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I Think That I Shall Never See…

10 Wednesday Jan 2018

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Economics in Middle-earth, Fairy Tales and Myths, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods, Uncategorized

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Alan Lee, Alexander Volkov, Battle of the Somme, C.S. Lewis, Caspar David Friedrich, deforestation, Fangorn, Fangorn Forest, German Romantics, Grimm Brothers, Haensel and Gretel, Industrial Revolution, Isengard, Kansas, L. Frank Baum, Leonid Vladimirsky, Mordor, pre-industrial, Saruman, The Lord of the Rings, The Scouring of the Shire, The Wizard of Emerald City, The Wizard of Oz, Tin Woodman, Tolkien, trees

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

In a letter to his aunt, Jane, dated 8-9 September, 1962, JRRT wrote:

“Every tree has its enemy, few have an advocate.” (Letters, 321)

We know, from his letters and from interviews, just how passionate he was about trees,

image1jrrt.jpg

but we were immediately caught by just how very Treebeardish he sounded:

“I am not altogether on anybody’s side, because nobody is altogether on my side, if you understand me…” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 4, “Treebeard”)

image2tbd.jpg

Trees almost seemed to be people to Tolkien—in fact, we know that Treebeard was based in part upon a person—his friend, CS Lewis—at least his voice and manner of speaking.

image3csl.jpg

As near-people, then, to Tolkien, their destruction would have been a kind of murder.  With that in mind, we thought of our last posting, in which we quoted Farmer Cotton talking about Sharkey’s regime in the Shire, including “They cut down trees and leave ‘em lie.”  (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”).  And we wondered whether, behind this, JRRT was talking not only about the orcs’ wanton devastation of trees,

image4treeruin.jpg

but also reliving the Battle of the Somme, in 1916, and seeing once more the acres of unburied dead (60,000 British casualties alone on the first day, 1 July, 1916).

image5dead.jpg

Certainly Treebeard saw this as murder, as he says to Merry and Pippin about Saruman

“He and his foul folk are making havoc now.  Down on the borders they are felling trees—good trees.  Some of the trees they just cut down and left to rot—orc-mischief that; but most are hewn up and carried off to feed the fires of Orthanc…Curse him root and branch!  Many of those trees were my friends, creatures I had known from nut and acorn; many had voices of their own that are lost for ever now.  And there are wastes of stump and bramble where once there were singing groves.”  (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 4, “Treebeard”)

Saruman, a person with “a mind of metal and wheels”, who was “plotting to become a Power”,

image6saruman.jpg

has turned Isengard into a vast factory, where “there is always a smoke rising”.

image7isengard.jpg

Thus, just as JRRT may have been recalling the Battle of the Somme, so perhaps he was also suggesting  the industrialization which had been in full swing when he was born and which he disliked intensely and which was reducing much of the part of England in which he grew up to the smoking wasteland Sharkey tried to make the Shire

image8.jpg

as we see in this Alan Lee depiction.

image9.jpg

Of course the deforestation went back long before the Industrial Revolution began.  Once upon a time, great forests covered much of the northern European world and humans lived in the midst of miles and miles of trees in clearings which they cut for themselves.

image10schwarz.jpg

image11farm.jpg

And we still have a distant memory of these, we would suggest, in some of our fairy tales.  If you think about the Brothers Grimm fairy tale of “Haensel and Gretel”, for example,

image12grimms.jpg

image13kinderund.jpg

image14schatten.jpg

you’ll remember that, not only did the children live in the middle of such forest, as did the witch, but their father was a woodcutter, someone who would have been involved in that very deforestation, if in a very small way.

image15woodcutter.jpg

This memory, collected by the Grimms and others in folktale form in the early 19th century, also provided inspiration for the German Romantics—as you can see in this painting by one of their greatest painters, Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840).

image16chasseur.jpg

To those Romantics, the forest was scary—but fascinating, as well—and disappearing, as the industrialism which JRRT disliked swallowed it.

image17blackcountry.jpg

Wood was, however, the plastic of the world for many generations, with infinite uses, from home heating to ship-building, and, wherever humans settled, wood was eaten up.  Here is a telling chart for Britain of the contrast between 2000BC and 1990AD.

image18mapofgb.gif

It is no surprise, then, that, during the 17th century colonization of what is called New England in the US, a major attraction was the availability of wood and the colonists took full advantage of that availability, as this chart shows—

image19deforest.jpg

The forest which Treebeard shepherds is, in fact, rather like the forest depicted in that chart of Britain, as Aragorn says:

“Yes, it is old…as old as the forest by the Barrow-downs, and it is far greater.  Elrond says that the two are akin, the last strongholds of the mighty woods of the Elder Days, in which the Firstborn roamed while Men still slept.”  (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 2, “The Riders of Rohan”)

But what would have happened to it had Saruman not lost Isengard to the very trees he was destroying?

image20destructionofisengard.jpg

In thinking about this, we were reminded of another woodcutter in a children’s story.

image21tinwoodsman.png

Or, if you prefer the film—

image22woodsman.jpg

He lives in the still-wooded land of Oz

image23oz.png

where there are even talking trees (although a lot less friendly than Treebeard).

image24talkingtree.jpg

Dorothy, however, lives in a Kansas seemingly blighted by the so-called “Dust Bowl” of the 1930s.

image25kansas.jpg

image26dustbowl.jpg

Would this have been Fangorn’s fate?  We have only to look at Mordor to believe it might have been, when all the trees fell silent.

image27mordor.jpg

As ever, thanks for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

PS

In 1939, a Russian children’s author, Alexander Volkov, published The Wizard of the Emerald City.  When one compares it with a certain American book of about 40 years before, striking similarities appear, starting with the title character.  And the illustrations, by Leonid Vladimirsky, also have something familiar about them…

image28vlad.jpg

There was one very practical change, however:  the Tin Woodman became the “Iron Lumberjack”, which rectifies a mistake in the original.  When Dorothy discovers the Woodman, he has rusted in place, but tin can’t rust!

Like Smoke From a Fire: Sharkey’s End

04 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Fairy Tales and Myths, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Maps, Narrative Methods, Research

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Adventure, Birmingham, Branywine, Bywater, Coketown, Dickens, Dol Amroth, England, Ents, factory, Fangorn, feudalism, Galadriel, Gandalf, Grima, Hard Times, Hobbiton, Idylls, industrial, Industrial Revolution, Isengard, King Edward School, Medieval, Merry, Midlands, Mordor, Morris, Oxford, Palantir, Pippin, poetry, pre-industrial, Saruman, Sauron, Scouring of the Shire, Sharkey, Southfarthing, Tennyson, The Lord of the Rings, The Shire, Tolkien

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always.

In a previous posting, we talked about Saruman as a kind of imitation Sauron and Isengard as a mini-Mordor.

sarum1

In this posting, we want to consider the implications of Gandalf’s remark about him in “Many Partings”, from The Return of the King: “I fancy he could do some mischief still in a small mean way.”

The mischief, when we see it, is definitely mean, but not small, even though confined to the limits of the Shire.

The world of The Lord of the Rings is a pre-industrial one. The most advanced technology, on the one hand, is the palantir (actually perhaps a magical, rather than mechanical, device)

palantir

and , on the other hand, a watermill.

j-r-r-_tolkien_-_the_hill_-_hobbiton-across-the-water_colored

Beyond that, it’s a medieval world, but without, it seems, feudalism, although there are, for example, castles and knights in the form of the Prince of Dol Amroth.

We can easily see why JRRT wanted this regression. On the one hand, like so many boys of his age, he had grown up reading Tennyson

John_everett_millais_portrait_of_lord_alfred_tennyson firstedition1859idylls

and William Morris

Morris-Portrait1

morris_tapestry

who had created a world of Victorian medievalism, Tennyson in poetry, Morris in many different art forms.

On the other, Tolkien had grown up in Birmingham, in the English Midlands, where there had been massive development throughout the era of the Industrial Revolution.

Textile Mill Diagram McConnel_&_Company_mills,_about_1820

Here’s Charles Dickens’ description of such a place from Hard Times (1856):

(Excerpt Describing Coketown)

Needless to say, although Tolkien kept a strong affection for King Edward School, where he was educated before Oxford,

KingEdwardsSchoolinBirmingham

he was less enthusiastic about the industrial world which surrounded it and this clearly colors his picture of Saruman. Look, for instance, at Fangorn’s description of him:

“He has a mind of metals and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment.” (The Two Towers, Book 1, Chapter 4, “Treebeard”) (It’s revealing, by the way that this is almost a quotation of something which Saruman later says of Gandalf, “When his tools have done their task he drops them.” The Return of the King, Book 2, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”)

Saruman, then, with his metal mind, has turned the once-beautiful Isengardgreg-hildebrandt-isengard-orthanc-saruman-607429-1920x1080

into an arms factory

kruppworks

another Midlands,

isengardasfactory

and has angered the Ents, as well, by the wanton destruction of trees, not just for fuel, it appears, but just out of sheer spitefulness.

The Wrath of the Ents, by Ted Nasmith

As we wrote earlier, all of this has remade Isengard into a mini-Mordor—as Frodo says: “Yes, this is Mordor…just one of its works. Saruman was doing its work all the time, even when he thought he was working for himself.” (The Return of the King, Book 2, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”)

So, when Saruman, Grima in tow, leaves his ruined factory, one could almost imagine just what he might have in mind when he says to the hobbits:

“Well, it will serve you right when you come home, if you find things less good in the Southfarthing than you would like.” (The Return of the King, Book 2, Chapter 6, “Many Partings”)

We know from Merry and Pippin’s experience at the gate of Isengard that Saruman has been importing pipe-weed, a main export of the Southfarthing.

merrypippinisengard

But when the hobbits, having forced the gate at the Brandywine, are making their way towards Hobbiton, they begin to have a feeling that much more has been damaged than the South Farthing: “Still there seemed an unusual amount of burning going on, and smoke rose from many points round about. A great cloud of it was going up far away in the direction of the Woody End.” (The Return of the King, Book 2, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”)

This smoke bears an ominous resemblance to the Midlands (and, in fact, to all of industrial England):

7ad841d6d5852b586a78fc03df7d64259715bddd.jpg__846x0_q80

There is worse to come, however: Bywater. “Many of the houses that they had known were missing. Some seemed to have been burned down. The pleasant row of old hobbit-holes in the bank on the north side of the Pool were deserted, and their little gardens that used to run down bright to the water’s edge were rank with weeds. Worse, there was a whole line of ugly new houses all along the Pool Side, where the Hobbiton Road ran close to the bank. An avenue of trees had stood there. They were all gone. And looking with dismay up the road towards Bag End they saw a tall chimney of brick in the distance. It was pouring out black smoke into the evening air.” (The Return of the King, Book 2, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”)

And here, we move from a single smoking mill to a smoking mill town.

BRADFORD/YORKSHIRE/1873

Saruman’s revenge has been more than small and mean, especially in terms of the industrial world which The Lord of the Rings rejects: the Shire is on its way to becoming another Midlands,

_77710962_3322454

even to the workers’ miserable housing.

preston

And the cutting down of trees (including, as we will find out, the Party Tree) insures the truth of Saruman’s sneering statement to the hobbits:

“…I have done much that you will find it hard to mend or undo in your lives.” (The Return of the King, Book 2, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”)

But, as we know, Saruman, even in his moment of triumph, has no more than a moment to enjoy it. He is murdered by Grima and here we see the final irony. As Saruman has turned the medieval, bucolic Shire into a smoky horror, so he himself is turned to smoke:

“To the dismay of those that stood by, about the body of Saruman a grey mist gathered, and rising slowly to a great height like smoke from a fire, as a pale shrouded figure it loomed over the Hill. For a moment it wavered, looking to the West; but out of the West came a cold wind, and it bent away, and with a sigh dissolved into nothing.” (The Return of the King, Book 2, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”)

61 - The scouring of the shire

A final thought, however. Might we see Saruman’s gesture towards the West, in which he clearly feels that he has been rejected by that which sent him to Middle Earth, as a mirror Galadriel’s gesture of rejection towards the East, when she refuses the Ring?

“She lifted up her hand and from the ring that she wore there issued a great light that illuminated her alone and left all else dark. She stood before Frodo seeming now tall beyond measurement, and beautiful beyond enduring, terrible and worshipful. Then she let her hand fall, and the light faded, and suddenly she laughed again, and lo! she was shrunken: a slender elf-woman, clad in simple white, whose gentle voice was soft and sad.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, Chapter 7, “The Mirror of Galadriel”)

galadriel

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

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