Ents, Elves, and Eriador

The Environmental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien

Matthew Dickerson, Jonathan Evans

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780813138381
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Science Fiction
• Index: Literature

"A fascinating ecocritical evaluation" of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion and other works of the master fantasist ( Northeastern Naturalist ). The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion are rarely considered to be works of environmental literature or mentioned together with such authors as John Muir, Rachel Carson, or Aldo Leopold. Nonetheless, Tolkien's vision of nature is as passionate and has had as profound an influence on his readers as that of many contemporary environmental writers. The burgeoning field of agrarianism provides new insights into Tolkien's view of the natural world and environmental responsibility. In Ents, Elves, and Eriador, Matthew Dickerson and Jonathan Evans show how Tolkien anticipated some of the tenets of modern environmentalism in the imagined world of Middle-earth and the races with which it is peopled. Dickerson and Evans examine Tolkien's major works as well as his lesser-known stories and essays, comparing his writing to that of the most important naturalists of the past century. A vital contribution to environmental literature and an essential addition to Tolkien scholarship, Ents, Elves, and Eriador offers both Tolkien fans and environmentalists an understanding of Middle-earth that has profound implications for environmental stewardship in the present and the future of our own world. "This book is for everyone who loves the work of J. R. R. Tolkien, and who loves the world around them." — Armchair Interviews "Anyone who ever thrilled to Tolkien's fighting trees, or to the earthy Tom Bombadil, or to the novel charm of the Shire will want to read this important and lovely book." —Bill McKibben, Scholar in Residence in Environmental Studies, Middlebury College

Part I

“The Tides of the World”

Gandalfian Stewardship and the
Foundations of Tolkien’s Vision

Chapter 1

Varda, Yavanna,
and the Value of Creation

In setting out to explore the legendarium of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth and to comprehend his imaginative vision, environmental or otherwise, the first thing one must realize is that Tolkien communicates through myth and story, not primarily through a set of abstract propositions. His ideas are expressed mythically, mythologically, and mythopoeically. He works mythopoeically because artistically he creates narratives meant to be understood as myths within his fictional world (the word mythopoeia means “the making of myths”). He works mythologically because his created myths are modeled, at least partially, on mythologies that already exist in our own world: Greek, Roman, Norse, Finnish, Celtic, and biblical. And he works mythically because—like the mythologies of our world—Tolkien’s created myths communicate not through the discursive impartation of factual propositions but through narratives. Traditionally, myths articulate the primordial, elemental, and foundational truths by which a culture defines reality and its origin and place within it, and they do so in story form. Environmental concerns represent one facet of the larger body of truths illustrated by Tolkien’s myths.

Tolkien’s Mythic Methodology

Although we are trying to describe objectively a set of abstract principles, ultimately the fact that Tolkien offers them to us in the highly subjective form of stories founded on myths is not a liability but an advantage. In their introduction to “Part III: Art and Creation Consciousness,” the editors of the essay collection Cry of the Environment make a strong statement about the profound need for imagination and art in the formation of an environmental vision:

The present ecological crisis we are facing is due in part to an impoverishment of imagination—creative solutions to admittedly complex ecological difficulties are rarely proposed and even more rarely taken seriously as “realistic.”

Artistic resources must be an integral part in the development of genuine creation consciousness. Art works—in every medium—can symbolize for us our deepest concerns: they can be documents of what is and is not meaningful in human existence. When we are engaged by a work of art, we begin to participate in a new vision of the world. . . . They help us to see our world—and our place in it—in a new way.¹

These editors point to a factor that is often not acknowledged in our response to the ecological crisis: the importance of art and of our engagement with art in ways that transform and shape our consciousness. Our imagination must not only be put to use; it must also be hallowed and shaped. In his introduction to The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, Norman Wirzba makes a complementary point when he addresses current environmental problems, including competition between the perspectives of commercial industrialism and preindustrial agrarianism:

First, we must recognize that an agrarian transformation of contemporary culture will require the work of the imagination. We need to be able to envision a future that is markedly different from today’s world, and be creative in the implementation of economic, political, religious, and educational reforms.²

Here Wirzba echoes the sentiments of John Elder quoted in our introduction. Before any reforms can be initiated and implemented, the imagination of our culture must be reached, and this is best done through art and literature—especially through myth. In his legendarium, as well as in various shorter fairy tales, Tolkien provides just the sort of highly engaging work of imagination required, one that may play an important role in the transformation of contemporary culture. Although Tolkien wrote his stories half a century ago and set them in a far older mythical past, in Wirzba’s terms, he enables us “to envision a future that is markedly different” from the present. Such a vision is itself mythic in import.

Where does that mythic vision begin? One of the most famous passages in The Lord of the Rings appears toward the end of The Two Towers when, on the verge of plunging into Mordor, Frodo and Sam pause to reflect on the narrative significance of their quest. Sam observes, rather acutely, that they are part of the same story as Beren and Lúthien, the famous characters of ancient legend whose tale, by the end of the Third Age, has acquired all the characteristics of myth:

“But that’s a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it—and the Silmaril went on and came to Eärendil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We’ve—you’ve got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end?” (IV/iv)

The answer, of course, is no, the great tales “don’t never end,” as Sam colloquially puts it. In fact, the connection between Sam and Frodo and the mythic figures of the Silmarillion is closer than the inhabitants of Middle-earth or most of Tolkien’s readers may realize. By the end of the Third Age, the name Eärendil is to most Hobbits simply the name of the Morning Star. In the mythology of Middle-earth, however, this star is a bright jewel, one of the three jewels known as the Silmarils, which are represented in the mythological text of the Quenta Silmarillion as the greatest treasures of the First Age of Middle-earth. Eärendil is the hero who carries a Silmaril through the heavens on the prow of his great ship Vingilot. He is also the grandson-in-law of Beren and Lúthien, who recover a Silmaril from the crown of the enemy Morgoth. And he is the father of Elrond, who plays such a significant a role in Sam and Frodo’s quest for Mount Doom. All this is told in full in The Silmarillion, Tolkien’s masterpiece recounting the creation of Middle-earth and its First Age. As is well known, Tolkien tried, ultimately without success, to have the book published simultaneously with The Lord of the Rings in a mammoth single-volume edition. In the end, he was able to secure publication of the trilogy, but The Silmarillion remained unpublished until 1977, four years after his death. Nevertheless, The Silmarillion provides the mythic background for The Lord of the Rings and is crucial to its full comprehension; Clyde S. Kilby notes that The Lord of the Rings has more than 600 references to the history of the First and Second ages of Middle-earth.³ To get to the heart of Tolkien’s vision, we have to begin with an examination of some of its mythic symbols.

The Two Trees of Valinor

Near the beginning of the first chapter of The Silmarillion, there is a description of the birth of two trees, which come to be known as the Two Trees of Valinor:

And when Valinor was full-wrought and the mansions of the Valar were established, in the midst of the plain beyond the mountains they built their city, Valmar of the many bells. Before its western gate there was a green mound, Ezellohar, that is named also Corollairë; and Yavanna hallowed it, and she sat there long upon the green grass and sang a song of power, in which was set all her thought of things that grow in the earth. But Nienna thought in silence, and watered the mound with tears. In that time the Valar were gathered together to hear the song of Yavanna. . . .

And as they watched, upon the mound there came forth two slender shoots; and silence was over all the world in that hour, nor was there any other sound save the chanting of Yavanna. Under her song the saplings grew and became fair and tall, and came to flower; and thus there awoke in the world the Two Trees of Valinor. Of all things which Yavanna made they have most renown, and about their fate all the tales of the Elder Days are woven. (Silm, 38)

One of the first things we must note is the mythic significance of this event, which is implied by the fact that all of the Valar—the most powerful beings of Middle-earth⁴—devote their full attention to this event, and “silence was over all the world in that hour.” This significance is also made explicit in the closing line of the paragraph: woven about the fate of these two trees are “all the tales of the Elder Days.” This might seem to be a surprising statement to make about a pair of trees. However, these trees not only have a central place in the physical layout of the undying city of Valmar, the capital of Valinor; they are also central to the early chronology of events in the mythic Elder Days of Middle-earth. It is a quest for the famed Silmarils, made from the light of the Two Trees, that drives the High Elves out of Valinor to return in exile to Middle-earth. This exile eventually results in the establishment of the Elvish kingdoms of western Middle-earth that remain in the Third Age—chiefly Lothlórien and Rivendell, but others as well—and, later, the founding of the kingdoms of Men in Gondor and Arnor. The famed White Tree of Gondor, replanted by Aragorn when he becomes king at the end of The Return of the King, is a descendent of the Two Trees of Valinor, and Aragorn’s planting of it evokes the memory of Yavanna’s primeval planting in the long-past mythic period. It is the light of the Two Trees of Valinor that lives in the star of Eärendil as well as in the Phial of Galadriel—the “star-glass” borne by Frodo.

As a philologist, Tolkien was interested in the sources and significance of names, and in his own works he showed the importance of people, places, objects, and other things by the patterns of their naming. “It gives me great pleasure, a good name,” Tolkien said in a 1971 BBC radio interview. “I always in writing start with a name. Give me a name and it produces a story, not the other way about normally.” In Tolkien’s works, the most important things usually have many names. Gandalf, for example, is given the names Mithrandir, Tharkûn, Olórin, Incánus, and others. Some things are of such universal significance—and, by virtue of the number of people and races to whom they are significant, so multifaceted in meaning and nuance—that many names are required. This is the case with the Two Trees. “Telperion the one was called in Valinor, and Silpion, and Ninquelótë, and many other names; but Laurelin the other was, and Malinalda, and Culúrien, and many names in song beside” (Silm, 38). Even the hillock on which the trees grow has two names, Ezellohar and Corollairë, both of which mean in Elvish “The Green Mound”; Galadriel’s realm of Lothlórien is also named Laurelindórenan after the younger of the two trees. All these names are evidence of the historic importance and of the deeper mythic qualities associated with the things they describe. Arguably, the Two Trees are the most mythically significant symbols in all of Tolkien’s writings about Middle-earth.

This leads us to the issue of what these two trees are, what they represent, and why they are so prominent in the history and mythology of Middle-earth and in the environmental themes explored in this book. In Tolkien’s ecology, the living world is not the only aspect of creation that is important. Mountains and rivers, seas and islands, the winds and skies, and the stars and stones are all part of nature. For this reason, the Valar—the godlike ruling powers—have their different identities bound up with different aspects of nature and with care for its various components. One might say that the Valar are stewards of Arda,⁵ or of various aspects of its substance. Manwë, the king of the Valar, is associated with the winds of Middle-earth, Varda with the stars, Aulë with the material substance of the earth, and Ulmo with the waters. Living things, however, have a special role and a special importance—partly because man, the mythmaker, is a living being, and partly because the author himself was a man.⁶ Among the Valar, Yavanna is the one most concerned with living things. She is called the “Giver of Fruits”; she is “the lover of all things that grow in the earth, and all their countless forms she holds in her mind, from the trees like towers in forests long ago to the moss upon stones or the small and secret things in the mould” (Silm, 27). To Yavanna, living beings in the biosphere can be divided into two groups, which she calls olvar (plants) and kelvar (animals). As illustrated by the earlier quotation, Yavanna pours “all her thought of things that grow in the earth” into the making of the Two Trees. It can be said, then, that these trees embody all living things in Arda at that time, a time so early in the cosmic history of Middle-earth that Men and Elves have not yet been brought into being. The timing here makes a great deal of difference, for—read in this light—the trees must be said to embody the living essence of the biosphere, the natural world apart from Men.

In this regard, it is interesting to note Tolkien’s language. Although the event is one in which Yavanna makes or creates the trees, the narrator also describes the trees as awakening—as if to imply that they had a life already, prior to Yavanna’s song of creation, which her singing simply arouses from dormancy. Even the very mound on which the trees grow is said to be “hallowed”—that is, made holy—by their presence. This mound is covered, we are told, with “green grass,” and in Tolkien’s writing, references to green, to grass, and especially to green grass suggest—like trees—important mythic symbolism.⁷ Even the color green alone is powerful; in the first chapter of the Quenta Silmarillion, for example, we read that “the new-made green was yet a marvel in the eyes of the makers; and they were long content” (Silm, 36). The mythic importance of green grass carries over into The Lord of the Rings. When he first meets the figure of Aragorn crossing the plains of Rohan, Éomer exclaims in surprise, “Dreams and legends spring to life out of the grass.” He later asks, “Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in daylight?” to which Aragorn replies, “The green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of legend though you tread it under the light of day!” (III/ii).

In addition to the description of the trees as “fair,” meaning “beautiful to the eye,” subsequent paragraphs depict them in greater detail. Two of the most striking features of the trees are the color of their leaves and flowers and the fact that they emit a light or radiance of their own. Telperion has leaves of silver and gives off a “dew of silver light” ever falling from its countless flowers. Laurelin has leaves whose edges are “glittering gold,” whose flowers are like “clusters of yellow flame” spilling “a gold rain upon the ground,” giving forth “warmth and great light.” We read:

In seven hours the glory of each tree waxed to full and waned again to naught; and each awoke once more to life an hour before the other ceased to shine. Thus in Valinor twice every day there came a gentle hour of softer light when both trees were faint and their gold and silver beams were mingled. Telperion was the elder . . . and that first hour in which he shone [was named] the Opening Hour, and [the Valar] counted from it the ages of their reign in Valinor. . . .

But the light that was spilled from the trees endured long, ere it was taken up into the airs or sank down into the earth; and the dews of Telperion and the rain that fell from Laurelin Varda hoarded in great vats like shining lakes, that were to all the land of the Valar as wells of water and of light. Thus began the Days of the Bliss of Valinor; and thus began also the Count of Time. (Silm, 38–39)

The overall imagery is fourfold: warmth, light, beauty, and—from the comparison to gold and silver, as well as their prominent place in Valinor—great worth or value. The word used by Tolkien here to capture all this is “glory,” with which the Bliss of Valinor is closely associated.

After Laurelin and Telperion are created, but before they are destroyed, the Noldorin jewel-smith Fëanor ponders “how the light of the Trees, the glory of the Blessed Realm, might be preserved imperishable.” Working in secret, summoning all his power, Fëanor creates out of crystal stronger than adamant the three great jewels known as the Silmarils. He encases in these jewels “the blended light of the Trees of Valinor, which lives in them yet, though the Trees have long withered and shine no more. Therefore even in the darkness of the deepest treasury the Silmarils of their own radiance shone like the stars of Varda; and yet, as were they indeed living things, they rejoiced in light and received it and gave it back in hues more marvelous than before.” Varda hallows the Silmarils, and it is foretold that “the fates of Arda, earth, sea, and air, lay locked within them” (Silm, 67). Two of these jewels are ultimately lost, but the one that remains becomes the beacon of Eärendil, the Morning Star.

The moment when the trees are destroyed by the giant spider Ungoliant—a figure of darkness or unlight whose name means “weaver of gloom”—is one of immeasurable grief and mou...