the energy and materials needed. And these two places are not the worst. Yet on the whole, most people are not even happier for it!
Other societies in Middle-earth function differently, although mostly under the aegis of non-autocratic royalty. Each is distinct, even those among humans: the Gondorians, the Riddermark and the Men of Bree are not interchangeable. Even if we want to regard hobbits, elves, dwarves and so on as different human ‘races’ (which would be a crude simplification), none of them suggests that it is possible or even desirable for people to live as ‘fortuitously separated brethren,’ with their first loyalties to an abstract ‘humanity’ over and above their own kind and communities. Perhaps such realism too has offended some defenders of this tattered liberal shibboleth.
On the other hand, The Lord of the Rings certainly does hold out the hope that different kinds and communities can respect one another’s differences, and live at peace with each other. And none of them resembles Mordor: an utterly authoritarian state, with a slave-based economy featuring industrialized agriculture and intensive industrialism – ‘great slave-worked fields away south,’ while ‘in the northward regions were the mines and forges’ – all of which is geared towards military production for the purpose of world-wide domination. And it is noteworthy, recalling the intense cults that surrounded such men as Hitler, Stalin and Mao, even in an officially secular state, that Mordor is also an ‘evil theocracy (for Sauron is also the god of his slaves) …’
To confuse Sauron with the pre-industrial kingships of Gondor or Rohan would be absurd. As Madawc Williams remarks, ‘if one king feels morally bound to respect your existing rights while the other is planning either to enslave you or feed you to his Orcs, you’d have little trouble knowing which side you ought to be on!’ Furthermore, what is ‘The Scouring of the Shire,’ politically speaking, but an account of local resistance to fascist thuggery and forced modernization?
That leaves the ‘approval of traditional property settlements.’ Well, I doubt if Tolkien’s approval could have been taken for granted; it would probably have depended a great deal on what was proposed for the land in question. And as Jonathan Bate points out, redistributing ownership is not going to be much use if the land in question is poisoned beyond use.
As I mentioned earlier, Bate makes another important point: a distinction between love of the land and love of the fatherland. The former, which is clear both in Tolkien’s personal life and in his books, involves a fierce attachment to highly specific and local places and things. As such, it offers little foothold to the inflated emotional abstractions that are so essential to fascist nationalism. This is vividly illustrated in Sam’s saving realization, when tempted by the Ring of Power, that: ‘The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command.’
Cultural materialism not only seems to produce an inability to read, or to recognize other dimensions than power (narrowly meant) and its effects. Remarkably, even in that realm it falls down. Take nostalgia, for example. Fraser Harrison, whom I quoted earlier, agrees with Raymond Williams that ‘nostalgia recognizes no duty to history.’ He asks us to recognize, however, that:
there is another dimension to nostalgia and that it should not be dismissed as simply a self-indulgent, escapist and pernicious failing. Whereas its account of history is patently untrue, and more ideological than it would pretend, it does none the less express a truth of its own, which reflects an authentic and deeply felt emotion … Our addiction to it is surely a symptom of our failure to make a satisfactory mode of life in the present, but perhaps it can also be seen as evidence of our desire to repair and revitalize our broken relations. The pastoral fantasy nostalgia invented is after all an image of a world in which men and women feel at home with themselves, with each other and with nature, a world in which harmony reigns. It is an ideal …
Now Tolkien gives us to understand, as strongly as possible while still writing a story and not a tract, that nostalgia pure-and-simple will not suffice. In Middle-earth, it is the Elves whose nostalgia is the strongest – both in the sense of yearning for the past and attempting to maintain that past now, in places like Lothlórien and Rivendell. But the aristocratic and artistic Elves, despite their valiant resistance, plainly offer no real solution to the central problem of the Ring.
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