Cob: Tolkien never owned a television or a washing machine

[GlobalCirclenet]

http://www.earthfirstjournal.org/efj/feature.cfm?ID=159&issue=v22n6
James Bell 
“Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.”  --
Galadriel

The world has changed./ I see it in the water./ I feel it in the Earth./ I
smell it in the air./ Much that once was is lost,/ For none now live who
remember it.

These words, spoken against a black movie screen, conjure forth images of
our own world just as much as they set the scene for the opening of the
fantasy film The Lord of the Rings—The Fellowship of the Ring. This epic
myth resonates on many levels with the changes our world faces, from global
warming to war. It is this ability to tap into universal archetypes that
has propelled its popularity today. After being nominated for 13 Academy
Awards and winning four, we can be sure that wizards and hobbits will be
part of our popular culture into the foreseeable future. 

It was the same when The Lord of the Rings first gained mass appeal in the
US as a paperback. The book sold three million copies between 1965 and 1968
coinciding with the worldwide student demonstrations of the late ’60s. It
gained an underground following among hippies and anti-war protesters, as
the story seemed to speak directly to their causes for social justice and
the environment. If anything, the book’s appeal to environmental
activists has grown over the years, with its author, J.R.R. Tolkien,
becoming a sort of patron saint of neo-luddites. Tolkien, at first glance,
seems an odd choice for the storyteller favorite of the luddite and
revolutionary—yet an examination of Tolkien’s epic sheds light on why
these stories resonate with the rebels of our technologic times. 

Tolkien the Messenger 

Tolkien, who lived from 1892 to 1973, was a stuffy Oxford don who grew up
in the Warkwickshire countryside during the turn of the last century. He
moved with his widowed mother when he was eight to the dirty industrial
city of Birmingham. Years later when he finally returned to his childhood
stomping grounds in his treasured hamlet of Sarehole, it had been overtaken
by urban sprawl. This “loss of paradise” inspired Tolkien’s outspoken
lifelong hatred of cars, roads and machinery. 

Tolkien never owned a television or a washing machine. He was a confirmed
luddite, rejecting refrigerated food and cars. “How I wish the
‘infernal combustion’ engine had never been invented,” he said. When
asked about his life, he responded, “I am in fact a hobbit (in all but
size). I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe and
like good plain food
 I go to bed late and get up late.” In an
enlightening letter written to his son, Christopher, in 1943, Tolkien
vented his frustration with government and the industrial age, “My
political opinions lean more and more to anarchy (philosophically
understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)

There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled
men of dynamiting factories and power stations.” It is this last
statement and others like it that lead one to wonder if Tolkien would have
approved of today’s “elves”—those of the Earth Liberation Front. It
is a fact that Tolkien was deeply troubled by the impact of modern industry
and technology on the world’s environment, especially “the lunatic
destruction of the physical lands which Americans inhabit.” 

In his letters, Tolkien considered technology a kind of “black magic.”
The machines of our world, and the dark magic of Mordor, were both
expressed in Tolkien’s words by a craving for “speed, reduction of
labor and reduction of the gap between idea or desire and the result or
effect.” The magic of creative enchantment was opposite that of
technology’s black arts. Tolkien saw enchantment as the artistic
construction of “Secondary Worlds,” like his own creation of Middle
Earth. Tolkien thought of his enchantments as introducing new fantasy
worlds and wonderlands into our own, making the Primary World a better
place to live. In particular, Tolkien believed that words held power.
Professor T.A. Shippey in The Road to Middle Earth wrote, “[Tolkien]
thought that people could feel history in words, could recognize language
styles, could extract sense from sound alone... It was like him to think,
Bombadil-style, that beneath all this there might be a ‘true language,’
one ‘isomorphic with reality’...” Enchantment through words was
Tolkien’s ultimate elfish craft and the primary reason behind his
creation of Middle Earth. 

Tolkien started enchanting us in 1937 when The Hobbit became the Harry
Potter of its day. Tolkien was a philologist—one who studies words and
researches their origins and histories. In Ancient Egypt, the name
“Hob” meant “messenger.” It is the name most commonly given to the
Egyptian god Thoth, the messenger of Ra. Thoth was the god of writing and
language. Tolkien coined the word “hobbit” and created the main hobbit
characters Bilbo and Frodo to be his “messengers.” In doing this,
Tolkien was drawing a parallel between the god of words and himself. More
importantly, Tolkien believed that these old words held power, and thus he
used their ancient meanings to give his enchantments life. 

The Fellowship of the Monkeywrench 

Tolkien would take years to craft a “sequel.” The Lord of the Rings,
published in 1954, would become a sort of epic anti-quest where Tolkien’s
heroes seek to rid the world of a great evil. This was the opposite of
mythical quests throughout history where heroes set off to find something
to bring back and aid their people. Tolkien’s heroes turn the tool of the
enemy against itself, tossing it into the fires of the Cracks of Doom like
a monkeywrench thrown into the gears of a machine. Our society’s growing
desire to rid itself of runaway technologic progress resonates with this
anti-quest element of the story. Tolkien would agree, “If there is any
contemporary reference in my story at all, it is to what seems to me the
most widespread assumption of our time: that if a thing can be done, it
must be done. This seems to me wholly false.” 

The science fiction author Gene Wolfe, who corresponded with Tolkien,
described the secret behind the epic’s inspiration. “He uncovered a
forgotten wisdom among the barbarian tribes who had proved (against all
expectation) strong enough to overpower the glorious civilizations of
Greece and Rome; and he had not only uncovered but understood it. What he
did, then, was to plant in my consciousness and yours the truth that
society need not be as we see it around us.” Tolkien’s goal was to
create a new mythology for England and a modern myth for “everyman.” 

England’s mythology was forgotten, buried around the countryside. The
Arthurian legends, Tolkien believed, were an imported French myth. He knew
that the Anglo-Saxon metalsmiths of old were storytellers, forging their
epics in their work. He reached back into the archeological and linguistic
roots of England to resurface a lost mythology. 

Tolkien found inspiration elsewhere as well, like from the rune singers of
Finland and their oral histories contained in the historic text of the
Kalevala. He recognized that the existence of the Kalevala gave an identity
to Finland that helped it exist as a nation separate from Sweden. He wanted
to fill his stories with such power and meaning. Tolkien captured all these
various tendrils of mythology in his novels, creating a modern mythology
for the “little guy”—the peasant, the worker, the student, the
underclass, the minority, the rebel. 

Middle Earth First! 

Today the success of the movie version of The Lord of the Rings continues
to extend the reach of Tolkien’s mythology. Galadriel, the elf queen of
Lothlorien, sums up his message when she tells the Hobbit Frodo that,
“Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.” Cate
Blanchett, who plays Galadriel in the film, comments on her character’s
purpose: “She’s handing on the torch to humankind, she’s challenging
the viewers to say what are you going to do with the Earth, we’ve had
this paradise, so now you men—you humankind—have the responsibility of
the Earth.” 

The Two Towers, the second part of The Lord of the Rings, is due out in
theaters around the world in December. Anyone who recalls the story will
remember that it is here that we are introduced to the Ent known as
Treebeard and his army of vengeful trees. Tolkien loved trees, and he was
upset with their destruction most of all: “The savage sound of the
electric saw is never silent wherever trees are still found growing. Every
tree has its enemy, few have an advocate. In all my works, I take the part
of trees as against all their enemies.” 

Indeed, it would seem that this would be a good time for activists in the
service of trees to make themselves known. Earth First!ers discussed this
very idea at this year’s Organizers’ Conference. Be on the look out for
Middle Earth First!ers defending a forest near you. Harnessing
Treebeard’s popularity for saving wilderness is something that would have
most assuredly made Tolkien smile. 

As Tolkien saw it—it’s the trees and the rest of us versus the
machines. “All this stuff is mainly concerned with the fall, mortality
and the machine. By the machine, I intend all use of external devices or
even the use of inherent inner powers, with the corrupted motive of
dominating and bulldozing the real world. The machine is our more obvious
modern form. The enemy in successive forms is always concerned with sheer
domination, and so the Lord of Machines
 As the servants of the machines
are becoming a privileged class, the machines are going to be enormously
more powerful. What’s their next move?” 

James Bell is a writer for Sustain, www.sustain.info, a nonprofit
environmental communications firm. He recently launched
www.LastWizards.com, where one can find essays and interviews on
eco-defense, culture jamming and occult philosophy.