Tolkien himself, of course, was deeply hostile to modernity, root and branch – capitalism (especially industrialism), unrestrained science, and state power alike. For him, they were idols whose worship had resulted, in our century, in the most efficient ever devastation of both nature and humanity alike. He once remarked that ‘I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind) …’ And he described the detonation of the atom bomb in 1945 as ‘the utter folly of these lunatic physicists.’ But that is not a very original observation, and neither so interesting nor significant as what has become of his anti-modernism, lovingly and skilfully embodied in a literary artefact, in postmodern times. As he himself put it, ‘it is the particular use in a particular situation of any motive whether invented, deliberately borrowed, or unconsciously remembered, that is the most interesting thing to consider.’
Now, it is perfectly possible to imagine Tolkien’s books ‘being’ truly reactionary: racist, nationalist, etc. I contend, however, that as it happens – as things have actually turned out – his implicit diagnosis of modernity was prescient; and his version of an alternative, progressive. That is, in the context of global modernization and the resistance to it, his stories have become an animating and inspiring new myth. It joins up with a growing contemporary sense, represented in postmodernism, of history’s sheer contingency: a liberating perception that things might have been different, and therefore could be different now. It suggests that just as there was life before modernity, so there can be after it.
In short, Tolkien’s books are certainly nostalgic, but it is an emotionally empowering nostalgia, not a crippling one. (The word itself means just ‘homesickness.’) One contemporary writer, Fraser Harrison, goes straight to the heart of the matter: ‘While it is easy to scoff at the whimsicality and commercialism of rural nostalgia, it is also vital to acknowledge that this reaching-out to the countryside is an expression, however distorted, of a healthy desire to find some sense of meaning and relief in a world that seems increasingly bent on mindless annihilation.’ Accordingly, says Harrison, ‘it becomes meaningful to talk of “radical nostalgia”.’
Only those who cling to the modernist myth of a singular universal truth (as opposed to myth and story and indeed interpretation as such) which is somehow directly accessible to those with the ‘correct’ understanding – only such people will look at Tolkien’s glorious tree and see, to use an apt image of William Blake’s, nothing more than ‘a Green thing that stands in the way.’ To the modernist, the choice is between truth and myth (or falsehood), whereas the postmodernist, giving up the pretence of a direct line to the Truth, sees the choice as between different truths; or to put it another way, between myths and stories that are creative and liberating, and those that are destructive and debilitating. As Tolkien put it, ‘History often resembles “Myth,” because they are both ultimately of the same stuff.’
Ironically, therefore, it is Tolkien’s critics who have been overtaken by events. Behind their instinctive antagonism lies an uncomfortable sense that here is a coherent fictional critique and an alternative, in every major respect, to the exhausted myth of modernity which has so far underwritten their own professional status; and worse, it is a popular one! Not for the first time, those who claim to know better than and even speak for ‘the people’ are lagging behind them.
I have said that Tolkien’s literary creation presents a remarkably complete alternative world, or rather, alternative version of our world. I myself only realized its depth and complexity when I tackled it in a spirit of determined but non-reductionist analysis. There are almost no threads that can be tugged without them leading on to others, almost indefinitely. But I found I could make sense of most of it in terms of three domains, each one nesting within a larger: the social (‘the Shire’), the natural (‘Middle-earth’), and the spiritual (‘the Sea’). I was encouraged in this by Tolkien’s own remark in his superb essay on the subject, that ‘fairy-stories as a whole have three faces: the Mystical towards the Supernatural; the Magical towards Nature; and the Mirror of scorn and pity towards Man.’
Thus, The Lord of the Rings begins and ends with the hobbits, in the Shire. This is the social, cultural and political world. It includes such things as the hobbits’ strong sense of community, their decentralized parish or municipal democracy, their bioregionalism (living within an area defined by its natural characteristics, and within its limits), and their enduring love of, and feeling for, place. In all these respects, the ultimate contrast is with the brutal universalism and centralized efficiency of totalitarian Mordor.
Now this sphere is indeed crucial, but it nests within a larger and weightier world, just as the Shire itself does: namely the extraordinarily varied and detailed natural world of Middle-earth. Note that this therefore includes the human world. Tolkien plainly had a profound feeling for nature, and perhaps especially its flora; his love of trees shines through everywhere. The sense in The Lord of the Rings of a tragically endangered natural world, savaged by human greed and stupidity in every corner of the globe, is confirmed for us in every daily newspaper. But this ‘nature’ is neither romantic nor abstract. There are plenty of dangerous wild places in Middle-earth; but they are all, like their blessed counterparts, very specific places. Indeed, Tolkien’s attention to ‘local distinctiveness’ is one of the most striking things about his books. It contributes greatly to the uncanny feeling, shared by many of his readers, of actually having been there, and knowing it from the inside, rather than simply having read about it – the sensation, as one put it, of ‘actually walking, running, fighting and breathing in Middle-earth.’
Above all, Tolkien’s is no add-on environmentalism. It suggests rather that whatever their differences, humans share with other living beings a profound common interest in life, and whatever aids life. Thus Middle-earth’s most distinctive places defy the separation, so beloved of modernist scientific reason, into ‘human or social and therefore conscious subjects’ and ‘natural and therefore inert objects.’ They are both: the places themselves are animate subjects with distinct personalities, while the peoples are inextricably in and of their natural and geographical locales: the Elves and ‘their’ woods and forests, the Dwarves and mountains, hobbits and the domesticated nature of field and garden. And some of the most beautiful places in Middle-earth are so, in large part, because they are loved by the people who share them. Tolkien’s prescient ecologism is therefore radical, in the modern sense as well as the old one of a return to roots. It anticipates, in many ways, both ‘social’ and ‘deep’ ecology, and retraces a premodern way of understanding the world which is still that of surviving indigenous tribal peoples. Time is running out for the rest of us to re-learn it.
Following this up, I then found myself at the edge of the second circle too. In Tolkien’s terms, I had been brought up short by