J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings:
Modernist Fantasy, Ecology, Trauma, and the Great War
Molly Hall
May 20, 2014
Master’s Paper: MA English Literature
University of New Hampshire
Prof. James Krasner, First Reader
Prof. Robin Hackett, Second Reader
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Literature dealing with war comprises the greater part of textual production from the
ancient Greeks to the contemporary twenty-first century novel. Writing which takes nature as its
primary inspiration also comprises a great many volumes in the Anglophone literary tradition,
especially from the romantic writers onward into the “nature writing” proper of the nineteenth
and twentieth century American tradition. For a century so dominated by war (World Wars I and
II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the two Gulf Wars, and countless intrastate wars globally)
and marked by unprecedented ecological change and increased public consciousness of such, the
intersections of these two discourses are curiously under-examined in academia, but especially
within literary scholarship.
I propose to deal with this gap in scholarship not by attempting an impossibly large study
of interactions between war and nature more generally in literature, but by starting at the
beginning, or at least a beginning. This paper will examine the relationship between the Great
War (1914-1918) and ecology in Britain1. Because so many have written on the Great War and
modernist aesthetics, and because the modernists are not often thought of as “nature-lovers” per
se, it might be most fruitful to look to an interbellum oeuvre which concerns itself differently
with nature than the modernist writers have. I will, therefore, take as my primary text J.R.R.
Tolkien’s fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings (LR), because of the pervasive nature of both war
and nature in the text, and also in an attempt to counterbalance the frequent examination of
1
My reason for choosing the word ecology rather than environment or ecosystem, is that, as will become more clear
as we move forward, I hope to examine the way in which war interacts with the totality represented by the
environment including all its ecosystems and the sum of the interactions within them, including the psychological
interactions that evolve out of the material realities of ecology and which inform our culture and its chief production
or artifact: literature. I also chose ecology because I am not referring to an ecosystem, but all ecosystems, the idea of
the environment, and the relationship humans both ontologically hold and perceive themselves to occupy, within it,
though these two can vary wildly. Thus, when I evoke the word ‘ecology’ I am not referencing its use as a “study
of” or “system that,” (OED), but rather as an ecological whole, comprised of all which exists within it, materially,
metaphorically, and mentally.
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modernist texts to the exclusion of fantasy literature, what one might call the modernist
monopoly on WWI literature.
I do not chose to evoke fantasy in the face of war and nature simply because I believe the
modernists have been over-done or are not good at it (in fact I could make many arguments to
the contrary and others have). I chose fantasy as the lens for my investigations of how literature
responded to the Great War as it intersects with ecology both because of the fantastic mode’s
unique relationship with trauma, of which the Great War is one, and because of fantasy texts
representations of nature in a distinctly different, almost opposite, fashion to modernist texts’.
In her introductory justification for why we should read fantasy and modernist works
together, Margaret Hiley evokes modernist poet W.H. Auden, who suggests that both modernist
and fantasy writers attempt to bridge the “gulf between the subjectively real […] and the
objectively real” (21) in response to the “the loss of values and roots”(31) as a result of the
trauma of World War One (WWI). This breakage of frames, to borrow a phrase from trauma
theorist Shoshana Felman, resulted in the “breakdown” of the “synthesis of objective reality and
subjective reality” (Hiley 22). The modernist reaction was to write under the assumption that
“only the subjectively real could be fully known,” while fantasy writers chose to conjure up a
“fantastic secondary world [where] the gap between subjective and objective reality no longer
exists”(22). In a century whose objective reality was marked by war and ecological destruction,
the modernist tendency to enforce a subjective distancing from such materialities by focusing on
the all-important “I” of subjective reality is reversed in fantasy literature, with the creation of
whole worlds which lack this distance. This difference between modernist and fantasy writing on
the divorce of the subjective from the objective is where my project asserts itself.
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As an ecocritic with an interest in poststructuralist theories, this gap between subject and
object is of tantamount importance. In our modern consciousness “nature,” or the environment,
most often occupies the theoretical space of objective reality, while humanity remains
thoroughly relegated to the subjective. How, then, according to Hiley’s framing of the impetus at
the source of both modernist and fantasy literary traditions in the twentieth century as the trauma
of WWI, has this war and its traumatic impact actualized this divorce between subjective and
objective reality? From our frame of ecological inquiry, we might begin to see this divorce,
moreover, as a conceptual one between humanity and ecology2. Furthermore, I will be
productive for us to ask, how might we see fantasy literature as an attempt to address this
dislocation of subject from ecology in its creation of a “secondary world [where] the gap
between subjective and objective reality no longer exists”?
In this paper I examine how J.R.R. Tolkien’s LR uses fantasy to negotiate the relationship
between war and ecology in response to the trauma of WWI. I will argue that J.R.R. Tolkien uses
fantasy to bear witness to the ecological nature of the subject’s experience of WWI without
transmitting that trauma to the reader, which, arguably, modernist writing does3. This is based on
the idea that fantasy, in positing an alternate reality which exists outside the imaginary order (in
the Lacanian sense) of historical “reality,” enables readers to encounter the trauma of WW1
without breaking their frames of reference in a way that the hypersubjective narrative techniques
2
This expands the notion of ecological impacts as well away from simply (usually human) damage to an external
objective ecological entity, towards a more realistic understanding of subjective trauma as always already an
ecological impact because of the embeddedness of the subject in ecology, whether they are directly aware of this or
not.
3
When I say that I will argue that J.R.R. Tolkien uses fantasy to bear witness to the ecological nature of the
subject’s experience of WWI without transmitting that trauma to the reader, which, arguably modernist writing does.
I mean not that modernist writers relay the generic trauma of warfare, in any way akin to the experience which a
veteran would have of PTSD, for this is not possible. What I do mean is that, as Shoshana Felman and Cathy Caruth
have both revealed, that what gets passed on is the hole in our narrative, the inability to express the trauma which
has occurred, the wound itself, or the acceptance of the divorce of subject from ecology in this sense, is inherited by
each new generation of readers of modernist writers, is absorbed unexamined.
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which characterize modernist aesthetics cannot. In doing so, I will be reading LR as testimony to
subjectivity’s divorce from ecology within the dominant historical narrative. This opens up a
previously unexamined form of literary witnessing to the trauma of WWI. What is at stake in this
attempt to re-place subjectivity is our awareness of the ecological impacts, not simply of the
historically empirical event of WWI itself, but of the ecologically displaced modern historical
narrative and attendant traumatized subjectivity created by this event4.
In viewing the dominant historical paradigm of the twentieth century as a result of our
blindness to the ecological impacts5 of the Great War, I conclude (although there is not space
enough to do a full study of these effects here) that one can read all subsequent ecological
destruction, especially that of warfare and the military-industrial complex which characterizes
the late colonial and postcolonial geopolitical and biopolitical schemas of the twentieth and
twenty-first century, as the repetition compulsions of the traumatized subject who is dislocated
4
When I speak, throughout this essay, of the modern subject, which comes about as the result of the First World
War, although I refer to a cultural paradigm shift which had an effect on all subjectivity within the twentieth century
and onward, it must be acknowledged that this experience is heavily mediated through the literary productions of
British white males, and although they speak to something broader than their own personal war experiences, there
are several groups of people for whom this transformation can be said to be felt differently, albeit still felt. Women,
people living under imperialism, subjects of non-western-European nations, all emerged from this period altered
with respect to the relationship between subjective and objective reality, but how this relationship was negotiated
and actualized in their respective subjectivities, cannot be assumed to be identical to the process described here,
although the dynamic is related, and the experience of the English subject of World War One cannot be said to be of
no use in the examination of the emergence of modern subjectivity for other groups, a degree of difference and not
kind would have to be traced and accounted for in any extension of my findings outside the Euro-male experience.
A prime example of this would be the emergence of modern African American subjectivity, of which Houston A.
Baker, Jr. states, “I want to suggest that a complete expressive modernity was achieved only when the ‘Harlem
Renaissance’ gave way to what might be called—following the practices of Anglo-American and British moderns—
‘Renaissancism,’” which began the project of self-determination for the modern African American subject (91). For
the African American subject, then, a modern subjectivity would emerge more closely in relationship to the Harlem
Renaissance, which would need to be examined alongside the narrative I have exposed here for any fruitful
discussion of modern African American subjectivity to emerge.
5
When I talk about ecological affects, we are not discussing, based on the definition of ecology noted in my first
footnote, simply material effects of warfare on the land, although these are notable in themselves. The ecological
effects of WWI on ecology are first and foremost psychological, and as a result of the interconnected and
interdependent nature of ecology, the psychological, or immaterial, translates (through human actions predicated on
culturally constituted identities) into material realities, wherein we find physical manifestations of our psychological
divorce from ecology as a result of world war one, or the paradigm shift solidified in its crucible of blood and oil.
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from ecology6. My project, therefore, challenges the modernist monopoly on WWI literature as
well as disrupting the anthropocentric trend in trauma studies which threatens to become rival
rather than ally to ecocritical theories in support of a sustainable turn in literary studies.
The Trauma of the Great War
I will, however, begin this discussion with the simpler claim that LR is in fact a response
to the trauma of WWI, something which Tolkien himself often denied, but a statement which
most scholars, myself included, have seen fit to contradict. In order to establish this I will first
discuss how we might conceive of the trauma of WWI, then move on to a specific explication of
where I have found LR to perform such a response. Next, I will begin to build the ecological
foundations of my argument as I explore the relationship between ecology and war in the text.
Although a majority of my reading will focus on bellicose moments in the narrative as well as
the general sense of loss hinted at throughout the text and brought to fruition in the final
chapters, my journey will begin, as Frodo’s has, in a more pastoral setting as I begin by looking
more widely at how ecology manifests in the story as a whole. Having established an idea of the
ecological framework of Tolkien’s secondary world of Middle Earth, we will enter the battle
grounds and look at scenes of war in the text and how such depictions either subsume or
integrate conceptions of ecology found elsewhere in LR. Throughout my treatment of ecology in
LR I will be asking how we can conceive of the relationship between war and ecology as
traumatic, how the text negotiates and seeks to represent trauma, and whom is the subject of this
trauma?
Because “ecology” is not fixed in place, influences on its conceptual constitution can be culturally defused, like a
pathogen, without material barriers as such, slowing it down, and little resistance (immunity) to its reception and
acceptance by a host. It is only by acknowledging the “immateriality” of ecology can we hope to stem the influences
which it may have on material manifestations of it through such cultural forces as literature.
6
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Once we understand how war, ecology, and trauma relate in LR as a response to WWI,
we can step back and look at this text in relation to its modernist contemporaries, in order to
discern how Tolkien’s negotiations of the disconnect between subjective objective reality differs
substantively from other writerly responses to WWI, by focusing on how authors on both sides
of the aisle translate the unique relationship between war, memory, and place, especially through
use of the pastoral mode. Finally, I will close my essay by concluding that LR’s uniquely
fantastical form of testimony enables it to address the specific rift manifested by WWI because
of its traumatic and ecological nature, a rift and a trauma which modernist writing may more
clearly manifest, but to which they are less likely to respond or evoke productive readerly
responses to.
This rift originates, or is brought to the fore, in the experience of the Great War, which
took place largely in Europe, between 1914 and 1918, and out of which Tolkien’s creation of his
secondary world, Middle-earth, has grown. Before we can decipher how it is that LR responds to
this experience, we must begin with the war itself, and look more widely at the literary history
surrounding the early twentieth century, in order that we might better understand in what way
this war is uniquely traumatic.
The Great War as a singularly traumatic event for the modern subject can be understood
as a threefold affect. Firstly, the Great War was traumatic for those who lived through it.
Secondly, it had a physically “traumatic” effect on the environment7. And lastly, the war had a
traumatic effect on the relationship between humans and ecology by virtue of the same dynamics
which facilitated the individual traumas of both people and the environment, resulting in the
I will note that here I use this term, “traumatic,” under quotation because of the absence of a true subject in the
entity of the environment, this term normally being reserved for individual human subjects or groups of people
bound by a shared traumatic experience.
7
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aforementioned split between subject and object in the cultural imaginary and the individual
subjectivities which it constitutes.
These individual subjectivities traumatized by the Great War are primarily the surviving
soldiers of the event8. While most people can agree that war is horrifying, not all war experience
qualifies as traumatic. At the turn of the twentieth century, the western world was only just
beginning to be cognizant of the science of psychology. Already having published several works
on the workings of the mind, Sigmund Freud’s explorations of extreme disturbances of the
psyche were given a fresh lens for analysis with the outbreak of WWI. Freud, in his first
important text on the dynamics of trauma, published in the wake of the war, posits in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle that:
A condition has long been known and described which occurs after severe mechanical
concussions . . . accidents involving risk to life; it has been given the name of ‘traumatic
neurosis’. The terrible war which has just ended gave rise to a great number of illnesses
of this kind, but it at least put an end to the temptation to attribute the cause of the
disorder to organic lesions of the nervous system brought about by mechanical force . . .
symptoms sometimes come about without the intervention of any gross mechanical force
(10-11)
The traumas inflicted by this war were uniquely capable of traumatizing the subject “without the
intervention of any gross mechanical force” in a “great number.” The Great War is, then, both
the epistemological origin of trauma as well as the author of a number of traumas
disproportionate to that previously recorded or researched by Freud.
8
We may also name the larger community of which these soldiers were a part (the better part of the western world)
as the psychological destruction which attends participation in the war-zone bleeds into civilian life upon soldier’s
return, affecting their loved ones and future offspring.
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What is it about this war that was able to “enfeeble” (Freud 10) a generation without any
reliance on physical force? Freud identifies the main determinant in an experience of trauma as
being “the factor of surprise, of fright” adding that “‘Fright’. . . is the name we give to the state a
person gets into when he has run into danger without being prepared for it, it emphasizes the
factor of surprise. I do not believe anxiety can produce a traumatic neurosis” (11). Feelings of
danger natural to the experience of war cannot, alone, produce a trauma for the victim, according
to Freud. What must needs be present (a presence which implies an absence), is “Fright” or
“surprise.” The absence implied in surprise is that of preparedness. The Great War, therefore,
was uniquely traumatic because, unlike other wars, people lacked preparation for the atrocities
they would participate in.
The work of Paul Fussell in his The Great War and Modern Memory gives us a better
understanding of this notion of un-preparedness in the context of the soldier-authors of WWI.9
First and foremost, this lack of preparedness is the result of confidence in misplaced
expectations, both by the soldiers and war strategists. Fussell explains that the British believed,
all the way up the ranks, that this would be a short, decisive, and triumphant war. The most
exemplary moment of dashed expectations within literary memory, Fussell points out, is the
frequent reference to the horrors of the Battle of the Somme in the summer of 1916, two years
into the war. Perched on a river in France, this area of the Western Front was famous for its
9
Because of his pointed identification of the effects of the Great War from the perspective of ground warfare, and
his focus on this war as a distinctively literary war, I have chosen to employ Paul Fussell’s work to the exclusion of
other scholars of World War One, for, in the contexts of my discussion which focuses on trauma and ecology, not
much more has been said or said quite so comprehensively as Fussell has here, despite the age of the text, having
been published more than 30 years hence. Because of this, discussions of WWI and race or gender, to name a few
relevant discourses, are not well attended to here. For more information on these intersections, see Jay Winter’s Sites
of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History, Jean Garrity’s Step-Daughters of
England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary, Jean Gallagher’s The World Wars Through the
Female Gaze, and Tim Stapleton’s No Insignificant Part: the Rhodesia Native Regiment and the East Africa
Campaign of the First World War.
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sense of security among soldiers as its trenches were better fortified than much of the rest of the
line. They thought this would be the big battle to end it all, they were well prepared (they
thought) to insure victory. Arguably, the offensive failed more miserably than any in the history
of war, if not more so, or more ironically so, as Fussell points out, for the expectation of victory
being so undoubted, and the lack of preparation for annihilation being so absent (31). One among
many similar battles, the spectacular failure and extraordinarily dense number of casualties at the
Somme often represents the mise en scène of the Great War in the eyes of the soldiers who
survive to write about it.
More than any one battle, however, the day-to-day conditions themselves, also a result of
unpreparedness for the realities of this war, contributed to the unexpected horrors of WWI, as
primarily a trench war. Fussell explains that British trenches were unlivable; they were “wet,
cold, smelly, and thoroughly squalid” (46), because, among other reasons, they were only built to
be temporary. Not prepared for a long war, British trench engineers produced what George
Coppard called “lousy scratch-holes” (quoted in Fussell 47). Although we cannot rightly say that
poor trench conditions traumatized soldiers directly, they did contribute to the overall feeling
that they inhabited a war zone unlike any they could have imagined enduring as a result of these
distorted expectations.
As an ironic external manifestation of the soldiers’ internal trauma, trench conditions
highlight the dissonance within. Speaking to this dissonance, Freud writes, “We describe as
‘traumatic’ any excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break through the
protective shield” of the mind wherein “there is no longer any possibility of preventing the
mental apparatus from being flooded with large amounts of stimulus” and so “the problem of
mastering the amounts of stimulus which have broken in and binding them . . . in the psychical
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sense, so that they can be disposed of” arises (33-4). As is frequently demonstrated in the war
memoirs and poetry of the First World War, these surroundings were constantly compared to
pastoral memories of the English countryside soldiers had left behind. The ill-fortified grossness
of the trenches themselves, then, became an extension of the ill-fortified “protective shield” of
the mind, unprepared for the horrors of a protracted trench war and unable to properly process
the many elements of the Great War which populated the soldiers experience with such ignoble
newness.
The prominent place of the misguided planning of the Somme offensive and the poorly
engineered trenches in writers’ efforts to express the trauma of war indicate that the strategies
(planning) and technology (engineering) hold the key to what kind of newness could have found
the soldiers so ill-prepared, resulting in such a singular trauma. Literary war scholar, Kate
McLoughlin, says of this sense of military novelty that the world wars “are ‘phenomenologically
and ontologically discontinuous’ with previous conflicts, whether due to their industrial scale or
to the fact that ‘modern weapons technology has fundamentally altered the locus of agency’. . . .
The inability to see the ‘ghastly ruin’ perpetrated by one’s own right arm reconfigures the
experience of conflict and must necessarily inform its representation” (10-11). Beginning with
the Great War, technology has transformed the experience of war for its participants. This war
was thoroughly an industrial war like no other before it, not a clash between civilizations so
much as between man and machine.
Soldiers entering the war were trained to use artillery, barbed wire, and machine guns,
but not to withstand the mental effects of bombardment. As Fussell points out, “the two novelties
that contributed most to the personal menace of the war [were:] Barbed wire [and] the machine
gun” (45). The reason for the enhanced fright at fresh war technology in WWI was, as
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McLoughlin explains, the dislocation of agency which such weaponry produces. You neither saw
the source of the assault, nor the target of your own aggression. As is typical of trauma, this type
of battle is characterized by a missed experience—missing pieces of the story, which create the
inability to “bind” and “dispose of,” the horrors of using and falling victim to industrial warfare.
“The war,” therefore, “will not be understood in traditional terms: the machine gun alone makes
it so special and unexampled that it simply can’t be talked about as if it were one of the
conventional wars of history. Or worse, of literary history” (Fussell 166).
Enhancing the traumatic effects of the advent of industrialized war was the new bent of
military strategy as well as the unintended results of its failures. Although military historian Carter
Malkasian has come to us with a defense of the effectiveness of strategies of Attrition more
generally, his discussion of its place as the definitive result of military planning in the Great War
makes no mistake about its ineffectiveness and costliness. “The term war of attrition,” he writes,
“usually conjures up images of futile and bloody slogging matches, epitomized by the Western
Front of the First World War,” but, “this image of attrition is misleading. In reality, attrition has
been effective in warfare and has not usually involved bloody slogging matches. . . . Many
historians have made the important observation that most attempts to achieve a ‘decisive’ victory
actually resulted in protracted wars of attrition,” but when well applied “Attrition is a gradual and
piecemeal process of destroying the enemy’s military capability” (1). The resulting atmosphere of
attrition in the theaters of the Western Front was a result, not, he has identified, of a purposeful
strategy of gradually and “piecemeal” “destroying the enemy’s military capability,” but, as Fussell,
McLoughlin, and others have also confirmed, the reality of an ill-prepared-for “decisive” battle,
which did not fully account for the force and nature of new technology, becoming, as a result, a
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“protracted [war] of attrition”10. The reason, which I will discuss in more detail later in the context
of LR, for the extraordinary horror of attrition and the failures of decisive battle on the Western
Front, is, in addition to the limited knowledge of how new technologies play out on the battlefield,
also, the unprecedented combination of attrition with the engagement in total war rather than in
the context of limited aims, such as a single battle (Malkasian 13-14, 29).
Because of the conflagration of machine guns, artillery, barbed wire, attrition, and total
war—which, as a rule, have become the trade-marks of modern war and the military-industrial
complex at work in inter-and-intra-state conflicts, the soldier in the Great War was vastly
underprepared for this new type of offensive and was subjected to interminable periods of
sustained fright resulting in the trauma which oozes from the literature of the period. Rather than
highly strategized battle on fields full of hand-to-hand combat, where soldiers at least feel a
degree of control over their experience, the Great War was instead characterized by the scene
Fussell describes: “In the three lines of trenches the main business of the soldier was to exercise
self-control while being shelled” (48). There is no time for processing. This war not a matter of
defense or offense in any traditional sense, but merely survival. Beginning with the Great War,
the experience of modern war is described by McLoughlin as follows: “In the arrhythmia of war,
periods of monotonous waiting are punctuated by bursts of intensive action. . . . A corpse, or
body part, is happened upon suddenly. There are vivid, split-second events. All these phenomena
are accentuated in the hypervigilance typical of those under fire” (71). She goes on to say that
“The effect is what Freud . . . called Schreck (fright) . . . and the most likely result is traumatic
This is with the important exception of the German command in the Battle of Verdun, wherein Falkenhayn’s
intentionally evoked the strategy of attrition, desiring to “bleed France white” as compared to the Somme and other
offensives which were planned as short decisive battles and turned into long drawn out exercises in attrition
(Malkasian 33-36).
10
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neuroses” (71). The very nature of industrial trench warfare, then, is traumatic, and these new
technologies and strategies point to what is uniquely traumatic about this war.
But what, you might ask, does this have to do, specifically, with our literary response to
the Great War? The absence of preparation and the novelty of industrialized total wars of
attrition produce a problem of incommunicability for those attempting to process their
experience and for a culture trying to work through the trauma of this historical event. It is this
which Fussell most pointedly addresses throughout his study of this literary war, as he terms it.
He describes, thusly, the challenges of writing the war, explaining,
The problem for the writer trying to describe elements of the Great War was its utter
incredibility, and thus its incommunicability in its own terms. [Modernist writing is] a
series of attempts to evolve a response that would have some degree or adequacy to the
unparalleled situation in which the writers were involved.’ Unprecedented meaning thus
had to find precedent motifs and images . . . The ‘new type of meaning’ [which these
writers attempt to create] is that of the new industrialized mass trench warfare. (150)
Because of the lack of precedent in the minds of soldiers and in the cultural memory of Britain,
writing war became a task of overcoming “incredibility” and “incommunicability,” a notion
which Charles Carrington called, “a secret that can never be communicated” to the home front,
the world at large, and generations to come (quoted in Fussell 124). Fussell goes on to declare
that “even if those at home had wanted to know the realities of war, they could not have without
experiencing them: its conditions were too novel, its industrialized ghastliness too
unprecedented. The war would simply have been unbelievable” (95).
The war represented “a triumph of modern industrialism, materialism, and mechanism,”
and the myth-making tendencies of war authors were an attempt to make sense of an
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“inexpressible terror long and inexplicably endured” (Fussell 124). This idea of industrial war as
signifier for “triumph” of the “modern” which is defined in terms of the dominance of the
inhuman ideologies: “industrialism, materialism, and mechanism” brings us to the cultural
narrative which belies the illusion of preparation for the unprecedented. “The collision between
the events and the language available . . . was one between events and the public language used
for over a century to celebrate the idea of progress,” expounds Fussell, “The difficulty was in
admitting that the war had been made by men and was being continued ad infinitum by them. . . .
Language [then] seems to falsify physical life and to betray those who have experienced it
absolutely—the dead” (184). The dominant narrative of progress in the West, which led Britain
into the Great War and equipped it with the aforementioned technology and strategies, does not
provide an adequate frame of reference, therefore, for the events which it produced.
Speaking of the world before the war, scholar A.J.P. Taylor states, “that was a different
world. The certainties were intact. Britain had not known a major war for a century, and on the
Continent . . . ‘there had been no war between the Great Powers since 1871. No man in the prime
of his life knew what war was like. All imagined that it would be an affair of great marches and
great battles, quickly decided” (quoted in Fussell 21). With no frame of reference for the events
they would undergo, soldiers and civilians alike could not but be traumatized by a memory of
war which can neither be “bound” and “disposed of,” nor integrated into historical and personal
narratives of memory. In Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s keystone text on trauma and
literature, Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, Laub
explains that, “While historical evidence to the event which constitutes the trauma may be
abundant and documents in vast supply, the trauma—as a known event and not simply as an
overwhelming shock—has not been truly witnessed yet, not been taken cognizance of” (57). Just
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as there are many historical records of the Great War, the profusion of literature which it
rendered, and the struggle of those authoring the war to compel language to tell what it cannot
because it lacks a point of reference, identifies for us the trauma of World War One. Literature
which attempts to testify to this trauma, as both fantasy and modernist writers of the early
twentieth century have, must find a way to communicate “events in excess of our frames of
reference” (Felman 5).
As much as the event of the Great War was “in excess of our frames of reference,”
traumatizing its human participants, this war also ushered in the advent of new levels of
environmental destruction, both materially and ideologically. We can divide the ecological
effects of the Great War, again, into three (albeit connected) paths: literal damage to ecosystems
in Europe, the creation of a rhetoric used to justify other ecocidal practices, and lastly, the
fueling of chemical production used to further the “war on nature” as well as to increase the
horror of human wars to come.11
In his book, Ecology of War & Peace: Counting Costs of Conflict, Tom Hastings defines
ecology simply as “the relationships between organisms and their environment” (xx). The most
obvious effect on these relationships in a trench war begins with the residual scars of the terrain
itself. As Hastings says, “There is always ecological damage from war, even if limited to a
transmogrification of green fields to mud fields” (45). The land, especially in France and
Belgium, absorbed “enormous amounts of widely incidental devastation of agricultural and
forest lands” (Westing 17). Arthur Westing’s Warfare in a Fragile World: Military Impact on
the Human Environment elaborates, as he writes, “the worst experienced by any European nation
11
There is also an argument to be made for the effects of industrialized war on our animal agricultural practices
(factory farming and processed food production and dissemination), and a good one at that, but one for which I
haven’t the space to do it justice. A good starting place for research into this area would be Carol Adams Sexual
Politics of Meat and Charles Patterson’s Eternal Treblinka.
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. . . During World War I . . . the battle areas and occupied zones of France are estimated to have .
. . some 200 thousand hectares [deforested]. Moreover, an additional 100 thousand hectares of
agricultural lands were so devastated”; the ecological effects of this are amplified by the lack of
recovery time between this and the Second World War, wherein they were equally damaged (523). Furthermore, Westing identifies the “disruption by war of agricultural and wild lands, and
thus of the ecosystems these regions support. The weapons and other means available to the
armed forces of today are increasingly capable of disrupting these natural and semi-natural
habitats” (3). Due to the new accoutrement of industrial modern war, not only is a fixed area
affected, but this destruction, by virtue of the nature of ecology and the relationships which
constitute it, reverberates throughout the ecosystems of Europe (and the world). For example,
having much of its habitat destroyed, like many other indigenous species which maintain a
balanced biosphere, wildlife also suffered vigorously, including the near extinction of the
European buffalo as a direct result of the war (Westing 56-8).
More than landscape alteration, reduced access to food supply for human beings, and
attendant species depletion, common ecological impacts of war in the twentieth century include
unexploded “landmines,” “bombing [which] leaves toxic craters,” and the “troops [which] carry
disease” (Hastings 40). This military technology and the humans which deploy and suffer it, lead
us to a key ecological outcome of the Great War: the “large scale employment of chemical
warfare agents” (Westing 17). In addition to piling up the casualties (which as a rule are
technically part of the ecological impact if the First World War for we as humans are not
removed from the ecosystems of which we are a part, despite the distortions of the cultural
imaginary caused by this war) and the seeping into the land, atmosphere, and water tables of
these chemicals—such as mustard gas—turning the geography of the Western Front into the
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“wastelands” of T.S. Eliot’s great modernist creation, chemical warfare, conceived in its modern
form in and for the Great War, had other more indirect and far reaching effects on ecology.
The development and proliferation of chemical warfare in the theaters of the Western
Front contributed to a rhetoric of war which was appropriated by the chemical manufacturing
industry to promulgate a war against nature, or that part of nature we call pests (fungi, bugs,
weeds, and small animals). In Edmund Russell’s War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects
with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring, the environmental historian discovers that
“The scale of killing in Europe supplied a ready-made comparison for the scale of insect threat”
producing statements such as a desire for “the outcome of the ‘war to the finish’ between Man
and Arthropod for ‘mastery of the planet,” and “Along with conveying the scale of the insect
menace, comparisons to the European War expressed the scale on which people might respond.
Nothing less than extermination of insect enemies . . . would protect humanity” (22). The fact
that Russell begins the chronology of his study of “war and nature” with the First World War is
illustrative in and of itself, but it is clear that the rhetoric of total war as it is entangled in
industrial warfare (including chemical weapons) begins to aggressively repackage the public’s
perception of their relationship to nature, not as ecological and connective, but as oppositional
and divisive. “The industrialization of war in Europe,” Russell declares, “hastened the
industrialization of pest control in the United States” (36). In this way, the ecological damage of
pesticide use in America and on an increasingly global scale can be traced to the First World
War, its practices, and rhetoric. Part of the trauma of the Great War, then, in addition to people’s
lack of preparation and incommunicability for and of a total industrial war of attrition, is the
ecological devastation which reduced the viability of global ecosystems, and created effects
which have lasted (repeated themselves?) well into the twenty-first century.
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In the investigation of what makes the Great War traumatic for both humans and the
environment, we must lastly and most importantly consider, in what way the traumas of the earth
and its people are entangled as mutual survivors of this war. The result which most thoroughly
implicated both humans and environment is the rift in the consciousness of modern subjects
between the realities of the internal subject and external object intensified if not catalyzed by the
Great War which causes both trauma for the person and the culture, manifesting a distorted view
of ecology. This distorted perspective, then, enables us to do greater ecological harm because of
our perceived disjunction from it. The aforementioned split can be read in the work of modernist
writers of the war as well as the scholarship which addresses it.
In explorations of all war writing, we find that the subject in the war-zone cannot be
thoroughly disentangled from ecology, as their texts are necessarily embedded in place. “The
challenge for war writing,” Kate McLoughlin explicates, “is to convey this charged space, to
communicate the complex situation—part psycho-physiological, part geographical—that is
conflict” (84). The textual mise en scène of war, then, is inextricably tied to the material
environment in which the writer-survivor experienced the trauma of war. Fussell draws our
attention to the fact that, “To be in the trenches was to experience an unreal, unforgettable
enclosure and constraint, as well as a sense of being unoriented and lost. One saw two things
only: the walls of and unlocalized, undifferentiated earth and the sky above” (54). In this
statement, the “unreal”-ity, “unforgettable enclosure,” and experience of disorientation and
“lost”-ness which writers of the Great War struggle to express is linked to an “unlocalized,
undifferentiated earth.” In coming to experience the environment as undifferentiated sameness
and to lose a sense of place, these writers express a collapsing of complex ecological
surroundings into an objectified “other,” disconnected from the experience of the self. Starkly
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distanced from the detailed pastoral descriptions of the English countryside, the British soldier’s
experience of place as ecological often becomes as inaccessible through the trauma of World
War One as his experience of the Western Front is from the home front.
The land of the battlefield itself reflects a similar connection between the ecological
effects of war and the correlated human trauma. Paul Fussell explains that the land itself still
“extrudes” remnants of the war as he writes his book over fifty years later (75). Metallic refuse
from the front resurfaces out of what has now otherwise seemingly been reformed into a bucolic
landscape (Fussell 76). Similarly, we see Hastings posit how “farmers in France continue to be
blown apart by mines laid there long ago” as an ecological effect of the war (40). This continued
disruption of the ability of people to cultivate the land is construed as a rupture in one of the
“relationships between organisms and their environment.” And this rupture is, here, described as
an extension of the trauma of the Great War and of ecology. Additionally, Russell foregrounds
people’s growing realization during the war that “private interests, with millions of dollars
invested in [chemical and firearms manufacturing] plants, now have to urge constantly
increasing military and naval expenditures so that their profits may continue,” from which the
public surmises that “a ‘war ring’ linked the army, navy, and industrial interests,” coming to the
conclusion that “in the private profits accruing from the great arms factories a powerful
hindrance to the abolition of war” existed (33). In this passage we can see that the same
industrial and economic dynamics which prolong the human trauma of the war also support the
growth of an industry which exists to wage a chemical and industrial war on the environment.
More than simply co-victims of the same historical locus of trauma, human subjects and
the objective environment suffer the trauma of separation from themselves/each other, which
was hinted at in Fussell’s diction of “undifferentiated earth.” Fussell explains that the writer-
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survivors of the war “perceive[d] things as regrettably disjointed if not actively opposed and
polarized” (115). This division is most obvious in the real and metaphorical division of
landscape (Fussell 86-7). The post-traumatic subject of the Great War, then, is constituted by a
world view which is essentially dichotomous, from allies and enemy, to pastoral nature before
the war and ecological wasteland after. Furthermore, Great War poet Max Plowman noted the
change between Victorian and modern conceptions of nature among soldiers, writing: “[in
Ruskin’s day] the upper and more glorious half of Nature’s pageant [the sky] goes unseen by the
majority of people . . . the trenches have altered that. Shutting off the landscape, they compel us
to observe the sky; and when it is a canopy of blue . . . and when the earth below is a shellstricken waste, one looks up with delight, recalling perhaps the days when, as a small boy, one
lay on the garden lawn at home counting the clouds as they passed” (italics mine, quoted in
Fussell 58). Although one way to interpret the division of the landscape, as Fussell mentions,
would be between French or Belgian and German land, Plowman’s comments on the “Shutting
off of the landscape” indicate a deeper division. Trench warfare, where the “earth below is a
shell-stricken waste” causes this foreclosure of connection between subject and place, and, in
replacing it with a repositioning of the subject upwards and backwards in space and time, away
from the ecological reality of our grounded-ness in this particular material and ecological place,
and towards a rewriting of memories of home, where it is unlikely a little boy would have been
as singularly fixated on the clouds as he would be his eye-level surrounding habitat: trees, earth,
animals, etc. This “Shutting off of the landscape” can be read as a manifestation of the
“disjointed” and “polarized” consciousness forming in the modern subject resulting from the
war.
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Continuing to discuss the mindset of the soldier as a result of the experience of the war,
Fussell identifies in Plowman’s words the core dynamic of this “division” and “Shutting off.”
Fussell adds that “those who ‘passed through the estranging remoteness of battle’ were ‘not
broken, but reborn” echoing a common “rhetoric of Conversion” in literature of the Great War
(Plowman quoted in Fussell 123). The conversion resulting from the Great War is this division
and “Shutting off” of the material environment, wherein those who lived through the war, the
next generation of English, were “not broken, but reborn.” What is meant by this reborn but not
broken self is that the trauma is not simply an experience of the personal (broken) self, but an
externally refashioned (reborn) self. The reborn self is a self that is disconnected from ecology
(shut off from the landscape). The trauma of the post-world-war-one-subjectivity is not just the
lack of preparations and incommunicability of the horrors of that particular war, but also the
"rebirth" out of ecology into the fantasy frame of an ontologically individuated subjectivity.
This disconnect is not simply pursuant to the literal survivors of the war and their close
relatives, but, as the title of Fussell’s book suggests, the effects of the Great War stamp the very
nature of modern memory, from 1914 to the twenty-first century. As Fussell states, people
“conceive[d] quite seriously that the war would become the permanent condition of mankind.
The stalemate and attrition would go on indefinitely, becoming, like the telephone and the
internal combustion engine, a part of the accepted atmosphere of the modern experience” (77).
Although that war did not in fact become a part of the modern experience, modern warfare did,
as did the psycho-cultural effects of the Great War. The way modern war as modern experience
is positioned is also telling. He uses the phrase “stalemate and attrition” to describe the endless
condition of modern life, constructing an image of life as stasis and death. This view of nature or
the state of things is anathema to ecology, which in reality is comprised of constant change and
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new life. Fussell continues, “Prolonged trench warfare . . . establishes a model of political, social,
artistic, and psychological polarization . . . whether enacted or remembered . . . which I take to
be the primary mode in modern writing” (83), explaining, “What we can call gross
dichotomizing is a persisting imaginative habit of modern times, traceable, it would seem, to the
actualities of the Great War” (82). The conditions of the war and their attendant traumatization,
not only of individuals, but also of popular memory and subjectivity, are productive of a
psychologically polarized mode of modern writing and of a general “habit of modern times,”
meaning that the trauma of World War One reshaped the way we see the relationship between
subject and object, and consequently, between subject and ecology.
The experience of the Great War, external to our present historical moment, can no
longer be perceived simply as such. We must admit its effect on our personal and contemporary
mental landscape. In describing a dream of being shelled from the sky by an unknown enemy, C.
G. Jung writes, “the war, which in the outer world had taken place some years before, was not
yet over, but was continuing to be fought within the psyche” (quoted in Fussell 122). The war
persists in the mind in a way which defies both time and space. Clarifying this, Fussell concludes
his study by commenting, “’The war that was called Great invades the mind’….and that war
detaches itself from its normal location in chronology and its accepted set of causes and effects
to become Great in another sense—all-encompassing, all-pervading, both internal and external
at once, the essential condition of consciousness in the twentieth century” (italics mine, 348).
Tolkien’s Response to the Great War
Now that we have thoroughly come to understand what was traumatic about the Great
War and how ecology and subjectivity are conjoined, ironically, in this traumatic experience
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through a psychical split between subject and object and the resultant division of the subject
from ecology in the mind of the modern subject and text, let us turn to Tolkien, our true object of
study, and see how he responds to this war, and the complex nature of its entanglement in
ecology, through The Lord of the Rings.
Our discussion thus far of the trauma of the Great War, for both humans and ecology, has
centered mainly on the battlefield. Our journey into LR will do no different. The Barrow Downs,
Helm’s Deep, Isengard, the Dead Marshes, Minas Tirith, Minas Morgul, and even in a smaller
way, Mount Doom; each of these places is marked within the text as a battle ground, among
countless others alluded to through songs and myths of the earlier ages. Not all are true
battlefields of the War of the Ring being addressed most directly by the plot of this narrative.
However, all of these spaces of war, I will later argue, are in fact responses to the condition
brought about by World War One, though in the text they may reference battles separated by
hundreds if not thousands of years from each other.
War is always shaped by the land or sea on, above, or below which it is fought. Tolkien
scholar Paul M. Lloyd corroborates this when he quotes military strategist J.C. Wylie, who
writes, “[the soldier’s] conception of the strategic scene is brought about primarily by the matter
of geography. Prominent and direct in its effect is the fundamental fact of terrain. . . . to the
soldier it is everything. It is the fixed field within which he operates. It is the limitation within
which he must function” (4, fn. 8), in reference to Sauron’s responses to the “definite
possibilities of action” imposed by the “geography of Middle-earth” (4). What is often not
considered, however, are the ways in which war shapes the place in return. During the Great
War, the second half of this equation was oft ignored, excepted when expressed in
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anthropocentric terms by the war writers, mourning their lost pastoral ideal. Within Tolkien’s
response, there is room for noticing, and space for acknowledgement.
LR is not so simply an allegory for the Great War, but an attempt to renegotiate the
mental landscape left in its wake. As Tolkien scholar Martin Simonson has said, “Tolkien was
not aiming at writing an allegory on the 20th century, but rather at constructing a tale with many
layers of significance, providing it with a broad scope of applicability. He was, of course,
conscious of the transitory spirit of the period, and of the cultural despair following the wake of
the Great War” (italics mine, 164). “Applicability” is the word oft used, by Tolkien himself, as
well as his more nuanced scholars, rather than allegory. Allegory roots itself in the specificity too
often of time and space. For Tolkien, LR is meant to respond to “the transitory spirit of the
period, and of the cultural despair” after the war; this transition is the selfsame “Conversion” of
modernist literary identification of a generation “reborn” and not “broken”; and this “cultural
despair” is the sense of disorientation felt by a culture unmoored from the stable world of
Victorian ideology, whose notions of progress had led them not to a gilded city of utopia, but
into a crucible of death and disjunction.
In his response to the post-war cultural rupture, John Ellison has noted, Tolkien’s
fantastic work of fiction accurately “illustrates its relationship to ‘real’, contemporary events . . .
As everywhere else, the relationship is not seen, not in any resemblance between the fictional
events, and those that had taken place, at the time they were set down, but in the associated
imagery” (18), and the “message it carries is as ‘realist’ as the most intentionally realistic fiction.
Fantasy is simply ‘the continuance of a realistic narrative by other means” (20). In this sense, the
fantastic nature of LR in no way excludes it from being a valid respondent to the trauma of the
war as its modernist contemporaries have been.
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As we have seen, the Great War has traumatized human subjects directly through the
generation of youths that served on the battle front, but everyone in Britain knew someone who
had been to the front, and, in the end, all were touched by this historical trauma. For Tolkien’s
part, he entered the war in 1916 and was immediately sent to the Somme on the eve of that great
battle. This was his primary experience of WWI, and it has greatly shaped the form of his
response in LR. Many have identified the chapter, “The Passage of the Dead Marshes,” as his
representation of the Somme, but, we will do well to remind ourselves that the text of LR is not
meant to be allegory, but rather “applicability” and “associated imagery.” We can see, therefore,
echoes of the Somme throughout the epic. In the section on the Battle of Helm’s Deep, I argue,
we find even more striking responses to the war and what was traumatic about the Somme in
particular for those involved. The central factors concerning traumatized subjectivity from the
war being a lack of preparation (materially and mentally), and the inability to communicate the
horrors that transpired, we must first look at Tolkien’s response to this lack of preparation on and
for the front, from which place we can then decide how LR deals with this incommunicability.
The lack of preparation due to the newness of the war’s strategy and technology is
manifested mainly in Tolkien’s characterization of attrition within total war throughout the story.
In his early historical analysis of LR as a text lending itself heavily to military analysis, Paul
Lloyd breaks down the strategies of Sauron and his forces, versus the Fellowship’s network of
combatants. He writes of Sauron and his minion Saruman, “their choice of objectives in their
first large-scale assault [is] least effective [and] most costly [being] a direct frontal assault on the
opponents strongest position [he never] gives any thought to the dangerous possibilities of his
actions, but thinks that massive force alone is sufficient to attain his ends” (5-6). Lloyd speaks
here of all the battles in the book, particularly of interest to us, however, is the implication for
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Helm’s deep. This “massive force” as strategy which results in ineffective and “costly” outcomes
in terms of casualties, is the strategy of attrition in the context of total war. Lloyd goes on to say,
“Sauron does not think as a good strategist. Having such large numbers of troops available, he
presses the assault, heedless of the cost” (6), which is to say that a proliferation of manpower
leads to strategies founded on the cheapness of human life. In a note on this notion, Lloyd
references twentieth century war strategist and veteran, Liddell Hart, who declares, “It is curious
how the possession of a blank cheque on the bank of man-power had so analogous an effect in
1807-14 and 1914-18” (6, §18). In the forces of the Dark Lord (Sauron), and his quest for worlddomination throughout the tale, Tolkien has constructed most pointedly, a careful criticism of the
strategy of attrition within total war, rather than an analogy painting the allied or German armies
as “good” or “evil.” In focusing his response as such, he reinforces the notion that attrition and
new technology are central to the trauma of WWI.
In the lead up to the battle of Helm’s Deep there are a great number of references to the
numerical greatness of Saruman’s armies indicating his commitment to a strategy of attrition.
Although they are outnumbered by the Orcs and Wild men, the Rohirrim12 will also in their own
way be adopting the same strategy. Gandalf and Aragorn have convinced Théoden to relinquish
the hold of Wormtongue, a minion of Saruman, on his kingship and ride out to Saruman’s
stronghold in Isengard to fight the inevitable battle for Rohan’s freedom from Sauron’s forces.
King Théoden orders that: “Every man that can ride should be sent west at once” (518), and “Let
them summon all who dwells nigh! Every man and strong lad able to bear arms” (519). This war,
12
Within LR the Kingdom of Rohan and its people have many names. The Kingdom itself also being called the
Riddermark and the Mark. The people (horsemen by trade) of Rohan are variously called: Rohirrim, the Riders, and
Riders of the Mark. Although the “people” referred to are often specifically the kingdom guard, not the general
population per se. This proliferation of locutions is typical of Tolkien’s philological “realism,” if you will. Helm’s
Deep is also in Rohan.
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as characterized by the repetition of the absolute term “every” and designation of “all” in the
gathering of soldiers, mirrors the unmitigated conscription practices of attrition within total war,
which, at the midway point of WWI, allied forces underwent as the unprecedented causalities of
that day in July and those many months of continued battle pressed on. Unfortunately, just as the
German strategy of attrition had “bled France white” at Verdun just before the Somme offensive,
reducing their personnel contribution and increasing the need for British manpower, so too do
the Fellowship forces go into Helm’s Deep already depleted and combating a strategy of total
annihilation.
Throughout the lead up to the battle again, we witness the judgment from several
characters that they do not have enough men to combat Saruman’s efforts at attrition. As they
approach the river Isen outside Isengard, a rider comes from a previous battle there and tells
Théoden’s host: “You come at last, but too late, and with too little strength . . . We were driven
back yesterday over Isen with great loss; many perished at the crossing. Then at night fresh
forces came over the river against our camp. All Isengard must be emptied . . . We were overmastered” (527). Here we see they are “too little strength” and we hear about another battle on a
river with “great loss” wherein the multiplicity of enemy forces “over-master[s]” Théoden’s
men. Furthermore, Théoden is told that “the host that comes from the North . . . is very great . . .
I do not doubt that the main strength of the enemy is many times as great as all that we have
here” (529), from which Théoden, choosing to ride to Helm’s Deep instead of Isengard,
concludes, “Nay, we are too few to defend the Dike . . . [but we] must stand [says his heir,
Eomer] if we are pressed” (530). The point we must derive from this repetition of inferior
numbers, is their choice to go to Helm’s Deep in response. Although exactly how out-numbered
Hall 29
they are still eludes Rohan, they choose a more defensible position for their battle, rather than the
open battle on the river, which they have already seen will be devastating.
The difference between the Somme and Helm’s Deep is primarily the knowledge of the
attrition about to be thrust upon them, and the ability, therefore to adjust other strategic elements
even within the total war military apparatus. The arrangement at Helm’s Deep, however, still
resembles the conditions of the Somme in many ways. Concerning Rohan’s personnel
arrangement Tolkien explains, “on the Deeping Wall and its tower, and behind it, Eomer arrayed
most of the strength that he had” (531). Similar to the Somme offensive, the man-power is frontloaded within the battle strategy and the geography of the battleground. Although Rohan does
not orchestrate the artillery barrage which began the Battle of the Somme, it does expend its
largest proportion of man-power on the front line, and the initial hours, therefore, of the battle.
Even the defensive layout of the Deep itself resembles the sense of extra safety, which
soldiers felt the Somme provided by contrast to Ypres or Verdun for example. Tolkien writes,
“There upon [the rocks surrounding Helm’s Gate’s] stood high walls of ancient stone, and within
them was a lofty tower. . . . A wall, too, the men of old had made from Hornburg to the southern
cliff, barring entrance to the gorge . . . There in the Hornburg at Helm’s Gate Erkenbrand, master
of Westfold on the borders of the Mark, now dwelt. As days darkened with threat of war, being
wise, he had repaired the wall and made the fastness strong” (528-9). Three layers of protection
this location provides, making it both Rohan’s only leverage ever the attrition brought by
Saruman, as well as the constructor of a false sense of hope and safety that the Deep has
prepared them for victory.
Once the battle commences, the fellowship fighters are accosted by armies beyond
number sent only to destroy them. The Orcs and men of Saruman are described not as a
Hall 30
proliferation of individual soldiers, but as: “boiling and crawling with black shapes . . . Hundreds
and hundreds more were pouring over the Dike and through the breach. The dark tide flowed up
the walls from cliff to cliff” (532). Their numbers are too great for expression, incomprehensible
in form, and so Tolkien represents them as animalized and naturalized forces, “shapes” and
“tide” of indefinite number, expressed only as “Hundreds and hundreds.” As Saruman’s host
meets the Deeping wall, “They wavered, broke, and fled back; and then charged again, broke and
charged again; and each time, like the incoming sea, they halted at a higher point . . . If any man
fell . . . two others sprang to take his place” (533). Once again, the enemy is an ocean of force
not a certain number of soldiers, endlessly bashing the wall, never needing rest or reinforcement
because of their great numbers. More than countless, they seem almost to defy the laws of the
physical world, and to multiply, one being replaced in each death by “two others.” As the battle
continues, so does the multiplication of the enemy host. In his evocation of the Orc army through
maritime metaphors, we recall two other important moments in which great bodies of water
come to bear. These are the ocean to the west of Middle-earth, from which all ring-bearers depart
in the final chapter of the book, and the great sea which Frodo alludes to, as the only thing which
might heal the wastelands of Mordor, in a tsunami of forgetting. Both of these aquatic moments
as well as the Orc as malevolent ocean play on the trope of the Ocean’s power to wipe out all
human life, as with a biblical plague of Noah’s proportions, and the space of forgetting, an
embodiment of oblivion.
The orcs are here characterized with watery words in order to bring to the fore the tension
in the Great War and Ring War, between a forgetting or loss of nature as home, and the
emergence of nature as uncanny bringer of death. Tolkien narrates, “The enemy before them
seemed to have grown rather than diminished, and still more were pressing up from the valley
Hall 31
through the breach. . . . Many were cast down in ruin, but many more replaced them” (535). In
this representation of a deindividuated and endlessly multiplying force, we find a residue of the
fright and incomprehensibility of the use of attrition in total war.
The counterpart to the trauma of this war, as a lack of preparation for the experience of
attrition within total war, is the inability to communicate this experience because of its newness.
The newness goes beyond this modern form of attrition to the technology used and the location
of battle. It is this condition to which LR responds. Tolkien Scholar, Rebekah Long, writes “[In
LR] the Great War’s violence defies the prescriptions of realism, accosting us with an ‘arresting
strangeness’ . . . the turn to the fantastic in twentieth-century literature is linked to the experience
of modern warfare, not as avoidance . . . but as testimony to the newness of this horror . . . War
informs the fantastic landscape of Tolkien’s narrative; in [LR] verbal topography is unearthed,
widened, and resown” (125). No longer do men fight hand to hand combat with swords or even
muskets and pistols as firearms, alone on an open battlefield. Instead the Great War gives
modernity wars fought in trenches with no physical contact with the “enemy” using machine
guns, artillery, and land mines. These elements of war are positioned within the text through this
fantastic battle scene to be the source of the horror and trauma of the battle par excellence chiefly
attributed as the feared source of their impending defeat, beyond the attrition visited upon Rohan.
Amidst the Battle, mentions of unfamiliar weaponry abound, chief among them being the
fire of the Orcs. Twice Aragorn and Théoden discuss their inability to combat this new terror.
“[T]he Orcs,” Aragorn to says to Théoden, “have brought a devilry from Orthanc . . . ‘They have
a blasting fire, and with it they took the Wall” (538-9). This “blasting fire” echoes the uncanny
destruction of landmines and artillery withstood by those fighting in the Great War, and with
greatest vigor at the Somme.
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In addition to this new technology, the landscape of war itself is changed from those in
fighters’ memory. Not the battle-fields of Tolkien’s often identified medieval evocations, but
trenches, such as those which dominate the space of WWI, find representation in the layout of
Helm’s Deep. Gandalf has instructed Théoden to head for the Deep rather than, “to the Fords of
Isen, and do not tarry in the plain!” (528). His instruction against rivers and plains, indicates the
instinct to hold battle there, as well as the new direction of trench warfare fantastically reenvisioned by Tolkien. The Deep itself, is described as defended from within: “The Deeping
Wall [which] was twenty feet high, and so thick that four men could walk abreast along the top,
sheltered by a parapet over which only a tall man could look . . . This battlement could be
reached by stair running down from a door in the outer court of the Hornburg; three flights of
steps led also up to the wall from the Deep behind” (531). Although the battlement evokes
medieval fortresses of old, it also hold in its imagery the constructed, rooted nature of the spaces
of war. Where the Riders of the Mark were used to riding out to battle on open fields, here in the
throes of total war defending themselves against attrition, they are forced into an enclosed
landscape of battle, like the trenches of the Great War. Speaking to this, Théoden confesses to
Aragorn: “’I fret in this prison . . . If I could have set a spear in rest, riding before my men upon
the field, maybe I could have felt again the joy of battle, and so ended. But I serve little purpose
here” (539).
The threat of new weaponry, the unfamiliar space of the trench war, and the defense
against attrition within total war are the three repeated themes of Tolkien’s Battle of Helm’s
Deep, in his textual response to his experience of the Somme Offensive, and the conditions of
modern war beginning in 1914 more generally. This response functions, as Long rightly
identifies, “as testimony to the newness of this horror . . . War informs the fantastic landscape of
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Tolkien’s narrative” and “in [LR] verbal topography is unearthed, widened, and resown.” In
general, we see Tolkien’s narration of the war to be an effort to both acknowledge what placed it
outside our frames of reference, while also putting back the preparation which was missing,
culturally, before WWI. This is why there is so much lead up—12 pages—to the battle, which is
itself only 10 pages in length.
In addition, the historical battle of the Somme, is won slowly and at great cost, but its
fantastic counterpart, the battle of Helm’s Deep lasts only two days, and is ended, not by
pressing forward with morbid stubbornness in the implementation and normalization of these
new horrors of war, but by reviving old battle-ways. When all hope is lost, Rohan rides out
“driving forth the enemy,” and as they reached the Dike, “they gazed down upon the Deepingcoomb. The land had changed. Where before the green dale had lain, its grassy slopes lapping
the ever-mounting hills, there now a forest loomed . . . trees . . . rank on rank . . .their twisted
roots were buried in the long green grass” (540-1). This forest did not spring up overnight, but
travelled there, to aid Rohan in defeating their common enemy, Saruman. And this strategy
succeeds. Trapped between the cavalry of Rohan and the translocated forest of Fanghorn, the
armies of Saruman panic and flee into death on the swords of the Rohirrim or into the forest
itself, where they will be killed by the trees (542). What is unique about Tolkien’s literary
response to the war is that, faced with an uncanny threat, the free peoples of Middle-earth ally
themselves with nature, and reject dehumanizing war tactics, rather than enduring the artillery
and trenches, and “shutting off the landscape” or reverting to a literary mode of inverted or antipastoral13.
Discussed at length in both Kate McLaughlin’s book, Authoring War, and Paul Fussell’s, The Great War and
Modern Memory.
13
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Why, our next question must be, is Saruman the common enemy of both man and tree?
This brings us to next battle in our discussion of LR, and the ways in which Tolkien responds to
the ecological trauma of the Great War. As identified above, the three chief ways in which we
can view the Great War as “traumatic” to ecology are through: material alteration to ecosystems,
fostering a rhetoric of nature as enemy, and expediting and normalizing industrial economies
which are characteristically exploitative of the environment. One moment which most explicitly
responds to this aspect of modern warfare is the events at Isengard between the Ents—trees with
subjectivity and agency—and Saruman’s forces. I call them events and not a battle, because
through happenstance, the armies had left Isengard to fight Rohan at Helm’s Deep when the Ents
came to annihilate Orthanc, the capital, of sorts, of Isengard.
After leaving the Deep, Rohan and company must go to Isengard to eliminate the
intermediary source of this incursion: Saruman. They first come to the river Isen, located on the
outer perimeter of Isengard’s valley, and they notice an unpleasant change. “The riders looked
down upon the crossings, and it seemed strange to them,” we read, “for the Fords had ever been
a place full of the rush and chatter of water upon the stones; but now they were silent. The beds
of the stream were almost dry . . . ‘What sickness has befallen the river? Many fair things
Saruman has destroyed: has he devoured the springs of Isen too?’ ‘So it would seem,’ said
Gandalf” (550-1). Although the war writings of the twenties and thirties acknowledge the
devastation wreaked on the landscape—we often think of T.S. Eliot’s “Wasteland” here—they
do so not out of mourning for the thing itself, but more often as an expression of mourning for
the meaningless void into which they feel humanity, alone, has been thrust, by modernity14. In
Although there are notable detractors from this theory, most recently Judith Paltin’s article, “’An Infected Carrier
of the Past’: Modernist Nature as the Ground of Anti-Realism,” in ISLE 20.4 (2013): 1-17, a notion which will be
addressed more directly in section three.
14
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Tolkien’s fantasy-scape, the river itself is a “fair thing” amongst others, which has “befallen” a
“sickness,” and been “destroyed” or “devoured” by Saruman, Sauron’s key henchman. This
environmental damage is characterized as “strange,” and they react almost with incredulity.
Dismayed with this discovery, they travel on towards Isengard only to find more ecological
alterations.
Arriving at Isengard, the company discovers where “Once it had been fair and green . . .
It was not so now. Beneath the walls of Isengard . . . most of the valley had become a wilderness
of weeds and thorns. . . . No trees grew there; but among the rank grasses could still be seen the
burned and axe-hewn stumps of ancient groves. It was a sad country” (553). Described not in
anthropomorphizing terms, the landscape is “sad” and “rank” because of the loss of “green” and
the “stumps of ancient groves.” As they draw closer, more impact on the land is revealed: “The
plain, too, was bored and delved. Shafts were driven deep into the ground . . . in the moonlight
the ring of Isengard looked like a graveyard of unquiet dead” (554). No battle threatening the life
of man was fought here. The tone of devastation and imagery of wounds and burial does not
represent the loss to human life, but the alteration to the landscape before them.
The source of this wounding is, they discover, the process of production which stripped
the land to create the fodder of war. Tolkien writes, “For the ground trembled. The shafts ran
down by many slopes and spiral stairs to caverns far under; there Saruman had treasuries, storehouses, armouries, smithies, and great furnaces. Iron wheels revolved there endlessly and
hammers thudded . . . plumes of vapour” arose (554). Saruman had bent the ecology of Isengard
to fuel his war efforts, cutting and burning trees, digging up earth, and shearing rock, to melt and
mold the iron weapons of war, to create the terrifying “blasting fire” of Orthanc, and to feed the
massive armies of Sauron. This is why the Ents call Saruman the “tree-killer” for he has
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destroyed many of them and their kin with axes and “liquid fire” (568), and this is also why they
joined forces with Rohan to defeat Saruman.
Not only does Tolkien reassert the materiality and agency of the environment in his
response to the trauma of the Great War, he also uses his narrative as a memorial to the
entanglement of the human experience of trauma and the ecological traumas of the war. One
place in which this is clearly illustrated, is in his description of the “Dead Mashes.” Rebekah
Long has termed the Dead Marshes a memorial to the Great War. She explains that “Tolkien was
marked indelibly by the Great War; he witnessed the Battle of the Somme” (128). Her reading of
this part of the narrative concludes that “The Dead Marshes act as a sort of war memorial, as a
textual actualization of the process of memory . . . the marshes with their undead show us that
death’s brutal physicality defies attempts to shape war’s ruptures into confined single-thread
narratives” (128-9).
While I agree that the Dead Marshes can be read as a memorial to the dead but not
forgotten of WWI, we must also acknowledge the peculiar and deliberate situation of this
memorial as a memorial built into the land, which remembers, and through which we must
remember the trauma of the Great War. The Dead Marshes are a landscape which literally
embody this process, as a memorial to war, which alludes to the Great War, especially and
arguably the most traumatic battle, in which Tolkien participated, the battle of the Somme.
Tolkien writes, “Sam tripped . . . his face was brought close to the surface of the dark mere. . . .
For a moment the water below him looked like some window, glazed with grimy glass, through
which he was peering. . . . he sprang back with a cry. ‘There are dead things, dead faces in the
water,’ he said with horror” (627). The faces seen by Sam are the corpses of an ancient battle,
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preserved in the Marsh water, embedded in the land. In this way, Tolkien has shaped a war
memorial in which the land absorbs the trauma of war, both human and ecological.
More than simply a symbolic representation of human trauma on the landscape, the Dead
Marshes literally encase the dead bodies of those lost to war, re-membering those fallen soldiers
in the sense of a putting back together of the body, which can be read as a symbolic
representation of what LR, as more than memorial, as testimony, hopes to do, to re-place the
subject into objective or material reality, into ecology. The reader soon learns from Gollum who
the dead are. Gollum explains to the Hobbits, on the eve of another battle (in the historical
present of the text) which will also take place again before the Gates of Mordor, “There was a
great battle long ago . . . They fought on the plain for days and months at the Black Gates. But
the Marshes have grown since then, swallowed up the graves; always creeping, creeping” (628).
Not simply fallen and preserved in place, the war dead are “swallowed up” by the marshes,
which surrounded by desolation at the hands of the powers of Mordor (whose ecological
destruction is worse than Isengard’s), merges with the “human” dead, creating a lasting space of
memory for their mutual trauma.
In her discussion of the Dead Marshes in LR as Tolkien’s way of remembering the war,
Long writes, “Tolkien and his contemporaries were raised on ‘Victorian pseudo-medieval
romance’ and brought these dreams of war into the trenches, while the language of euphemism
obscured the realities of war” (131). While, as Paul Fussell adeptly accounts, most war poets and
memoirists used the elements of the Victorian romance ironically alongside their dark
pastoralisms, Tolkien seems to have rejected this inversion wholesale, seeing no value in using a
broken mirror to reflect the present through the past. Long continues, “In reaction to this
euphemism, Tolkien in his fiction . . . searches for a new language of violence . . . ‘Middle-earth
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. . . looks so familiar to us and speaks to us so eloquently because it was born with the modern
world and marked by the same terrible birth pangs” (Garth quoted in Long 131). In searching for
this language of violence, in order to represent the wounds of both man and nature, Tolkien
shares some of the broken imagery of the modernists, but diverges in distinct ways.
Again, we find ourselves in the company of T.S. Eliot, whose flagship poem “The
Wasteland” is, as we would expect, rife with terminology of wastage and decay. LR, too, evokes
such imagery, but not with the same hopeless desolation of Eliot, more with a sense of fantastic
geographic historiography. He depicts the Dead Marshes which Sam and Frodo pass through led
by Gollum on the way to Mount Doom to destroy the One Ring as:
[D]reary and wearisome. Cold clammy winter still held sway in this forsaken country.
The only green was the scum of livid weed on the dark greasy surfaces of the sullen
waters. Dead grasses and rotting weeds loomed up in the mists like ragged shadows of
long-forgotten summers. . . . There was a deep silence, only scraped on its surfaces by the
faint quiver of empty seed-plumes, and broken grass-blades trembling in small airmovements that they could not feel. (626)
We stumble into a landscape which embodies both its present ruin, and mourns its distant past.
Here it is eternal winter, Tolkien evoking the “long-forgotten summer,” a typical reference to the
last summer before the war, symbolic of an innocent ideal time before the historical rupture of
the war. Everything is “dead” and “rotting” vegetation, and the only inkling of agency left in the
place, is the penetration of the “deep silence” by the scrapings of “empty seed-plumes, and
broken grass-blades,” as well as the “scum of livid weed” upon the water, each on the surface
symbolic of infertility, broken life, and the invasion of a darker nature, respectively: the wastage
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of a generation fighting and dying in the war. The land itself seems to hold the memory of this
trauma in its own embodied ruination.
But landscape as wasteland is not the only thing to be read into Tolkien’s description of
the Dead Marshes. With the presence of this algae on the water, the “scum of livid weed,” we
detect a hint of life, or “green” as he colors it. Terming the life a weed may seem to imply it is a
sort of invasive species, a biological pollutant due to the history of land use in that spot (as
battlefield). Weeds, however, as has oft been noted, are a cultural locution, and not an ecological
one, implying an obstacle to domestic agriculture more that an obstacle to the ecological health
of a place. Indeed, in the next line, one of the plants which are mournfully described as “dead” or
“rotting,” indicating they are part of some “original” landscape which Tolkien evokes this scene
as the ruins of, are also described as “weeds,” putting them in tension with the more maleficent
sounding weeds on the water. This algae then—rather than representing a pollutant on the land, a
term which aligns itself more with notions of steady-state ecology, a theory from which
contemporary ecological sciences have departed, favoring now a systems theory model, in which
ecology, as closed system, can have no pollutant, for there is no outside ecology from which said
pollutants could invade—must be read within this systems theory model of ecology, wherein it
may be a manifestation of ecological change, but cannot be termed either negative or positive, in
any absolutist sense. Reading the horticultural description of the Dead Marshes landscape,
alongside the character’s encounter with the archaeological artifacts of battlefield dead in the
marsh waters, Tolkien’s memorial to the Great War inscribed in this place emerges as an
outgrowth of both ecological and historical trauma. More than just a symbol, the writing of the
Dead Marshes wastage is a remembering of the traumatic past of survivors of the war together
with that of land itself.
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Beyond this space of memory to subjective and ecological loss, is a place characterized
as “beyond all healing” (632). Frodo describes the mournful sight for the reader. Just past the
Dead Marshes lay “the desolation that lay before Mordor: the lasting monument to the dark
labour of its slaves that should endure when all their purposes were made void; a land defiled,
diseased beyond all healing—unless the Great Sea should enter in and wash it with oblivion”
(631-2). By positioning these two spaces next to each other Tolkien intends to construct, I
believe, two visions for both our past and future as dictated by the Great War. We can occupy a
space of memory where we rejoin the subjective and the ecological, split by the many disasters
of the war; or, we can continue living in a world we envision as a “wasteland” which is “beyond
all healing” of the split between subjectivity and ecology baring a force of nature which erases
humanity all together.
Tolkien, I believe, would have us choose the former, hence his fantastic remerging of the
forces of people and nature throughout the secondary world he has created in response to WWI:
Middle-earth. As Long has stated, “We can view [LR] not as an allegory of the Great War . . . but
as a recollection of it . . . which investigates the creative work of memory in reply to the trauma
of war. Fantasy, conceived in Tolkien’s novel as a dialogic process of invention and
remembrance, allows for a return to the war that is not documentary or allegorical in approach
but memorial” (Long 125-6). It is up to readers to decide what and how we are called to remember that and this world.
Ecological Frameworks in Frodo’s Middle-Earth
In order to more fully grasp that which we are asked to re-member about the Great War,
and its cleaving of subject and ecology which ironically fuses war and ecology in its resultant
Hall 41
trauma and to which Tolkien directs his memorial text, we must parse out the way in which
ecology manifests itself specifically in the context of war within The Lord of the Rings. It is
entangled with trauma, yes, but how does LR manifest this war trauma ecologically? Ecological
critics of LR have consistently taken an over-simplified stance regarding their readings of
ecology in Tolkien’s most famous work. I have noticed two trends in LR scholarship more
generally, and especially in ecocritical scholarship on Tolkien’s work, although it is not often
performed by self-identified ecocritics. First, it is consistently dependent on a reading of
Tolkien’s legendarium15 as a whole, and his essays16, letters, interviews, lectures, and
translations, and is not performed in a Barthesean17 fashion—a close reading of a single text
without examining outside influences. Second, those taking up the subject of nature within
Tolkien do so in a way which presumes that humans lie outside of, or are separate from nature,
despite their claims that Tolkien’s work asks us to treat this other lovingly and judiciously.
I believe we lose something of the depth more pointed readings can provide when we
ignore what LR individually indicates by never providing undivided critical attention on a
specific text of Tolkien’s, as a specific product of a specific historical moment18. This is
something I hope to remedy here. As for the romantic, almost Victorian, notions of nature which
This term refers to all of Tolkien’s mythopoeic work on the secondary world of Middle-earth, most often the core
texts of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, although you frequently see his Lost Tales
references in conjunction with these main three. There are several other works by Tolkien which are drawn on, his
Anglo-Saxon translations, his early poetry, and his later science fiction stories, and his children’s stories, all of
which can be said to have their place in the legendarium, but less directly.
16
The most cited essay I have found is his “On Faerie Stories,” where he lays out many of his philosophies on
narrative creation, including his philological perspectives, and his opinions on the nature of fantasy writing as a
genre.
17
What I mean when I refer here to Roland Barthes, is the notion, which my scholarly efforts subscribe to, that,
while history and culture are influences on a text, the individual author of a work, his or her intentions, psychology,
and biography, are not directly relevant to the interpretation of a text, per se, which is to say, not that such work is
not valid, (reading LR in conjunction with Tolkien’s letters for example) but that it is not the same critical act as
leaving the letters out, and, more importantly, it is not often (ever?) done with Tolkien, but it will be in this essay.
18 This could however be read as a performance of the ecological nature of his writing, each thing being so
embedded and interdependent on the other texts, that it cannot be meaningfully isolated.
15
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scholars have located in Tolkien’s text, I believe their dependence on the author’s own intents
and experiences have influenced too much their findings, especially because of the author’s
staunch Catholicism. The texts, I believe, point to a more complicated and original view of the
human place in the “natural” world than Catholic mythology would lend itself to, shaped by the
trauma of World War One and the resulting solidification of an ever widening divide between
subject and ecology.
We shall begin, then, with a look at how ecology is represented within LR as a whole, and
how our view of this narrative as response to the trauma of the Great War shifts the register of
nature in the text, away from that of other critics, towards a more nuanced, ecological, and
historically situated understanding of the work. We will look first at the ecological framework of
Middle-earth represented within LR beginning including the pastoral setting from which Frodo
embarks on his journey, and which is favored for ironic employment by modernist war writers.
This will be followed by an examination of both loss resulting from war at various key points in
the epic, and then expand this into a look at how this imaginary of loss and war is interwoven
with Tolkien’s ecological framework in the novel. We will then position ourselves for the next
section in which we will consider in what way this bell-eco-se story is a distinctly traumatic
narrative, expanding our discussion of loss to include Frodo’s experience specifically, at Mount
Doom and as a wounded body.
As I have explained, the dominant interpretation of nature in LR has been that humanity
is other than nature. This implies that humanity exists outside of ecology, which, as I have stated,
is antithetical to Tolkien’s Middle-earth ecology. Let’s see why. Chris Brawley has written that,
“For ecocritics, literature is a means of a paradigm shift, a learning of a new language which
places the non-human in a central position as part of the whole” (293). This seems to be the
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predominant source of the misreading of “nature” in LR: a malformed ecocritical assumption that
literature simply inverts the existing paradigm. Current trends in ecocriticism, however, do not
subscribe to structuralist notions of center, but more to deconstructive and poststructuralist
notions of decentered systems, and by extension ecologies or ecosystems. This trend occurred
concurrently with scientific shifts in understandings of ecology, away from steady-state models
and towards systems models. Although some may still practice a romantic and scientifically
incomplete idea of nature and therefore be performing textual readings of its reflection and
construction within literature in an inaccurate, and I would add irresponsible or dangerous way,
most contemporary ecocritics have updated their theories19.
Brawley’s approach is mirrored in the work of other scholars most known to approach
Tolkien’s work ecocritically. Matthew Dickerson and Jonathan Evans outline Tolkien’s
environmental ethic as a “deep and complex ecological vision . . . including positions compatible
with both conservation and preservation” (xvi), wherein the Hobbits and Entwives represent a
conservation ethic through their sustainable agriculture, and the Elves and Ents represent the
precept of preservation through their supranatural horticulture and wilderness protection,
respectively.
Dickerson and Evans claim, also, that Tolkien’s vision is governed primarily by a notion
of Christian Stewardship, which can be located throughout the novel, but especially through the
characters of Gandalf, the wizard, and Aragorn, heir to the throne of Gondor. They define this
stewardship model as “the benevolent, selfless custodial care of the environment” (xx), which
leads them to the conclusion that in Middle-earth people, “although they are a part of nature . . .
also somehow transcend nature . . . from the beginning, nature’s purpose is ultimately bound to
19
See recent works in the last two decades by Bruno Latour, Serpil Opperhiem, Dana Phillips, and Tim Morton for
examples of a more postmodernist ecocriticism, all of whom published before the date of this article (2007).
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their coming into the world” (51). Leading Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger subscribes also to this
othering of nature, writing in her comparison of the Ents to Old Man Willow (both trees with
agency within the text, one assisting and the other malevolent towards people) that, “The
problem . . . of how to answer growing human needs without sacrificing to them some portion of
the natural environment, is unsolvable . . . it is inevitable that we alter nature, and in that
alteration it is also inevitable that some of the things we would wish to preserve will be
irretrievably lost” (274). In general, then, scholars have agreed that Middle-earth contains an
ecology in which the subject is always already inherently displaced, and in which they care for
the environment as stewards from without, and because of this tension, they must accept an
inherent loss in the system, substituting their own well-being for that of some natural other.
This problem of the tension between nature as ward and nature as object of consumption
is fundamentally rooted romantic notions of nature, but it is curiously complicated by the idea of
the pastoral in general and in LR. The pastoral mode holds particular significance for narratives
responding to the Great War. Paul Fussell has explained that “For the English, nature is . . . a
‘stay’ against the chaos of industrial life . . . Recourse to the pastoral [becomes] an English mode
of both fully gauging the calamities of the Great War and imaginatively protecting one’s self
against them . . . to hint by antithesis at the indescribable; at the same time, it is a comfort in
itself” (255). Tolkien, too, evokes the pastoral throughout LR, most notably at the beginning and
end of the story, in his descriptions of the Shire as idyllic and then as damaged utopia, but also,
similarly to other Great War writers, during scenes of battle. Before the war proper, traveling
under the protection of the elves, on their way out of the Shire, the four hobbits are surrounded
constantly by landscapes such as the following: “the wooded slopes on to the top of a shoulder of
the hills that stood out into the lower land of the river valley . . . eastward the ground fell steeply
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and the tops of the dark trees, growing at the bottom of the slope, were below their feet. Beyond,
the low lands lay dim and flat under the stars. Nearer at hand a few lights twinkled in the village
of Woodhall” (81). This type of long description of the natural landscape which describes nature
as both free from destruction and consumption but also ordered and distinctly separate from
concepts of “wilderness” landscapes, and including reference to rural habitation by people, is
typical of the pastoral mode. The conventional “stewardship” of agricultural communities
working the land responsibly is implicit in the lay of the land: woods, rivers, grasslands, and
village, cohabiting but not comingling in the pastoral space. Although the twinkling lights of the
“village of Woodhall” cohabits but does not comingle with such “natural” spaces as “wooded
slopes” and “the lower land of the river valley” its adjacency implies at least an ecological
landscape in which the life of the subject and the presence of “nature” are thoroughly ensconced
in the same space. Rather than a “shutting off of the landscape” of the front or a distortion of the
pastoral which can only exist fully on the home front but never in the trenches, Tolkien’s
pastoral presents the reader with a pastoral world which might be characterized as nostalgic, but
never as ironized into unreality.
From here, and before we return to the Shire to find it too has been marred by Sauron’s
soldiers (Saruman), between these two points of edenic paradise and hellish apocalypse, we find
we have not left the pastoral behind in the Shire, but rather brought it with us to the fronts from
home. As with the other war-writers the pastoral in war is evoked as a lens through which to
understand the new horrors of total war. Looking out at the enemy Orc host in the previously
discussed battle of Helm’s Deep, we read: “and the men of the Mark amazed looked out, as it
seemed to them, upon a great field of dark corn, tossed by a tempest of war, and every ear glinted
with barbed light” (533). Within battle, instead of the longed for and coveted fields of grass and
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wooded shades, we find ourselves facing a decidedly malicious corn-field, whose mission is to
end human life, not aid in its survival as the landscape does with the village of Woodhall.
By describing the orcs with their weapons as a field of corn blowing in a storm, Tolkien
highlights the horror of the infinite number of orcs and their spears, ready to annihilate
Fellowship forces. While this use of the pastoral valorizes the ideal pastoral situated at “home”
by contrast with the horrors of war, it also implies a more dangerous, indifferent if not outright
malevolent force within nature, a nature which turns on humanity and attempts to bring about its
demise. In this evocation of nature, which ecocritics have all ignored in the text, I see no simple
call for stewardship, nor tension between preserving nature and consuming it for survival.
Instead, we see a vision of nature divided unto itself. A palimpsest of ecological landscapes.
There is nature as home and nature as enemy, and all coded within the language of war. In his
use of pastoral language to describe scenes of battle, Tolkien brings the ecological vision of the
modernist war writer into his narrative. Read in the context of the greater project of the book,
however, I do not believe we can read this conflation of orcs with a malevolent nature as the
typical ironic inversion of the pastoral used by other British writers of the war. By highlighting
the tensions that total war and attrition experiences produce in the observer of battle and focusing
on the distorted perceptions of ecology, Tolkien’s war both validates the modernist writer’s
aesthetic experience of war, while complicating it in an effort to expose the disjuncture in the
subjective relationship to ecology which has been produced by the trauma of war. It is essential
to see this ironic pastoral performance as it is mitigated by the presence of the rescue by the Ents
towards the end of the battle, where man and nature join forces to fight a common enemy, which
seeks to destroy them all. The nature of Tolkien’s pastoral is not of the idyllic bucolic kind it
became by the Victorian era, but rather, the dark pastoral of medieval and renaissance texts,
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which is capable of holding the tension of a nature that has no need for our survival, together
with our inherent embeddedness in it.
No ecocritical reading of LR would be complete without a discussion of Tom Bombadil.
According to Dickerson and Evans, “Tolkien embraced . . . the fundamentally positive value of
the material world and the physical creation . . . by giving us the character of Tom Bombadil,
whose selfless knowledge and love of the created world are independent of any power or
advantage they might afford” (xx), and furthermore, “Tom Bombadil [is] the most explicit,
concrete embodiment of the natural world—an incarnation, we might say, of environment itself
[he] may not fit into Middle-earth because he stands for it” (19). Bombadil’s presence in the text,
then, functions simply as an embodied symbol for nature, a nature which is purely material and
physical. But I believe this misses the point. Arriving at Tom Bombadil’s house, the first real
stop along the hobbits’ journey out of the Shire, Frodo asks who the man is: “’He is,’ said
[Tom’s companion]. . . ‘He is the Master of wood, water, and hill.’ ‘Then all this strange land
belongs to him?’ [Frodo responds] ‘No indeed!’ . . . ‘The trees and the grasses and all things
growing or living in the land belong each to themselves” (124). In Frodo’s (and our) introduction
to Tom, we are given the impression, not of any materiality or physicality constituting him, but
rather his mastery over materiality (the landscape) and his constitution being derived from being
itself (“He is”). His mastery discludes notions of possession, however, and seems to evoke more
of an intellectual mastery.
Omniscient and all knowing, Bombadil describes himself as: “old. Eldest . . . Tom was
here before the rivers and trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn . . . He was
here before the Kings and the graves and the Barrow-wights. . . . There was Tom already, before
the seas were bent. He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless—before the Dark Lord
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came from Outside” (131). The two types of verbs Tom uses to define himself are cognitive
verbs and forms of the verb “to be.” This is significant for three reasons: first, because of his
being composed of existence outside of time (i.e. he defies the space-time continuum) making
his form the opposite of matter (material or physical) which can only exist in relation to time;
second, because of the form his existence does take: memory (“Tom remembers”) and knowing
(“He knew”); and third, because he is defined entirely by verbs, which, as a rule, are the opposite
of material or physical, but rather motion and energy. In this sense, I believe Tom does not
represent “nature” but ecology. He is not all of the concrete “others” over which we have kind
dominion or right to consume, he is inconsumable; he is the system itself from which materiality
comes and goes, converted here and there into and out of energy. He is the system, embodied, a
paradox, resisting the simple division of nature and culture within the text, such as Brawley’s
comment that, Tom Bombadil represents a human-nature relationship in which we “view nature .
. . as a representation of that which is other” (297).
Another important figure in all discussions of the environment within LR are the walking
talking tree-herding trees, the Ents. The most prominent Ent character, Treebeard, says to Merry
and Pippin, concerning the loss of the Entwives, “perhaps we shall find somewhere a land where
we can live together and both be content. But it is foreboded that that will only be when we have
both lost all that we now have. And it may well be that that time is drawing near at last. For if
Sauron of old destroyed the gardens, the Enemy today seems likely to wither all the woods” (4767). Ents and Entwives of the past had a half-remembered disagreement over whether cultivation
or preservation was the best course of action. This occurs after the Elves woke up the trees (turning
them into agents and therefore Ents). Awakening to separation from an undifferentiated whole or
system to individual consciousness has come with a division for the Ents, on how to inhabit the
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land. This division (here gendered) results in the loss of offspring, which will be further discussed
later. But, the reunion of the Ents, according to this passage, can only come with a loss, with the
destruction of both cultivated land (“gardens”) and preserved wildernesses (“woods”).
This reading contradicts the predominant interpretation by scholars such as Flieger,
whose astute identification of a paradoxical tension in Tolkien’s representations of nature can be
expanded upon as I have above. She writes,
The voice of Treebeard reminds a world whose Cartesian world-view has effectively
divorced it from nature that it may be losing—and indeed destroying—something
irreplaceable . . . The Ents and the world they care for . . . are dying out . . . a modern
depiction of ecological loss . . . The Ents primal energy is the very essence of the wild,
and it is that wildness which is doomed . . . civilization . . . by its very nature will
eventually kill off the wild. Not just the industrializing of Saruman but the industrious
gardening of the Entwives . . . The tame, by its very desire for order, will edge out the
wilderness . . . The time of the Ents is over, and the Fourth Age, the Age of Men,
predators of trees, is about to begin . . . Treebeard speaks and epitaph for himself and his
world (221-222)
She seems to use the same Cartesian binaries that she criticizes by dividing the world into
wilderness and civilization. By terming Treebeard’s words an epitaph, she characterizes the
whole of the book not as a testimony (as I argue) but as an elegy to the loss of wild nature at the
hands of civilization.
By placing the book in its historical context of the Great War, and reading the text as a
testimony to that trauma, we cannot help but put aside the foreclosure attached to elegiac
narratives, for testimony does not seek a Cartesian sense of knowing, divided and dissected, but
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rather a Bombadilian sense of knowing, systemic and diffuse. The Ents, after all, are not simply
trees, wild and separate from human subjectivity and agency, but representations of existence
and being writ large. Flieger herself explains, the “OED [defines the Anglo-Saxon root word:]
ent . . . as ‘the ent, or existent’ . . . Tolkien seemed to want to reconnect the word ent to the verb
‘to be,’ that is, to the primal notion of ‘being’” (213). The Ents, therefore, like Tom, are not
simply the embodiment of nature as other, but nature as all.
The creation of Middle-earth, as secondary world, is, itself the testimony to the trauma as
ecological. As Margaret Hiley has explained, “fantasy responds to the potential for total
annihilation in modern warfare . . . The fragmentation of reality caused by war necessitates the
retreat into the coherent reality of a secondary world. Perhaps fantasy represents one of war’s
greatest transformations—that of primary reality, through its fragmentation and disappearance—
into a secondary one” (42). The loss rent by this war was so great and indescribable that it
necessitated the creation of a new earth, a re-worlding of the world in order to attend to the split
created between subject and ecology. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, however, is no simple allegory, as
we have seen, where, in this new world we learn how to be or not be in harmony with ecology.
LR reflects the division and also manifests its mending, it testifies to the trauma produced by the
Great War, but also narrates a process of working-through. Because of the complex tasks
achieved by the story, we must expand our scope, and see how throughout the text, not merely in
moments of battle or its aftermath, or moments steeped in “nature” explicitly, Tolkien addresses
the displacement of subjectivity from ecology within a story about war.
Trauma: The Entanglement of History in Ecology
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Within The Lord of the Rings place and history are always entangled, both through the
emplacement of ruins in the landscape to past wars, and the evidence of residual alterations to
the environment from historical events of the people of Middle-earth. Early in the book, this
precedent is set. After their encounter with Tom Bombadil, the hobbits head for Bree, the last
outpost of the Shire before the final leg of their journey through less inhabited lands to Rivendell
for the council which forms the Fellowship of the Ring. In doing so they must travel through the
Barrow-downs. Here, they come under attack, this time not by their present foes—Sauron,
Saruman, Orcs, or Black Riders—but, in what seems to be unrelated to the plot of the War of the
Ring, by adversaries from another time. The ghosts of Kings past rise from their graves and
attempt to entrap the hobbits in a Barrow (a type of hill-tomb). While inside the Barrow, Merry
even begins to dream he is at war in a distant age, but he experiences it as if it is a personal
memory. In her essay on “Memory and Reincarnation in Middle-earth,” Flieger writes that “the
episode occurs in a landscape already haunted by history and oral tradition, the Barrow-downs”
(97). Although she merely notices the characterization of this landscape where the event under
analysis takes place, and moves on to further discussions of memory and trans-temporal
subjectivities, she first identifies the Barrow-downs as a “landscape haunted by history” because
the Barrows which populate this land are the Celtic-inspired grave sites wherein multiple people
are interred in a hollowed out hill or mound.
The people locked in the land in death are the Kings and Warriors of the Kingdoms of
Men of Ages past. The land, therefore, is not simply haunted by history, but by the history of
war, for on those hilly fields, were fought many battles of old. Just as Mark Heberle explains
that the “narrative” of LR is “haunted by the Great War” (142), in his discussion of trauma and
war in LR, so too does the landscape within the narrative suffer from a similar haunting. In his
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reminder to us that hauntings are always connected to if not synonymous with trauma, we can
read the haunting of the lands of Middle-earth with buried ghosts and crumbled ruins as a
symbolic representation of the trauma of war manifesting itself in the environment.
The threat of attempting to be in a place without understanding the entanglement of
human history in place, can be summed up by Tom Bombadil’s comment to the hobbits after
saving them from total absorption into the death realm of battles past: “You’ve found yourselves
again, out of the deep water. Clothes are but a little loss, if you escape from drowning . . . Run
naked on the grass” (144). The risk is not merely death of the body but death of the self. Here, as
in Frodo’s locution of the oblivion of water which could cleanse the ruined lands of Mordor in
forgetting tides which would also wash away humanity though salvaging “nature,” forgetting is
associated with the “deep water.” This scene, then, forebodes the consistent theme of one’s
subjective relationship to place, and structures the relationship between war, land, and self as the
scene of subjective transformation in response to the trauma of war.
By embedding this trauma literally in the land, Tolkien represents the ecological
entanglement of the subject’s negotiation of war trauma. The forgetting of the self which the
hobbits luckily evaded, represents the forgetting of one’s subjective embeddedness in ecology or
in the land itself, which can come as a result of total war. In calling out to Tom, who embodies
the always already inclusiveness of ecology on Middle-earth, they are saved from oblivion and
awaken to the memory of the dangers of forgetting. Attempting to traverse this environment
without remembering the traumatic history absorbed into its land can prove dangerous, as the
hobbits discovered. The land often finds a way to force your ownership of that past, as it
attempted to do with Merry and the others. Their time in the Barrows seems most essentially to
be a manifestation of the dark nature in which the mind of the Great War survivor, and the
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history and therefore memory of that war are trapped. On the outskirts of the Shire, of the space
of home, the hobbit’s encounter with both Tom and the Barrows begin to alter the perspective of
the hobbits and the readers in their approach to ecology and history, setting the stage for the
performance of the Ring War which unfolds.
Faith, if that is the right word, in an ecology beyond human instrumentalization (Tom)
will save post-war subjectivity (the hobbits) from the place where the “light vanished” (141) in
the “dark chamber[s]” of “sudden deep silence” (142), allowing it to awaken to a being-in-place
where “light stream[s] in, real light, the plain light of day” as Tom’s incantation of “Leave your
barrow empty! Lost and Forgotten be, darker than the darkness, Where gates stand forever shut,
till the world is mended” causing the “Wight” which dragged them into the dark barrow to fade
“away into an unguessable distance; and after that silence” (142). The evacuation of historical
memory from the spaces of forgetting in which our lost humanity is interned in a dark nature,
towards a plain one which “You’ve found yourselves again” and can “Run naked on the grass,”
wherein you “wake one day to find that [you] are unexpectedly well and the day is again full of
promise” (144). Although most of the tale takes place outside the shire proper, the symbolic
home-place in this text, its position on the outskirts, in the liminal space between inside and
outside, not quite at Bree, but far from Hobbiton, marks the margins of the home place as the
ideal site for transformation of the subject-as-displaced-from-ecology into the ecologically
embedded subjectivity.
To begin the journey with this lesson is significant. Christopher Garbowski suggests that
there is a transformative relationship, also, not just between place and history, but place and self,
which emerges in LR. He writes, “There is an axiological significance to the unexplored vistas
which the prose of the trilogy constantly suggests [something being always left unseen.] [T]he
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journey thus understood suggests a course of self-transcendence . . . self-transcendence is
propelled less by a greater self-awareness than by more profound external-awareness” we
should, therefore avoid too much self-awareness, for “[t]he more the eye sees itself, the less the
world and its objects are visible to it” (25). Although the storyline does evoke the traditional
wander-lust of the quest narrative (a popular evocation among war narratives), this overly
romanticized notion is rejected for its too internalized modality. What the hobbits gain,
especially Frodo and Sam, at the end of this quest to destroy the One Ring (rather than to possess
some grail-like artifact), is not greater self-awareness, but self-transcendence. While the
ecocritical readings we explored earlier evoked a transcendence of human over nature, however,
Garbowski offers us a transcendence of the “external” over the “self,” via the acquired
familiarity with numerous lands. The hobbits new knowledge of the traumas carried within
places would shape their external-awareness into a knowledge which connects the transcendence
of the self with the understanding of the connection between trauma, war, and the environment.
Of the two pieces of scholarship which discuss Tolkien’s work directly in light of trauma
(although without any reference to trauma theorists, substituting instead clinical psychological
scholarship to support their analyses) neither addresses the whole of LR as a testimony to
historical trauma. Both critics choose instead to focus too narrowly on the individual as recipient
and carrier of trauma. In one piece the focus is on Tolkien’s personal trauma, and the other solely
on Frodo as traumatized figure. While laying the groundwork for other more expanded readings
of trauma in the text, neither acknowledges either the link to ecology, or the collective nature of
the Great War’s effects, although these aporias are not entirely unacknowledged by the authors.
Heberle does close his article by stating, “A more detailed consideration of The Lord of the Rings
as a post-traumatic narrative haunted by the Great War . . . cannot be accommodated in this
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chapter . . . Whether as public history or personal memory, psychic trauma, moral evil, or simply
the endless cycle of war since 1914, Tolkien’s works are haunted by such shadows” (142). I hope
that this essay will have performed this “more detailed consideration” of LR “as a post-traumatic
narrative haunted by the Great War,” or at least begun to.
Mark Heberle’s illuminating study, “The Shadow of War: Tolkien, Trauma, Childhood,
and Fantasy,” primarily addresses Tolkien’s work as an example of the author writing through
his own personal traumas of World War I, of a double dislocation in childhood, and of the loss of
both his parents, but Heberle does give us some useful ways to think through the text as a
testimony to the historical, extrapersonal trauma of the Great War within his analysis 20. Heberle
summarizes his reason for diagnosing the text as a narrative of trauma, stating, “Tolkien’s
original mythology has many of the earmarks of post-traumatic narratives, including
fragmentation, reversal of chronology, repetition, and lack of closure” (138). Although he sees
these as marks of the author’s traumatic experiences, we can also read them as evidence of a
work testifying to an extrapersonal trauma, such as the cultural trauma of the Great War.
Another scholar addressing trauma and war in LR diagnoses Frodo as a victim of war
trauma. Michael Livingston writes, “Frodo . . . bears all the qualities of a veteran soldier
returning from combat. To put a modern term to the transformation in Frodo’s character at the
end of The Return of the King, it appears that Frodo is suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder, more commonly known as ‘shell-shock’” (78). I agree that Frodo does evidence
behavior representative of some traumatic experince, but I believe Tolkien’s characterization of
Frodo goes beyond simple historical representation, or a working-through of his own wartime
20
To a certain extent a personal trauma shared by others always already a historical trauma. But that is a thought for
another essay.
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experiences. The implications of Frodo’s role as a survivor of trauma on the intersections of war
and ecology will be discussed in more detail further on.
What is important to remember is Frodo’s stated reason for embarking on this quest
which lead to his traumatic experiences in the War of the Ring: to save his pastoral Shire. In
addition to the ironic use of the pastoral in describing war scenes, it was also evoked by war
writers, as Tolkien has with his early descriptions of the Shire, as a lost paradise, destroyed
forever by the events which follow your departure from that time and place. Paul Fussell
explains,
For the modern imagination the last summer [before WW1] has assumed the status of a
permanent symbol for anything innocently but irrevocable lost [David Lowe has said]
like those other generations who were given to witness the guillotining of the world, we
never expected it. And like that of our counterparts, our world seemed most beautiful just
before it disappeared.’ Out of the world of summer, 1914, marched a unique generation.
It believed in Progress and Art and in no way doubted the benignity even of technology.
The word machine was not yet invariably coupled with word gun (25)
“Real” memories of this final summer at home on the “real” landscape of England, and the
pastoral ideal, were forever fused in the crucible of the war. The trauma, then, is not just in the
corrupted memory of the war itself waged on strange and foreboding yet overdetermined
landscapes, but its corruption of the memory of life and land before the war, which was distorted
into an unnaturally harmonious relationship between man and nature, supporting the sudden
disconnect of subject from ecology in the shock of the birth of the military-industrial complex
out of World War One. This is why, as Brawly says, “the industrialization of our world divorces
us from an experience of the sacramental vision [of nature], and hence there is more of a need to
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experience it within literary forms . . . the Shire is a peaceful place [its] pastoralism . . . is the
first image of home . . . the Shire represents a closeness to nature” (304). Although taken in the
context of the whole epic of LR I don’t believe readers should interpret this “closeness to nature”
within the Shire as a realistic or attainable ideal, I do believe it demonstrates a representation of
the common distortion of what “home” used to be before the war. Whether Tolkien is satirizing
or valorizing this pastoralism is up for debate.
Not up for debate, however, is the notion of nature as other within the text, as I have
demonstrated in my readings of the Ents and Tom Bombadil. It seems clear through the powerful
pull of the pastoral, the presence of these supranatural characters, and the way in which
landscapes and historical subjects interact within LR that there is no getting outside of ecology
for humans. As Tim Matts and Aiden Tynan have propounded in there theoretical digressions on
the concept of Geotrauma, which we will discuss more later on: “It is necessary to
reconceptualize, beyond this negative mode, the violence invoked whenever we speak of
environmental damage. This first of all requires re-considering what is meant by ‘nature.’ . . .
conceiving of a metaphysics of nature as . . . an objective ‘’thing’ …that is ‘out there’ beyond us
. . . is to ignore the very ecological relations that already characterize the specifically human”
(Timothy Morton quoted in Matts and Tynan 154). Not only, according to Matts and Tynan, is
there no “objective” reality which can rightfully be said to be “beyond” our subjective reality,
but, the “violence” of “environmental damage,” must be “reconceptualized” to acknowledge this.
It is just such a “reconceptualization” which I believe The Lord of the Rings achieves in
its narration of ecological “violence” together with the human trauma of war. The key
understanding Tolkien’s “reconceptualization” lies in the much discussed presence of loss
throughout the text, not merely, as one would expect it, simply at the end of the tale, although
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there it is most clearly felt by readers I would argue, who must compound their feelings of
vicarious loss which they experience through the characters, with their own sorrow at the closing
of the book. Livingston states of the end of the story that, “in taking the ship west, Frodo admits
that he cannot find solace even in his beloved Shire. Like veterans returning to England, Frodo
finds that he is a stranger in the land that he fought so long and hard to save” (88). Livingston
refers to the final departure of Frodo from Middle-earth, not long after the war has ended. Frodo
says to Sam before boarding the ship to sail into the West with the Elves, “I tried to save the
Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must be so, Sam, when things are in danger:
someone has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them” (1029). Frodo’s trauma,
then, is most fully manifested in its alienation of himself from his home, the Shire.
In other words, we could say that the War of the Ring has dislocated Frodo’s subjectivity
from ecology, through his traumatic experience at the hands of Sauron and the One Ring. Now
that we have a better grasp on some of the ways Tolkien has constructed “natural” landscapes
and characters in his text, it is this connection between the losses of war in LR and the
traumatized subject’s relationship to place (as ecology) within the narrative, that will be explored
in the next section, where we will begin to gain a fuller picture of Tolkien’s testimony to the
Great War, and the role that fantasy as a genre plays in this narrative performance.
Loss and Recovery: A Traumatic Displacement from Middle-earth
Throughout the Fellowship of the Ring, we are introduced to a pervasive sense of loss
through stories and songs of a distant age or lost history which was previously unknown to the
Hobbits, not just concerning the wars over the One Ring, but also the Shire and Middle-earth
more generally. But once the fellowship is formed and the troop sets out on its journey, more
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explicit and eminent, ring war related losses surface throughout the text. After the battle of
Helm’s Deep and the Rohirrim’s encounter with the Ents for the first time in their memory,
Gandalf says to King Théoden: “not only the little life of Men is now endangered, but the life
also of those things which you have deemed a matter of legend [“the marvel of the trees”]. You
are not without allies, even if you know them not.” (550). Here, Gandalf’s reference to the
impromptu alliance between Ents and Men to fight Sauron through Saruman’s defeat is couched
in a reference to the legendary status previously held by creatures such as Ents, similar to the
legends which the Hobbits encountered throughout the first part of this tale, seeming somewhere
between history and fantasy. Things of legend throughout LR are evoked often as a way to
achieve what has been called Tolkien’s theory of “recovery.” Christopher Brawley, reading
Tolkien through an ecocritical lens, believes, “What Tolkien means [by recovery] is that [when]
we appropriate our world through language acquisition . . . we lose a sense of total participation
in the natural world. Fantasy, by its subversiveness, allows us to view the world in a new . . .
manner . . . respecting the environment and seeing things as apart from ourselves, to see
difference [as] a manifestation of that which is holy” (295). According to Brawly, then, Tolkien
seeks to recover a connection to nature lost with language, through the creation of a secondary
world where no such loss persists. Brawley seems to be overlaying a Lacanean conception of
language acquisition onto Tolkien’s sense of recovery, wherein the child begins to differentiate
an individual “I” during the mirror stage, during language acquisition. If Tolkien’s writing shows
us how to recover our lost “sense of total participation in the natural world,” however, how does
this lead us to “seeing things as apart from ourselves”? Total participation in something is the
opposite of seeing it as apart from us. The two cannot be equivocated, nor should we attempt to,
as I do not believe Tolkien seeks to recover a perception of us as “apart” but rather our “total
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participation in” the world, through the narrative experience of LR. In the recovery of “total
participation in the natural world,” which Brawley correctly identifies as important to an
understanding of “Ecology and Loss in The Lord of the Rings,” we should see, instead, Tolkien’s
efforts to bridge the gap between subjectivity and objectivity, or subject and ecology, which
became the dominant reality in a modernity codified by the Great War.
The reacquisitions of a lost alliance between Ents and Men, therefore, can be seen to
recover a lost connection between humans and living “nature” at the very moment it forebodes
its loss. Théoden responds to Gandalf’s above comments by stating, ‘Yet also I should be sad . . .
For however the fortune of war shall go, may it not so end that much that was fair and wonderful
shall pass forever out of Middle-earth?’ ‘It may,’ said Gandalf. ‘The evil of Sauron cannot be
wholly cured, nor made as if it had not been. But to such days we are doomed” (550). In
moments such as these reader feels the magic and connection of a world where humans and trees
work alongside each other to fight a common enemy, Sauron and the power of his One Ring,
only to immediately lose the possibility of this world being sustained, as if it was created only to
be lost. There seems to be something in particular about the “evil” of this Ring, Sauron’s Ring,
which makes this loss unrecoverable as opposed to the previous conflicts of Men and Elves we
hear of in stories of the First and Second Ages. What, exactly, makes this power exceptionally
damaging, we will discuss more later on. It is possible, however, to read this emergent and
reemerging modern power through and over “nature” itself, as loosely connected to the
movement of enlightenment and its distorted nostalgic return or continuation in
modernity/modernism.
Indeed the loss of the Ents is a continued theme. Brawley explains, “Despite their victory,
the Ents are also a part of the fading of Middle-earth” (302). On the journey back from Mordor,
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stopping again at Fangorn forest, the fellowship speaks with the Ents again. In response to
Treebeard, the head Ent’s, remark about Men needing to be around for a long time in order for
the Ents to take notice, Gandalf replies, “in this age it may well prove that the kingdoms of Men
shall outlast you, Fangorn my friend” (979), which the Ents also seems to be aware of from their
earlier conversations with Merry about the time of their reunion with the Entwives, which will
occur when they have lost all, being near. Dickerson and Evans have framed the, “the ancient
separation of the Ents from the Entwives [as] a rift that stems from the male and female [Ents’]
unresolved argument concerning preservation of wilderness versus its conservation for practical
use” (143). Brawley has noted also that because the Ents and Entwives were “sundered” in the
past no Entings may be born, which he identifies as part of the commonly found “hint of despair”
in LR (303). Brawley’s categorization of the lack of Entings as being the result of a division
between Ents and Dickerson and Evan’s identification of the root of this division in the conflict
of conservation versus preservation point to a division between subjectivity as embedded in
nature (conservation) and one which is displaced from it (preservation) at the source of loss in
LR. As we will see, although this ring war did not cause the division per se, it will function to
codify its results.
The conversation then shifts away from Gandalf, who will leave Middle-earth, to
Aragorn, who will remain. Aragorn, now having reclaimed his throne at Gondor, says to
Treebeard, “I bid you farewell. May your forest grow again in peace. When this valley is filled
there is room and to spare west of the mountains, where once you walked long ago” (980). But
hearing this offer of cohabitation and recovery, “Treebeard’s face became sad. ‘Forests may
grow,’ he said. ‘Woods may spread. But not Ents. There are no Entings” by which he means that
“normal” trees may flourish, but the trees awoken long ago by the Elves to speech and
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subjectivity, will be lost with time. “Yet maybe there is now more hope in your search [for the
Entwives]” the new and hopeful King replies, “Lands will lie open to you eastward that have
long been closed.’ But Treebeard shook his head and said, ‘It is far to go. And there are too many
Men there in these days” (981). Treebeard refuses the possibility of a new generation of Ents.
We have seen that the War of the Ring parallels the Great War in many ways. The loss of the
Entings within the results of the ring war also mirrors the Great War, as the lack of Entings
evokes the lost generation of the First World War. All that youth, dead or traumatized.
Although the destruction of the ring was meant to bring the assurance of freedom, and the
victory of the allied forces over Germany and the safety of the free world, it is a freedom and
safety which are in many ways void and infertile to those who survive the conflict. The
possibility of reconnection, says Treebeard, with the Entwives, afforded to them by the downfall
of Mordor, is made meaningless by the distance (“far to go”) and changing face of habitation on
the land (“too many Men there”). The chasm is too far to bridge for the Ents, the face of the
world too changed by the powers of the war. There will be no more Ents. In a way, we can see
their loss as an extension of the Elves rescinding back to the West, for it was they who awoke the
trees in the first place, and so it seems only logical that they should fade along with the Elves’
Ring-Power and their fair lands on Middle-earth.
We may recall an early moment of the prescience of this loss in the fellowship’s
journey, their passage through the fantastical sylvan land of Lothlόrien, where old and powerful
Ring-bearing Elves dwell. Being harbored there temporarily, and aided with clothes, food, and
powerful magical weaponry or sorts, Frodo’s troop is about to depart when he finally gains the
counsel of their leader, Lady Galadriel. Frodo offers her the Ring, and despite her temptation,
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she refuses and exhorts that she has passed a final test and now must pass into the West. Frodo
does not understand why this is so, and she responds:
Do you not see wherefore your coming to us is as the footstep of Doom? For if you fail,
then we are laid bare to the Enemy. Yet if you succeed, then our power is diminished, and
Lothlόrien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away. We must depart into the
West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten . . .
the love of the Elves for their land and their work is deeper than the deeps of the Sea, and
their regret is undying and can never wholly be assuaged (365)
In this passage, overwrought with layers of meaning, Galadriel explains the relationship between
the Elves, the land, and the One Ring. In the distant past, before Sauron was truly known as
enemy, the Elves helped him to create the Rings of Power. We are told in the sections of LR
describing the history of the Ring, that some rings where given to the leaders of each “great”
race: Elves, Men, and Dwarves. Why the Ents and Hobbits etc. do not receive rings is not
explained thoroughly, but the story does explain that secretly, Sauron forged “One Ring to rule
them all” in the “fires of Mount Doom,” where Frodo must go to destroy it, only at its point of
origin. In destroying the One Ring, however, the power of the others will be “diminished.” As
Verlyn Flieger explains, the loss of the ring-power is the “indicator of Lόrien’s regressively
receding relationship to Time and Change” (247) ending the process by which “the experience of
time slowed almost to a standstill by Galadriel’s elven ring” (248). It is the Elven ring itself,
then, which lends the supranatural power and affect to the lands of the Elves on Middle-earth. To
a degree, I feel that Tolkien does not want us to see the Elven environment as a natural ideal or
originary nature which it often is. Nonetheless, the diminishment of the Elven rings is linked,
here, to the fading of the Elven lands, and the presence of the Elves themselves on Middle-earth.
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There are four points to note about the Ring’s destruction and the Elves’ land. First, that
Frodo’s journey to Lothlόrien brings the same knowledge to the Elves that Frodo’s own arrival at
Mount Doom brings to him. This is implicit in the mirroring of the name of the ring-forging
mountain of Mordor in Galadriel’s description of Frodo’s coming to Lothlόrien, as the “footstep
of Doom.” What Frodo learns on his arrival at Mount Doom will be further discussed later on,
but it is, as Galadriel foretells, an awareness of imminent loss and leaving in a sense. Second, we
note that this loss seems unavoidable, either Sauron will destroy the Elves, they will remain and
be transformed by oblivion, or they will be forced to leave the land that defines them. Either the
destruction of the self or the home-land must ensue, although the two are not as separate as they
might seem. Third, we are told that it is the Ring-power that sustains the magical lands of
Lothlόrien, which seem resistant to the passage of time and which hold natural objects
possessing supranatural properties, such as food which, though small and plain, can sustain a life
for unbelievable amounts of time. Such fodder is what keeps Sam and Frodo alive in the lifeless
lands of Mordor. The loss of ring-power also seems to threaten the loss of memory. The Elves
could stay, says the Lady, but they would become a “rustic folk” who both “forget” and are
“forgotten,” and whom dwell, not in the forest any longer, but in “dell and cave.” Either way,
then, the Elves will experience a traumatic displacement. Displaced from their forest either into
death, the West, or valleys and mountains, and the trauma implicit in the forgetting of what it
was they are displaced from. Fourth and finally, we see an oceanic conceit within the passage.
Rife with both metaphors of the sea and forgetting, the two become conflated by the end of her
speech. Tolkien describes this loss writing: “tides of Time will sweep it away,” and “the love of
the Elves for their land and their work is deeper than the deeps of the Sea” amidst his description
of that which will “fade,” be “diminished,” and “dwindle” “slowly to forget and to be forgotten.”
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This forgetting resembles the erosion of earth by water, in which, rather than a sudden moment
of unprocessed shock, the mind awakens to a loss which has been accumulated so gradually that
is was unnoticed until it may be reminded by comparison, of that which it once was. The depth
of their suffering, also, will exceed the depth of the sea which will separate them from their
forest when they depart to the West. Furthermore, due to the traumatic displacement of the Elves,
“their regret is undying and can never wholly be assuaged.” This wound of displacement is
unable to be healed, the Elves, once gone, will never be “wholly” made whole again, having lost
either their land or their knowledge of their magical connection to it. Once again, the reader is
only introduced to magical realms in the moment of their disintegration. The magic of the Elves,
once amplified by the Rings, will now die with it, like the future of the Ents.
The One Ring and the Shire: An Accidental Fall, a Wounded Body, and a Leaving
And now, let us turn to the bearer of the One Ring itself, Frodo, as he finally arrives at
Mount Doom to destroy the ring, and complete the purpose of his quest, saving Middle-earth.
After Sam carries Frodo the rest of the way up the mountain to help him with the burden of the
ring, the pair get into a scuffle with Gollum, and Frodo scampers ahead into Mount Doom. When
Sam finds his way in, he sees Frodo on the edge of the crack from which lava spits and boils
below, and the following occurs:
‘I have come,’ [Frodo] said. ‘But I do not choose now to do what I came to do. I will not
do this deed. The Ring is mine!’ And suddenly, as he set it on his finger, he vanished
from Sam’s sight . . . then [Sam] saw a strange and terrible thing. Gollum on the edge of
the abyss was fighting like a mad thing with an unseen foe. To and fro he swayed, now so
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near the brink that almost he tumbled in, now dragging back, falling to the ground, rising,
and falling again. And all the while he hissed but spoke no words. (945-6)
At the crucial moment, when Frodo is able to destroy the ring, the hobbit cannot. As we read in
the exclamation “The Ring is mine!” which follows a series of emphatic “I” statements, Frodo
has been consumed by the Ring itself. We can read this possessive statement as a marker of
transformation. The “is,” as the verb to be was intended to, functions as a symbol of equation.
Frodo does not simply claim ownership of the object, he expresses the deep entanglement of his
self, his subjectivity, in it. Flieger reads this concatenation also in the power of the ring over the
bearer’s body. She writes, “in the case of Frodo . . . Tolkien is using invisibility as the outward
and visible (or invisible) sign of an inward process, a progressive fading and loss of self” (285).
Not only does the ring erase his physical form from sight, but from reality. Donning the ring, no
longer does Frodo merely wear the ring; he is the Ring, it has become a part of him, putting his
self under erasure. And with that, his body quite literally disappears. This is the function of the
ring, it allows for the disappearance of the physical from sight. But Gollum, who has also long
since given himself over to the ring, finds him, and the fight for its possession, precariously, on
the edge of the fiery crack of Doom.
One can’t help but notice the diction here is reminiscent of the Biblical Fall. Gollum and
Frodo locked in battle over the ring fall repeatedly: “falling to the ground” and “falling again.” In
addition, this creature, Gollum, who was once a Hobbit, but who was long since corrupted
physically and mentally by possession of the ring, does not talk, rather, he “hissed but spoke no
words.” There are many things we could say about this. First, it is evocative of the serpentine
form of the evil which insinuated the desire to pluck an undeserved knowledge from the tree in
the Garden of Eden, initiating the fall from paradise and original sin for humanity.
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Second, in making this being here wordless, Tolkien plays with a notion of language
developed throughout the story, as linked to both creation and loss. Although there are many
moments of linguistic innovation we could look at given Tolkien’s position as both a philologist
and a “sub-creator,” two linguistic moments seem most relevant: the writing on the One Ring
and the Entish language. Flieger writes that Entish (the language of the Ents) performs the
“interconnection of name and experience,” whose words grow with time becoming a palimpsest
of meaning and expression, some words taking all day to annunciate (247). But, unlike with
Entish, “language can diminish as well as grow,” which we see in the case of Lόrien, wherein
“the name and its relation to its referent” expresses an “ongoing shortening and limitation of
expression, removal rather than accretion” (Flieger 248). Language, therefore, is tied not merely
to the creation of meaning in LR but to material reality itself. Existence, however, is not tied to
the emergence of language, for, as we know, Tom Bombadil is meant to have existed in a time
before language (Flieger 246), echoing Brawley’s sentiments on the “total participation in
nature” before the acquisition of language which Tolkien seeks to recover.
What, then, do we make of the other instance of linguistic connections to material reality,
the inscription on the One Ring? Sauron’s inscription on the interior of the ring seems to be that
which lends it its power (“One Ring to rule them all”). If we take this ring empowered by
language as symbolic of the dangerous powers of language to make the world in your own
fashion, which Sauron did in creating the ring21, what do we make of the need to destroy this
I may be fruitful to evoke a discussion of the ring as empowered by writing and it’s most embodied victim,
Gollum. The name, I imagine, was not chosen lightly by Tolkien. Within the story his name is attributed to the noise
he makes in his throat, a (non) verbal mark or his disfigurement and devolution due to prolonged contact with the
ring in isolation from society. However, it is worth noting that there is a long tradition within Hebrew literature and
mythology of the Golem, which, being phonetically identical to Gollum, is in short, a creature created when a man
tries to use holy words meant only for use by God himself, and makes a mistake in the recitation, specifically meant
to be conceived of as a grammatical mistake, causing the creation to be born malformed, and often times, evil. For
more on this notion, see William A. Covino’s “Grammars of Transgression: Golems, Cyborgs, and Mutants.”
Rhetoric Review 14.2 (1996): 355-373. Print.
21
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threat to unmake the division it has produced? Is there a sense in which we must lose ourselves
as linguistically constituted subjects in order to gain “total participation in nature” and become
subjects not displaced from ecology? I will address this further in the next section on fantasy and
testimony, and their generic and linguistic kinship.
Amidst this repeated falling, Gollum finally makes his move to gain the ring once and for
all from Frodo. Tolkien writes,
The fires below awoke in anger, the red light blazed, and all the cavern was filled with a
great glare and heat. Suddenly Sam saw Gollum’s long hands draw upwards to his
mouth; his white fangs gleamed, and then snapped as they bit. Frodo gave a cry, and
there he was, fallen upon his knees at the chasm’s edge. But Gollum, dancing like a mad
thing, held aloft the ring, a finger still thrust within its circle. It shone now as if verily it
was wrought of living fire. ‘Precious, precious, precious!’ Gollum cried. ‘My precious! O
my precious!’ And with that, even as his eyes were lifted up to gloat on his prize, he
stepped too far, toppled, wavered for a moment on the brink, and then with a shriek he
fell. Out of the depths came his last wail Precious, and he was gone (946)
The liquid rock at the core of the mountain seems to respond to the struggle on its brink. Even as
Tolkien evokes images of Eden, we feel as well though we are on the edge of Hell itself. Again
Gollum is snake-like, with “white fangs” that “snapped” down on Frodo’s ring-bearing finger.
And here again, do we pick up our sequence of falls. Frodo is “fallen on his knees,” Gollum
“toppled,” and then “he fell.” This ultimate fall is the crux of the scene because it is the fall that
destroys the One Ring, not, as the fellowship intended, completed by Frodo, who in the end
failed at his task, but by the unlikely Gollum himself. Also important to note is that the fall of
destruction is not intentional but accidental.
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The significance the traumatic fall is, as explained by trauma theorist Cathy Caruth, to be
located in “the recurring image of the accident . . . as the illustration of the unexpected or the
accidental . . . becom[ing] the exemplary scene of trauma par excellence . . . because it tells of
what it is, in traumatic events, that is not precisely grasped” (6). In LR, it is almost as if the
shuddering and glowing “anger” of the mountain itself caused the fall, called the ring home
again, as it also seemed to with its previous owner, who lost it as he fell dead into a river. It is
within Gollum’s absorption with his “Precious” that this accident is allowed to occur, and it is
also his last word, as he dies not thinking of his own survival, but of what he has become, no
longer a person, but the beholder of the precious ring. It is in this moment, the transpiring of both
a bodily dismemberment and a fall, which I insist we must read the whole of World War I
trauma in LR as well as the idea through which we must understand the loss and trauma that is at
once ecological and subjective within the text. As Caruth explains, “the unexpected reality—the
locus of referentiality—of the traumatic story . . . Paul de Man’s notion of referentiality . . .
associates reference with an impact . . . the impact of the fall . . . the story of the falling body . . .
the story of the impact of reference [in which] the story of trauma is inescapably bound to a
referential return” (7). Gollum’s fall, repeated literally and metaphorically in Frodo’s fall to his
knees, therefore, illustrates the moment of the impact of reference for Frodo, who, being unable
at the time to grasp its meaning because of its accidental nature, is the moment of trauma itself.
Also missed is the referent of the war itself, fought for the destruction of the ring. Frodo never
sees a major battle, nor Sam, as the rest of the fellowship have. For him the struggle and conflict
of the ring have remained in many ways an individual and isolated burden. Recall also that each
physical wound he does accrue in service to this war comes to him when he has used the ring to
become invisible. Let us not also forget that Sam is our narrator though this scene. He bears
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witness to the whole terrible affair that both initiates a staggering loss for Frodo and others but
also saves Middle-earth, although he himself is unable to see the moment of losing the finger or
the ring.
The wounded body of Frodo is key to our understanding of trauma in LR, as well as our
understanding of the relationship between the war of the Ring and ecology in Middle-earth, and
therefore the “real” war, the Great War, which Tolkien’s sub-creation responds to. After the
eagles rescue Frodo and Sam from Mount Doom and the war is ended, the fellowship and all the
major actors of the tale convene at Gondor while they recover and Aragorn ascends to the throne
which is his birthright. This initiates the final chapters of The Return of the King, and Frodo’s
journey home to the Shire. It seems as if despite all the horror witnessed and loss foreboded,
things have been arighted and Middle-earth has entered into a stage of renewal and rebirth which
is in many ways a recovery. However, upon arriving at the Shire, even after righting many of the
damages done by Saruman in the four Hobbit’s absence, Frodo is not at peace. Although no
physical scarring remains, the wounds accumulated by Frodo and cauterized by the fall of the
Ring, remain unhealed. Tolkien first depicts Frodo on the anniversary of a “war” wound from his
journey, “found . . . lying in his bed; he was clutching a white gem that hung from a chain about
his neck and he seemed half in a dream. ‘It is gone forever,’ he said, ‘and now all is dark and
empty” (1024). Traumatized by the loss of the ring, he often slips in an out of reality, declaring
the deep and irreversible alteration wrought upon him by its destruction. Flieger writes that the
loss of the ring is Frodo’s “final, awful test that he will fail . . . he will have lost his innocence . .
. his ordinary physical and psychological self, and his home. All that on top of the greatest loss
of all—the Ring . . . The loss has saved him from wraith-hood but left him bereft and
diminished” (289-90). She remarks here that the loss of the ring does not bring to an end his
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suffering at its hands, but rather compounds all of his physical wounds gained under its spell of
invisibility into a loss not merely of the body, but of the subjectivity it encloses. In place of the
ring, he clutches a “white gem” where the ring once hung. Now it is Galadriel’s glass, given to
him as he departed Lothlόrien, where he first understood the loss attendant to the ring, and this
glass which also saved him from Shelob who wounded nonetheless. The light and life of the
elves cannot heal Frodo now, however, for whom all is still “dark and empty.”
Within the Shire itself, for whom Frodo fought so hard and lost so much to try and
protect, rather than enjoying his return to his home-land, he becomes alienated, displaced within
his own place. Tolkien writes, “Frodo dropped quietly out of all of the doings of the Shire, and
Sam was pained to notice how little honour he had in his own country. Few people knew or
wanted to know about his deeds” (1025). Sam noticed other ways in which Frodo seemed at a
distance from the Shire despite his residence there: “One evening Sam came into the study and
found his master looking very strange. He was very pale and his eyes seemed to see things far
away. . . . ‘I am wounded,’ . . . ‘wounded; it will never really heal.’ . . . Two years before on that
day it was the dark and the dell under Weathertop” (1025). Again on an anniversary of a bodily
wound, acquired because of the ring, Frodo slips in an out of reality just as his did on that night.
He is no longer fully present in place. Part of his mind wandering to the ghostly world of
Weathertop, in a different time and place, where, then too, as he put on the ring, the physical
place faded from around him and he received his wound. Flieger explains that, “evidences of
Frodo’s transformation come after and as a direct result of his wounding by the Morgul-knife at
Weathertop . . . his perception of reality changes as he begins to fade out of the real world while
at the same time the real world begins to fade before his eyes . . . Frodo fades further and further
out of the physical world and deeper and deeper into the psychological and metaphorical wraith-
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world of the Ring” (Flieger 285-286). On the journey from Weathertop to Rivendell where he
was saved, he slips further away from physical grounding and more and more into an immaterial
world, where the power of the ring is the only governing force. In the scene above, Frodo
declares aloud, finally, the persistent nature of his wounds, which will not allow him peace in the
Shire. This repetition of the experience of the wounded body that will not heal only upon the
return to his home-place, to safety, is typical of the belated reemergence of traumatic memories.
What is most interesting here is that Tolkien portrays this trauma as explicitly linked to the
inability to re-embedded one’s self in one’s home-place. Not only that, but that he does so
through the mirroring of the psychic wound of losing himself to the ring in the wounds of his
body and that the same loss, this unhappy displacement, has been echoed throughout the book
with the elves and the Ents and elsewhere as a result of the ring’s destruction.
Frodo’s Failure, Leaving Middle-earth, and the Subjective-Objective Divide
And as a result of these unhealed wounds, Frodo and the other losses of Middle-earth
take their leave in the final chapter of the book. The official end of the Third Age when the last
of the ring-powers leave from Grey Havens west of the Shire over the sea and into the West. In
this book which, from the beginning constructs itself as a narration which ends in an inevitable
loss, a loss which turns out to be the trauma of the destruction of the One Ring, it is only fitting
that it close with a final loss, a belated loss, when the reader believes the worst is over and
desires only a happy ending, we get a leaving. Concerning the presence of a leave-taking within
narratives of trauma, Caruth writes, the narration of the “trauma of leaving [inscribes] words that
do not simply refer, but . . . convey the impact of a history precisely as what cannot be grasped
about leaving” (21). The leaving, then, is the narrative performance of the fall, the traumatic
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moment of the inscrutable impact of reference. It tells us that this impact (of the war) is missed
in our encounter with leaving. Tolkien lays out this final scene before us:
[O]n another journey . . . I am coming,’ said Frodo [in response to Bilbo] ‘The Ringbearers should go together.’ Sam . . . at last understood what was happening [asking]
‘And I can’t come.’ ‘No, Sam. Not yet anyway, not further than the havens. . . . Your
time may come. Do not be too sad Sam. You cannot always be torn in two. You will have
to be one and whole, for many years. . . . ‘But,’ said Sam, and tears started in his eyes, ‘I
thought you were going to enjoy the Shire, too, for years and years . . . ‘So I thought too,
once. But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I have tried to save the Shire, and it has been
saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has
to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them. But you are my heir: all that I
had and might have had I leave to you. And also you have Rose . . . keep alive the
memory of the age that is gone, so that people will remember the Great Danger and love
their beloved land all the more . . . Then Elrond and Galadriel rode on; for the Third Age
was over, and the Days of the Rings were passed, and an end was come of the story and
song of those times. With them went many Elves of the High Kindred who would no
longer stay in Middle-earth . . . a great gray horse . . . Gandalf [wearing] the Third Ring .
. . Gandalf also would take the ship with them [and he said as Merry and Pippin arrived]
Well, here at last, dear friends, on the shores of the Sea comes the end of our fellowship
of Middle-earth . . . and [they] went aboard; and the sails were drawn up, and the wind
blew, and slowly the ship slipped away down the long grey firth; and the light of the
glass of Galadriel that Frodo bore glimmered and was lost. And the ship went out into the
High Sea and passed into the west (1029-1030)
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In this final scene, we come to better understand the loss and trauma of the ring as both
ecological, and historical. Note that it is not all who experience loss and change through the war
who leave Middle-earth for the West. There are no Ents present, nor Dwarves, other hobbits, or
Aragorn, who, though they were deeply involved in the conflict do not pass away. Only the
Ring-bearers must go. The displacement, therefore, not merely all loss, is tied to those who have
in some way, given themselves over to a ring, although not all possess the One-ring, the power of
all their rings, you will recall, are governed by it. Even Gandalf, it appears, although we do not
learn of this until now, has been a ring bearer all along, bearing one of the three elven rings, we
assume.
Only those wounded by the fall of the ring, the ring bearers, must leave. Caruth gives us a
possible way of reading this leaving within what I will soon assert is Tolkien’s testimony to the
trauma of World War One. She writes, using Freud’s text, Moses and Monotheism, as an
example, that “a falling . . . is transmitted precisely in the unconscious act of leaving. It is this
unconsciousness of leaving that bears the impact of history” (22), but she continues, “Leaving
home . . . is also a kind of freedom, the freedom to . . . bring [one’s] voice to another place . . .
[the] freedom to leave is, paradoxically, not to live but to die: to bring forth [one’s] voice to
others in dying. [the] voice emerges, that is, as a departure . . . that addresses us” (23). Choosing
to leave not when the peril is at its greatest, during Sauron’s reign, but rather in his fall with the
destruction of the ring, the Elves, Gandalf, Frodo, and Bilbo do not leave their home to live but
to die, death being the consequence of remaining while the One Ring perishes. In leaving, or
rather, in Tolkien’s authoring of a story of leaving, the voice of the lost “emerges” “as a
departure” and “addresses us.” It is this address, which makes LR distinctly testimonial, and it is
only through this departure, this narration of loss, this tale of traumatic displacement, that he may
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give his testimony, in a way that obligates his readers, compels them to bear witness in turn to
his testimony of what one is displace from within(ecology) and how this came to be historically
realized.
As such, in Frodo’s conversation with Sam, he expresses the leaving not simply as a
voluntary retirement of sorts, but rather as a displacement. He loses the Shire more than he
leaves it of his own accord. As Christopher Garbowski states, “after his traumatic experiences
Frodo realizes that he can never be like other people” (26). The wounds of Frodo’s body are
more than physical, they are psychic, and the final wound, embodied by the destruction of the
ring, was a trauma too great to bear. “Frodo’s wounding on Weathertop,” Flieger comments,
“does not ever ‘really’ heal . . . Tolkien does not want us to forget that he does not recover . . .
like a deeply damaged, battle-scarred veteran of war whose post-traumatic flashbacks are the
psychic souvenirs of his physical injuries. Frodo’s maimed body bears the marks and the
memories of his experiences” (290-291). It is a displacement which takes the form of a leaving
because his wounded subjectivity will not endure middle earth any longer, and so his body is
forced to depart.
In the final moments, we recall, Frodo decides not to lose the ring, but rather to give
himself to it. Because he was not ready to release it, its loss inherently lacks preparation.
Concerning these actions of Frodo’s on Mount Doom, Flieger asserts,
Frodo’s failure [and his] sacrifice [depict] Aragorn [as] the healer, [and] Frodo the
wounded figure, both evocative of Christ, [they] share between them the renewal of
Middle-earth. Of all Tolkien’s saviours [sic], Frodo alone loses everything. He undergoes
a spiritual death with no promise of rebirth . . . In [Tolkien’s] world the Fall, the
separation from God . . . is a gradual process . . . the process is continual, encompassing
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both fall and redemption as parts of the whole. We might say that Tolkien’s world is
falling rather than fallen . . . leaving at the center a space for the audience to see itself,
and thus to participate in the story (230-231)
This compelling reading of Frodo’s fall and this narrative of trauma, although Flieger does not
name it as such, introduces an interesting notion of a “gradual,” “continual” fall. In this sense,
the trauma of the ring, symbolic of ecologically displaced subjectivity, is not simply a result of
the moment of the ring’s destruction, just as the split between subjective reality and objective
reality cannot have grown solely from the events of the Great War alone. The impact of the
reference of history, the unknowable at the core of the traumatic experience of the war, are, in
part so traumatic and unknowable because of their gradual and continual nature. They lack the
climactic impact of a great battle. Furthermore, Tolkien’s “leaving at the center a space for the
audience to see itself” can be read, then, as the space between battle epic and quest narrative in
which he houses his testimonial address to the reader22.
Frodo’s failure is the very thing that makes the ring-loss traumatic, it is at the very
moment that he becomes one with the ring, that it is destroyed, and the fall, of himself, of
Gollum, of the ring, carry with them the impact of reference, a knowledge for which he has no
frames of reference and for him, therefore, holds the force of impact, with none of the referential
meaning, for the ring is no longer a thing external, but constitutes his very subjectivity. Like the
historical war in which Tolkien fought, this lack of reference is fostered partially by what Kate
McLoughlin labels extremity. She claims, “What makes armed conflict such a slippery opponent
22
It is worth noting that Flieger does not discuss how within Christianity, Christ, too, failed in a sense, crying out in
the last, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” and evincing in the savior, even, a loss of faith within his act of
self-sacrifice, so that all people may be redeemed for their lapses as well. I doubt very much that Tolkien as a
staunch Catholic would forget the things which I as a “recovering” Catholic can manage to recall. In addition, can
we not see originary biblical fall and its divorcing of humanity for the Garden of Eden and the presence of God, as
related to the divorcing of subjective reality from objective reality, of which the strongest association is “nature?”
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is its extremity as an experience. ‘Extremity’ is not here defined in any absolute or relative sense
. . . the extremeness that is war carries the individual who experiences it away from the familiar
and the ordinary [causing the distinctive] depiction of trauma, pain, and memory” (8) in war
writing. Life without the ring, nay, existence without it, has become extremity to Frodo, in the
absence of an active battlefield.
This displacement resulting from Frodo’s missed encounter with the meaning of the
ring’s destruction is defined by him as a division of the self. His subjectivity is torn in two,
something he cautions Sam, who was less effected by the ring, to resist. Frodo has lost his
unified subjectivity, and remains divided, between the ring-world, of immaterial power, and the
physical world, of home-place, or ecology. As Michael Livingston writes, “Frodo does not desire
to be a martyr; he does not wish to be celebrated or even remembered. He simply wishes to be
whole once more. But his trauma is too great. This world, for which he fought so hard, holds
nothing but continued pain for him. He cannot be healed here . . . The world he has saved, sadly,
is one to which he can no longer relate” (89). This desire for wholeness reflects a division which
mirrors the split between subjective and objective reality. Margaret Hiley, elaborating on W.H.
Auden’s early comments on Tolkien as compared to his peers, explains,
In W.H. Auden’s review of LR, he “differentiates between so-called subjective reality,
that is ‘a man’s experience of his own existence’ (44), and objective reality, which he
defines as the ‘experience of the lives of others and the world about him’ (44). Thus, a
difference is made between inner consciousness and self-experience on the one hand, and
the perception of the outer world and other individuals on the other. One of the great
problems of literature that tries to give a complete picture of reality—especially narrative
fiction—lies therefore in the bridging of this ‘gulf between the subjectively real […] and
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the objectively real” (44). . . . External reality appeared overwhelming and incoherent; it
no longer seemed possible for an individual to understand the world around him or her . .
. The synthesis of objective reality and subjective reality broke down; only the
subjectively real could be fully known. In reaction to this, classic modernist fiction . . .
bear[s] out this divorce of subjective from objective reality in favour of the subjective
perspective . . . A different way of circumventing the divide is to negate it and seek
refuge from the incoherent outside world in the creation of a secondary world, an
imagined reality coherent in itself, more or less independent of outside reality. . . . In the
secondary world, the gap between subjective and objective reality no longer exists, as
there is only one reality: that of the sub-creator (21-22)
By not attempting to refer to our reality, and being hyper-performative of the fantastic nature of
the text, rather than hyper-performative of the textual nature of reality, Tolkien and the other
inklings demonstrated a world that need not have a reality in which the subjective is seen as
disjointed from the objective, but rather a performance of the world, or reality, as a closed
system, in which the two interact.
Alternately, this split is addressed by modernist writers with their inversion into a reality
constructed as a subjective totality, putting objective reality under erasure. Paul Fussell writes,
for example, how, the Great War memoir as romance quest portrays “The landscape [as]
‘enchanted,’ full of ‘secret murmurings and whispers.’ The setting in which ‘perilous encounters’
and testing take place is ‘fixed and isolated.’ Distinct from the settings of the normal world”
(146). He also notes that, the Victorian romances on which much Great War writing relied for
stock metaphor, alluding to and reworking them to ironize the war, contained the “demonic
vegetable world’ [with] ‘sinister forest . . . or a health . . . or a wilderness . . . [like] Eliot’s Waste
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Land;” oft referenced was William Morris’ The Well at the World’s End wherein “the end of the
world’ is a cliff overlooking a boundless sea, very unlike the world ending with the British front
line” but, which is often used to describe the “landscape of the front” (147). We can see in LR,
too, that “boundless sea” as the end of the world, and as the frontier boundary of the “landscape
of the front.” In LR, however, rather than demonizing or ironizing the ecology of Middle-earth,
or attributing it to some subjectively constructed fictional “outside,” Tolkien offers us a tale
which in many ways may seem to sacrifice the subject for the preservation of ecology. Dickerson
and Evans write that, “The attitude of sacrificial humility is expressed throughout The Lord of
the Rings. It is expressed . . . fundamentally, in terms of the protection of the natural environment
in the landscapes . . . Environmental stewardship” (88). More than stewardship, however, I feel
that Tolkien depicts the sacrifice or loss of the self not to save ecology, but in order to testify to
this sacrifice as a repetition of the traumatic split of subject from objective reality, and its
attendant notions of ecological embeddedness. This split is the split that Tolkien, and other
fantasy writers, attend to with their creation of a secondary reality, where the two are not
divided, as they have been by the ring, by the trauma of the Great War. Frodo has lost his
connection to objective reality, displaced from ecology. Sam, on the other hand, is called to
maintain his connection to the Shire, to be whole in place, to heal the division of subject from
object as the result of the war, which Frodo cannot.
Sam is asked, not only to embody the whole self, both a subject, and an ecologically
embedded subject, remaining fully present in the Shire, but also to keep alive the memory of the
trauma of the ring war. Frodo asks him to do this by telling him to be a keeper of memory, a
teller or recorder of history. Sam, in other words, as the key witness to the whole of this
narrative, and most importantly, to the missed moment of the traumatic event itself, the fall of
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the ring and its subsequent loss, is asked by those wounded beyond reparation, to testify or bear
witness to this historical trauma, just as Tolkien, who, in many ways cannot escape the subjective
displacement from ecology because he bears this trauma at the core of his identity, can bear
witness to the traumatic split for what it really was, not a generation who lost their lives and
selves so that others may keep it, but who lost themselves without knowing what was lost or
how, only to repeat this loss from their space of subjective displacement, through the ironic
evocation of place under erasure, as always already in the moment of dissolution, or through the
aporias of their language on “nature” and landscape following the Great War. By testifying to the
“Great Danger” of the trauma of the ring, Sam may re-engender a “love of their beloved land,”
which can be read as a step towards an ecological re-placement of the subject, a collapsing of the
perceived divide between subject and object. As environmental historian, J. Donald Hughes
explains, the environmental history of the world is based not simply on the physical interactions
between humans and their environment, but also the notion that: “Systems of ideas have power
to shape human action. Individuals have at times behaved according to the principles of a
doctrine they have accepted, consciously or unconsciously, although the behavior would seem to
have been counter to self-interest and may even have resulted in death . . . and changed the face
of the Earth” (79). Essentially, ideas change ecology, and they do this by changing our perceived
place within it. This is, I believe, the goal of Tolkien’s testimony, which seeks to change the way
subjects conceive of their relationship to ecology, through its narration of a historical split
between the two resulting from the trauma of the Great War, and the doctrine of modernity it
produced.
It is not, therefore, the loss of objective reality, a loss of “nature,” which is the core
trauma of World War One. Such a trauma would be purely material, and as Freud notes, it is a
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mental not mechanical agent which causes war neuroses of the new, severe, and widespread
type, the type which Caruth and others have theorized into historical trauma. What, then, is being
lost from Middle-earth which reflects the Great War’s greatest trauma? It is not really the trees,
mountains, rivers, or any “purely objective” aspect of nature. What we lose, then, in the story,
are all of the characters (Elves, Ents, Frodo, Gandalf, even Shadowfax). They must go or pass or
dwindle. They suffer the separation from this place, their homeland, and the “magic” of them, if
you will, which I might suggest is linked to some sort of illusion of ecosubjectivity, their way of
being within ecology, is erased.
The trauma of World War I is not enacted, therefore, upon ecology, but within us,
humans, and our separation (perceived) from it. As Bombadil and Treebeard have implied, they,
and “nature,” in the end, are indifferent to the fate of humanity. Ecology will persist regardless of
our actions, it just may not persist in a fashion conducive to the sustainability of the human
species. LR is, after all, a work of literature, and we, literary scholars, and not scientists.
Although there are very “real” material consequences both of World War I and our subjective
disjuncture, what I address here is our loss not the loss of a world. Throughout LR, as many
people have noted, we experience wondrous magical things, places, and creatures. We may
desire strongly to actualize and dwell in that fantastic realm, desire for all this to be “true.” But
the tragic beauty of LR is that at every step on Frodo and the Fellowship’s journey they (and we)
experience the magic of a world where our absence from it is always already implicit, both in its
nature as fantasy, as well as indicated by the pervasive sense of loss throughout the story: future,
past, or actualized in the plot. What we get in reading LR is a reenactment, a performance, of our
missed encounter with the fall from, or leaving of, ecology within our own psyche, a placement
we were never fully conscious of holding in the first place. Although the Great War did not
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create this displacement, it awoke us to it, belatedly, to a traumatic impact of reference for which
we had no frame of reference, and whose fantasy frames Tolkien tries diligently to recreate for
us in this epic tale, as the Men of Middle-earth are created, empowered in that world, as modern
people, Fourth-Agers, if you will, in the very historical act of losing all that once defined their
home-place of Middle-earth, the place where Elves and Men and talking trees may mingle, at the
end of history, after the war to end all wars. Do we not see here both the ring war and the Great
War?
Dreaming of Middle-earth: A Belated Testimony to Loss
Because the trauma of World War I is not enacted upon ecology, but within us, humans,
and our separation (perceived) from it, as I have said, what is at stake is not the persistence of
ecology, but its persistence in a fashion conducive to the sustainability of the human species,
what I address here is our loss not the loss of a material world, due to our subjective disjuncture
from ecology as manifested in the absence or distortion of objective reality throughout the
dominant literary aesthetics of the twentieth century: modernism. LR’s representation of a
fantastic secondary world constructs a world wherein our absence from it is always already
implicit, both in its nature as fantasy, as well as indicated by the pervasive sense of loss
throughout the narrative. Tolkien’s narrative reenacts or performs our missed encounter with the
fall from, or leaving of, ecology within our own psyche, as a result of the trauma of the Great
War, whose event did not create this displacement, but awoke us to it, belatedly, to a traumatic
impact of reference for which we had no frame of reference, and whose fantasy frames Tolkien
tries diligently to recreate as he details the birth of modern humanity through the loss of their
home-place, or ecology.
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The Lord of the Rings narrates our displacement from ecology, which amounts to the
birth of the modern subject. The typical modernist Great War narrative, as Paul Fussell has
explained, employs a characteristic ironic pastoral, highlighting both the experiential distance of
the war experience from what is “natural,” the cognitive distance of the soldier’s experience
from those “at home,” as well as the physical distance (although quantitatively almost absurdly
close) between the home front, which from their perspective in the trenches on the continent
seems to embody the pastoral ideal of England which they set out to protect, and the literal front,
the front lines of the battle field. Describing one of the scenes which produced modernist pastoral
ironies, Fussell writes that, on the front, in the lines, “The stench of rotten flesh was over
everything . . . Dead horses and dead men—and parts of both—were sometimes not buried for
months and often simply became an element of parapets and trench walls. You could smell the
front line for miles before you could see it” (52). In Fussell’s words we see images of subjects
melded with the earth, which, rather than giver of life, becomes the recipient of death. With no
chance to mourn the dead, but none to ignore them either, soldiers experience seemed an absurd
reversal of natural cycles of life embodied by the pastoral narratives of Victoriana and Georgian
English literary culture, on which they were raised and by which they sustained themselves
during moments of military inertia. It is in this evocation of the pastoral that we can begin to see
the ecological displacement which Tolkien seeks to address.
In his exploration of the place of literature within the relationship between nature and
culture, Dana Phillips has explained that the pastoral, which Lawrence Buell says “anticipates”
the “dilemma of having to come to terms with natural environments while participating in
institutions of a technological culture that insulates one from the natural environment and splits
one’s allegiances,” anticipates this split and insulation because it “first helps to create” them and
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then it “sustains and exacerbates” them (19). The pastoral mode does this by “buying wholesale
the distinction between natural environments” and culture (19). He goes on to describe the
process by which the pastoral mode performs a “reductive process” of the “hyperspaces” which
environments are, by constructing them primarily as “Landscapes [which] are more easily
apprehended than the environments in which they are situated in space” metonymically (19).
When the environment functions merely as landscape and not as hyperspace, one loses the sense
of the ecological space as “An ecological niche [which is] a multidimensional hypervolume” of
which “not all of its dimensions are spatial” (20). Although neither Buell nor Phillips addresses
the role of WWI in this sustenance and exacerbation of the split between nature and culture,
which mirrors the divide under examination here between subject and ecology, by drawing upon
the pastoral tradition for the expression of the “unnatural” terrors of the trauma of war, modernist
writers “exacerbated” this divide, and, as I have termed it elsewhere, actualized the displacement
of subject from ecology.
Rather than creating a world where the pastoral is ironized and distorted, the fantasy
world of Middle-earth re-creates the pastoral, not ironically, but in order to stage the
displacement of the ring-bears, or post-war modern subjects, out of a pastoral world, a world
which by its very mode of representation “creates,” sustains,” and “exacerbates” displacement.
WWI scholar, Modris Eksteins, explains that the war affects the “becoming,” the “emergence, in
the first half of the century, of our modern consciousness (xiii). This modern subject, possessing
of this new consciousness, is characterized, according to Eksteins, by the “questioning [of] the
integrity of the ‘real’ world, the visible and ordered world [which] was undermined . . . as the
external world collapsed in ruins, the only redoubt of integrity became the individual . . . what
came after [the Somme offensive, which poet David Jones] called ‘the Break’ [was that] the I
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became all-important” (211). The birth of the modern subject as subject displaced from ecology
which Tolkien depicts with the leaving from Middle-earth of the ring-bearers, mirrors the
“collapse” of the “external world” and the “Break” after the Somme in the traumatic falling of
the One Ring to destruction, which while like the Somme, became a (the) turning point in ending
the war (eventually), was also the origin of a trauma which differentiated the “all-important” “I.”
The age which Tolkien ushers in with his falling and leaving, suitably, is the Age of Men, just as
the Birth of the Modern Age (the subtitle of Ekstein’s book), ushers in a consciousness defined
solely as the “I” from which the “external world” has fallen away23.
What is it, however, about Tolkien’s chosen genre of fantasy makes the depiction of a
traumatic ecological displacement as actualized by WWI more effective than within modernist
aesthetics? This suitability, I believe, comes from fantasy’s unique relationship to trauma and
narration. Cathy Caruth’s exploration of trauma and narrative seizes upon Freud and Lacan’s
ideas about the importance of dreams to desire, and their relationship, in turn to reality,
especially the reality of loss. She writes, “dreams and wish-fulfillment [are linked in Freud] to
the question of external reality [to] a reality of death, catastrophe, and loss” (93). This would
suggest that, as more generally Freud’s notions of the death drive have done, that we dream in
order to actualize our desire to know our loss, as consciously as we experience our waking
reality, the enigma of our survival if you will. We dream because we desire death, but more
simply, we dream because we desire to understand the missed encounter with death (read death
here as loss or trauma, in the sense that these are deaths of the self or that self), a missed
It is worth noting here, although this may be for another essay, that the singular “I” of modern consciousness is
mirrored in the eye of Sauron, his only physical embodiment in the world, and which sees all, especially penetrating
the bearer of the One Ring, the source of his power. Another tangible representation of a sort of detached but
embodied eye/I can be found in Virginia Woolf’s description of how to observe the world as a writer (Robin can you
help me out here and remind me which work this is from?), although her eye seems more to put the “I” under
erasure in its experiencing of the “external world.”
23
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encounter which constitutes our very survival, our present, persistent self. Dreams, moreover, are
by nature “phantastic,” and as Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn conclude, in their
introduction to the Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, despite fantasy’s shifty
indefinability “all [major fantasy theorists] agree that fantasy is about the construction of the
impossible” (1). Indeed, In Andrew M. Butler’s discussion of the application of psychoanalysis
to fantasy, he explains that Rosemary Jackson has most famously applied psychoanalytic notions
of “phantasies” which refer to “desires, drives, or unconscious fears” in an effort to read Freud
and Lacan’s “notions of the divided self” into such texts because she believes, “fantasy ‘has a
subversive function in attempting to depict a reversal of the subject’s cultural formation . . . for
Jackson, fantasy is a ‘literature of desire, which seeks that which is experienced as absence and
loss” (91). Fantasy, like the dream, attempts to recode the subject by recovering an absence. This
absence resonates both as the absent memory at the core of a traumatic experience only
experiences belatedly in flashbacks or dreams, but never as reality proper, as well as the loss at
the core of LR’s tale, which I have identified as a fantastic ecological displacement, which is
really a subjective loss.
Lest we begin to see this dreaming and fanaticizing as an elegiac act, Caruth reminds us
that “the dream . . . in Lacan’s analysis [is] a function of awakening . . . to respond, in
awakening, to a call that can only be heard within sleep” (99). It is only by dreaming that we are
able to awaken to the call of what she would call the voice of the wound, or of trauma. Fantasy,
then, not only does not obscure reality, but it facilitates the awakening (belatedly) to the reality
of a trauma, of which we were not conscious before. Not only that, but “Awakening, in Lacan’s
reading of [Freud’s] dream, is itself the site of trauma, the trauma of the necessity and
impossibility of responding to another’s death” (Caruth 100). It is in this sense that we can see
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why fantasy is particularly useful in the treatment of the trauma of this war. The trenches of
WWI, as Fussell and Eksteins have explained, are the site of an awakening, a birth, of a
subjectivity which is traumatized by the break which created it. While Tolkien’s fantastic
narration of this trauma is itself the fantasy from which readers will hopefully awaken to the
reality of the subjectivity created by WWI, but also it re-creates the fantasy from which early
twentieth century subjects emerged into the Great War, the fantasy of subjective separation from
objective reality, of subject from ecology. But in having missed the original encounter of the
trauma, the subjective shift which allowed for a perceived divide to be naturalized, which was
initiated at least as far back as the enlightenment, the modern subject survives by creating a new
fantasy, a hypersubjective reality, in which objective reality, for all intents and purposes, ceases
to be acknowledged as “real.”
And, therefore, as Paul Fussell has stated, “Thus the drift of modern history domesticates
the fantastic and normalizes the unspeakable. And the catastrophe that begins it is the Great
War” (81). This domestication of the “fantastic” is almost synonymous with the normalization of
the “unspeakable” here, and the unspeakable new fantasy-cum-reality is created by the
“catastrophe,” or trauma, of WWI. And so to express the trauma of WWI, what better genre than
that which presents the impossible as the normal? In grappling with how writers depict their war
experiences, Kate McLoughlin introduces Lawrence I. Langer whose idea of “‘irrealism’: ‘a
complex amalgamation of reality and unreality’ that is ‘discontinuous and dislocated’,” followed
by Michael Rothberg who:
proposed something very like, if not identical to, irrealism in the phenomena he terms
‘traumatic realism’. Like irrealism, traumatic realism entails the ‘survival of claims of
realisms into discourses that could be considered modernist, even post-modernist’. . . [It]
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comprises not-writing in the sense that it ‘evokes the real as a “felt lack”: the traumatic
realist detail, unlike the standard realist detail, points to a ‘necessary absence’. [which
rather than expunging] the traces of the trauma or loss that called the narrative into being
in the first place’ [instead] constantly recalls the ‘site and origin of loss’ (138).
Fantasy, although never mentioned by McLoughlin, when used to express trauma, functions
much like this “irrealism” or “traumatic realism,” especially in Tolkien, in the way it points to a
loss always already implicit in its existence as a secondary world, rather than our own.
Moreover, in both of these tentative generic definitions, notions of place are key. The irrealism
represents reality as “dislocated” and traumatic realist writing “points” through its conspicuous
absences, to the originary “site” of trauma. Fantasy, then, is ideal for expressions of the traumatic
displacement of subject from ecology because of WWI, because both depicts reality as
dislocated, by which I mean subjective reality has been displaced, and points to the site of
trauma, as the dislocation from objective reality during the war.
So now that we know that fantasy is suited to the depiction of this loss and that Tolkien is
trying to replace, as all survivors do, the missed encounter with the trauma, the memory of that
experience, might we ask, why? Why does he? The answer, I believe, is to testify, that we might
bear witness to the origins of our subjectivity, as modern people, in the Great War. This bearing
witness, would be, ideally, an awakening of our own, into the knowledge of something disjointed
in our relationship “with” ecology. But, does he succeed? And first, what does it mean to call a
narrative a testimony? In Shoshana Felman’s pivotal work on literature and testimony, she
asserts that for a witnessing of testimony to be effective, it must, “make the [reader] feel [and]
progressively discover, how the testimony cannot be subsumed by its familiar notion, how the
texts that testify do not simply report facts but, in different ways, encounter—and make us
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encounter—strangeness” (7). While it seems obvious that presenting the historical reality of the
First World War to modern readers through the lens of a fantasy tale about elves, hobbits, and
talking trees might be convincing enough evidence of making the reader “feel,” “discover,” and
“encounter” a “strangeness,” it is less the strangeness of the obvious deviations from empirical
reality which testify to the trauma, but rather the strangeness in the sense of an estrangement at
the core of the story, a becoming stranger in your own home, as the ring-bearers experience
when they must leave. The reader is progressively awakened from the dream of Middle-earth and
its quest and defeat of evil, to an encounter with their own history, awakening to their
estrangement from ecology as Frodo’s falling bears the impact of his leaving his home-place.
Felman reinforced the connection between fantasy and testimony, when she identifies in
literature that which is needed to bear witness to history, which history cannot do itself. After her
discussion of how the holocaust could not be imagined and that this lack of imagination, based
on a lack of frames of reference for such a horror, allowed the holocaust to occur, Felman writes
that “history as holocaust proceeds from a failure to imagine, so that it takes an imaginative
medium . . . to gain an insight into its historical reality” (105).
24
In conclusion, LR represents the fantastic secondary world from which we (modern
hypersubjective subjects) are always already absent. In representing the always already
displacement of the modern subject, Tolkien attempts to perform and re-place our missed
encounter with the fall from ecology. The narration of a traumatic event is the replacement of a
lost memory. This traumatic narrative is a testimony because LR replaces the frames of
24
James and Robin: Beginning with this paragraph, I decided to lay off the quotes, and say what I wanted to say. I
did not want to overdo my theorizing and get too far from the text, but I was going to bring in Slavoj Zizek, Jacques
Lacan, and Catherine Belsey on Subjectivity, Ideology, and Language, and also Tim Morton and Lee Rozelle, both
of whom are what you might call post-structuralist ecocritics, to extend that subjectivity to a deeper engagement
with ecology and sustainability. I wasn’t sure if that would be too far a field of my project, and may be best to save
for another time, or if I should bring it in to clarify my claims about LR. I don’t include an in depth discussion of
that here. Let me know if it should be added.
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reference, which in this case are ecological frames, without which we cannot understand or
process the displacement. Our mind protected us from the trauma’s ability to cause a dissolution
of our subjects altogether by, as seen in modernist literature, asserting that there is no objective
reality. We need to re-form a subjectivity within the “fantasy” of ecology, rather than submit
subjectivity to undifferentiated dissolution in some Real as ecology, or continuing with our
hypersubjective and unsustainable fantasy, which may eventually result in some form of
ecoapocalyptic destruction. This will allow us to maintain a subject that is not the only reality,
but not lost to the undifferentiated objective reality. This is what the environmental ethic of LR
attempts, through its depiction of displacement. Just as the Great War is a result of the modern
history since enlightenment, or even the renaissance, so too is the realization of any subjective
trauma as ecological long in the making but latent and therefore unknown.
Tolkien’s use of fantasy to bear witness to the ecological nature of the subject’s
experience of WWI, without transmitting the trauma, which modernist literature can be said to
do by maintaining or repeating the trauma of hypersubjectivity. LR testifies to the subjective
divorce from ecology within a dominant historical narrative. Fantasy, by positing an alternate
reality outside the Lacanian imaginary order of historical “reality” allows the readers to
encounter the trauma of WWI, which is constitutive of modern subjectivity and its maintaining
ideologies, without breaking the frames of reference because it replaces them, whereas modernist
aesthetics repeat or even revel in this break. In doing so, Tolkien subtly replaces the notion of
there being no outside the text with the idea that there is no outside ecology, or he at least
succeeds in merging the two.
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