Toby Fox was like shiiiittt they be liking my Guys too much I need to create someone so inconceivably unlikable the mere sight of him inspires fury and distaste in those of pure. Bring in the Anime Twink
like yes actually there is a conversation to be had about how a characters actions are framed and how they thematically fit with the rest of the story and it can in fact reflect the author's beliefs. some authors are even trying to make a point
not all depiction is glorification but sometimes it is and you need to be able to tell the difference. not because your immortal soul will be tainted by reading The Bad One, but because you need to have reading comprehension skills
I thought I might write up some meta/analysis around Tolkien’s conservative ‘environmentalism’ being uncritically viewed as an objectively ‘correct’ opinion, and viewing it through a temporal lens, ie what it was that influenced my approach to fics like Unsightly or The Culling of the Cormorant or Snakebite. I was initially not going to post it because I feel like this is a subject that can easily be misconstrued into ‘oh you think caring about trees sucks huh’ when that is literally the opposite of what I’m claiming. However, my circus, my monkeys, etc.
Anyway, Tolkien’s pastoralism and conservationist spirit are often treated as though they were the singularly politically uncomplicated parts of his imagination (especially by those who really want everything they consume to be morally ‘pure’ lmao), but I don't think that is at all true. And I also think that much of the environmentalism within the books has less to do with environmentalism itself and much more to do with his ideas around temporality, ie I think the reason many adaptations or readings of his work fall flat in attempting to discern his thoughts on trees is because they ignore how the legendarium’s ecological stances are deliberately bound up with its stances on historical continuity, inherited custom, settled habitation and relatively stable social relations. To conserve in name trees and fields, and through them conserve certain relationships between people, land and time.
Which is why I think “pastoralism” is a more appropriate category to describe the appealing treefucker spirit of the books than “environmentalism”. To very quickly go into the difference: environmentalism begins from the ecological fact that landscapes are dynamically indifferent to the boundaries placed around them, while pastoralism begins from a human community already situated within a landscape and asks how that community might preserve its relationship to said landscape. And the reason I prefer sticking to pastoralism is because Tolkien repeatedly assigns moral weight to the passing of time, and the effect of time on the people occupying a landscape.
The social ideal of the Shire, so prevalent on this website that you actually have people calling it a communal anarchist utopia and what not, is how it exists in perfect correspondence with its own, localised landscape, where everything belongs to a continuous historical organism ever since the three nomadic Hobbit-groups settled and intermingled within the region. So far from being anarchist, I think the utopian quality of the Shire rests in a fantasy that history stopped changing the fundamental terms on which a community exists. He doesn’t actually even say it’s a utopia, or make a narrow hard-conservative argument of all change being objectively bad, but is quite clear that all change comes from ‘within’, from local and regional actors in the service of a greater national cause. Frodo saves Middle Earth, and in doing so, saves the Shire.
To return to the Shire’s utopian status, as I have said before elsewhere, the Shire is not exactly an egalitarian peasant commune, the Shire is like. Idk man. Devon. Surrey. The Bagginses and Tooks possess histories and estates while the Gamgees occupy a different social position, though labour is largely invisible because the rural economy is aestheticised into a state of abundance. Sam's relationship to Frodo is genuine and profoundly important yet also its a relationship whose feudal residue isn’t ever stated to be directly oppressive. The social order is legitimate because it is imagined as reciprocal and organically evolved.
As a subject of study, I do think Tolkien's pastoralism becomes more interesting if you don’t simply call it nostalgic or resistant to progress, and once again I think he’s probably spinning in his grave like a chicken on a spit whenever it is flattened as such. The guy doesn’t once say all change is bad. He is perfectly capable of imagining desirable change, eg Aragorn's restoration transforming a ‘degraded’ political order. He does, however, distrust change that severes itself from inherited forms. It’s the basic ‘RETVRN’ formula: good political change is restorative and returns something to health, while bad political change assumes that society can be redesigned according to an abstract theory of change (sorry for the nonprofit speak, I am in recovery…).
And across the books, Tolkien repeatedly makes organic growth the standard against which modernity fails, and his ideal social forms often tend to develop gradually and acquire complexity without being deliberately engineered. Saruman does pollute Isengard, yes, but his pollution involves the sudden reorganisation of living systems according to an externally imposed logic, and Mordor takes this to its extreme, where the landscape itself becomes a military-industrial apparatus.
In his very famous 1951 letter to Milton Waldman he describes the central conflict of his mythology partly in terms of the desire for domination, and generally across his letters he repeatedly returns to the relationship between machinery, power and the pitfalls of imposing one’s will upon the world, wherein his hatred of industrialisation is inseparable from his hatred of instrumentalisation. And this is very interesting! He is a clever and extremely well read man, who can clearly see how mass industrialisation is and has thusfar been a transformation in the relationship between humans and the non-human world, and he actually is hostile to the concentration of power that accompanies technological mastery. Bro would actually fucking hate Amazon, because he recognises the violence involved in treating living things as objects; and disagrees with the idea that more productive capacity constitutes social progress. And honestly, same! I think so too! Hi-5 bro!
But the difference between me and Tolkien is that the alternative he imagines is a return to embeddedness where production is embedded in locality and people embedded in local community, local community embedded in inherited custom, and all three embedded in a wider national landscape of differing peoples with a similar goal. And this is why the theme of ‘belonging’ and positive social bonds in Tolkien also very much fascinates me, where it’s often one of the things people are most compelled by and one of the reasons many are drawn to the legendarium, including me, even though it’s clear that the opposite of domination, for Tolkien is not emancipation but an idea of belonging, which is a different and difficult ecological category.
If the ‘value’ of a landscape is measured exclusively through the history of a specific community's relationship to it, you cannot avoid the question of who legitimately belongs there. And while there is a definite attempt to resolve that question through traditional racial exclusion, he also repeatedly distinguishes between peoples who are of a landscape and transformative forces that arrive from outside it. And these boundaries are not geographical alone, because Khand, Harad and Rhún are both part of the same landmass that makes up Middle Earth and Beleriand.
It isn’t that Tolkien outright says “natives good, foreigners bad”, because I genuinely just find it uninteresting when the conservative argument is made in that flat and extremely boring register and wouldn’t even care enough to analyse it. But Arda is full of migration, exile, intermixture and displaced peoples, across ME, Beleriand and Valinor, not to mention how Númenórean history itself is founded upon migration, the War for the Jewels kicks off when the Noldor cross the sea, the awakening of the elves is followed by a mass migratory movement, so on and so forth, an entire mythology structured by movement across landscapes across thousands of years, where time itself conveys political authority.
Conservatism at its most simple definition is a theory contingent on the spiritual and moral authority of accumulated social forms, ie the Burke-ian idea that institutions accrue legitimacy through development rather than fact of establishment. And that’s what I think is really interesting in looking at Tolkien’s pastoralism through the temporal lens, how he consistently trusts what has grown over what has been made. And so, if you look at it from that light, sure, Tolkien absolutely is a conservationist in the most literal sense of the world, because, and I am quoting from my own fic here sorry, though I use it in a very different context:
Do you understand now? How every successful conservation project must be, at its core, an explanation of why other people should care about something precious to you? A study of what has been lost already, and why, and what could be lost that might be worth saving, and why.
Because I anticipate this line of questioning, please note I don’t actually think there’s inherently reactionary about distrusting industrial capitalism or defending local ecological knowledge or opposing the commodification of land or arguing that human communities should exist within rather than above ecological systems. I agree with all of that, but I do think it’s worth looking at how Tolkien’s agreement with the same attaches those positions to a further proposition, in which the existing inherited community is itself an ecological good, needing only minor internal tweaks.
Returning to his environmental approach, the threat to the Middle Earth landscape is consistently depicted as a destruction of accumulated time, and the ‘dying world’ of LotR presents us infinite varieties of ruin, all characterised as the long defeat. And when social continuity is treated as analogous to ecological continuity, the immigrant moves from another participant in a society's continuing history to a symbol of ecological rupture, or a natural disaster.
“…the enemy increases and we decrease. We are a failing people, a springless autumn… childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry.”
Faramir, commander of forces in a territory directly bordering ‘the Harad’, where Haradrim incursions are common in Ithilien.
And this is, mind you, written all in the context of the English countryside in the ‘final days’ of Empire where inward migration from ‘the colonies’ is still not as much as the ‘outward migration’ to them, yet is now noticeable enough that it becomes a ‘national’ problem instead of an urban one constrained to docks and industrial cities. And like I just said, the apparent timelessness of the English countryside is itself the product of substantial privilege.
I can actually give a pretty good example! I’ve lived in a couple of rural areas in the UK (and much of it in Oxfordshire itself) and I can tell you that much of the English pastoral landscape today is inaccessible because land has been fenced off, or ‘conserved’, as private property or agricultural land. Ie it’s pretty easy from that position to see the romantic pastoral ideal’s real face: a landscape engineered to be represented as belonging to all “native Brits” culturally while being materially controlled by a tiny fraction of said “native Brits”.
Which is incredibly funny to me personally because the most recent example of this whole sentiment is how Oxfordshire has actually become one of the first counties in the UK to ban people hanging English flags on public property like lamposts. For those outside the UK: this is a recent occupation explicitly associated with far right groups, because there are extremely active groups doing that in rural Oxfordshire… not so much in the city of Oxford itself, because obviously the city is pretty diverse thanks to the university, and this brand of brave patriot generally tends to be too cowardly for the ‘finding out’ stage of ‘fucking around’. And the argument re: the far right hanging up flags on lampposts isn’t exactly a case of progressives claiming that Union Jacks are racist or whatever. But a flag is universally agreed to be a very efficient instrument for turning an abstract political claim into a claim about space and says, in effect, that this specific piece of public landscape should visibly signify a specific national community.
The crucial seeming paradox here is that rural Oxfordshire was the first place in the country where this specific brand of ugly far-right activism, so often presented in the media as an urban problem due to increased interaction with immigrants, has ramped up to the point even the courts took notice. Because rural Oxfordshire is one of the wealthiest and most heavily protected parts of England, marked by large concentrations of inherited land, prestigious rural settlements, aristocratic landholdings, large conservation areas and wildlife conservation projects, AONBs (places legally declared as ‘areas of outstanding national beauty’) historic estates. And extremely powerful cultural investment, historically and in present day, in the idea of the English countryside. A third of the countryside in the region is owned by the Mountbatten family, of ‘Partition of Indian Subcontinent’ fame, and several estates lay empty because they used to belong to Russian oligarchs for decades before their assets were frozen in 2022.
Basically, apart from Oxford itself and the university population, much of Oxfordshire doesn’t actually resemble the migrant-populated, working-class urban environments through which contemporary anti-immigration politics is usually explained and ‘justified’, and the county is full of basically variations of Tolkien himself, ie people considered as ‘genteel conservatives’ (🙄). Yet it still was a place where explicitly far-right mobilisation became particularly intense, and this a mobilisation not being carried out through the aristocratic population (many of whom live full time in foreign countries, including the Bahamas and the UAE) but the middle+working class white British population who form the rest of the regional majority and share this ‘pastoral utopia’.
What wouldn’t Sam do for his Mr Frodo?
And in doing right by his Mr Frodo, he does right by the world.
Which, in terms of both class and race, I think should make us suspicious of an account of anti-immigration politics based exclusively on the idea of contact. If hostility was just a reaction to the experience of proximity to an unfamiliar/undesirable demographic, you’d think the most homogeneous rural regions would be the least anxious about immigration. Instead, you find anticipatory nativism, which is the political depiction of a threat to an imagined community whose defining characteristic is having not yet been irreversibly transformed. Which is a sentiment I’ve seen myself across rural Germany as well (although ‘apparent timelessness’ is somewhat easier to counter in that setting, for a myriad of reasons).
Anyway, the case of Oxfordshire shows the anxiety is not “these people have changed my village”, because they haven’t. Instead of that, it’s “this village is one of the last places these people have not yet changed, and we have to prevent it from doing so”, where it’s not driven by the desire for an imagined past or utopian present but rather the fear of a counterfactual future. Which is exactly what plays out with the Hobbits’ storyline: the high drama of the Scouring of the Shire is plonked right at the end of the book after the main war, very interestingly going against established narrative formula, serves to prove that the Hobbits’ fears and anxieties about the possible plight of their homeland were absolutely correct.
The temporal-ecological undercurrent in the legendarium is just so interesting in that it’s a fantastic demonstration of how the conservative pastoral imagination tends to first turn a historical and social arrangement into a landscape and then turn the landscape into what is deemed natural. And thus, defending the arrangement is equivalent to defending nature itself, and anything that alters these arrangements can consequently be described as ecological destruction. So the flag-lampost people, ie the hardest and most explicitly far right version of contemporary British conservatism, are simply just radicalising the idea that a place has an authentic historical character which political action ought to preserve, which is a deliberately embedded idea within the English pastoral tradition.
And this rhetoric absolutely works! You have ‘ordinary’ white British working class folk trying to drive a small handful of immigrants out of a region where the vast majority of the landscape is inaccessible to said white British working class folk. And the rhetoric works because there is something worth conserving. The rural English landscape is beautiful, mass industrial development can destroy ecosystems, capital displaces communities, national approaches flatten local particularity, the urban housing market transforms villages into commodities. The rhetoric works because it engages with undeniable material contradictions, which is fine, and then offers a more ‘humane’ cultural homogeneity as the ecological solution, which is dangerous.
Because in a world of urban alienation and climate collapse, the desire for continuity is incredibly tempting even for people who in any other situation would not be radicalised so far rightwards. And I think Tolkien and other writers like him are at their most perceptive when insisting that a human life cannot be reduced to economic utility. It’s the perfect bait for economic and social discontent, the equivalent of blaming some Indian Deliveroo rider being the sole reason for your unemployment: there was once a place of abundance in which we all belonged together and had more than enough, and it is possible to get it back.
Which I think leaves us with a more uncomfortable yet more interesting question than whether or not Tolkien was a ‘real’ environmentalist. Because he was! He genuinely is one! He enjoys his trees! Every good character is some brand of treefucker! But his environmentalism is part of a larger conservative ontology in which an accumulated past leads to a presumption of legitimacy. In the legendarium, home is morally privileged over elsewhere, continuity over rupture, inheritance over invention, development over upheaval, and restoration over transformation. And these are all ingredients for a very humane critique of industrial capitalism, but only in the right hands. Outside them, it just turns the preservation of a social landscape into a moral environmentalist imperative.
And I’m saying this partly because I get really fucking annoyed when people respond to this sort of critique in bad faith and intellectually lazy ways like “oh so you’re saying the Shire is fascist” or that “loving English hedgerows is now a cancellable offence huh” or “is Tolkien the only problematic writer in your eyes”. Nobody said that. I like a hefty hedgerow myself. I think all writers should be some brand of problematic. I am only saying that the legendarium’s underlying ecological conceit is often read as a politics detached from his views on race and gender, when it is absolutely establishing a conservative and reactionary theory of belonging by framing it in a compellingly emotional ecological register.
Across the trilogy (and also across much of the writing of Beleriand), the landscape moves gradually from a vessel through which history has passed into evidence of whom said history, and thus the landscape, belongs to. The conservative pastoral is excellent at playing this remarkable trick of making migratory history and power structures disappear by actually preserving its traces, giving you ancient walls without enclosures (Shire, Girdle of Melian), ancient borders keeping out a dehumanised Other (say, Gondor-Harad) without the breaches (Haradrim boys being taken to Gondor as ‘tributes’), or certain contested territories without the complexity of conflict (‘Harondor’, Umbar).
I’m not at any point denying that Tolkien was a genuine lover of the English countryside and the pastoral environment. He was! He genuinely did care about it! I just think that, imo, caring about the environment does not make someone ecologically progressive. What I want from ecological progress is less consoling and probably more difficult, ie I want to defend the conditions under which there can still be a future that doesn’t need to look like the world which produced us, and I give very little fucks about preservation because preservation always comes with custodians and custodians always come with curatorial decisions. I think that ecological conservation, at its most compelling, should have nothing to do with the preservation of anything that is or once was, and everything to do with defending the natural world’s capacity to pleasantly surprise us. As Elros says in the bird fic:
Still, the natural world is indifferent to our accounting. It keeps no column marked those deserving of death. Remove the cormorant and the mullet multiply until the eelgrass thins beneath them, empty the eelgrass and the fry lose their nursery. All of us are stumbling sword-first in the dark, dealing victorious wounds in the name of righteous restoration. Even though the world is composed not of victors but of a series of obligations: weed to current, current to fish, fish to bird, bird to salt, salt to rain.
Perhaps this is why the cormorant never sees his dive as an act of faith in the continuance of the world, and enters the water as desperately one day as it does the next. Why it expects no praise for taking what permits its little world to persist and continues to dive despite the twanging of the bow, refusing to accept that its place in the world is deserving of punishment. Perhaps that is why the infant chicks eagerly open wide for both beak and blade. Perhaps the only common inheritance among all living things is a moment of surprise at the cruelty of the world. Perhaps every creature understands this, bar us. Perhaps it is we alone who have conceived of the survival of another as theft from oneself. How lonely it feels, to walk this remarkable world after learning such a thing.
cicero already a horrible ''''''''father'''''''' '''''''figure''''''' to so so so many people and yet there's always more possibilities. do you remember that one guy who suggested catullus marrying tullia and being cicero's son in law could have fixed him
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