is meaningless except as structured by ideas; conversely, ideas have highly material effects. Revolutions – before, during and after – are saturated with myth. Nor is the political character of traditions and positions inherent and fixed for all time; look how Marxism-Leninism, supposedly ‘left-wing,’ became crudely authoritarian; or how ‘conservative’ parties today have become vehicles of sweeping radical change. Williams doesn’t even seem to realize that people do not live by factual and physical bread alone, but also by ideas, values and visions of alternatives.
It is not surprising, then, that his treatment of pastoralism terminates in mere abuse of Tolkien’s work as, absurdly, ‘half-educated’ and ‘suburban.’ Oxford professors may be many things, but they are not yet half-educated; and Tolkien actually complained to his son in 1943 that ‘the bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets. It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb.’ Nor has Williams noticed that the hobbits’ pastoralism is dominated and subverted by other themes. As Gildor said to Frodo, ‘it is not your own Shire … Others dwelt here before hobbits were; and others will dwell here again when hobbits are no more. The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out.’ As Merry too admitted, ‘It is best to love first what you are fitted to love, I suppose: you must start somewhere and have some roots, and the soil of the Shire is deep. Still there are things deeper and higher; and not a gaffer could tend his garden in what he calls peace but for them, whether he knows about them or not.’ The Lord of the Rings could thus better be seen as an extended argument that pastoralism alone is not enough – doomed, even: ‘The Shire is not a haven, and the burden of the tale is that there are no havens in a world where evil is a reality. If you think you live in one, you are probably naïve like the early Frodo, and certainly vulnerable.’
Perhaps the political problem is the richness and centrality of the natural world in Middle-earth (and not just pastoral nature). But if so, it only serves to confirm that the Left of Williams and his followers remains stuck in a modernist and economistic world-view. Had Marxist socialism accepted William Morris’s generous offer to meet halfway (as E. P. Thompson put it), this tragedy never would have happened.
Thompson himself is a good counter-example: Morris’s biographer, a passionate critic of economism and class reductionism, defender of William Blake’s mythos, and, perhaps not so coincidentally, a passionate gardener. Here, in a catalogue that would have impressed even Samwise, is Thompson’s account of his garden on his fiftieth birthday: ‘there is: rasps, strawbs, red, white and black currants, worcester berries, wineberries, gooseberries, loganberries, lettuces, radishes, asparagus, tomatoes, globe artichokes, Jerusalem artichokes, marrow, cucumber, broad beans, peas, runner beans, french beans, rhubarb, cabbage, broccoli, carrots, leeks, spring onions, celery, CORN, apples, peaches, nectarines and weeds.’
Thompson is one powerful reminder that in order to be progressive it is not helpful, let alone necessary, to adopt the po-faced dogma of materialist and rationalist modernism. George Orwell (also a gardener), is another. In ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’ (1946), he asked:
Is it wicked to take a pleasure in spring? … is it politically reprehensible, while we are all groaning, or at any rate ought to be groaning, under the shackles of the capitalist system, to point out that life is frequently more worth living because of a blackbird’s song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some other natural phenomenon which does not cost money and does not have what the editors of left-wing newspapers call a class angle?
Williams says that nostalgic ‘celebrations of a feudal or aristocratic order’ embody values that ‘spring to the defence of certain kinds of order, certain social hierarchies and moral stabilities, which have a feudal ring but a more relevant and more dangerous contemporary application … in the defence of traditional property settlements, or in the offensive against democracy in the name of blood and soil.’
Williams’ disciple and biographer Fred Inglis has made the unpleasant implications of this passage explicit in relation to Tolkien, whose ‘schmaltz-Götterdämmerung’ (he wrote) is such that ‘for once it makes sense to use that much-abused adjective, and call Tolkien a Fascist.’ He later retracted this outrageous slur only to claim the same thing of The Lord of the Rings: ‘instead of Nuremberg, Frodo’s farewell.’
So let us consider the politics (in the narrow sense) of both Tolkien and Middle-earth. Before doing so, however, I would like to point out that there is simply no Wagnerian ‘Götterdämmerung’ in The Lord of the Rings; ‘Victory neither restores an earthly Paradise nor ushers in New Jerusalem.’ In addition, Tolkien disliked Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, with which his work has often been bracketed – ‘Both rings were round,’ he once snapped, ‘and there the resemblance ceases’ – and all the more so for drawing directly on some of the same mythological material that Wagner only knew second-hand, and used to such very different ends. (Interestingly, Ragnarok was a relatively late aspect of Germano-Scandinavian mythology that never caught on in the pagan Anglo-Saxon England that so influenced Tolkien. Even then, it was, apparently, un-English in its melodrama.)
Tolkien noted in 1943 that ‘My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control, not whiskered men with bombs) – or to “unconstitutional” Monarchy.’ I have already mentioned his hostility to the state. Actually, whiskered or not, Tolkien arguably anticipated the eco-sabotage of the group Earth First!; his approval stretched to the war-time ‘dynamiting [of] factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as “patriotism,” may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.’
Some years later, Tolkien wrote:
I am not a ‘socialist’ in any sense – being averse to ‘planning’ (as must be plain) most of all because the ‘planners,’ when they acquire power, become so bad – but I would not say that we had to suffer the malice of Sharkey and his Ruffians here. Though the spirit of ‘Isengard,’ if not of Mordor, is of course always cropping up. The present design of destroying Oxford in order to accommodate motor-cars is a case. But our chief adversary is a member of a ‘Tory’ Government.
(He was referring to a narrowly-defeated proposal in 1956 to put a ‘relief road’ through Christ Church Meadow – something with a distinctly contemporary ring.)
So Tolkien himself can be classed as an anarchist, libertarian, and/or conservative – not at all in the contemporary sense of the last (which has been almost entirely taken over by neo-liberalism), but in the sense of striving to conserve what is worth saving. None of these categories can easily be assimilated to either Left or Right, which is itself usually sufficient cause to be dismissed by those who like to have these things cut and dried. In a consistently pre-modern