I'm working on an essay about the trees in my life. There was a cherry tree in the yard of the old woman next door: she let me climb up into it, eat cherries, and read. There were trees that I climbed at the edge of the Catholic seminary at the end of my street. The seminarians meditatively walking the paths never quite got used to the sound of girls in trees laughing. The elm in our back yard kept us cool so we guarded with our pocket book and window cleaner: Dutch Elm Disease was a danger, so we had it sprayed every year at a ridiculous expense and then washed the windows that were also sprayed. There have been two large pine trees in front of each of the houses I have bought so I could look out on something green in winter. They're a nuisance in other ways: grass won't grow under them because they instantly suck up water and then drop acidic needles. But their placid green under the snow soothes my eyes and my spirit on short winter days. A crab apple tree convinced me to buy this house because it was in bloom the May weekend Veronica and I drove from Winnipeg to Regina to buy a house so I could start a new job in July. That tree, which has such a flowing, enclosing shape, has been my place to daydream, meditate, reflect, grieve. It keeps me safe.
So I obviously had to re-re-re-read Lord of the Rings, because no essay on trees would be complete without Ents. The row of carrots in my vegetable garden is just a row of carrots. But Tolkien knew that we saw trees as individuals that had their own sense of time that contrasted to our own, particularly in the cell phone age. This re-reading, I often stopped to think about about how smart and prophetic Tolkien was, how much he knew about us in the twenty-first century. To read Tolkien in the time of the idiot id in the White House is quite a new experience. So I kept thinking about the smart questions Tolkien asked or his observations about human frailties and strengths. I thought I'd like to write a lot of essays, but I'm no Tolkien scholar. For that you need a former student of mine, Benjamin Barootes, who now teaches Mediaeval literature at Memorial.
So this isn't an exhaustive nor even particularly smart list of things we could dive into when we read Lord of the Rings. Please feel free to add your own questions or observations in the comments section. It's summer: the perfect time to settle down under a tree in the evening and read LOTR.
1. Well, there's the obvious one. Perhaps because Tolkien lived through the four days of the Great Smog in 1951, he knew how deadly industrialized air was (it was estimated there were between 10,000 and 12,000 deaths). He reveled in the beauty and variety of nature and recognized that our unabated use of nature's resources hurt us profoundly. Sauron lives in a wasteland. Saruman just cuts trees down for the fun of it. Tolkien was a proto-environmentalist. Surely someone has written this one.
2. Power that admires itself too fully simply says "I want." "I want destruction." "I want power." Never even "I want because...." as if the desire for power were self-evident or even natural. Sauron doesn't utter a single word through Lord of the Rings, as if to emphasize the irrationality of his desires. On the other hand, even before Sauron is destroyed, but certainly afterwards, stories and poems and songs are eagerly attended to. The rituals and poems that come after the ring is destroyed, in particular, teach us that language and ritual are the markers of order in defiance of the silence of disorder.
3. Tolkien believed in diversity before it was even a thing. Of course we solve problems better or see our complex sociality more clearly when we have a range of skills and perspectives at hand. People, wizards, halflings, elves, dwarves all bring their respective skills to, say, the battle at Helms Deep or the destruction of the ring.
4. LOTR is a lesson in leadership. Sometimes leading means trusting people and letting them get on with the job, something middle managers need to learn. (Hands off! People do their best when they're trusted, not when they're surveilled or shamed. There's scientific evidence to back this up.) Both Gandalf and Aragorn know that if anyone can get the ring back to Mount Doom, it is Frodo, with Sam's help, of course. Aragorn organizes a big distraction on the edges of Mordor to give Frodo the best chance, but he doesn't lift the burden from him, nor does Faramir.
5. "I'm really the one person who can solve all these problems--if you'd only give me the ring!" Does that remind you of someone? Boromir and his father Denethor are both wrong and both bring their deaths upon themselves because of this assumption. Solving problems, in LOTR as in contemporary Canada, takes a community--a varied community.
6. LOTR is a lesson in kingship--or leadership, if you will. When Gandalf appears in Rohan, Theoden has become old and hesitant, but when Gandalf kicks out Wormtongue and makes clear the latter's connections to Saruman, Theoden is ready to re-evaluate his response. After leading the Riddermark to victory at Helms Deep, Theoden gathers his people and rides to the defense of Gondor, where he dies nobly. Denethor, on the other hand, would rather kill himself and his son than face possible failure or pain. The time he has spent gazing into the Palantir has not given him knowledge but led to despair. Where Theoden is willing to revise his worldview, Denethor is frozen in his. From this follow two more principles:
7. It's not over until it's over. Uncertainty sucks, but on a daily basis it's all we have. I think it was Voltaire who said "Uncertainty is painful but certainty is stupid." Denethor wants to be certain of his victory and if he can't be, he wants to leave the world on his own terms, taking his gifted son with him.
8. And the hands of a king are the hands of a healer. The wisdom in this makes my eyes get a little misty. It's a model of kingship that is pure service, one that abjures power and embraces responsibility. After the ring is destroyed and Sauron defeated, Aragorn spends a lot of time going from place to place to ensure that his people are well.
9. People who destroy nature just to create despair and power the "engines" of their own desires are evil. Somehow the natural world represents a value they can neither share nor understand. The only thing they can to do something so antithetical to their values and world view is to destroy it. The trees cut down in the Shire and left to rot are destruction for destruction's sake, a proof of power that creates despair: purely evil.
10. Long before all the science about how nature heals us, how it brings us crucial awe that creates perspective, how its beauty gets under our skin, Tolkien understood how healing nature is. Two dried up leaves of athelas can undo the wounds of the Nazgul.
11. Humility is a strength. Of course, Gandalf counts on Frodo to get the ring to Mount Doom because he's humble, just an ordinary hobbit. Other people proudly think they could control the ring's force and would not destroy it, whereas only destroying the ring will end Sauron's will to power. Frodo fully understands this, though at the last moment Gollum, whose life has been so twisted by desire for the ring, plays a vital role. Frodo's not perfect, but he's the best we've got.
But we can't forget Sam. Sam is, if possible, even more humble than Frodo, whom he calls "Master." Sam can't carry the ring to Mount Doom, but he can carry Frodo. The scenes with Shelob in the tunnels are probably Sam at his best. He considers all his options, always with the idea that he might be wrong in the back of his mind. He takes the ring and Galadriel's bottle of light from Frodo, whom he believes is dead, knowing this is wrong but not knowing what else to do. The quest must be continued. When he learns that Frodo isn't dead, the ring and the light help Sam rescue him, but he concludes again he has indeed done a wrong thing and gives them back to Frodo. Except that he couldn't have rescued Frodo without them. As we're making momentous decision, convinced we're right, that our perspective is unerring, we need to keep Sam's humble questioning in mind.
Please, make this a conversation and add your own thoughts!
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