“There's nothing in "The Lord of the Rings" except that it's a foundation of one's feeling for trees, flowers and England generally.” J.R.R. Tolkien
Tolkien planned to dedicate his lore “to England; to my country” (Letters, 144 #131; cf. 250 #190)), yet the books and films are an astonishing global phenomenon. Why? Maybe the world over there is an appetite for Elves, Hobbits, Wargs, Nazgûl, and nasty little fellows like Gollum. Maybe its success speaks to the voyeur in us: the appeal of wandering inside one man’s densely constructed fantasy; or maybe it is because we sense that the fantasy world that is Middle-earth is jammed full of moral, political, philosophical, and religious ideas with which we wrestle and perhaps have some sympathy. Maybe we agree with Tolkien that the Hobbits are happy and free? More, perhaps we sense that they are happier and freer than us?
Tolkien: “I do find this Americo-cosmopolitanism very terrifying… For I love England” (Letters, 65 #53). What is this Americo-cosmopolitanism? Let me offer two contrasting images of the city to define it and the distinction that Tolkien makes in favor of his beloved England. The first is from David Hume, the second Tolkien. Hume argues that civilization relies on the intimate relationship between commerce and refinement in the arts and sciences. These combine in the city. Hume writes:
The more these refined arts advance, the more sociable men become… They flock into cities; love to receive and communicate knowledge; to show their wit or their breeding; their taste in conversation or living, in clothes or furniture. Curiosity allures the wise; vanity the foolish; and pleasure both. Particular clubs and societies are everywhere formed: Both sexes meet in an easy and sociable manner; and the tempers of men, as well as their behavior, refine apace. So that, beside the improvements which they receive from knowledge and the liberal arts, it is impossible but they must feel an increase of humanity, from the very habit of conversing together, and contributing to each other’s pleasure and entertainment.
The city is an allure of fashion, opulence, and vanity. It incites what is best about us, argues Hume, our “relish for action,” quickness of mind, and our very humanity. The city, for the Scot, is a beachhead in the Whig transformation of civilization. This transformation is ongoing: urbanization is a global phenomenon and accounts for massive contemporary migrations. Hume would certainly militarily defend a fashionable city, but would he the Shire?
Middle-earth has its share of magnificent cities but, interestingly, in Lord of the Rings they are mostly marked by decay. Gondolin was long ago overrun by Orcs, Osgiliath is in ruins, Dwarrowdelf a tomb, Rivendell is emptying, and the White City sparsely populated. Pippin, coming to the White City for the first time, is struck by its grandeur and power:
Yet it was in truth falling year by year into decay and already it lacked half the men that could have dwelt at ease there. In every street they passed some great house or court over whose doors and arched gates were carved many fair letters of strange and ancient shapes: Pippin guessed of great men and kindreds that had once dwelt there; and yet now they were silent, and no footstep rang on their wide pavements, nor voice was heard in their walls, nor any face looked out from door or empty window.
And at the heart of the White City: “A sweet fountain played there in the morning sun, and a sward of bright green lay about it; but in the midst, drooping over the pool, stood a dead tree, and the falling drops dripped sadly from its barren and broken branches back into the clear water.” Tolkien does not celebrate cities like David Hume. Rather is he sympathetic to Vincent McNabb, the Anglo-Irish Dominican and spiritual director of the anarcho-syndicalist workshop of Ditchling. McNabb: the “unceasing Nazareth cry is: `Come back, not to Ur, Memphis or Jerusalem, but to Nazareth, lest you prepare another Golgotha.’” Why are cities sacrificial? For Tolkien, as for McNabb, it is on account of the division of labor they necessitate.
In The Silmarillion, the great Númenórean city of Armenelos is consigned to the sea by the wrath of Eru as punishment for the human sacrifice practiced there. In The Hobbit, Erebor is a wreck occupied by the worm, Smaug, and the Elves, at least, think the Dwarves rather invited Smaug with their greed. Greed sacrificing persons is intrinsic to the division of labor. Adam Ferguson:
Manufactures, accordingly, prosper most, where the mind is least consulted, and where the workshop may, without any great effort of imagination, be considered as an engine, the parts of which are men… But if many parts in the practice of every art, and in the detail of every department, require no abilities, or actually tend to contract and to limit the views of the mind, there are others which lead to general reflections, and to enlargement of thought.
Many today intuit that there is an unacceptable twisting of values inside much of our commercial civilization. Whether in film and television or local shops and bars, a common complaint heard about our world of work is the way in which persons are disregarded as mechanistic management practices squeeze out short-term profits. That which is highest—persons—and that which is finest—the life of the mind, arts, hobbies, and craft—play second fiddle to what should be instrumental—money and efficiency. Ferguson’s Tory anxiety about the division of labor is Tolkien’s. Though Boromir speaks lovingly about the White City, and Aragorn and Arwen renew it, nonetheless the Shire, a constellation of villages, is most to Tolkien’s taste. This preference includes an important philosophical point.
Famously, Lord of the Rings opens with Tolkien telling us that Hobbits are in “close friendship with the earth,” and “do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom.” Their craft is slow, and so their consumption of the earth is slow. Hence Tolkien opposes futurism’s cult of speed. In his BBC interview, Tolkien complains that “multiplication makes everything faster now.” The first page of The Silmarillion begins with war; the first page of LotR begins with what is worth defending.
Hobbits do not constitute a commercial civilization trading far and wide and dedicated to perpetual innovations in the arts and sciences because they are not in thrall to the division of labor. Most people are charmed by Bilbo and the Shire, but not all. Some are irked. Hugo Brogan relies on Paul Fussell to criticize Tolkien for “gross dichotomizing”: Tolkien’s use of gardens is dismissed as a merely typical English literary conceit to evade a fuller assessment of the Great War. This point misses the strategic significance of flora. Gardening is not an alternative to war; for Tolkien, it is a component part. An infantryman throughout the Great Warand resident of Ditchling, the Welsh poet David Jones provides a dark example: “faery-bright a filigree with gooseberries and picket-irons – grace this mauled earth.” Gooseberries were barbed-wire spheres made “at leisure, by day” and tossed out at night to thicken the entanglements in front of trenches. Brogan misses something even deeper, though. The division of labor can only be humanized if some part of a civilization escapes its logic. The Shire is a symbolization of this Tory insight.
Here is a very Hobbity thing from our Middle Ages. Gangdays or Rogation Days persisted in the villages of the British Isles from before the Norman Conquest and for a thousand years after:
Led by the priest and carrying the Cross, banners, bells, and lights, the men of the village went in perambulation about the boundaries of the village. They beat its bounds. The small boys who went with the procession were thrown into the brooks and the ponds or had their buttocks bumped against the trees and rocks which marked the bounds, so that they should remember them the better… The bounds of his village were the most important bounds he knew.
Whiggery and the division of labor is a threat to these boundaries. Tolkien’s Shire is not a wholesale rejection of the division of labor, rather it calls for the marginalization of the division of labor in orienting political order. The point can be illustrated by two elements of Tolkien’s biography.
I contend that Tolkien is a symbolist, and the Shire a symbol, a cosmion of a free life (Voegelin). Symbols are complex, housing sub-theses that need explication. Because symbols are not simplistic it is possible to both like some aspects of brutalist architecture and nonetheless prefer trees before almost all things, and such appears to have been the case with Tolkien. Tolkien lived in two houses in Oxford. In the BBC interview, he notes that the house on Manor Road had been knocked down for a new, brutalist library. He says: “there’s an enormous combined English and Law library built there, which isn’t bad, I think, at all. At any rate, there’s a lot of it inside that is very good, anyway.” In the same interview, he says:
I haven't the slightest recollection whatsoever—I normally preserve a very bright visual recollection of where I was, where I am and things that are associated with what I'm looking at. I shall always remember, for instance, this chap dangling the green lights…—but I haven't the slightest recollection of anything, the position, where the window was, myself, or the thoughts, anything that came out of the whole of the Ent chapter. That came straight out of the leaf-mould. There was no difficulty and no sense of trouble of composition, but it must have been sort of burgeoning there. I don't know if that's a good example.
Tolkien offers a cautious approval of brutalist buildings and a full-throated one of trees. The idea of basic orientations coming out of the leaf-mould—fallen leaves decaying and reentering the soil as fertilizer—answers a critical need after the Whig Settlement. Understanding this need is critical to good politics, and thus, per Clausewitz, any account of war.
Clausewitz observes that “military movements are practically impossible in heavily wooded country,” and that intense cultivation, “where the land is cut up by numerous ditches, fences, hedges, and walls,” creates friction in military operations. Arguably Clausewitz’s richest idea, friction identifies all the ways in which military endeavour is depleted. For Tolkien, the Shire is why we fight and how we fight. Forests, fields, and gardens are inherited, they are ancestral. They are the leaf-mould that should orient politics and marginalize the division of labor. War would then be about home, restricted to defense of ancestral flora and fauna. The Lord of the Rings is a myth for England and a lesson to all about war.
*This essay is adapted from Tolkien, Philosopher of War and is published with the kind permission of The Catholic University of America Press
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