Tolkien in the Twenty-First Century: The Meaning of Middle-Earth Today
“Can we recover our lost enchantment with the natural world before it turns on us?”
In Tolkien in the Twenty-First Century: The Meaning of Middle-Earth Today, Professor Nick Groom guides us through the tangled landscape of Middle-Earth, and sorts for the reader its dizzying population of shape-shifting, name-changing Hobbits, Dwarves, Elves, Trolls, Orcs, and, occasionally, Humans, into their overlapping and deliberately confusing stories. His goal in charting, in painstaking detail, Tolkien’s complex fantasy world, is to explain the meaning of Middle-Earth for those of us living today, as the book’s subtitle promises.
The promise is kept, but only after a long wearying slog through the origins, development, and composition of Tolkien’s texts and their numerous adaptations into radio, film, television, and video games. Comparisons of characters, settings, and plot lines across these various platforms form the bulk of Groom’s commentary, yielding a read that is about as compelling as a phone book. While academic specialists and fanatical devotees of Tolkien’s work will likely be dazzled by Groom’s erudition and astonishing thoroughness, the general reader unfamiliar with either Tolkien’s texts or their numerous adaptations, particularly Peter Jackson’s films of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, will struggle to reach the finish line.
Tolkien was a complicated, highly literate man who lived through the tumultuous times of the 20th century—two world wars, a Depression, and the spread of industrialization and rampant consumerism that have ravaged the natural world. His fiction can be read as an escape from that reality into a lost world of enchantment where, nevertheless, the foibles and weaknesses of human civilization are repeated and thrown into sharp relief.
The appeal of this imagined world that is both an escape and a mirror can be measured by the enormous cultural reach of Middle-Earth and its denizens through our mass media. There can be no question that Tolkien’s oeuvre is a phenomenon that has both spawned and superseded a host of imitators, including the Star Wars franchise, Dungeon and Dragons, and countless other fantasy products.
But apart from its ongoing commercial exploitation, the key question is, how does the Tolkien phenomenon apply to us today, we who have failed to properly manage a pandemic, and who have ignored scientific warnings of imminent global disaster from the burning of fossil fuels? The natural world on which we depend for survival is imperiled, and many forms of escape from our peril are in play: denial, defeat, correction, adaptation. The chaos of our response was anticipated by Tolkien in his depiction of Middle-Earth (the place between heaven and hell).
Immersed in the medieval past, he saw our present and our potential future. In claiming Tolkien’s current relevance, Groom quotes from the critic Patrick Curry: “The Lord of the Rings ‘imaginatively re-connects its unprejudiced readers with a world that is still enchanted, that is, a world in which nature—including, but also greatly exceeding, humanity—is still mysterious, intelligent, inexhaustible, ensouled.’ This is a sentient world in which humanity and Human perspectives are only a part, and which also looks forward to focusing on the non-Human.”
Can we recover our lost enchantment with the natural world before it turns on us? According to Groom, failure was the hallmark of Tolkien’s tales. Mankind could avoid defeat, but it could not avoid failure. Will we prove him right?