Green Like Him

The inspiring and enduring vision of J.R.R. Tolkien.

OUR STORYTELLING imagination may be as old as our habit of building smoky fires, and it may yet prove stronger. The modest British author J.R.R. Tolkien unleashed on the world far more than a mere thousand pages of magic rings, talking tree-beings, the no man’s land of Mordor and the gardens of the Shire. He lent imaginative power to the realization that the natural world can be altered for the worse by our actions, and it needs our defense.

For John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973), “green” first signified not a sociopolitical movement or a way of walking lightly on the Earth, but the color of the perfectly round door to the Hobbit-hole of Bilbo Baggins.

Author of two rampant bestsellers—The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–55)—Tolkien came to writing fantasy by way of philology, the loving study of words. The early work of his pen was devoted to preserving not land or species, but the languages he made up himself, or the etymologies of fine English words such as “walrus.” (That’s his research showing in several dozen Oxford English Dictionary entries under W.)

As it turned out, Tolkien’s rear-guard action against loss was not restricted to “word-hoards.” And his desire to preserve and protect the familiar must have been strengthened when he served in World War I—when he lost close friends and labored through shattered landscapes.

Tolkien worked his concerns and interests into Middle Earth, the setting of his fiction. His invented world accommodated the people to speak his languages. In it he found room for both vials of starlight and pans of rabbit stew, for enormous icky spiders—and Hobbits. Short, hairy-toed people with bottomless appreciation for food, drink, cheer, hearth and family, Hobbits live in the Shire, a territory green in the old sense and the new. (Not coincidentally, it resembles merrie olde England.) And they lend a lightness and homeyness to the operatic grandeur in which they are haplessly plunged by the War of the Ring.

The Lord of the Rings has been voted “book of the century” or “favorite book” in various polls around the world, and was named “Book of the Millennium” by Amazon.com readers in 1999. Its undying influence was boosted for the 21st century by director Peter Jackson’s movie trilogy: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002) and The Return of the King (2003). But it has attracted geeks and dreamers in immoderate numbers from the beginning.

The book’s glorious fate was sealed in the mid-1960s when it crossed from England to the United States (initially in bootlegged form) and was seized upon with glad cries by college undergraduates. Happily, their enthusiasm ran deeper than the crop of “Frodo Lives” bumper stickers, winking references to “pipeweed,” and a contagious urge to wear boots and hooded cloaks. Readers couldn’t miss the love of nature in the tale, the significant contrast between clean rivers and choked ones, between unspoiled forests and wretched expanses of trampled mud.

Nor will they whenever Tolkien’s tales are read.

—Sarah Lindsay

FOR AN EXCERPT FROM THE TWO TOWERS, SEE “STAR PAGES”.