Exploiting Middle-earth

On Ecocritical Thought and Fantasy

Abstract

This essay examines the value of mythology and mythopoeic fantasy in clarifying the social, ecological, and political dynamics of the Anthropocene, based primarily on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973). It explores the use of 'myth' and 'mythology' in relation to Tolkien's work and how it provides an orientation for living in the world. By exploring the motifs of Tolkien’s Second Age, it demonstrates the merits of Tolkien’s work within the field of Critical Ecology as well as the pertinence of a more nuanced ecocritical approach within the field of Tolkien studies. It also examines how mythopoeic fantasy is the most subversive art form, as it can suspend disbelief, produce Secondary Belief and facilitate a primary experience of enchantment. Finally, the essay discusses Tolkien's theory of recovery, escape and consolation, revealing the liberatory power of mythopoeic fantasy in a changing and troubled world.

Introduction

In this essay, I will demonstrate the value of mythology and mythopoeic fantasy in clarifying the social, ecological, and political dynamics of the Anthropocene, based primarily on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973). I will provide an overview of prominent approaches to ecocriticism in Tolkien scholarship and highlight some of the ways his mythology can be contextualised within the re-enchantment movements of the Victorian and Edwardian periods. I will touch on some of the central animistic features of his works, arguing that their ecumenical ‘literary’ context and ‘Christian’ affiliations made them substantially more influential and radical. I will then offer an ecocritical exploration of the motifs of Tolkien’s Second Age, including the changing of the earth in the ‘Fall of Númenor,’ in relation to the dynamics of the Anthropocene. Through this, I hope to simultaneously demonstrate the merits of Tolkien’s work within the field of Critical Ecology and the pertinence of a more nuanced ecocritical approach within the field of Tolkien studies. I will conclude with some thoughts on Tolkien’s theory of recovery, escape, and consolation, revealing the liberatory power of mythopoeic fantasy in a changing and troubled world.

Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote (2007: p. 87), “What fantasy does that the realistic novel generally cannot do is include the nonhuman as essential … To include anything on equal footing with the human, as equal in importance, is to abandon realism.” This realism, of course, is not reality as-it-is, but rather our dominant anthropocentric narrative, in which humans are the sole actors on a planetary stage filled with props and background scenery. To challenge this falsehood is to undermine the frail logic at the heart of our most exploitative hegemonic systems. While science fiction is generally regarded as a robust basis for ecocritical dialogue, providing a space to explore some of the possible social, psychological, environmental, and political futures facing humanity, fantasy has routinely been marginalised and ignored (Ulstein, 2015: p. 8). This is, arguably, because science fiction serves the purposes of mainstream environmentalism – envisaging a future filled with salvatory technological innovations born out of human ingenuity – while fantasy has a fundamentally more subversive nature. Indeed, as Chris Brawley argues (2014, p. 23), “By making trees walk or animals talk, mythopoeic fantasy is perhaps the most subversive art form there is.” But in a genre overrun with medieval clichés and half-baked metaphors, it’s clear that not all ‘fantasy’ is created equal – the ‘mythopoeic’ element is essential for unlocking the genre’s potential for transformation.

Approaching the Perilous Realm of ‘Myth’

Myth and mythology are tricky terms to deal with, given their variable baggage-laden connotations. Folklorists and religious scholars maintain their own narrow definitions of these terms, usually reserving them for matters pertaining to cosmogenesis or the affairs of the gods (Segal, 2015: p. 4). In its original Ancient Greek context, however, mythos simply meant ‘word’ or ‘story,’ and when combined with Greek logos (‘speech/word,’ related to the verb legein, ‘to speak’) it became mythologia or ‘mythology’ – ‘words concerning words’ (2000, pp. 6-7) or the ‘telling of stories.’ But over time, logos became estranged from mythos: the former became synonymous with reason and logic, and the latter with mythicalfalsehoods. This notion remains pervasive in modern Euro-American cultural and linguistic contexts. For the purposes of this essay, I will follow Robert Segal’s definition of myth as “a story about something significant” which commands “a powerful hold on its adherents” irrespective of its veracity or falsehood (Segal, 2015: p. 5). While the word ‘mythology’ is popularly used to refer to the presumedly untruthful beliefs premodern or ‘foreign’ cultural traditions, this speaks more to our ethnocentrism than to the nature of the term. There is nothing intrinsic about mythology that requires it to have been fashioned in the ancient past, and to dwell on matters of ‘veracity’ is to largely misunderstand its function. A myth’s viability is not dependent upon its faithfulness to empirical facts, but rather its applicability and capacity to provide “an orientation for living in [the] world” (Scarborough, 1994: p. 110).

As this essay deals primarily with J.R.R. Tolkien, it’s necessary to explain the use of ‘myth’ and ‘mythology’ in relation to his work. It’s notable that he routinely used such terms when speaking about his own writings, particularly his ‘Silmarillion’ materials (Tolkien, 1981: p. 17, 26, 134, etc.). He imagined his own myths as sitting alongside works like Beowulf, The Iliad, and The Mabinogion – something larger than mere ‘literature,’ though not as domineering as religious mythology. He was famously averse to the purely allegorical use of mythic themes, writing, “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations … I much prefer history, true or feigned ... many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author” (1954: p. 11). While an author of allegory can impose their personal opinions upon a reader through the fanciful use of metaphor, both nuance and enchantment are unavoidably sacrificed in the process. While the “magical understanding by men of the proper languages of birds and beasts and trees” is deemed by Tolkien to be a foundational desire at the heart of mythopoeic storytelling (1947, p. 36), no reader walks away from Orwell’s Animal Farm enchanted by the lucidity of barnyard animals. Allegory is explicitly ‘just a story,’ requiring at most a temporary suspension of disbelief – effective mythology and fairy-stories, however, can not only suspend disbelief but actively produce “Secondary Belief” (1947: p. 52), thus facilitating a primary experience of enchantment.

While he fervently resisted efforts to reduce his narratives to any singular ‘meanings’ (1954: p. 10), Tolkien’s works are distinctly applicable to ecological matters, given their centrality in the stories themselves. ‘Middle-earth’ is not the name of an imaginary planet, but an old Germanic title for our own inhabited Earth, here derived from Old English Middangeard. As Tolkien clarifies, “The theatre of my tale is this earth, the one in which we now live, but the historical period is imaginary” (1981: p. 239). As such, his stories are directly involved in the dynamics of our own planet – albeit approached from an enchanted point of view. He identifies such an approach, in its most earnest manifestations, as the true approach of ‘fairy-stories,’ discussed at length in his praiseworthy essay on the topic. He explains (1947: p. 32), “fairy-stories are not in normal English usage stories about fairies or elves, but stories about Fairy, that is Faërie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being. Faërie contains many things besides elves and fays … it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves … when we are enchanted.”

Tolkien was notably influenced by Elias Lönnrot’s construction of The Kalevala as a ‘national mythology’ for Finland, which effectively “justified in the eyes of the whole of Europe Finland’s right to independence, and elevated the Finnish language into the main expression of the ‘soul’ of the Finnish people” (Fimi, 2009: p. 86). In the early years of Tolkien’s own creative venture, it’s evident that he thought of his own ‘mythology’ as a kind of English counterpart to The Kalevala– albeit distinctly less politically ambitious in its codification (2009: p. 53). But while Lönnrot sought to – at least overtly– ground his creative reconstructions in established folk traditions, Tolkien took a different approach. As a philologist, he was principally expert in ‘Language and Literature’ and the reconstruction of proto-languages through comparative linguistics. He was acutely aware that such procedures also reliably uncovered proto-myths, pointing to common ‘genetic’ roots for many Indo-European and global mythic motifs. But his dreams of creatively filling in the gaps of Anglo-Saxon mythology diminished – or at least evolved – in the wake of the World Wars (2009: pp. 60-61). The unscrupulous conflation of ‘linguistic’ and ‘racial’ categories had turned philological discourse into a tool of oppression in Europe (Hutton, 1999: pp. 1-13), and the notion of nationalist mythologies became significantly more sinister.

As Tolkien warns (1947: pp. 65-66), “Fantasy … can be ill done. It can be put to evil uses. It may even delude the minds out of which it came … Men have conceived not only of elves, but they have imagined gods and worshipped them, even worshipped those most deformed by their authors’ own evil. But they have made false gods out of other materials: their notions, their banners, their monies; even their sciences and their social and economic theories have demanded human sacrifice.” Fascism, anthropocentrism, capitalism, and the Anthropocene itself can all be viewed as such ‘fantasies.’ But despite their reliance on fictions, they can still radically alter our experience of the primary world. Myths can act as a medicine or a poison, depending on their contents and context of use. Tolkien predicted that, “If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts or evidence), then Fantasy would languish until they were cured … and become Morbid Delusion” (1947: p. 65). I would argue that the standard narrative of the Anthropocene – in which an undifferentiated Anthropos has suddenly and unexpectedly stumbled into geological agency – is just such a tale. But not all myths are delusive, and it may be that so-called ‘fantasy’ holds the keys to both our destruction and our recovery, helping us imagine new ways of being in a more-than-human world.

The Road So Far: Tolkienian Ecocriticism

While Tolkien’s works have rarely been discussed in mainstream literary ecocriticism, ecological analyses have long been a mainstay in Tolkien scholarship (Siewers, 2013: pp. 166-67). Tolkien often spoke of his inclination towards the perspectives of non-human nature, writing in 1972 (1981: 419-20), “In all my works I take the part of the trees as against all their enemies. Lothlórien is beautiful because there the trees were loved; elsewhere forests are represented as awakening to consciousness of themselves. The Old Forest was hostile to two legged creatures because of the memory of many injuries. Fangorn Forest was old and beautiful, but at the time of the story tense with hostility because it was threatened by a machine-loving enemy.” These were, quite poignantly, among Tolkien’s final remarks published in his lifetime. His capacity to breathe life into landscapes and treat them as characters rather than static backdrops is, for many, one of the most memorable components of his legacy.

Patrick Curry’s Defending Middle-Earth (1997) was the first book-length treatment on Tolkien’s ecological vision, positioning his work as a “remedy for pathological modernity” geared towards “the resacralization (or re-enchantment) of experienced and living nature, including human nature, in the local cultural idiom” (Curry, 1997: p. 31). At the time of its publication, Tolkien’s characters and locales had become a mainstay among road protesters in Britain, who often placed “eco-pagan” values at the heart of their movement. “Fairy mythology” was taken up as “an almost fairytale-like struggle between the benevolent forces of nature and a tyrannical and destructive humanity” (Letcher, 2001: p. 147). To Curry, Tolkien’s work is a union of “Christian (but non-sectarian) ethic of humility and compassion” with “neo-pagan reverence for nature” and “a liberal humanist respect for the small, precarious and apparently mundane” (1997: pp. 28-29), but his environmental “advocacy” approach was met with both praise and criticism (Siewers, 2013: p. 166).

Largely in response to Curry’s work, Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger argues that Tolkien’s treatment of nature (particularly trees) contains problematic incongruencies that undermine his purported eco-centricity: for instance, while the ents of Fangorn Forest are presented as protagonists in their revolt against Isengard, Old Man Willow and the Old Forest are characterised as evil – even though both are ‘nature’ revolting against deforestation (Flieger, 2000: p. 148). In Flieger’s view, Tolkien struggled to accept that “civilization and nature are at undeclared war with one another,” even in the case of the ‘good guys’ (Flieger, 2000: pp. 155-56). Curry addressed this criticism in his 2004 edition of Defending Middle-earth, where he argues that Flieger simply fails to recognise the difference between “limited self-defence” and industrial deforestation, arguing that hobbit “woodsmanship” was a fundamentally more sustainable form of forestry and thus less contemptable (2004: p. 155).

It’s somewhat puzzling that this should be the most well-known debate in Tolkien ecocriticism since, as Alfred Siewers points out (2013: p. 167), both arguments operate “largely outside of the discourse of eco-criticism as a field,” ignoring the fact that “the integration of the human with the natural … can be a part of an eco-centric framework, not necessitating the clear privileging of nonhuman nature in a binarized way.” Such nuances are preliminarily fleshed out in Tolkien’s abandoned draft of A New Shadow (his abandoned Lord of the Rings sequel), but this is unfortunately left out of the conversation entirely (Tolkien, 1996: p. 413). I’d argue that both Curry and Flieger also ignore the basic complexities imposed by Tolkien’s ‘translation’ conceit – i.e. the conception that works like The Lord of the Rings were ‘translated’ from original source materials composed by the characters themselves in the prehistoric past (Tolkien, 1955: pp. 1167-72). Given Tolkien’s dedication to the consistency of this framing story, it would be far more incongruent if Old Man Willow was not treated as an antagonist by chroniclers who only narrowly escaped his grasp.

After Curry, Matthew Dickerson and Jonathan Evans’s 2006 book, Ents, Elves, and Eriador, was the next major contribution to the field, also speaking to Tolkien’s “deep and complex ecological vision … including positions compatible with … modern environmentalism” (Dickerson & Evans, 2006: p. 11). Like Curry, they identify important spiritual dimensions in Tolkien’s work, but rather than characterising them the product of an eco-pagan sensibility, they instead see his vision as exclusively Christian, arguing that “the best foundation for an environmental consciousness is a Christian one identical with, or at least comparable to, Tolkien’s” (Dickerson & Evans, 2006: 26). As others have argued, this apologetic approach conveniently ignores the problematic historical legacy of so-called Christian “stewardship” in practice, and in his review of the text, Curry identifies “serious problems” with their ahistorical and otherwise uncritical approach, concluding that “In relation to ecocriticism generally and Tolkien studies in particular, it is therefore decidedly regressive” (Curry, 2007: p. 4).

While not explicitly constructed as ‘ecocriticism,’ a more valuable and considered work is Dimitra Fimi’s Tolkien, Race and Cultural History (2009), which offers crucial historical and social context for many elements of Tolkien’s creative process, including his constructed languages and interest in ‘national myths.’ Most pertinently, she situates his engagement with fairies, elves, and nature spirits within a Victorian and Edwardian context, which saw such beings routinely invoked as a reaction against industrialism and empiricist disenchantment (Fimi, 2009: p. 29). Other notable contributions include Andrew Light’s ‘Tolkien’s Green Time’ (2003), which speaks to Tolkien’s use of “geologic or naturally scaled time” to highlight more-than-human narratives, and Christopher Brawley’s Nature and the Numinous in Mythopoeic Fantasy Literature (2014), which explores the power of ‘mythopoeic fantasy’ to subvert our normative perceptions of nature.  Notably, very few scholars have made any mention of the ‘Anthropocene,’ the most notable exception being Britta Maria Coligs’s ‘The Forest as a Voice for Nature’ (2021), which merely recounts the official Anthropocene narrative as presented by Steffen and Crutzen (Coligs, 2021: p. 67). While Tolkien’s work could never have been intended as an allegory for the Anthropocene, the applicability of his work in its critical exploration deserves far more serious investigation.

Fairies, Faith, and Re-Enchantment

The earliest traces of Tolkien’s mythology emerged around 1914, during his undergraduate years at Oxford*,* mostly consisting of poems filled with fairies, goblins, and “shadow-folk” singing “songs of olden gods” (Fimi, 2009: pp. 14-17).These were well-received by his literary club, the TCBS, who saw themselves as a brotherhood of visionary artists on a “serious mission” to “make the world better, more beautiful and more righteous” (2009, p. 41). During a weekend “council” in December of 1914, they agreed that Tolkien should pursue his mythopoeic creation in earnest (Garth, 2003: pp. 54-70), but his plans were temporarily put on hold when he and his peers were sent into the First World War. By the end of 1916, most of Tolkien’s school friends, and half of the TCBS, had died, leaving him largely on his own to carry out his fellowship’s lofty ambitions. Having narrowly escaped death with a bout of trench fever, he returned to his creative endeavour with a newfound sense of urgency. He drafted several elaborate stories (and multiple languages) in this time, still largely centred around fairies and their “fading,” a motif that has been present in English literature at least since Chaucer’s time (Fimi, 2009: p. 38). But in Tolkien’s hands this notion became significantly more poignant, marking an “end of innocence brought about by the Great War, the erosion of authentic folk belief brought about by industrialisation and the loss of faith brought about by rationalism” (2009: p. 38). Industrialisation had a deep and sustained impact on Tolkien’s psyche. He idealised his upbringing in the rural West Midlands hamlet of Sarehole, having moved from South Africa with his mother and brother as a young boy, but as it was increasingly swallowed up in the industrialisation of Birmingham, he found the Arcadia of his childhood “shabbily destroyed” (Tolkien, 1954: pp. 11-12).

Tolkien’s fairy-stories followed in a long line of anti-industrial re-enchantment movements emerging across Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Fairies were invoked by Victorian Spiritualists and Christians alike to counteract the increasing domination of “reason and industrialism” and “restore belief in the supernatural” (Fimi, 2009: p. 35). Up until the Great War, Fimi notes that many people earnestly believed that fairies inhabited the British Isles (2009, p. 38). It’s clear that, for Tolkien, fairies (whom he later referred to as elves) were far more than some whimsical metaphor for pre-industrial life. But while Victorians had reduced them to diminutive flying pixies, Tolkien’s elves were far more noble and powerful – the “elusive inhabitants of the twilight and fringes of the world” (Harvey, 1997: p. 172). In his personal life, he tended towards a naturalistic approach to such beings (2009: p. 49), once expressing to C.S. Lewis that he saw them as a “real*”* (and explicitly non-metaphorical) feature of the natural world, albeit more readily encountered in a time when “a family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations” (Lewis, 2000: p. 909). While he stopped short of asserting his stories as factual historical accounts, Tolkien regarded the kinds of beings within them to be potentially ‘real’ non-human agents embodied in the natural world, like the nymphs, dryads, and other entities found in pre-modern animistic traditions. His was a distinctly animistic mythology, but one that could be engaged with ecumenically in both spiritual and secular contexts. Unlike religious dogma, a good myth can point towards the truth without being mistaken for the truth itself, creating an enchanted universal ground upon which even heavy philosophical topics (like power and mortality) can be explored from many angles.

While some scholars argue that Tolkien’s work is exclusively Christian (Wood, 2003; Sommavilla, 1983; Dickerson and Evans, 2006), others like Claudio Testi argue for a ‘synthetic’ approach, centred around “a universe that is essentially the pagan expression of a level of nature that is nevertheless in harmony with the supernatural level of Revelation” (2018: p. 136). Tolkien overtly acknowledged that his work was “built on or out of certain ‘religious’ ideas,” but he clarifies that it “is not an allegory of them (or anything else), and does not mention them overtly, still less preach them” (Tolkien, 1981: pp. 283-84). His famed dissatisfaction with the Arthurian tradition was partly due to its explicit involvement with, and representation of, the Christian religion (1981: p. 144). It’s clear that Tolkien’s personal and mythopoeic perspectives often diverged from formal Christian theology (1981: p. 355), including in his approach to nature. Catherine Madsen (1988, p. 47) suggests that Tolkien’s approach to “natural religion” may have even been constructed as a kind of “escape” from Christianity itself – not an abandonment, but a liberation from the “accretions of theology which have put such a strain on both reason and kindness.” Given that Christianity, the world’s largest religion, has been regarded as “the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen” (White, 1967: pp. 1203-07), Tolkien’s role as a ‘Christian writer’ becomes significantly more important – and his ecocentric, animistic, and polytheistic mythology profoundly more subversive. As Brawley argues, Tolkien’s intent was not merely to re-enchant an industrialised secular audience, but also to “subvert normative perceptions of the natural world” even and especially in his own faith (2014: p. 20).

Akallabêth, the Anthropocene, and the Changing of the Earth

Most Tolkien ecocriticism focuses on the affairs at the end of the Third Age, particularly the destructive expansion of Sauron’s empire and Saruman’s industrial deforestation, but far less attention has been paid to the complex dynamics that preceded the War of the Ring. I’d argue that this is, at least in part, because our critical perception of mythic events is subtly conditioned by the same distortions that we project onto our own environmental history. But if mythology can truly shake us loose from such distortions, then deeper engagement with the myth should offer clarity to both the narrative itself as well as its applications in the primary world. In this section, I’ll highlight some of the oft-overlooked political, ecological, and existential dimensions embedded in the ‘Fall of Númenor,’ Tolkien’s take on the Atlantis myth, and the important parallels that can be drawn in the critical investigation of the Anthropocene.

The myth of Númenor’s ‘Downfall’ (the ‘Akallabêth’) underwent many alterations throughout Tolkien’s life, but the ‘official narrative’ is as follows (Tolkien, 1955: pp. 1070-74): having aided the elves in their war against Morgoth, three houses of humans are rewarded by the gods with an island off the western coast of Middle-earth, midway between the Old World and the immortal realm of the gods. There, with the assistance of the elves, they establish a highly advanced society, excelling in many sciences, arts, and crafts. But over time, some of the Númenóreans became unsettled. Their royal line was descended from Elros the half-elven, who was granted a choice between elvish immortality or the mortal life of a human. Having chosen the latter, he and his descendants were thus subject to mortality, a fate that they came to perceive as a divine curse, and they grew increasingly resentful of both the elves and the gods. Anticipating a revolt, the gods ban the Númenóreans from approaching the shores of the Undying Lands, lest they should foolishly attempt to seize deathlessness by force (an impossibility). The Númenóreans obliged for a time, seeking instead to contrive their own sense of ‘immortality’ through world domination. They even supplant Sauron from his position of power in Middle-earth, only to foolishly allow him access to the ear of the king, whom he convinces to assemble an armada and assail the gods. As a result, the gods punish them by sinking Númenor into the ocean and removing the Undying Lands permanently from the circles of the world – transforming the very shape of the Earth in the process.

The story of Númenor is, among many other things, a story about the changing of the world, and as such it is particularly well-suited for Anthropocenic applications. It is precisely due to the Númenórean “attempt to seize world-power and immortality by force” that the island civilisation was destroyed, leading to the sundering of the mortal lands from the blissful realm of the gods (Tolkien, 1981: p. 198). Such ambitions “necessitated,” in Tolkien’s words, “a catastrophic change in the shape of Earth.” (1981: p. 194). Geological transformation is not a mere side-effect of the pursuit of domination, but in fact the terms and conditions of its accomplishment. The pursuit of global domination necessitatescataclysm. But much like the myth of the Anthropocene, Númenor fall is often remembered as an abrupt occurrence – and one that was principally orchestrated by divine powers (both benevolent and diabolical). We’re told that the doom befell them “In an hour unlooked for by Men” (Tolkien, 1977: p. 279), but in fact their inevitable fall was millennia in the making.

It's less often acknowledged that the Númenórean ecocide began in the 9th century of the Second Age (SA), when Tar-Aldarion initiated the deforestation of Eriador to provide timber for Númenor and its colonies (Tolkien, 1980: pp. 281-82). This was harshly criticised by many of his peers and subjects, to whom “it seemed that he had little love for trees in themselves, caring for them rather as timber that would serve his designs” (Tolkien, 1980: p. 208). But the destruction only increased with time, with a great deal of lumber going towards the building of Númenórean ships. But much like the colonial European fleets created from the once-thriving Mediterranean woodlands, Númenórean ships were used for far more than mere exploration, and the “incalculable” devastation (1980: p. 282) wrought by their growing empire was never limited to the death of trees. As Númenórean forestry practices became more aggressive and exploitative, indigenous forest-dwelling communities started revolting against them, leading to the systematic subjugation, dispossession, and enslavement of “lesser men” under Númenórean rule (Tolkien, 1955: p. 1073). Late in life, Tolkien composed a short account from this period (1996: p. 422-38), in which an indigenous man named Tal-Elmar is seized by an invading Númenórean ship, where the captain tells him, “Your time of dwelling in these hills is come to an end. Here the men of the West have resolved to make their homes, and the folk of the dark must depart – or be slain” (Tolkien, 1996: p. 437).

By the 19th century SA, Númenor was a formidable colonial superpower with tremendous wealth and influence, controlling vast stretches of land along the western coasts of Middle-earth (Tolkien, 1955: p. 1120). By the time the ambitious king Ar-Pharazôn usurped the throne in the 33rd century SA, the primitive accumulation of natural resources and slave labour had allowed the Númenóreans to become one of the most powerful forces the world had ever known, rivalled only by the growing influence of Sauron in Middle-earth (Tolkien, 1977: p. 289-90). Ar-Pharazôn challenges Sauron for global domination, and the latter surrenders, offering himself as a prisoner. In his profound hubris, the king accepts Sauron’s offer and brings him back to Númenor, where he spends half a century “seducing” the elite and using their lust for power to broker their own destruction. But while he may have “compassed” their ruin (Tolkien, 1977: p. 290), the causal seeds of annihilation were being planted by the Númenóreans for well over two thousand years in what might be described as a pursuit of “Peak Humanity” (Grove, 2015). An exploitative worldview and lust for dominance allowed them to be easily fooled by Sauron’s veneer of benevolence, offering ever more power as a solution for mortality.

Techno-fixes and the Rings of Power

The Númenóreans weren’t the only ones grappling with an existential crisis in the Second Age. The elves of Middle-earth were facing a similar, but opposite, dilemma: the burden of immortality in an ever-changing world. Most of the elves left in Middle-earth at this time had rejected invitations from the gods to depart for the Undying Lands, many compelled by their own worldly ambitions. Being an elf carried far more prestige in the mortal world than in the realm of the gods, and elves like Galadriel desired to establish their own realms of influence (Tolkien, 1981: pp. 247-52). But over time, they came to realise that deathlessness in a world of death carried its own uniquely potent grief, and that over time they would ultimately ‘fade’ into the background of a human-dominated world.

When he first re-emerged in the Second Age, Sauron presented himself as an ally to the elves, posing as an emissary of the gods (Tolkien, 1980: p. 256). At this time, “his motives and those of the Elves seemed to go partly together: the healing of the desolate lands.” (Tolkien, 1981: p. 152). He offered a solution for their crisis – the creation of magic rings that would, at least on a limited scale, halt and prevent “decay (i.e. ‘change’ viewed as a regrettable thing),” while enhancing the “natural powers” of their bearers. But Tolkien notes that, “approaching ‘magic,’” the enhancement of power is “a motive easily corruptible into evil, a lust for domination” (1981: p. 152). The coercive use of power to dominate other persons (human and non-human) is at the heart of Tolkien’s view of ‘evil.’ There is a very fine line between a desire to ‘heal’ and a desire to ‘dominate’ – a lesson particularly relevant to modern environmentalism.

Sauron’s ‘techno-fix’ initially seemed to accomplish the aims of the elves, giving them the ability to create hidden pockets of agelessness in a world of entropy – but they came with a catch. Sauron’s help was not offered without self-interest, and after assisting in the creation of the elven rings, he forged his own ruling ring to be the master of all the others. Thus, in exchange for enhanced potency and a temporary reprieve from outer impermanence, the elves came to discover that they would also be subject to Sauron’s surveillance and manipulation. In protest, they hid the three rings made without his direct involvement, while the rest were seized by Sauron’s forces and redistributed to humans and dwarves under similar pretences of power (Tolkien, 1977: pp. 286-88).

The One Ring is a complicated device that exemplifies a nuanced philosophical debate on the nature of power and technology. “The Machine,” Tolkien notes, is “more closely related to Magic than is usually recognised” (1981: p. 146). Several characters argue that it should be used ‘for good,’ presuming that its utility can somehow transcend the sinister foundations of its creation. But as Gandalf notes in The Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien: 1954: p. 75), even if used out of “pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good,” the mere desire to wield such exploitative power would only ever lead to ruin. It is only through the relinquishment of the lust for domination that authentic ‘healing’ can occur. Notably, the heroes who ultimately facilitate the Ring’s destruction are not powerful warriors, but humble and unimposing hobbits. While they are themselves a kind of ‘human,’ they exemplify a different path for humankind: one in which we retain our animistic spirit and shun the pursuit of dominion, finding fulfilment instead through community, engagement with nature, and the simple joys of life. But even for the hobbits, willpower alone is not enough to bring an end to the Ring. Frodo famously ‘fails’ at the Cracks of Doom, and all hope would have been lost if not for Gollum’s intervention – a turn of events only made possible because Frodo, through his pity, allowed him to live. The Lord of the Rings is, at its core, not a simple story of ‘good’ overpowering ‘evil’ – it’s a story about the world-altering power of compassion, even at the ends of the earth.

Conclusion: Recovery, Escape, and Consolation

Returning to the foundational question of this essay, I argue that mythology can offer a lens through which complex more-than-human dynamics can be clarified and philosophically negotiated. As Le Guin writes (2007: p. 87), “Although the green country of fantasy seems to be entirely the invention of human imaginations, it verges on and partakes of realms in which humanity is not lord and master, is not central, is not even important.” When such perspectives are drawn into the fore of our cultural consciousness, the negotiation of interbeing becomes more immediately perceptible. Tolkien’s works are not a metaphor for the Anthropocene, but engagement with myths such as these can nonetheless have a meaningful impact on how we perceive our history, our place in the world, and the many contextual dimensions of our emerging epoch. As Alan Garner writes (Curry, 1997: p. 133), “Myth is not entertainment, but rather the crystallization of experience, and far from being escapist literature, fantasy is an intensification of reality.”

But escapism, as Tolkien reminds us, is not always a misguided pursuit. In fact, he deems it one of the three most essential functions of a fairy-story, alongside recovery and consolation. He writes (1947: p. 69), “Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic,” asking, “Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home?” He reminds his reader – in the mid-1940s, no less – that “departure from the misery of the Führer” would be viewed by the Nazis as a most treacherous form of escape (2014: p. 69). This sense of ‘escape’ also calls to mind the maroon communities in the Americas, founded by Africans who escaped enslavement and fled into the wild, establishing clandestine communities alongside indigenous peoples beyond the confines of European control. For these communities, escape was (and still is) a “continual process of liberation,” allowing a sense of meaning and community to grow from the cracks of systemic exploitation (Bona, 2018). It is often through escape that we can hope to discover the ‘real world’ around us.

There are, of course, less useful forms of escape – with dissociation and apathy being among the most dangerous when it comes to the climate crisis. For escape to be liberatory rather than dissociative, we need an experience of recovery, which Tolkien defines as the “regaining of a clear view … seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them.” It is a process of transcending the “drab blur” of triteness (which Tolkien deems to be “the penalty of ‘appropriation’”) and looking at the world anew (1947: p. 67). In a fairy-story, even the most familiar and apparently ‘mundane’ phenomena can be enchanted with an “arresting strangeness” (1947: p. 60) that might, in turn, help us to experience them on their own terms. We may have convinced ourselves that anthropocentrism and instrumentalism are logical ontological baselines for reality, but as Bruno Latour writes (2017: p. 70), “… animation is the essential phenomenon; and deanimation is the superficial, auxiliary, polemical, and often defensive phenomenon. One of the great enigmas of Western history is not that ‘there are still people naive enough to believe in animism,’ but that many people still hold the rather naive belief in a supposedly deanimated ‘material world.’”

The consolation of a fairy-story is largely conferred through what Tolkien terms the “eucatastrophe,” or “good catastrophe … a fleeting glimpse of Joy … poignant as grief” (1947: p. 75). This is the proverbial ‘happy ending,’ but one that emerges only when it is least expected. In the context of the climate crisis, it may be difficult and even dangerous to trust in such a twist, and if we try too hard to seize it, then it may slip right through our fingers. But a sense of consolation can arise through the liberation of enchantment itself. We may not be able to ‘save’ the world, but we can create the space for new ways of living to emerge through the cracks, and in doing so we may recover a sense of what it means to be human in a more-than-human world.

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