Hall 34

J.R.R. Tolkiens The Lord of the Rings:

Modernist Fantasy, Ecology, Trauma, and the Great War

Molly Hall

May 20, 2014

Masters Paper: MA English Literature

University of New Hampshire

Prof. James Krasner, First Reader

Prof. Robin Hackett, Second Reader

Literature dealing with war comprises the greater part of textual production from the ancient Greeks to the contemporary twenty-first century novel. Writing which takes nature as its primary inspiration also comprises a great many volumes in the Anglophone literary tradition, especially from the romantic writers onward into the nature writing proper of the nineteenth and twentieth century American tradition. For a century so dominated by war (World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the two Gulf Wars, and countless intrastate wars globally) and marked by unprecedented ecological change and increased public consciousness of such, the intersections of these two discourses are curiously under-examined in academia, but especially within literary scholarship.

I propose to deal with this gap in scholarship not by attempting an impossibly large study of interactions between war and nature more generally in literature, but by starting at the beginning, or at least a beginning. This paper will examine the relationship between the Great War (1914-1918) and ecology in Britain[footnoteRef:1]. Because so many have written on the Great War and modernist aesthetics, and because the modernists are not often thought of as nature-lovers per se, it might be most fruitful to look to an interbellum oeuvre which concerns itself differently with nature than the modernist writers have. I will, therefore, take as my primary text J.R.R. Tolkiens fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings (LR), because of the pervasive nature of both war and nature in the text, and also in an attempt to counterbalance the frequent examination of modernist texts to the exclusion of fantasy literature, what one might call the modernist monopoly on WWI literature. [1: My reason for choosing the word ecology rather than environment or ecosystem, is that, as will become more clear as we move forward, I hope to examine the way in which war interacts with the totality represented by the environment including all its ecosystems and the sum of the interactions within them, including the psychological interactions that evolve out of the material realities of ecology and which inform our culture and its chief production or artifact: literature. I also chose ecology because I am not referring to an ecosystem, but all ecosystems, the idea of the environment, and the relationship humans both ontologically hold and perceive themselves to occupy, within it, though these two can vary wildly. Thus, when I evoke the word ecology I am not referencing its use as a study of or system that, (OED), but rather as an ecological whole, comprised of all which exists within it, materially, metaphorically, and mentally.]

I do not chose to evoke fantasy in the face of war and nature simply because I believe the modernists have been over-done or are not good at it (in fact I could make many arguments to the contrary and others have). I chose fantasy as the lens for my investigations of how literature responded to the Great War as it intersects with ecology both because of the fantastic modes unique relationship with trauma, of which the Great War is one, and because of fantasy texts representations of nature in a distinctly different, almost opposite, fashion to modernist texts.

In her introductory justification for why we should read fantasy and modernist works together, Margaret Hiley evokes modernist poet W.H. Auden, who suggests that both modernist and fantasy writers attempt to bridge the gulf between the subjectively real [] and the objectively real (21) in response to the the loss of values and roots(31) as a result of the trauma of World War One (WWI). This breakage of frames, to borrow a phrase from trauma theorist Shoshana Felman, resulted in the breakdown of the synthesis of objective reality and subjective reality (Hiley 22). The modernist reaction was to write under the assumption that only the subjectively real could be fully known, while fantasy writers chose to conjure up a fantastic secondary world [where] the gap between subjective and objective reality no longer exists(22). In a century whose objective reality was marked by war and ecological destruction, the modernist tendency to enforce a subjective distancing from such materialities by focusing on the all-important I of subjective reality is reversed in fantasy literature, with the creation of whole worlds which lack this distance. This difference between modernist and fantasy writing on the divorce of the subjective from the objective is where my project asserts itself.

As an ecocritic with an interest in poststructuralist theories, this gap between subject and object is of tantamount importance. In our modern consciousness nature, or the environment, most often occupies the theoretical space of objective reality, while humanity remains thoroughly relegated to the subjective. How, then, according to Hileys framing of the impetus at the source of both modernist and fantasy literary traditions in the twentieth century as the trauma of WWI, has this war and its traumatic impact actualized this divorce between subjective and objective reality? From our frame of ecological inquiry, we might begin to see this divorce, moreover, as a conceptual one between humanity and ecology[footnoteRef:2]. Furthermore, I will be productive for us to ask, how might we see fantasy literature as an attempt to address this dislocation of subject from ecology in its creation of a secondary world [where] the gap between subjective and objective reality no longer exists? [2: This expands the notion of ecological impacts as well away from simply (usually human) damage to an external objective ecological entity, towards a more realistic understanding of subjective trauma as always already an ecological impact because of the embeddedness of the subject in ecology, whether they are directly aware of this or not.]

In this paper I examine how J.R.R. Tolkiens LR uses fantasy to negotiate the relationship between war and ecology in response to the trauma of WWI. I will argue that J.R.R. Tolkien uses fantasy to bear witness to the ecological nature of the subjects experience of WWI without transmitting that trauma to the reader, which, arguably, modernist writing does[footnoteRef:3]. This is based on the idea that fantasy, in positing an alternate reality which exists outside the imaginary order (in the Lacanian sense) of historical reality, enables readers to encounter the trauma of WW1 without breaking their frames of reference in a way that the hypersubjective narrative techniques which characterize modernist aesthetics cannot. In doing so, I will be reading LR as testimony to subjectivitys divorce from ecology within the dominant historical narrative. This opens up a previously unexamined form of literary witnessing to the trauma of WWI. What is at stake in this attempt to re-place subjectivity is our awareness of the ecological impacts, not simply of the historically empirical event of WWI itself, but of the ecologically displaced modern historical narrative and attendant traumatized subjectivity created by this event[footnoteRef:4]. [3: When I say that I will argue that J.R.R. Tolkien uses fantasy to bear witness to the ecological nature of the subjects experience of WWI without transmitting that trauma to the reader, which, arguably modernist writing does. I mean not that modernist writers relay the generic trauma of warfare, in any way akin to the experience which a veteran would have of PTSD, for this is not possible. What I do mean is that, as Shoshana Felman and Cathy Caruth have both revealed, that what gets passed on is the hole in our narrative, the inability to express the trauma which has occurred, the wound itself, or the acceptance of the divorce of subject from ecology in this sense, is inherited by each new generation of readers of modernist writers, is absorbed unexamined.] [4: When I speak, throughout this essay, of the modern subject, which comes about as the result of the First World War, although I refer to a cultural paradigm shift which had an effect on all subjectivity within the twentieth century and onward, it must be acknowledged that this experience is heavily mediated through the literary productions of British white males, and although they speak to something broader than their own personal war experiences, there are several groups of people for whom this transformation can be said to be felt differently, albeit still felt. Women, people living under imperialism, subjects of non-western-European nations, all emerged from this period altered with respect to the relationship between subjective and objective reality, but how this relationship was negotiated and actualized in their respective subjectivities, cannot be assumed to be identical to the process described here, although the dynamic is related, and the experience of the English subject of World War One cannot be said to be of no use in the examination of the emergence of modern subjectivity for other groups, a degree of difference and not kind would have to be traced and accounted for in any extension of my findings outside the Euro-male experience. A prime example of this would be the emergence of modern African American subjectivity, of which Houston A. Baker, Jr. states, I want to suggest that a complete expressive modernity was achieved only when the Harlem Renaissance gave way to what might be calledfollowing the practices of Anglo-American and British modernsRenaissancism, which began the project of self-determination for the modern African American subject (91). For the African American subject, then, a modern subjectivity would emerge more closely in relationship to the Harlem Renaissance, which would need to be examined alongside the narrative I have exposed here for any fruitful discussion of modern African American subjectivity to emerge.]

In viewing the dominant historical paradigm of the twentieth century as a result of our blindness to the ecological impacts[footnoteRef:5] of the Great War, I conclude (although there is not space enough to do a full study of these effects here) that one can read all subsequent ecological destruction, especially that of warfare and the military-industrial complex which characterizes the late colonial and postcolonial geopolitical and biopolitical schemas of the twentieth and twenty-first century, as the repetition compulsions of the traumatized subject who is dislocated from ecology[footnoteRef:6]. My project, therefore, challenges the modernist monopoly on WWI literature as well as disrupting the anthropocentric trend in trauma studies which threatens to become rival rather than ally to ecocritical theories in support of a sustainable turn in literary studies. [5: When I talk about ecological affects, we are not discussing, based on the definition of ecology noted in my first footnote, simply material effects of warfare on the land, although these are notable in themselves. The ecological effects of WWI on ecology are first and foremost psychological, and as a result of the interconnected and interdependent nature of ecology, the psychological, or immaterial, translates (through human actions predicated on culturally constituted identities) into material realities, wherein we find physical manifestations of our psychological divorce from ecology as a result of world war one, or the paradigm shift solidified in its crucible of blood and oil. ] [6: Because ecology is not fixed in place, influences on its conceptual constitution can be culturally defused, like a pathogen, without material barriers as such, slowing it down, and little resistance (immunity) to its reception and acceptance by a host. It is only by acknowledging the immateriality of ecology can we hope to stem the influences which it may have on material manifestations of it through such cultural forces as literature.]

The Trauma of the Great War

I will, however, begin this discussion with the simpler claim that LR is in fact a response to the trauma of WWI, something which Tolkien himself often denied, but a statement which most scholars, myself included, have seen fit to contradict. In order to establish this I will first discuss how we might conceive of the trauma of WWI, then move on to a specific explication of where I have found LR to perform such a response. Next, I will begin to build the ecological foundations of my argument as I explore the relationship between ecology and war in the text. Although a majority of my reading will focus on bellicose moments in the narrative as well as the general sense of loss hinted at throughout the text and brought to fruition in the final chapters, my journey will begin, as Frodos has, in a more pastoral setting as I begin by looking more widely at how ecology manifests in the story as a whole. Having established an idea of the ecological framework of Tolkiens secondary world of Middle Earth, we will enter the battle grounds and look at scenes of war in the text and how such depictions either subsume or integrate conceptions of ecology found elsewhere in LR. Throughout my treatment of ecology in LR I will be asking how we can conceive of the relationship between war and ecology as traumatic, how the text negotiates and seeks to represent trauma, and whom is the subject of this trauma?

Once we understand how war, ecology, and trauma relate in LR as a response to WWI, we can step back and look at this text in relation to its modernist contemporaries, in order to discern how Tolkiens negotiations of the disconnect between subjective objective reality differs substantively from other writerly responses to WWI, by focusing on how authors on both sides of the aisle translate the unique relationship between war, memory, and place, especially through use of the pastoral mode. Finally, I will close my essay by concluding that LRs uniquely fantastical form of testimony enables it to address the specific rift manifested by WWI because of its traumatic and ecological nature, a rift and a trauma which modernist writing may more clearly manifest, but to which they are less likely to respond or evoke productive readerly responses to.

This rift originates, or is brought to the fore, in the experience of the Great War, which took place largely in Europe, between 1914 and 1918, and out of which Tolkiens creation of his secondary world, Middle-earth, has grown. Before we can decipher how it is that LR responds to this experience, we must begin with the war itself, and look more widely at the literary history surrounding the early twentieth century, in order that we might better understand in what way this war is uniquely traumatic.

The Great War as a singularly traumatic event for the modern subject can be understood as a threefold affect. Firstly, the Great War was traumatic for those who lived through it. Secondly, it had a physically traumatic effect on the environment[footnoteRef:7]. And lastly, the war had a traumatic effect on the relationship between humans and ecology by virtue of the same dynamics which facilitated the individual traumas of both people and the environment, resulting in the aforementioned split between subject and object in the cultural imaginary and the individual subjectivities which it constitutes. [7: I will note that here I use this term, traumatic, under quotation because of the absence of a true subject in the entity of the environment, this term normally being reserved for individual human subjects or groups of people bound by a shared traumatic experience.]

These individual subjectivities traumatized by the Great War are primarily the surviving soldiers of the event[footnoteRef:8]. While most people can agree that war is horrifying, not all war experience qualifies as traumatic. At the turn of the twentieth century, the western world was only just beginning to be cognizant of the science of psychology. Already having published several works on the workings of the mind, Sigmund Freuds explorations of extreme disturbances of the psyche were given a fresh lens for analysis with the outbreak of WWI. Freud, in his first important text on the dynamics of trauma, published in the wake of the war, posits in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that: [8: We may also name the larger community of which these soldiers were a part (the better part of the western world) as the psychological destruction which attends participation in the war-zone bleeds into civilian life upon soldiers return, affecting their loved ones and future offspring.]

A condition has long been known and described which occurs after severe mechanical concussions . . . accidents involving risk to life; it has been given the name of traumatic neurosis. The terrible war which has just ended gave rise to a great number of illnesses of this kind, but it at least put an end to the temptation to attribute the cause of the disorder to organic lesions of the nervous system brought about by mechanical force . . . symptoms sometimes come about without the intervention of any gross mechanical force (10-11)

The traumas inflicted by this war were uniquely capable of traumatizing the subject without the intervention of any gross mechanical force in a great number. The Great War is, then, both the epistemological origin of trauma as well as the author of a number of traumas disproportionate to that previously recorded or researched by Freud.

What is it about this war that was able to enfeeble (Freud 10) a generation without any reliance on physical force? Freud identifies the main determinant in an experience of trauma as being the factor of surprise, of fright adding that Fright. . . is the name we give to the state a person gets into when he has run into danger without being prepared for it, it emphasizes the factor of surprise. I do not believe anxiety can produce a traumatic neurosis (11). Feelings of danger natural to the experience of war cannot, alone, produce a trauma for the victim, according to Freud. What must needs be present (a presence which implies an absence), is Fright or surprise. The absence implied in surprise is that of preparedness. The Great War, therefore, was uniquely traumatic because, unlike other wars, people lacked preparation for the atrocities they would participate in.

The work of Paul Fussell in his The Great War and Modern Memory gives us a better understanding of this notion of un-preparedness in the context of the soldier-authors of WWI.[footnoteRef:9] First and foremost, this lack of preparedness is the result of confidence in misplaced expectations, both by the soldiers and war strategists. Fussell explains that the British believed, all the way up the ranks, that this would be a short, decisive, and triumphant war. The most exemplary moment of dashed expectations within literary memory, Fussell points out, is the frequent reference to the horrors of the Battle of the Somme in the summer of 1916, two years into the war. Perched on a river in France, this area of the Western Front was famous for its sense of security among soldiers as its trenches were better fortified than much of the rest of the line. They thought this would be the big battle to end it all, they were well prepared (they thought) to insure victory. Arguably, the offensive failed more miserably than any in the history of war, if not more so, or more ironically so, as Fussell points out, for the expectation of victory being so undoubted, and the lack of preparation for annihilation being so absent (31). One among many similar battles, the spectacular failure and extraordinarily dense number of casualties at the Somme often represents the mise en scne of the Great War in the eyes of the soldiers who survive to write about it. [9: Because of his pointed identification of the effects of the Great War from the perspective of ground warfare, and his focus on this war as a distinctively literary war, I have chosen to employ Paul Fussells work to the exclusion of other scholars of World War One, for, in the contexts of my discussion which focuses on trauma and ecology, not much more has been said or said quite so comprehensively as Fussell has here, despite the age of the text, having been published more than 30 years hence. Because of this, discussions of WWI and race or gender, to name a few relevant discourses, are not well attended to here. For more information on these intersections, see Jay Winters Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History, Jean Garritys Step-Daughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary, Jean Gallaghers The World Wars Through the Female Gaze, and Tim Stapletons No Insignificant Part: the Rhodesia Native Regiment and the East Africa Campaign of the First World War.]

More than any one battle, however, the day-to-day conditions themselves, also a result of unpreparedness for the realities of this war, contributed to the unexpected horrors of WWI, as primarily a trench war. Fussell explains that British trenches were unlivable; they were wet, cold, smelly, and thoroughly squalid (46), because, among other reasons, they were only built to be temporary. Not prepared for a long war, British trench engineers produced what George Coppard called lousy scratch-holes (quoted in Fussell 47). Although we cannot rightly say that poor trench conditions traumatized soldiers directly, they did contribute to the overall feeling that they inhabited a war zone unlike any they could have imagined enduring as a result of these distorted expectations.

As an ironic external manifestation of the soldiers internal trauma, trench conditions highlight the dissonance within. Speaking to this dissonance, Freud writes, We describe as traumatic any excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield of the mind wherein there is no longer any possibility of preventing the mental apparatus from being flooded with large amounts of stimulus and so the problem of mastering the amounts of stimulus which have broken in and binding them . . . in the psychical sense, so that they can be disposed of arises (33-4). As is frequently demonstrated in the war memoirs and poetry of the First World War, these surroundings were constantly compared to pastoral memories of the English countryside soldiers had left behind. The ill-fortified grossness of the trenches themselves, then, became an extension of the ill-fortified protective shield of the mind, unprepared for the horrors of a protracted trench war and unable to properly process the many elements of the Great War which populated the soldiers experience with such ignoble newness.

The prominent place of the misguided planning of the Somme offensive and the poorly engineered trenches in writers efforts to express the trauma of war indicate that the strategies (planning) and technology (engineering) hold the key to what kind of newness could have found the soldiers so ill-prepared, resulting in such a singular trauma. Literary war scholar, Kate McLoughlin, says of this sense of military novelty that the world wars are phenomenologically and ontologically discontinuous with previous conflicts, whether due to their industrial scale or to the fact that modern weapons technology has fundamentally altered the locus of agency. . . . The inability to see the ghastly ruin perpetrated by ones own right arm reconfigures the experience of conflict and must necessarily inform its representation (10-11). Beginning with the Great War, technology has transformed the experience of war for its participants. This war was thoroughly an industrial war like no other before it, not a clash between civilizations so much as between man and machine.

Soldiers entering the war were trained to use artillery, barbed wire, and machine guns, but not to withstand the mental effects of bombardment. As Fussell points out, the two novelties that contributed most to the personal menace of the war [were:] Barbed wire [and] the machine gun (45). The reason for the enhanced fright at fresh war technology in WWI was, as McLoughlin explains, the dislocation of agency which such weaponry produces. You neither saw the source of the assault, nor the target of your own aggression. As is typical of trauma, this type of battle is characterized by a missed experiencemissing pieces of the story, which create the inability to bind and dispose of, the horrors of using and falling victim to industrial warfare. The war, therefore, will not be understood in traditional terms: the machine gun alone makes it so special and unexampled that it simply cant be talked about as if it were one of the conventional wars of history. Or worse, of literary history (Fussell 166).

Enhancing the traumatic effects of the advent of industrialized war was the new bent of military strategy as well as the unintended results of its failures. Although military historian Carter Malkasian has come to us with a defense of the effectiveness of strategies of Attrition more generally, his discussion of its place as the definitive result of military planning in the Great War makes no mistake about its ineffectiveness and costliness. The term war of attrition, he writes, usually conjures up images of futile and bloody slogging matches, epitomized by the Western Front of the First World War, but, this image of attrition is misleading. In reality, attrition has been effective in warfare and has not usually involved bloody slogging matches. . . . Many historians have made the important observation that most attempts to achieve a decisive victory actually resulted in protracted wars of attrition, but when well applied Attrition is a gradual and piecemeal process of destroying the enemys military capability (1). The resulting atmosphere of attrition in the theaters of the Western Front was a result, not, he has identified, of a purposeful strategy of gradually and piecemeal destroying the enemys military capability, but, as Fussell, McLoughlin, and others have also confirmed, the reality of an ill-prepared-for decisive battle, which did not fully account for the force and nature of new technology, becoming, as a result, a protracted [war] of attrition[footnoteRef:10]. The reason, which I will discuss in more detail later in the context of LR, for the extraordinary horror of attrition and the failures of decisive battle on the Western Front, is, in addition to the limited knowledge of how new technologies play out on the battlefield, also, the unprecedented combination of attrition with the engagement in total war rather than in the context of limited aims, such as a single battle (Malkasian 13-14, 29). [10: This is with the important exception of the German command in the Battle of Verdun, wherein Falkenhayns intentionally evoked the strategy of attrition, desiring to bleed France white as compared to the Somme and other offensives which were planned as short decisive battles and turned into long drawn out exercises in attrition (Malkasian 33-36). ]

Because of the conflagration of machine guns, artillery, barbed wire, attrition, and total warwhich, as a rule, have become the trade-marks of modern war and the military-industrial complex at work in inter-and-intra-state conflicts, the soldier in the Great War was vastly underprepared for this new type of offensive and was subjected to interminable periods of sustained fright resulting in the trauma which oozes from the literature of the period. Rather than highly strategized battle on fields full of hand-to-hand combat, where soldiers at least feel a degree of control over their experience, the Great War was instead characterized by the scene Fussell describes: In the three lines of trenches the main business of the soldier was to exercise self-control while being shelled (48). There is no time for processing. This war not a matter of defense or offense in any traditional sense, but merely survival. Beginning with the Great War, the experience of modern war is described by McLoughlin as follows: In the arrhythmia of war, periods of monotonous waiting are punctuated by bursts of intensive action. . . . A corpse, or body part, is happened upon suddenly. There are vivid, split-second events. All these phenomena are accentuated in the hypervigilance typical of those under fire (71). She goes on to say that The effect is what Freud . . . called Schreck (fright) . . . and the most likely result is traumatic neuroses (71). The very nature of industrial trench warfare, then, is traumatic, and these new technologies and strategies point to what is uniquely traumatic about this war.

But what, you might ask, does this have to do, specifically, with our literary response to the Great War? The absence of preparation and the novelty of industrialized total wars of attrition produce a problem of incommunicability for those attempting to process their experience and for a culture trying to work through the trauma of this historical event. It is this which Fussell most pointedly addresses throughout his study of this literary war, as he terms it. He describes, thusly, the challenges of writing the war, explaining,

The problem for the writer trying to describe elements of the Great War was its utter incredibility, and thus its incommunicability in its own terms. [Modernist writing is] a series of attempts to evolve a response that would have some degree or adequacy to the unparalleled situation in which the writers were involved. Unprecedented meaning thus had to find precedent motifs and images . . . The new type of meaning [which these writers attempt to create] is that of the new industrialized mass trench warfare. (150)

Because of the lack of precedent in the minds of soldiers and in the cultural memory of Britain, writing war became a task of overcoming incredibility and incommunicability, a notion which Charles Carrington called, a secret that can never be communicated to the home front, the world at large, and generations to come (quoted in Fussell 124). Fussell goes on to declare that even if those at home had wanted to know the realities of war, they could not have without experiencing them: its conditions were too novel, its industrialized ghastliness too unprecedented. The war would simply have been unbelievable (95).

The war represented a triumph of modern industrialism, materialism, and mechanism, and the myth-making tendencies of war authors were an attempt to make sense of an inexpressible terror long and inexplicably endured (Fussell 124). This idea of industrial war as signifier for triumph of the modern which is defined in terms of the dominance of the inhuman ideologies: industrialism, materialism, and mechanism brings us to the cultural narrative which belies the illusion of preparation for the unprecedented. The collision between the events and the language available . . . was one between events and the public language used for over a century to celebrate the idea of progress, expounds Fussell, The difficulty was in admitting that the war had been made by men and was being continued ad infinitum by them. . . . Language [then] seems to falsify physical life and to betray those who have experienced it absolutelythe dead (184). The dominant narrative of progress in the West, which led Britain into the Great War and equipped it with the aforementioned technology and strategies, does not provide an adequate frame of reference, therefore, for the events which it produced.

Speaking of the world before the war, scholar A.J.P. Taylor states, that was a different world. The certainties were intact. Britain had not known a major war for a century, and on the Continent . . . there had been no war between the Great Powers since 1871. No man in the prime of his life knew what war was like. All imagined that it would be an affair of great marches and great battles, quickly decided (quoted in Fussell 21). With no frame of reference for the events they would undergo, soldiers and civilians alike could not but be traumatized by a memory of war which can neither be bound and disposed of, nor integrated into historical and personal narratives of memory. In Shoshana Felman and Dori Laubs keystone text on trauma and literature, Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, Laub explains that, While historical evidence to the event which constitutes the trauma may be abundant and documents in vast supply, the traumaas a known event and not simply as an overwhelming shockhas not been truly witnessed yet, not been taken cognizance of (57). Just as there are many historical records of the Great War, the profusion of literature which it rendered, and the struggle of those authoring the war to compel language to tell what it cannot because it lacks a point of reference, identifies for us the trauma of World War One. Literature which attempts to testify to this trauma, as both fantasy and modernist writers of the early twentieth century have, must find a way to communicate events in excess of our frames of reference (Felman 5).

As much as the event of the Great War was in excess of our frames of reference, traumatizing its human participants, this war also ushered in the advent of new levels of environmental destruction, both materially and ideologically. We can divide the ecological effects of the Great War, again, into three (albeit connected) paths: literal damage to ecosystems in Europe, the creation of a rhetoric used to justify other ecocidal practices, and lastly, the fueling of chemical production used to further the war on nature as well as to increase the horror of human wars to come.[footnoteRef:11] [11: There is also an argument to be made for the effects of industrialized war on our animal agricultural practices (factory farming and processed food production and dissemination), and a good one at that, but one for which I havent the space to do it justice. A good starting place for research into this area would be Carol Adams Sexual Politics of Meat and Charles Pattersons Eternal Treblinka. ]

In his book, Ecology of War & Peace: Counting Costs of Conflict, Tom Hastings defines ecology simply as the relationships between organisms and their environment (xx). The most obvious effect on these relationships in a trench war begins with the residual scars of the terrain itself. As Hastings says, There is always ecological damage from war, even if limited to a transmogrification of green fields to mud fields (45). The land, especially in France and Belgium, absorbed enormous amounts of widely incidental devastation of agricultural and forest lands (Westing 17). Arthur Westings Warfare in a Fragile World: Military Impact on the Human Environment elaborates, as he writes, the worst experienced by any European nation . . . During World War I . . . the battle areas and occupied zones of France are estimated to have . . . some 200 thousand hectares [deforested]. Moreover, an additional 100 thousand hectares of agricultural lands were so devastated; the ecological effects of this are amplified by the lack of recovery time between this and the Second World War, wherein they were equally damaged (52-3). Furthermore, Westing identifies the disruption by war of agricultural and wild lands, and thus of the ecosystems these regions support. The weapons and other means available to the armed forces of today are increasingly capable of disrupting these natural and semi-natural habitats (3). Due to the new accoutrement of industrial modern war, not only is a fixed area affected, but this destruction, by virtue of the nature of ecology and the relationships which constitute it, reverberates throughout the ecosystems of Europe (and the world). For example, having much of its habitat destroyed, like many other indigenous species which maintain a balanced biosphere, wildlife also suffered vigorously, including the near extinction of the European buffalo as a direct result of the war (Westing 56-8).

More than landscape alteration, reduced access to food supply for human beings, and attendant species depletion, common ecological impacts of war in the twentieth century include unexploded landmines, bombing [which] leaves toxic craters, and the troops [which] carry disease (Hastings 40). This military technology and the humans which deploy and suffer it, lead us to a key ecological outcome of the Great War: the large scale employment of chemical warfare agents (Westing 17). In addition to piling up the casualties (which as a rule are technically part of the ecological impact if the First World War for we as humans are not removed from the ecosystems of which we are a part, despite the distortions of the cultural imaginary caused by this war) and the seeping into the land, atmosphere, and water tables of these chemicalssuch as mustard gasturning the geography of the Western Front into the wastelands of T.S. Eliots great modernist creation, chemical warfare, conceived in its modern form in and for the Great War, had other more indirect and far reaching effects on ecology.

The development and proliferation of chemical warfare in the theaters of the Western Front contributed to a rhetoric of war which was appropriated by the chemical manufacturing industry to promulgate a war against nature, or that part of nature we call pests (fungi, bugs, weeds, and small animals). In Edmund Russells War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring, the environmental historian discovers that The scale of killing in Europe supplied a ready-made comparison for the scale of insect threat producing statements such as a desire for the outcome of the war to the finish between Man and Arthropod for mastery of the planet, and Along with conveying the scale of the insect menace, comparisons to the European War expressed the scale on which people might respond. Nothing less than extermination of insect enemies . . . would protect humanity (22). The fact that Russell begins the chronology of his study of war and nature with the First World War is illustrative in and of itself, but it is clear that the rhetoric of total war as it is entangled in industrial warfare (including chemical weapons) begins to aggressively repackage the publics perception of their relationship to nature, not as ecological and connective, but as oppositional and divisive. The industrialization of war in Europe, Russell declares, hastened the industrialization of pest control in the United States (36). In this way, the ecological damage of pesticide use in America and on an increasingly global scale can be traced to the First World War, its practices, and rhetoric. Part of the trauma of the Great War, then, in addition to peoples lack of preparation and incommunicability for and of a total industrial war of attrition, is the ecological devastation which reduced the viability of global ecosystems, and created effects which have lasted (repeated themselves?) well into the twenty-first century.

In the investigation of what makes the Great War traumatic for both humans and the environment, we must lastly and most importantly consider, in what way the traumas of the earth and its people are entangled as mutual survivors of this war. The result which most thoroughly implicated both humans and environment is the rift in the consciousness of modern subjects between the realities of the internal subject and external object intensified if not catalyzed by the Great War which causes both trauma for the person and the culture, manifesting a distorted view of ecology. This distorted perspective, then, enables us to do greater ecological harm because of our perceived disjunction from it. The aforementioned split can be read in the work of modernist writers of the war as well as the scholarship which addresses it.

In explorations of all war writing, we find that the subject in the war-zone cannot be thoroughly disentangled from ecology, as their texts are necessarily embedded in place. The challenge for war writing, Kate McLoughlin explicates, is to convey this charged space, to communicate the complex situationpart psycho-physiological, part geographicalthat is conflict (84). The textual mise en scne of war, then, is inextricably tied to the material environment in which the writer-survivor experienced the trauma of war. Fussell draws our attention to the fact that, To be in the trenches was to experience an unreal, unforgettable enclosure and constraint, as well as a sense of being unoriented and lost. One saw two things only: the walls of and unlocalized, undifferentiated earth and the sky above (54). In this statement, the unreal-ity, unforgettable enclosure, and experience of disorientation and lost-ness which writers of the Great War struggle to express is linked to an unlocalized, undifferentiated earth. In coming to experience the environment as undifferentiated sameness and to lose a sense of place, these writers express a collapsing of complex ecological surroundings into an objectified other, disconnected from the experience of the self. Starkly distanced from the detailed pastoral descriptions of the English countryside, the British soldiers experience of place as ecological often becomes as inaccessible through the trauma of World War One as his experience of the Western Front is from the home front.

The land of the battlefield itself reflects a similar connection between the ecological effects of war and the correlated human trauma. Paul Fussell explains that the land itself still extrudes remnants of the war as he writes his book over fifty years later (75). Metallic refuse from the front resurfaces out of what has now otherwise seemingly been reformed into a bucolic landscape (Fussell 76). Similarly, we see Hastings posit how farmers in France continue to be blown apart by mines laid there long ago as an ecological effect of the war (40). This continued disruption of the ability of people to cultivate the land is construed as a rupture in one of the relationships between organisms and their environment. And this rupture is, here, described as an extension of the trauma of the Great War and of ecology. Additionally, Russell foregrounds peoples growing realization during the war that private interests, with millions of dollars invested in [chemical and firearms manufacturing] plants, now have to urge constantly increasing military and naval expenditures so that their profits may continue, from which the public surmises that a war ring linked the army, navy, and industrial interests, coming to the conclusion that in the private profits accruing from the great arms factories a powerful hindrance to the abolition of war existed (33). In this passage we can see that the same industrial and economic dynamics which prolong the human trauma of the war also support the growth of an industry which exists to wage a chemical and industrial war on the environment.

More than simply co-victims of the same historical locus of trauma, human subjects and the objective environment suffer the trauma of separation from themselves/each other, which was hinted at in Fussells diction of undifferentiated earth. Fussell explains that the writer-survivors of the war perceive[d] things as regrettably disjointed if not actively opposed and polarized (115). This division is most obvious in the real and metaphorical division of landscape (Fussell 86-7). The post-traumatic subject of the Great War, then, is constituted by a world view which is essentially dichotomous, from allies and enemy, to pastoral nature before the war and ecological wasteland after. Furthermore, Great War poet Max Plowman noted the change between Victorian and modern conceptions of nature among soldiers, writing: [in Ruskins day] the upper and more glorious half of Natures pageant [the sky] goes unseen by the majority of people . . . the trenches have altered that. Shutting off the landscape, they compel us to observe the sky; and when it is a canopy of blue . . . and when the earth below is a shell-stricken waste, one looks up with delight, recalling perhaps the days when, as a small boy, one lay on the garden lawn at home counting the clouds as they passed (italics mine, quoted in Fussell 58). Although one way to interpret the division of the landscape, as Fussell mentions, would be between French or Belgian and German land, Plowmans comments on the Shutting off of the landscape indicate a deeper division. Trench warfare, where the earth below is a shell-stricken waste causes this foreclosure of connection between subject and place, and, in replacing it with a repositioning of the subject upwards and backwards in space and time, away from the ecological reality of our grounded-ness in this particular material and ecological place, and towards a rewriting of memories of home, where it is unlikely a little boy would have been as singularly fixated on the clouds as he would be his eye-level surrounding habitat: trees, earth, animals, etc. This Shutting off of the landscape can be read as a manifestation of the disjointed and polarized consciousness forming in the modern subject resulting from the war.

Continuing to discuss the mindset of the soldier as a result of the experience of the war, Fussell identifies in Plowmans words the core dynamic of this division and Shutting off. Fussell adds that those who passed through the estranging remoteness of battle were not broken, but reborn echoing a common rhetoric of Conversion in literature of the Great War (Plowman quoted in Fussell 123). The conversion resulting from the Great War is this division and Shutting off of the material environment, wherein those who lived through the war, the next generation of English, were not broken, but reborn. What is meant by this reborn but not broken self is that the trauma is not simply an experience of the personal (broken) self, but an externally refashioned (reborn) self. The reborn self is a self that is disconnected from ecology (shut off from the landscape). The trauma of the post-world-war-one-subjectivity is not just the lack of preparations and incommunicability of the horrors of that particular war, but also the "rebirth" out of ecology into the fantasy frame of an ontologically individuated subjectivity.

This disconnect is not simply pursuant to the literal survivors of the war and their close relatives, but, as the title of Fussells book suggests, the effects of the Great War stamp the very nature of modern memory, from 1914 to the twenty-first century. As Fussell states, people conceive[d] quite seriously that the war would become the permanent condition of mankind. The stalemate and attrition would go on indefinitely, becoming, like the telephone and the internal combustion engine, a part of the accepted atmosphere of the modern experience (77). Although that war did not in fact become a part of the modern experience, modern warfare did, as did the psycho-cultural effects of the Great War. The way modern war as modern experience is positioned is also telling. He uses the phrase stalemate and attrition to describe the endless condition of modern life, constructing an image of life as stasis and death. This view of nature or the state of things is anathema to ecology, which in reality is comprised of constant change and new life. Fussell continues, Prolonged trench warfare . . . establishes a model of political, social, artistic, and psychological polarization . . . whether enacted or remembered . . . which I take to be the primary mode in modern writing (83), explaining, What we can call gross dichotomizing is a persisting imaginative habit of modern times, traceable, it would seem, to the actualities of the Great War (82). The conditions of the war and their attendant traumatization, not only of individuals, but also of popular memory and subjectivity, are productive of a psychologically polarized mode of modern writing and of a general habit of modern times, meaning that the trauma of World War One reshaped the way we see the relationship between subject and object, and consequently, between subject and ecology.

The experience of the Great War, external to our present historical moment, can no longer be perceived simply as such. We must admit its effect on our personal and contemporary mental landscape. In describing a dream of being shelled from the sky by an unknown enemy, C. G. Jung writes, the war, which in the outer world had taken place some years before, was not yet over, but was continuing to be fought within the psyche (quoted in Fussell 122). The war persists in the mind in a way which defies both time and space. Clarifying this, Fussell concludes his study by commenting, The war that was called Great invades the mind.and that war detaches itself from its normal location in chronology and its accepted set of causes and effects to become Great in another senseall-encompassing, all-pervading, both internal and external at once, the essential condition of consciousness in the twentieth century (italics mine, 348).

Tolkiens Response to the Great War

Now that we have thoroughly come to understand what was traumatic about the Great War and how ecology and subjectivity are conjoined, ironically, in this traumatic experience through a psychical split between subject and object and the resultant division of the subject from ecology in the mind of the modern subject and text, let us turn to Tolkien, our true object of study, and see how he responds to this war, and the complex nature of its entanglement in ecology, through The Lord of the Rings.

Our discussion thus far of the trauma of the Great War, for both humans and ecology, has centered mainly on the battlefield. Our journey into LR will do no different. The Barrow Downs, Helms Deep, Isengard, the Dead Marshes, Minas Tirith, Minas Morgul, and even in a smaller way, Mount Doom; each of these places is marked within the text as a battle ground, among countless others alluded to through songs and myths of the earlier ages. Not all are true battlefields of the War of the Ring being addressed most directly by the plot of this narrative. However, all of these spaces of war, I will later argue, are in fact responses to the condition brought about by World War One, though in the text they may reference battles separated by hundreds if not thousands of years from each other.

War is always shaped by the land or sea on, above, or below which it is fought. Tolkien scholar Paul M. Lloyd corroborates this when he quotes military strategist J.C. Wylie, who writes, [the soldiers] conception of the strategic scene is brought about primarily by the matter of geography. Prominent and direct in its effect is the fundamental fact of terrain. . . . to the soldier it is everything. It is the fixed field within which he operates. It is the limitation within which he must function (4, fn. 8), in reference to Saurons responses to the definite possibilities of action imposed by the geography of Middle-earth (4). What is often not considered, however, are the ways in which war shapes the place in return. During the Great War, the second half of this equation was oft ignored, excepted when expressed in anthropocentric terms by the war writers, mourning their lost pastoral ideal. Within Tolkiens response, there is room for noticing, and space for acknowledgement.

LR is not so simply an allegory for the Great War, but an attempt to renegotiate the mental landscape left in its wake. As Tolkien scholar Martin Simonson has said, Tolkien was not aiming at writing an allegory on the 20th century, but rather at constructing a tale with many layers of significance, providing it with a broad scope of applicability. He was, of course, conscious of the transitory spirit of the period, and of the cultural despair following the wake of the Great War (italics mine, 164). Applicability is the word oft used, by Tolkien himself, as well as his more nuanced scholars, rather than allegory. Allegory roots itself in the specificity too often of time and space. For Tolkien, LR is meant to respond to the transitory spirit of the period, and of the cultural despair after the war; this transition is the selfsame Conversion of modernist literary identification of a generation reborn and not broken; and this cultural despair is the sense of disorientation felt by a culture unmoored from the stable world of Victorian ideology, whose notions of progress had led them not to a gilded city of utopia, but into a crucible of death and disjunction.

In his response to the post-war cultural rupture, John Ellison has noted, Tolkiens fantastic work of fiction accurately illustrates its relationship to real, contemporary events . . . As everywhere else, the relationship is not seen, not in any resemblance between the fictional events, and those that had taken place, at the time they were set down, but in the associated imagery (18), and the message it carries is as realist as the most intentionally realistic fiction. Fantasy is simply the continuance of a realistic narrative by other means (20). In this sense, the fantastic nature of LR in no way excludes it from being a valid respondent to the trauma of the war as its modernist contemporaries have been.

As we have seen, the Great War has traumatized human subjects directly through the generation of youths that served on the battle front, but everyone in Britain knew someone who had been to the front, and, in the end, all were touched by this historical trauma. For Tolkiens part, he entered the war in 1916 and was immediately sent to the Somme on the eve of that great battle. This was his primary experience of WWI, and it has greatly shaped the form of his response in LR. Many have identified the chapter, The Passage of the Dead Marshes, as his representation of the Somme, but, we will do well to remind ourselves that the text of LR is not meant to be allegory, but rather applicability and associated imagery. We can see, therefore, echoes of the Somme throughout the epic. In the section on the Battle of Helms Deep, I argue, we find even more striking responses to the war and what was traumatic about the Somme in particular for those involved. The central factors concerning traumatized subjectivity from the war being a lack of preparation (materially and mentally), and the inability to communicate the horrors that transpired, we must first look at Tolkiens response to this lack of preparation on and for the front, from which place we can then decide how LR deals with this incommunicability.

The lack of preparation due to the newness of the wars strategy and technology is manifested mainly in Tolkiens characterization of attrition within total war throughout the story. In his early historical analysis of LR as a text lending itself heavily to military analysis, Paul Lloyd breaks down the strategies of Sauron and his forces, versus the Fellowships network of combatants. He writes of Sauron and his minion Saruman, their choice of objectives in their first large-scale assault [is] least effective [and] most costly [being] a direct frontal assault on the opponents strongest position [he never] gives any thought to the dangerous possibilities of his actions, but thinks that massive force alone is sufficient to attain his ends (5-6). Lloyd speaks here of all the battles in the book, particularly of interest to us, however, is the implication for Helms deep. This massive force as strategy which results in ineffective and costly outcomes in terms of casualties, is the strategy of attrition in the context of total war. Lloyd goes on to say, Sauron does not think as a good strategist. Having such large numbers of troops available, he presses the assault, heedless of the cost (6), which is to say that a proliferation of manpower leads to strategies founded on the cheapness of human life. In a note on this notion, Lloyd references twentieth century war strategist and veteran, Liddell Hart, who declares, It is curious how the possession of a blank cheque on the bank of man-power had so analogous an effect in 1807-14 and 1914-18 (6, 18). In the forces of the Dark Lord (Sauron), and his quest for world-domination throughout the tale, Tolkien has constructed most pointedly, a careful criticism of the strategy of attrition within total war, rather than an analogy painting the allied or German armies as good or evil. In focusing his response as such, he reinforces the notion that attrition and new technology are central to the trauma of WWI.

In the lead up to the battle of Helms Deep there are a great number of references to the numerical greatness of Sarumans armies indicating his commitment to a strategy of attrition. Although they are outnumbered by the Orcs and Wild men, the Rohirrim[footnoteRef:12] will also in their own way be adopting the same strategy. Gandalf and Aragorn have convinced Thoden to relinquish the hold of Wormtongue, a minion of Saruman, on his kingship and ride out to Sarumans stronghold in Isengard to fight the inevitable battle for Rohans freedom from Saurons forces. King Thoden orders that: Every man that can ride should be sent west at once (518), and Let them summon all who dwells nigh! Every man and strong lad able to bear arms (519). This war, as characterized by the repetition of the absolute term every and designation of all in the gathering of soldiers, mirrors the unmitigated conscription practices of attrition within total war, which, at the midway point of WWI, allied forces underwent as the unprecedented causalities of that day in July and those many months of continued battle pressed on. Unfortunately, just as the German strategy of attrition had bled France white at Verdun just before the Somme offensive, reducing their personnel contribution and increasing the need for British manpower, so too do the Fellowship forces go into Helms Deep already depleted and combating a strategy of total annihilation. [12: Within LR the Kingdom of Rohan and its people have many names. The Kingdom itself also being called the Riddermark and the Mark. The people (horsemen by trade) of Rohan are variously called: Rohirrim, the Riders, and Riders of the Mark. Although the people referred to are often specifically the kingdom guard, not the general population per se. This proliferation of locutions is typical of Tolkiens philological realism, if you will. Helms Deep is also in Rohan.]

Throughout the lead up to the battle again, we witness the judgment from several characters that they do not have enough men to combat Sarumans efforts at attrition. As they approach the river Isen outside Isengard, a rider comes from a previous battle there and tells Thodens host: You come at last, but too late, and with too little strength . . . We were driven back yesterday over Isen with great loss; many perished at the crossing. Then at night fresh forces came over the river against our camp. All Isengard must be emptied . . . We were over-mastered (527). Here we see they are too little strength and we hear about another battle on a river with great loss wherein the multiplicity of enemy forces over-master[s] Thodens men. Furthermore, Thoden is told that the host that comes from the North . . . is very great . . . I do not doubt that the main strength of the enemy is many times as great as all that we have here (529), from which Thoden, choosing to ride to Helms Deep instead of Isengard, concludes, Nay, we are too few to defend the Dike . . . [but we] must stand [says his heir, Eomer] if we are pressed (530). The point we must derive from this repetition of inferior numbers, is their choice to go to Helms Deep in response. Although exactly how out-numbered they are still eludes Rohan, they choose a more defensible position for their battle, rather than the open battle on the river, which they have already seen will be devastating.

The difference between the Somme and Helms Deep is primarily the knowledge of the attrition about to be thrust upon them, and the ability, therefore to adjust other strategic elements even within the total war military apparatus. The arrangement at Helms Deep, however, still resembles the conditions of the Somme in many ways. Concerning Rohans personnel arrangement Tolkien explains, on the Deeping Wall and its tower, and behind it, Eomer arrayed most of the strength that he had (531). Similar to the Somme offensive, the man-power is front-loaded within the battle strategy and the geography of the battleground. Although Rohan does not orchestrate the artillery barrage which began the Battle of the Somme, it does expend its largest proportion of man-power on the front line, and the initial hours, therefore, of the battle.

Even the defensive layout of the Deep itself resembles the sense of extra safety, which soldiers felt the Somme provided by contrast to Ypres or Verdun for example. Tolkien writes, There upon [the rocks surrounding Helms Gates] stood high walls of ancient stone, and within them was a lofty tower. . . . A wall, too, the men of old had made from Hornburg to the southern cliff, barring entrance to the gorge . . . There in the Hornburg at Helms Gate Erkenbrand, master of Westfold on the borders of the Mark, now dwelt. As days darkened with threat of war, being wise, he had repaired the wall and made the fastness strong (528-9). Three layers of protection this location provides, making it both Rohans only leverage ever the attrition brought by Saruman, as well as the constructor of a false sense of hope and safety that the Deep has prepared them for victory.

Once the battle commences, the fellowship fighters are accosted by armies beyond number sent only to destroy them. The Orcs and men of Saruman are described not as a proliferation of individual soldiers, but as: boiling and crawling with black shapes . . . Hundreds and hundreds more were pouring over the Dike and through the breach. The dark tide flowed up the walls from cliff to cliff (532). Their numbers are too great for expression, incomprehensible in form, and so Tolkien represents them as animalized and naturalized forces, shapes and tide of indefinite number, expressed only as Hundreds and hundreds. As Sarumans host meets the Deeping wall, They wavered, broke, and fled back; and then charged again, broke and charged again; and each time, like the incoming sea, they halted at a higher point . . . If any man fell . . . two others sprang to take his place (533). Once again, the enemy is an ocean of force not a certain number of soldiers, endlessly bashing the wall, never needing rest or reinforcement because of their great numbers. More than countless, they seem almost to defy the laws of the physical world, and to multiply, one being replaced in each death by two others. As the battle continues, so does the multiplication of the enemy host. In his evocation of the Orc army through maritime metaphors, we recall two other important moments in which great bodies of water come to bear. These are the ocean to the west of Middle-earth, from which all ring-bearers depart in the final chapter of the book, and the great sea which Frodo alludes to, as the only thing which might heal the wastelands of Mordor, in a tsunami of forgetting. Both of these aquatic moments as well as the Orc as malevolent ocean play on the trope of the Oceans power to wipe out all human life, as with a biblical plague of Noahs proportions, and the space of forgetting, an embodiment of oblivion.

The orcs are here characterized with watery words in order to bring to the fore the tension in the Great War and Ring War, between a forgetting or loss of nature as home, and the emergence of nature as uncanny bringer of death. Tolkien narrates, The enemy before them seemed to have grown rather than diminished, and still more were pressing up from the valley through the breach. . . . Many were cast down in ruin, but many more replaced them (535). In this representation of a deindividuated and endlessly multiplying force, we find a residue of the fright and incomprehensibility of the use of attrition in total war.

The counterpart to the trauma of this war, as a lack of preparation for the experience of attrition within total war, is the inability to communicate this experience because of its newness. The newness goes beyond this modern form of attrition to the technology used and the location of battle. It is this condition to which LR responds. Tolkien Scholar, Rebekah Long, writes [In LR] the Great Wars violence defies the prescriptions of realism, accosting us with an arresting strangeness . . . the turn to the fantastic in twentieth-century literature is linked to the experience of modern warfare, not as avoidance . . . but as testimony to the newness of this horror . . . War informs the fantastic landscape of Tolkiens narrative; in [LR] verbal topography is unearthed, widened, and resown (125). No longer do men fight hand to hand combat with swords or even muskets and pistols as firearms, alone on an open battlefield. Instead the Great War gives modernity wars fought in trenches with no physical contact with the enemy using machine guns, artillery, and land mines. These elements of war are positioned within the text through this fantastic battle scene to be the source of the horror and trauma of the battle par excellence chiefly attributed as the feared source of their impending defeat, beyond the attrition visited upon Rohan.

Amidst the Battle, mentions of unfamiliar weaponry abound, chief among them being the fire of the Orcs. Twice Aragorn and Thoden discuss their inability to combat this new terror. [T]he Orcs, Aragorn to says to Thoden, have brought a devilry from Orthanc . . . They have a blasting fire, and with it they took the Wall (538-9). This blasting fire echoes the uncanny destruction of landmines and artillery withstood by those fighting in the Great War, and with greatest vigor at the Somme.

In addition to this new technology, the landscape of war itself is changed from those in fighters memory. Not the battle-fields of Tolkiens often identified medieval evocations, but trenches, such as those which dominate the space of WWI, find representation in the layout of Helms Deep. Gandalf has instructed Thoden to head for the Deep rather than, to the Fords of Isen, and do not tarry in the plain! (528). His instruction against rivers and plains, indicates the instinct to hold battle there, as well as the new direction of trench warfare fantastically re-envisioned by Tolkien. The Deep itself, is described as defended from within: The Deeping Wall [which] was twenty feet high, and so thick that four men could walk abreast along the top, sheltered by a parapet over which only a tall man could look . . . This battlement could be reached by stair running down from a door in the outer court of the Hornburg; three flights of steps led also up to the wall from the Deep behind (531). Although the battlement evokes medieval fortresses of old, it also hold in its imagery the constructed, rooted nature of the spaces of war. Where the Riders of the Mark were used to riding out to battle on open fields, here in the throes of total war defending themselves against attrition, they are forced into an enclosed landscape of battle, like the trenches of the Great War. Speaking to this, Thoden confesses to Aragorn: I fret in this prison . . . If I could have set a spear in rest, riding before my men upon the field, maybe I could have felt again the joy of battle, and so ended. But I serve little purpose here (539).

The threat of new weaponry, the unfamiliar space of the trench war, and the defense against attrition within total war are the three repeated themes of Tolkiens Battle of Helms Deep, in his textual response to his experience of the Somme Offensive, and the conditions of modern war beginning in 1914 more generally. This response functions, as Long rightly identifies, as testimony to the newness of this horror . . . War informs the fantastic landscape of Tolkiens narrative and in [LR] verbal topography is unearthed, widened, and resown. In general, we see Tolkiens narration of the war to be an effort to both acknowledge what placed it outside our frames of reference, while also putting back the preparation which was missing, culturally, before WWI. This is why there is so much lead up12 pagesto the battle, which is itself only 10 pages in length.

In addition, the historical battle of the Somme, is won slowly and at great cost, but its fantastic counterpart, the battle of Helms Deep lasts only two days, and is ended, not by pressing forward with morbid stubbornness in the implementation and normalization of these new horrors of war, but by reviving old battle-ways. When all hope is lost, Rohan rides out driving forth the enemy, and as they reached the Dike, they gazed down upon the Deeping-coomb. The land had changed. Where before the green dale had lain, its grassy slopes lapping the ever-mounting hills, there now a forest loomed . . . trees . . . rank on rank . . .their twisted roots were buried in the long green grass (540-1). This forest did not spring up overnight, but travelled there, to aid Rohan in defeating their common enemy, Saruman. And this strategy succeeds. Trapped between the cavalry of Rohan and the translocated forest of Fanghorn, the armies of Saruman panic and flee into death on the swords of the Rohirrim or into the forest itself, where they will be killed by the trees (542). What is unique about Tolkiens literary response to the war is that, faced with an uncanny threat, the free peoples of Middle-earth ally themselves with nature, and reject dehumanizing war tactics, rather than enduring the artillery and trenches, and shutting off the landscape or reverting to a literary mode of inverted or anti-pastoral[footnoteRef:13]. [13: Discussed at length in both Kate McLaughlins book, Authoring War, and Paul Fussells, The Great War and Modern Memory. ]

Why, our next question must be, is Saruman the common enemy of both man and tree? This brings us to next battle in our discussion of LR, and the ways in which Tolkien responds to the ecological trauma of the Great War. As identified above, the three chief ways in which we can view the Great War as traumatic to ecology are through: material alteration to ecosystems, fostering a rhetoric of nature as enemy, and expediting and normalizing industrial economies which are characteristically exploitative of the environment. One moment which most explicitly responds to this aspect of modern warfare is the events at Isengard between the Entstrees with subjectivity and agencyand Sarumans forces. I call them events and not a battle, because through happenstance, the armies had left Isengard to fight Rohan at Helms Deep when the Ents came to annihilate Orthanc, the capital, of sorts, of Isengard.

After leaving the Deep, Rohan and company must go to Isengard to eliminate the intermediary source of this incursion: Saruman. They first come to the river Isen, located on the outer perimeter of Isengards valley, and they notice an unpleasant change. The riders looked down upon the crossings, and it seemed strange to them, we read, for the Fords had ever been a place full of the rush and chatter of water upon the stones; but now they were silent. The beds of the stream were almost dry . . . What sickness has befallen the river? Many fair things Saruman has destroyed: has he devoured the springs of Isen too? So it would seem, said Gandalf (550-1). Although the war writings of the twenties and thirties acknowledge the devastation wreaked on the landscapewe often think of T.S. Eliots Wasteland herethey do so not out of mourning for the thing itself, but more often as an expression of mourning for the meaningless void into which they feel humanity, alone, has been thrust, by modernity[footnoteRef:14]. In Tolkiens fantasy-scape, the river itself is a fair thing amongst others, which has befallen a sickness, and been destroyed or devoured by Saruman, Saurons key henchman. This environmental damage is characterized as strange, and they react almost with incredulity. Dismayed with this discovery, they travel on towards Isengard only to find more ecological alterations. [14: Although there are notable detractors from this theory, most recently Judith Paltins article, An Infected Carrier of the Past: Modernist Nature as the Ground of Anti-Realism, in ISLE 20.4 (2013): 1-17, a notion which will be addressed more directly in section three. ]

Arriving at Isengard, the company discovers where Once it had been fair and green . . . It was not so now. Beneath the walls of Isengard . . . most of the valley had become a wilderness of weeds and thorns. . . . No trees grew there; but among the rank grasses could still be seen the burned and axe-hewn stumps of ancient groves. It was a sad country (553). Described not in anthropomorphizing terms, the landscape is sad and rank because of the loss of green and the stumps of ancient groves. As they draw closer, more impact on the land is revealed: The plain, too, was bored and delved. Shafts were driven deep into the ground . . . in the moonlight the ring of Isengard looked like a graveyard of unquiet dead (554). No battle threatening the life of man was fought here. The tone of devastation and imagery of wounds and burial does not represent the loss to human life, but the alteration to the landscape before them.

The source of this wounding is, they discover, the process of production which stripped the land to create the fodder of war. Tolkien writes, For the ground trembled. The shafts ran down by many slopes and spiral stairs to caverns far under; there Saruman had treasuries, store-houses, armouries, smithies, and great furnaces. Iron wheels revolved there endlessly and hammers thudded . . . plumes of vapour arose (554). Saruman had bent the ecology of Isengard to fuel his war efforts, cutting and burning trees, digging up earth, and shearing rock, to melt and mold the iron weapons of war, to create the terrifying blasting fire of Orthanc, and to feed the massive armies of Sauron. This is why the Ents call Saruman the tree-killer for he has destroyed many of them and their kin with axes and liquid fire (568), and this is also why they joined forces with Rohan to defeat Saruman.

Not only does Tolkien reassert the materiality and agency of the environment in his response to the trauma of the Great War, he also uses his narrative as a memorial to the entanglement of the human experience of trauma and the ecological traumas of the war. One place in which this is clearly illustrated, is in his description of the Dead Mashes. Rebekah Long has termed the Dead Marshes a memorial to the Great War. She explains that Tolkien was marked indelibly by the Great War; he witnessed the Battle of the Somme (128). Her reading of this part of the narrative concludes that The Dead Marshes act as a sort of war memorial, as a textual actualization of the process of memory . . . the marshes with their undead show us that deaths brutal physicality defies attempts to shape wars ruptures into confined single-thread narratives (128-9).

While I agree that the Dead Marshes can be read as a memorial to the dead but not forgotten of WWI, we must also acknowledge the peculiar and deliberate situation of this memorial as a memorial built into the land, which remembers, and through which we must remember the trauma of the Great War. The Dead Marshes are a landscape which literally embody this process, as a memorial to war, which alludes to the Great War, especially and arguably the most traumatic battle, in which Tolkien participated, the battle of the Somme. Tolkien writes, Sam tripped . . . his face was brought close to the surface of the dark mere. . . . For a moment the water below him looked like some window, glazed with grimy glass, through which he was peering. . . . he sprang back with a cry. There are dead things, dead faces in the water, he said with horror (627). The faces seen by Sam are the corpses of an ancient battle, preserved in the Marsh water, embedded in the land. In this way, Tolkien has shaped a war memorial in which the land absorbs the trauma of war, both human and ecological.

More than simply a symbolic representation of human trauma on the landscape, the Dead Marshes literally encase the dead bodies of those lost to war, re-membering those fallen soldiers in the sense of a putting back together of the body, which can be read as a symbolic representation of what LR, as more than memorial, as testimony, hopes to do, to re-place the subject into objective or material reality, into ecology. The reader soon learns from Gollum who the dead are. Gollum explains to the Hobbits, on the eve of another battle (in the historical present of the text) which will also take place again before the Gates of Mordor, There was a great battle long ago . . . They fought on the plain for days and months at the Black Gates. But the Marshes have grown since then, swallowed up the graves; always creeping, creeping (628). Not simply fallen and preserved in place, the war dead are swallowed up by the marshes, which surrounded by desolation at the hands of the powers of Mordor (whose ecological destruction is worse than Isengards), merges with the human dead, creating a lasting space of memory for their mutual trauma.

In her discussion of the Dead Marshes in LR as Tolkiens way of remembering the war, Long writes, Tolkien and his contemporaries were raised on Victorian pseudo-medieval romance and brought these dreams of war into the trenches, while the language of euphemism obscured the realities of war (131). While, as Paul Fussell adeptly accounts, most war poets and memoirists used the elements of the Victorian romance ironically alongside their dark pastoralisms, Tolkien seems to have rejected this inversion wholesale, seeing no value in using a broken mirror to reflect the present through the past. Long continues, In reaction to this euphemism, Tolkien in his fiction . . . searches for a new language of violence . . . Middle-earth . . . looks so familiar to us and speaks to us so eloquently because it was born with the modern world and marked by the same terrible birth pangs (Garth quoted in Long 131). In searching for this language of violence, in order to represent the wounds of both man and nature, Tolkien shares some of the broken imagery of the modernists, but diverges in distinct ways.

Again, we find ourselves in the company of T.S. Eliot, whose flagship poem The Wasteland is, as we would expect, rife with terminology of wastage and decay. LR, too, evokes such imagery, but not with the same hopeless desolation of Eliot, more with a sense of fantastic geographic historiography. He depicts the Dead Marshes which Sam and Frodo pass through led by Gollum on the way to Mount Doom to destroy the One Ring as:

[D]reary and wearisome. Cold clammy winter still held sway in this forsaken country. The only green was the scum of livid weed on the dark greasy surfaces of the sullen waters. Dead grasses and rotting weeds loomed up in the mists like ragged shadows of long-forgotten summers. . . . There was a deep silence, only scraped on its surfaces by the faint quiver of empty seed-plumes, and broken grass-blades trembling in small air-movements that they could not feel. (626)

We stumble into a landscape which embodies both its present ruin, and mourns its distant past. Here it is eternal winter, Tolkien evoking the long-forgotten summer, a typical reference to the last summer before the war, symbolic of an innocent ideal time before the historical rupture of the war. Everything is dead and rotting vegetation, and the only inkling of agency left in the place, is the penetration of the deep silence by the scrapings of empty seed-plumes, and broken grass-blades, as well as the scum of livid weed upon the water, each on the surface symbolic of infertility, broken life, and the invasion of a darker nature, respectively: the wastage of a generation fighting and dying in the war. The land itself seems to hold the memory of this trauma in its own embodied ruination.

But landscape as wasteland is not the only thing to be read into Tolkiens description of the Dead Marshes. With the presence of this algae on the water, the scum of livid weed, we detect a hint of life, or green as he colors it. Terming the life a weed may seem to imply it is a sort of invasive species, a biological pollutant due to the history of land use in that spot (as battlefield). Weeds, however, as has oft been noted, are a cultural locution, and not an ecological one, implying an obstacle to domestic agriculture more that an obstacle to the ecological health of a place. Indeed, in the next line, one of the plants which are mournfully described as dead or rotting, indicating they are part of some original landscape which Tolkien evokes this scene as the ruins of, are also described as weeds, putting them in tension with the more maleficent sounding weeds on the water. This algae thenrather than representing a pollutant on the land, a term which aligns itself more with notions of steady-state ecology, a theory from which contemporary ecological sciences have departed, favoring now a systems theory model, in which ecology, as closed system, can have no pollutant, for there is no outside ecology from which said pollutants could invademust be read within this systems theory model of ecology, wherein it may be a manifestation of ecological change, but cannot be termed either negative or positive, in any absolutist sense. Reading the horticultural description of the Dead Marshes landscape, alongside the characters encounter with the archaeological artifacts of battlefield dead in the marsh waters, Tolkiens memorial to the Great War inscribed in this place emerges as an outgrowth of both ecological and historical trauma. More than just a symbol, the writing of the Dead Marshes wastage is a remembering of the traumatic past of survivors of the war together with that of land itself.

Beyond this space of memory to subjective and ecological loss, is a place characterized as beyond all healing (632). Frodo describes the mournful sight for the reader. Just past the Dead Marshes lay the desolation that lay before Mordor: the lasting monument to the dark labour of its slaves that should endure when all their purposes were made void; a land defiled, diseased beyond all healingunless the Great Sea should enter in and wash it with oblivion (631-2). By positioning these two spaces next to each other Tolkien intends to construct, I believe, two visions for both our past and future as dictated by the Great War. We can occupy a space of memory where we rejoin the subjective and the ecological, split by the many disasters of the war; or, we can continue living in a world we envision as a wasteland which is beyond all healing of the split between subjectivity and ecology baring a force of nature which erases humanity all together.

Tolkien, I believe, would have us choose the former, hence his fantastic remerging of the forces of people and nature throughout the secondary world he has created in response to WWI: Middle-earth. As Long has stated, We can view [LR] not as an allegory of the Great War . . . but as a recollection of it . . . which investigates the creative work of memory in reply to the trauma of war. Fantasy, conceived in Tolkiens novel as a dialogic process of invention and remembrance, allows for a return to the war that is not documentary or allegorical in approach but memorial (Long 125-6). It is up to readers to decide what and how we are called to re-member that and this world.

Ecological Frameworks in Frodos Middle-Earth

In order to more fully grasp that which we are asked to re-member about the Great War, and its cleaving of subject and ecology which ironically fuses war and ecology in its resultant trauma and to which Tolkien directs his memorial text, we must parse out the way in which ecology manifests itself specifically in the context of war within The Lord of the Rings. It is entangled with trauma, yes, but how does LR manifest this war trauma ecologically? Ecological critics of LR have consistently taken an over-simplified stance regarding their readings of ecology in Tolkiens most famous work. I have noticed two trends in LR scholarship more generally, and especially in ecocritical scholarship on Tolkiens work, although it is not often performed by self-identified ecocritics. First, it is consistently dependent on a reading of Tolkiens legendarium[footnoteRef:15] as a whole, and his essays[footnoteRef:16], letters, interviews, lectures, and translations, and is not performed in a Barthesean[footnoteRef:17] fashiona close reading of a single text without examining outside influences. Second, those taking up the subject of nature within Tolkien do so in a way which presumes that humans lie outside of, or are separate from nature, despite their claims that Tolkiens work asks us to treat this other lovingly and judiciously. [15: This term refers to all of Tolkiens mythopoeic work on the secondary world of Middle-earth, most often the core texts of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, although you frequently see his Lost Tales references in conjunction with these main three. There are several other works by Tolkien which are drawn on, his Anglo-Saxon translations, his early poetry, and his later science fiction stories, and his childrens stories, all of which can be said to have their place in the legendarium, but less directly. ] [16: The most cited essay I have found is his On Faerie Stories, where he lays out many of his philosophies on narrative creation, including his philological perspectives, and his opinions on the nature of fantasy writing as a genre. ] [17: What I mean when I refer here to Roland Barthes, is the notion, which my scholarly efforts subscribe to, that, while history and culture are influences on a text, the individual author of a work, his or her intentions, psychology, and biography, are not directly relevant to the interpretation of a text, per se, which is to say, not that such work is not valid, (reading LR in conjunction with Tolkiens letters for example) but that it is not the same critical act as leaving the letters out, and, more importantly, it is not often (ever?) done with Tolkien, but it will be in this essay. ]

I believe we lose something of the depth more pointed readings can provide when we ignore what LR individually indicates by never providing undivided critical attention on a specific text of Tolkiens, as a specific product of a specific historical moment[footnoteRef:18]. This is something I hope to remedy here. As for the romantic, almost Victorian, notions of nature which scholars have located in Tolkiens text, I believe their dependence on the authors own intents and experiences have influenced too much their findings, especially because of the authors staunch Catholicism. The texts, I believe, point to a more complicated and original view of the human place in the natural world than Catholic mythology would lend itself to, shaped by the trauma of World War One and the resulting solidification of an ever widening divide between subject and ecology. [18: This could however be read as a performance of the ecological nature of his writing, each thing being so embedded and interdependent on the other texts, that it cannot be meaningfully isolated.]

We shall begin, then, with a look at how ecology is represented within LR as a whole, and how our view of this narrative as response to the trauma of the Great War shifts the register of nature in the text, away from that of other critics, towards a more nuanced, ecological, and historically situated understanding of the work. We will look first at the ecological framework of Middle-earth represented within LR beginning including the pastoral setting from which Frodo embarks on his journey, and which is favored for ironic employment by modernist war writers. This will be followed by an examination of both loss resulting from war at various key points in the epic, and then expand this into a look at how this imaginary of loss and war is interwoven with Tolkiens ecological framework in the novel. We will then position ourselves for the next section in which we will consider in what way this bell-eco-se story is a distinctly traumatic narrative, expanding our discussion of loss to include Frodos experience specifically, at Mount Doom and as a wounded body.

As I have explained, the dominant interpretation of nature in LR has been that humanity is other than nature. This implies that humanity exists outside of ecology, which, as I have stated, is antithetical to Tolkiens Middle-earth ecology. Lets see why. Chris Brawley has written that, For ecocritics, literature is a means of a paradigm shift, a learning of a new language which places the non-human in a central position