Arda Inhabited: Environmental Relationships in The Lord of the Rings

by Susan Jeffers

With the box office successes of movies based on The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, familiarity with J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth is growing. Unfortunately, scholarship dealing with Middle-Earth itself is comparatively rare in Tolkien studies, and students and scholars seeking greater insight have few resources. Similarly, although public concern for the environment is widespread and going green has never been trendier, ecocriticism is also an underserved area of literary studies. Arda Inhabited fills a gap in both areas by combining ecocritical and broader postmodern concerns with the growing appreciation for Tolkien's Middle-Earth.

Susan Jeffers looks at the way different groups and individuals in The Lord of the Rings interact with their environments. Drawing substantially on ecocritical theory, she argues that there are three main ways these groups relate to their power with, power from, and power over. Ents, Hobbits, and Elves have power with their environments. Dwarves and Men draw power from their place, interacting with the world symbolically or dialectically. Sauron, Saruman, and Orcs all stand as examples of narcissistic solipsism that attempts to exercise power over the environment. Jeffers further considers how wanderers in Middle-Earth interact with the world in light of these three categories and examines how these relationships reflect Tolkien's own moral paradigm.

Arda Inhabited demonstrates how Tolkien studies enhances ecocriticism with a fresh examination of interconnection and environment, and ecocriticism enriches Tolkien studies with new ways of reading/listening to his work.

The book is published by The Kent State University Press.

Genres: Fantasy

Audible Audio

First published September 19, 2014

About the author

Susan Jeffers received her M.A. from Abilene Christian University, where she taught first year composition and early American literature. She has also published an essay on Mormonism and the Twilight Saga, "Bella and the Choice Made in Eden" in _The Twilight Mystique: Critical Essays on the Novels and Films_. Jeffers has presented on a wide variety of topics, including nature and spirituality in the poetry of Wallace Stevens and patriarchal violence and female agency in The Canterbury Tales. She currently lives in southern Maryland with her family.

Reviews

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

My review appeared in Mythlore 34.1 (Fall/Winter 2015).

Jeffers writes that The Lord of the Rings is not primarily a war story (p. 1). But on July 25, 2016, I noticed that in Tolkien's Letters (#154), he writes that The Lord of the Rings "is a tale about a war" (p. 197). The wording here certainly places war as one of the primary themes. Furthermore, Tolkien writes at the end of The Silmarillion that when the Elves refused to give Sauron their rings, "[f]rom that time war never ceased between Sauron and the Elves" (288). Additionally, "in battle with Sauron the Third Age ended even as it had begun"—in war (303). Tolkien calls this story "the tale of the War of the Ring" (303). See also Lewis's review of LOTR in On Stories: "the whole world is going to the war; the story rings with galloping hoofs, trumpets, steel on steel," and the realism of the work comes from Tolkien's first-hand experience in war (88). Jeffers may be misreading Brooke-Rose, who calls the war a sub-plot many times (71, 77, 81, 83).

[Inkdeathinbloom · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this on two levels:

1) As a hardcore Lord of the Rings fan, I enjoy critical readings of LOTR. Arda Inhabited digs into LOTR from an environmental perspective, and it is intermittently fascinating and loving; a love letter to the forests and mountains and Ents, and an analysis on what we can take away from LOTR into our own environmental relationships. It was lovely on both an environmental level and a fandom level, like a really good Comic-con panel.

2) This is a lovely introduction to ecocriticism. I think that critical lenses are often difficult for the typical reader to get into, and this worked as a gentle primer and introduction to the topic, educating the reader on ecocriticism, environmentalism, and an awareness of environmental relationships, through the already familiar territory of LOTR.

If you're into either LOTR or environmentalism/ecocriticism, I would highly recommend.

***I listened to this on audiobook. I must warn all LOTR fans that the audiobook was surely punking us all. The narrator of the audiobook had clearly never seen or heard of LOTR before, and accordingly, they mispronounced almost everything (except somehow, the Dwarvish names- those they said with perfect inflection; Moria was said like Mariah- it was horrifying and only the tip of the iceberg).