The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy

by Gregory Bassham

  Unfortunately, Tom remains wrapped in mystery, and among Tolkien scholars and die-hard fans, a matter of some debate. The most common interpretation of this character is that Tom is some kind of anomalous nature spirit, different from everything else in the book, but accounting for his understanding and power over the natural world. Some however claim that he is a Maia (a kind of powerful immortal spirit, such as Gandalf or Sauron), or even one of the Valar, the archangelic guardians of the world.4 In a letter, Tolkien explains that Tom represents “a particular embodying of pure (real) natural science: the spirit that desires knowledge of other things, their history and nature, because they are ‘other’ and . . . entirely unconcerned with ‘doing’ . . .” (L, p. 192; italics omitted). Tom could certainly be lots of things and still embody this ethos of investigation, either as an independent nature spirit or as a god.

  Regardless of what or who Tom is, what is important to us here is that he is represented as essentially unconcerned with the events of the War of the Ring. At the Council of Elrond, when it is debated what to do with the Ring, a suggestion is made that it be given to Tom. Frodo had told the Council that when he gave the Ring to Tom he was able to control it (making it temporarily disappear) and that moreover he could see Frodo when the latter put on the Ring and was invisible to everyone else. Perhaps Tom could keep the Ring safe from Sauron. Gandalf however argues against the idea, saying that it is not so much that Tom has power over the Ring but that “the Ring has no power over him.” Even if Tom were persuaded to keep the Ring, “he would not understand the need. And if he were given the Ring, he would soon forget it, or most likely throw it away. Such things have no hold on his mind. He would be a most unsafe guardian; and that alone is answer enough” (FR, p. 298).

  Whether angel, god, or spirit, Tom is attuned to the natural world above all things. This is his chief concern, and no matter the explanation, he has been in Middle-earth since its creation watching all things slowly evolve, take root, and grow. In part this may be why Tom would be unconcerned with the Ring, since the struggle over it happens at only one snap-shot in time and is important mainly to the self-conscious peoples of Middle-earth rather than to the earth itself. Though one of the elves at the Council of Elrond does point out that both Tom and the earth will suffer if Sauron wins, since he can “torture and destroy the very hills” (FR, p. 298), still, we are told that Tom would fall last of all, and then “Night will come.”

  But if this were true wouldn’t Tom be concerned with the victory of Sauron and so want to help the Council? Such an outcome for Middle-earth sounds like the hypothetical future of our own world where the planet is made uninhabitable for any life forms by a nuclear holocaust. But just as we should be skeptical of any claim that the earth itself would be concerned in any coherent sense with such a turn of events, Tom as the embodiment of the natural world in some form is also believed to be indifferent. Part of the explanation for Tom’s indifference may be temporal. Time for him is green; it is bound with the long-rhythms of nature as they come and go, and not with the relatively brief experiences of the self-conscious beings (and especially mortals) of the planet. In addition, this perspective is not only temporally different but green also in terms of its different perspective. It is more “collective” than “individual.” From Tom’s perspective, attuned to natural cycles, the welfare of individuals does not matter as much as the sustainability of the continuing and evolving processes of nature. Tolkien saw something of this in his reflections on Tom’s relationship to the Ring. From Tom’s perspective we see that “The power of the Ring over all concerned . . . is not the whole picture, even of the then state and content of that part of the Universe” (L, p. 192). As I will point out below, however, this does not imply that we should be unconcerned with the fate of our own planet because it is unconcerned with us, just as it is not the case that the free peoples of Middle-earth should be indifferent to the destruction of their own world.

  We see a similar kind of indifference to short-term affairs, as well as a kind of collective perspective on the world with the ents. For example, shortly after the battle of Helm’s Deep, as Gandalf leads the victorious men of Rohan through the mysterious wood that had appeared at the end of the battle, a group of ents are seen walking swiftly towards them. Surprised, “The riders cried aloud in wonder, and some set their hands upon their sword-hilts” (TT, p. 168). Gandalf calms the company, saying, “You need no weapons. These are but herdsmen. They are not enemy, indeed they are not concerned with us at all.” What does Gandalf mean by this? Arguably that the ents are unconcerned with the riders in part because to them the men of the company are only fleeting figures who will come and go on the larger timeline of the world, eventually passing into oblivion, no matter what they do.

  The perspective of the ents is again quite different from the other characters, and it is not just their long individual lives that seems to differentiate them. The ents, as the forest given the power of speech and human-like locomotion, see the affairs of men in much the same way as we might imagine how our own forests might view our affairs if they were made conscious. But even more peculiar is that their perspective appears to be more collective than individual. While there is not much direct evidence for this suggestion in the text, it is a reasonable inference given how closely connected the ents are to the forest. While they must be individuated in order to be characters that we can more effectively empathize with, their orientation is driven by their intimate collective identity with the forest. We can learn the personality of a particular ent, such as Treebeard, but they do not appear to exist as independent from each other or independent from the forests that they protect. The ents in the scene just mentioned do not notice the riders of Rohan but they do take care to notice what each individual tree is doing.

  This perspective makes sense given the kind of things they are supposed to be. Particular trees live and die, just as individual humans live and die, but a forest goes on as a collective ecosystem and does not exist as a single tree. So too, it seems, with the ents. The temporal perspective they have is thus most likely not one confined to their particular life-span, but is more akin to what we would imagine to be the perspective of a whole forest as it continues from a past into a future with different individual entities coming into being and passing away as part of a larger life cycle. When a tree dies in a healthy forest it does not simply pass away but becomes nourishment for both flora and fauna in a forest that regenerates into yet more forest continuing on into the future. And the same, we can assume, may be true of the ents, or, at the very least, we can imagine that this is how they see themselves in relationship to the larger ecosystem of which they are a part. As Treebeard puts it, “We are made of the bones of the earth” (TT, p. 91). In contrast we humans (either here or in Middle-earth) can more easily abstract ourselves away from the ecosystems which nourish us and reshape our environment to suit our particular needs. The ents however are so intimately connected to their environment that they cannot live outside of it. Indeed, the population of ents is said to have diminished as the forest has dwindled.

  There is however another reason why the ents are diminishing which may also help make the case for their collective identity as tied to the forests. Treebeard tells us that the ents are also in decline because they have lost their mates, the “entwives.” The entwives are represented as beings that both nurture and personify domesticated agricultural environments in a similar way to the relationship between the ents and the forests. As Treebeard tells the story to Merry and Pippin, the entwives evidently became so caught up in their agricultural environments that they abandoned the forests entirely and the ents eventually lost touch with them. While this may be evidence that the entwives did not care for the future of their overall species, it instead points to the very different perspective taken by these characters in their intimate relationship with their environments. The ents and the entwives grow distant from each other because they are drawn toward more involvement with the en
vironments that they personify, or perhaps grew out of. In this sense they do not really act as one species at all—with a species interest in procreation and reproduction—but rather two different species concerned with the flourishing of two different environments. It is a strange tale, and one of the mysteries of the book as Tolkien saw it, himself admitting that he did not know for certain what had become of the entwives (L, pp. 179, 419). The situation that is represented, however, is one of a kind of mutual loss. The ents must have been as preoccupied with the rhythms and time scale of the forests as the entwives were with their environments in order to have let them stray so far and disappear. But it is evidence of a close collective identity between the ents and the forests, one that is even closer than that to beings of their own kind.

  This perspective of the ents again points to a kind of representation of the indifference of nature. While the temporal view of the ents again is not that of billions of years of geologic time, it is at the very least a green time from the perspective of the long history of nature that pre-exists humanity in Middle-earth and which, it is assumed, will continue after humans are gone. Though the ents are brought into the War of the Ring, this occurs mainly because Saruman and the orcs have destroyed part of Treebeard’s forest. Without Saruman’s sins against the forest it is not clear the ents would have become involved in the War at all.

  Just as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “If a lion could talk we could not understand it,” no doubt if a forest or ecosystem could talk we wouldn’t understand it either. Its perspective would be too foreign to us. But when we anthropomorphize a natural entity it is not simply to imagine what a thing would say if given a voice, but also to say something about how we can look at the world differently from our own limited perspective. In part, Tolkien’s representation of a green time in the experience of ents and Tom Bombadil does just this: it encourages us to take a longer view of our own history and our relationship to the other living things with which we share the earth.

  Into the Future

  With the benefit of the sciences of geology and cosmology we know that our earth was in existence for billions of years prior to the appearance of humans on the planet. The evocative metaphors invented by geologists and evolutionary biologists to represent this deeper sense of time are familiar to most of us: we humans are relative newcomers on the scene, here in only the last few seconds of the earth’s history as represented by a twenty-four-hour clock. Assuming that the extinction of all life on earth does not happen at the same time as the end of our own species, then life will go on without us for billions of years after we are gone. Many like myself are certain that the universe itself will go on for billions of years after the earth is destroyed by the inevitable death of the Sun.

  It’s extremely difficult to imagine ourselves in relation to this deeper time and history, even if we consider only the history of life on earth. Failure to consider the consequences of our own actions in relation to this longer time span is therefore quite understandable. But if we could take on even a little of that perspective, it would help us to acquire the humility to recognize that we are part of a story much longer and grander than ourselves.

  I said above that part of the power of Tolkien’s representation of green time was that it showed the basic indifference of nature to even the most momentous events in the book, and by extension of our own brief existence. This indifference results partly from the long time spans of the green-time characters and partly from their ecosystemic or collective perspectives. Still, the representation of this form of green time in The Lord of the Rings does not ultimately encourage the principal characters to become indifferent to what happens to the natural world. When nature becomes personified it does fight back in the story, and the forces allied with the Fellowship mourn the loss of parts of the natural world spoiled by Sauron and Saruman and want to defend it too. The different perspective of the green-time characters in The Lord of the Rings is something that the others must engage with and which they come to respect. They can then count among their ultimate victories not only protecting their respective peoples and places but also the personified earth itself. If we were to take a lesson from these themes then I think it would be that we should also try to similarly empathize with the nature of our own planet whenever possible and to defend it when it needs defending. The indifference of the green-time characters in these works should not be taken as a reason to be indifferent to nature. Rather, it should help us to feel all the more awe-struck by the more ancient and in some ways more complex forms of life with which we share our world.

  Can such a view help us? It could. Daily we are confronted with global environmental problems that challenge our ability to understand their long-term implications and our part in either causing or mitigating them. Daily we are given reasons not to worry about these problems or, more commonly, confronted with trade-offs that require us to set them aside. Global warming is a good example. Fifteen years ago there was clear disagreement in the scientific community about global warming. Today there is near-unanimity that the planet is heating up and that the consequences could be dire, especially for poorer countries in the Southern hemisphere.

  The worst consequences of global warming however are far off in time and space, most likely only harming those places that cannot retool their economies in the future to respond adequately to such a change. How do we encourage people to become concerned about such remote harms they are causing? What will motivate people now to set aside short-term economic gains through continued use of technologies that aggravate global warming in favor of long-term environmental sustainability? In part, it will involve taking a longer view of human welfare than we are accustomed to, one where we take responsibility for our actions that create consequences in the future for people and places we will never know. Such a perspective begins to approximate Tolkien’s green time. Though it would be too much to suggest that we think like a forest (though many environmentalists have said things very similar to this), The Lord of the Rings at least helps us to imagine what it is to care for things as a process and into a future that may or may not include our species. It is a challenge for us to live our lives without only considering the moments of our own lifetime as always the most important.

  Reading Tolkien is surely no panacea for our environmental ills. Still, there is a recognizable call here for us to appreciate the longer perspective of other things in the world and to take responsibility for our actions given our dominant position on our planet. This is something Tolkien understood and represents in the book by means of the diminishment of the non-human peoples of Middle-earth. As the War of the Ring comes to an end and the Fourth Age begins, the future of humanity is uncertain. At one point, Legolas and Gimli become philosophical about this issue:

  “It is ever so with the things that Men begin: there is a frost in Spring, or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise.”

  “Yet seldom do they fail of their seed,” said Legolas. “And that will lie in the dust and rot to spring up again in times and places unlooked-for. The deeds of Men will outlast us, Gimli.”

  “And yet come to naught in the end but might-have-beens, I guess,” said the Dwarf.

  “To that the Elves know not the answer,” said Legolas. (RK, p. 153)

  Our future is uncertain. But Tolkien is an entertaining and engaging guide for us to think about that future. When those like my friend Julia go back to Middle-earth, they enter into a landscape populated by very different kinds of relationships than are possible in our own world, though not ones that we cannot imagine ourselves taking part in. In Middle-earth we can be put in relationships with the natural world where we come to take responsibility for it because it is so wonderfully different from ourselves. This seems a lesson we can take back to our own world and put to good use.5

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  1 Patrick Curry, Defending Middle-earth (London: HarperCollins, 1998).

  2 Some may see the immortality of the elv
es as a counterexample to the long-temporal perspective that I am attributing to green time. If the elves are immortal, why are they not green and hence indifferent to the affairs of humans? But a clear difference is that the elves are the historical enemies of Sauron (and the earlier manifestations of evil that preceded him) and so do take an interest in the affairs of men, rather than only of nature or something else, at least for the reason of overthrowing their enemy. The relationship between elves and humans is actually unique and quite intimate. As Tolkien tells us, the elves stand for the perfected capacities of humans to one degree or another. According to Tolkien, “The Elves represent . . . the artistic, aesthetic, and purely scientific aspects of the Humane Nature raised to a higher level than is actually seen in Men” (L, p. 236).

  3 Peter Jackson gives the elves a more direct role in determining the outcome of the War by having them come to Rohan’s rescue at Helm’s Deep in the movie version of The Two Towers.

  4 See Eugene Hargrove, “Who is Tom Bombadil?” at http://www.cas.unt.edu/~hargrove/bombadil.html. Hargrove makes a strong case that Tom is the Valar Aule and that Goldberry is Yavanna.

  5 My thanks to Eric Katz, Meg Kilvington, and especially Julia Voss for helpful advice on this chapter.

  PART V

  Ends and Endings

  13

  Providence and the Dramatic Unity of The Lord of the Rings