollshaws and Mirkwood in The Hobbit, reappearing in The Lord of the Rings, to the Old Forest, Lothlórien, and Fangorn forest which each occupy whole chapters of The Lord of the Rings, not to mention the great forests of Beleriand and Valinor of The Silmarillion. Indeed, while Middle-earth was still "in a twilight under the stars", the "oldest living things had arisen: ... on earth, the shadows of great trees". For the Tolkien critic Tom Shippey, the mention of Mirkwood is an echo of the Norse mythology of the Elder Edda, with the pathless forests of the North over the Misty Mountains described in one of the poems in the Edda, the Skirnismal. Tolkien believed that the primeval human understanding was, as he wrote in Tree and Leaf, "communion with other living things", now lost. 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. Harmony with the land 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", 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." == Environmental devastation ==

In the foreword to the Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien wrote that while the work had no "allegorical significance ... whatsoever", Tolkien describes the shattering impact of industrialisation at Saruman's Isengard and in Sauron's dead land of Mordor. Tolkien's feelings about nature fit into a more general pattern of decline, the belief that while evil may be countered, the losses will not quite be made up. As Kocher writes "Ents may still be there in our forests, but what forests have we left? The process of extermination is already well under way in the Third Age, and in works outside the epic Tolkien bitterly deplores its climax today." Saruman's Isengard Tolkien has the Treebeard, leader of the tree-giants, the Ents, say of the Wizard Saruman: , 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. == A longed-for restoration ==

Trees marching to war at a wild Birnam Wood, by John Stoddart, 1800 In The Lord of the Rings, on the morning after the long night of the Battle of Helm's Deep, in which Saruman tried to destroy Rohan, both armies saw that a forest of angry, tree-like Huorns now filled the valley, trapping Saruman's army of Orcs. The Orcs fled into the Huorn forest and were destroyed. 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". Critics note that it is a shock that the battle, the Orcs, and Saruman's hopes of conquest should end this way. They also observe that it represented Tolkien's wish-fulfilment to reverse the harm he could see being done to the English countryside. The Scouring of the Shire suggests that Tolkien wished he had the Hobbit Merry's magic horn to rouse people to environmental action in England. Illustrated is a French 15th century hunting horn. Critics since the 1970s have commented on Tolkien's environmentalism as seen in The Lord of the Rings, especially in the chapter "The Scouring of the Shire". 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." Nicholas Birns calls the chapter "as much conservationist as it is traditionalist", writing that it presents a strong pro-environmentalist argument in addition to its other themes. Plank describes the chapter's emphasis on the "deterioration of the environment" "quite unusual for its time", with the Hobbits returning to the England-like 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". The chapter has been seen as something of a call to arms, a wish to rouse people to environmental action in their "own backyard". == References ==