So here we are at the beginning of Book 5, and the pace has indeed picked up. We enter Minas Tirith, and are introduced to Denethor, and meet Beregond, and are shown with Bergil the hosts marching in to succor Minas Tirith in her hour of need, and then at the very end we see the start of that same Night in daylight that overtook Frodo and Sam on their journey to the Cross-roads in Ithilien. All in one day.
Because it is so central to this Chapter, and what follows, and because it is really the only example of a city as we would understand it that we see in Tolkien’s world, I would like to pause and consider Minas Tirith in a possible different light. It begins with what Tolkien seems to be saying about what is wrong with Minas Tirith. What we hear mostly, up to now and even in this introduction to it, is that Gondor, and therefore Minas Tirith, is “fading.” Its people are not so “high” as they were, says Faramir. Houses in Minas Tirith are empty now, where aged loremasters once desperately scanned their books and the stars in a sterile search for immortality.
However, there is another possible aspect of what is wrong with Minas Tirith. Consider this: Gimli and Legolas enter Minas Tirith after the battle, and what strikes them as wrong about it? Legolas: there is too little that is green and growing. Gimli: there is some stonework that is not so good – and remember, Gimli sees stone as being alive, and a part of Nature.
Now note that in the Appendices, we find out that Denethor’s wife sickens and dies “untimely” in Minas Tirith, away from the Nature of her childhood home. In other words, there is a reasonable case to be made that Minas Tirith the city is sick; that it transmits that sickness to its inhabitants; and that sickness consists of a lack of Nature, or of a sense of Nature being an integral part of their worlds. And whatever other problems the Rohirrim suffer from not being “high”, this does not appear to be one of them: there is a sense of “fading” in the Rohirrim from mighty ancestors, but not a sense of loss of Nature and the decay of buildings. So I would suggest that in Middle-Earth, this sickness is a thing of cities.
So if loss of Nature is a sickness of cities, what is to be done about it? Aside, of course, from the more superficial fixes: bring in more green and growing plants and trees; replace decayed buildings and structures with new, vibrantly alive ones. And here is where, I think, this becomes a question not only for Tolkien’s world, but for ours.
I am, for the last few years of my life, a “climate change guy.” To me, the essence of things is captured in that silly ad for the movie Fellowship of the Ring: “Are you scared? Not scared enough!” To me, no matter how scared you are, unless you feel in your gut at every moment the loss of 9/10ths of all your great-great-grandchildren in untimely and horrible deaths from disease and starvation, 9/10ths of all your cats, of all your dogs, of all your trees, of all your gardens, of all the wild things in Nature, no more birds, no more fish except jellyfish, in a steaming, stinking world ripped by wild gusts of destruction and with the childhood homes of more than half of us Under the Wave – what Joe Romm calls “Hell and High Water” – then, to me, you are not scared enough.
The relevance to cities is this: As noted by Jeffrey Sachs in “The Age of Sustainability”, for the first time in human history, more than 50% of humankind live in cities. And as we cope with climate change, that percentage is likely, if anything, to increase. It makes sense, when we seek to combat climate change, to minimize the impact of humans by withdrawing to cities. And it is easier and quicker to “go green” in cities, to implement solar energy and make things energy-efficient great building by great building rather than farm by farm.
But the dilemma is this: How do we create the impetus within ourselves to cope with climate change effectively when in cities Nature is simply not visible? Yes, minority communities and the outcast above all can connect natural disasters to climate change, but aside from that, it’s all “book learning” to one who does not hike in the wild, who has never seen birds in flight for the winter against a sunset sky. How do we embed Nature in the life of the city dweller so that he or she can “be the climate change” and then embed sustainability deep in his or her global culture?
So what is the answer? What is the answer in Tolkien’s world, what might it say about the answer in ours? Because, of all authors, Tolkien is one of the ones most sensitive to, most sophisticated about, Nature.
And Tolkien’s general answer to this in his world, I believe, boils down to this: “the rightful King.” Aragorn. The leader who is “high”; who through his deep history of ancestral “high” kingship and his own learning understands the deep history and the collective myth of the world. But there’s no Nature in this answer, or at least not necessarily. And so, there’s more to Aragorn than we have considered thus far.
I believe that there are two elements of Aragorn that we haven’t really considered that make him a rightful ruler of a City in Nature: that he is Elf-kin, and that he is a Ranger. He is Elven-descended, Elven-brought up, Elven-wed. His heart yearns for Minas Tirith; even more so for the fair hill and tree of Cerin Amroth. The Elven love for Nature, integration with Nature, sense of swimming in a world of Nature, is all there.
The notion of being a Ranger is trickier – although, remember, Aragorn does say to the hobbits at Isengard that he is just as much a Ranger of the North as he is Aragorn the heir of Isildur in the South. What is it about being a Ranger that speaks to being in tune with Nature? And is there an analogue in our world?
I don’t know that I have a satisfactory answer to these questions. But let me start with the differences between a hiker and a Ranger, in this world that we have seen up to now with the eyes mostly of a hiker. A hiker is oriented more to a Road, to diverging from that Road and coming back to it; a Ranger is committed to seeking out danger off the Road and going towards it. A hiker is an observer, an absorber of Nature; a Ranger is a hunter, a user of Nature. A hiker is more oriented to exploring one small part of the world at a time, deeply; a Ranger is more likely to explore a wider swathe of the world. A Ranger incorporates a hiker, and more; a Ranger is more likely to be “high” than a hobbit hiker or even a Bounder.
And these differences suggest to me a possible answer in our world. What if people in cities were trained to be, expected to be, Rangers as part of their daily lives? What if the young of cities were trained to live lightly on the Nature outside the cities, to foster sustainability there, by frequent visits? What if there was a year or two of “sustainability service” at the end of youth to live during that time entirely outside the city, for the most part in Nature? What if periodic weekend exodus for duties in Nature was expected of everyone, except for family leave after childbirth, until retirement? I can see the difficulties; but I can also see the potential.
But the key to success is that the wealthy, the powerful must also equally become Rangers; no exceptions. This would be a world more like that envisioned by L.E. Modesitt in one of his science fiction books (I can’t remember which) – a world in which the price of wealth and power must always be paid in service to ecology. And the price of the time “taken off” by the powerful in handling emergencies more poorly and keeping businesses and the economy afloat less readily must also be paid. And here we return to Aragorn.
I would diffidently suggest that the key to his rightfulness as ruler, to the justification for Kingship in any form, lies as much in Aragorn’s ability to be a Ranger as in his characteristics as a “high” leader and an appreciator of the Elven aspects of Nature. His ability to heal the sickness of Minas Tirith and then maintain that city as an integral part of a wider realm, incorporating fully the Nature outside its walls, depends on his ability to not only design the greening of Minas Tirith with a “high” viewpoint and fine-tune its details with Elven love, but also actively and proactively maintain that balance between city and outside world from now on with the knowledge and skills of a Ranger. Oh, and grow the North to a similar balance from the opposite direction with all three skills.
Never mind the question of kingship; could such a system of Rangers, possibly combined with love of Nature and “highness”, incorporated equally in our leaders, work to help combat climate change and then, if successful, create a sustainability culture? I guess, I hope that Tolkien’s ideas in this area are at least worth thinking about.
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Like You’ve Never Heard It:
- The First of a Series of Ramblings About JRR Tolkien
- Part II. Pre-Psychology Writing, Poetry, and a New Hero
- Part III. Torture, Enlightenment
- Part IV. Weather, Mushrooms, Leaders
- Part V. In the Moment, Sam the Obscure
- Part VI. Folk Songs, Master, First, Fair
- Part VII. Hiking, Curses, Noble Language
- Part VIII. The Hiker’s Extrasensory Writing
- Part IX. Torture, Elves, Endings
- Part X. Your Highness
- Part XI. Business Meetings, Dwarves
- Part XII. Horns of Wild Memory
- Part XIII. Ecstasies of the Dwarves
- Part XIV. Valaraukar, the Third Touch of God
- Part XV. Memory, Nature, Passion
- Part XVI. The Gift of Enchantment
- Part XVII. Frontier Maturity
- Part XVIII. Pity, Decisions, Endings
- Part XIX. Into the Shadow, Kings, Names, Winds
- Part XX. People of the Morning, Child Soldiers
- Part XXI. Herdsmen and High Trees
- Part XXII. The Faith of God
- Part XXIII. Theoden’s Law
- Part XXIV. Helm’s Deep, Zangra, and A Life Worthy of Song
- Part XXV. Book of Marvels, Book of Friendship
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