“In Every Wood in Every Spring There is a Different Green” : An Independent Project in Literature on The Ecocritical Dialogue and Carnivalesque Aspects of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Legendarium

Sammanfattning: Tolkien’s Middle Earth is characterised by the conflict between the forces of good, often represented as guardians of nature juxtaposed to the forces of evil, marked by a voracious edacity for a nature destroying industry. In fact, the second volume of the LotR deals with Saruman’s war against nature. Dickerson and Evans point out that “Saruman sacrifices the values of permanence or sustainability for his grand scheme of domination and ownership” (68). Yet, any previous research of this struggle has drowned out the very voice of nature which industry has sought to silence forever. This project has presented Tolkien’s Legendarium in a new, non-anthropocentric fashion, where nature and its agents, like the Ents and Hobbits possess explicit and implicit voices of dialogic ecocriticism and laughter. Against dialogue, nature, and laughter we have found Tolkien’s take on the nature of evil. Defined in Melkor, Sauron and Saruman by their monologic, ecosadist tyranny. Evil, in Middle Earth does not seek to just squash and burn culture and civilisation but to uproot every forest and dry out every single stream. Ecosadism is plagued by an eternal struggle for a single voice. A quest which Bakhtin arguments and Tolkien’s narrative show that it is impossible. Dialogue is one of fundamental sources of cognition and being, of personhood and oneness with nature while laughter is the primer of wholeness’ found in the world and the subversion of norms and rigid hierarchies. This independent project demonstrates that Professor Tolkien’s work contains ecocritical aspects beyond those of romantic pastoralism and bucolic representations of nature. Instead, through the dialogue present in the very nature of Middle Earth, between trees and Ents, animals and non-human beings and objects, Tolkien achieved a deep ecological subversion of anthropocentric perspectives in literature. This essay shows that, by unshackling his narrative from the constraints of reality, Tolkien’s work through the medium of fantasy allows us to peer through minds and eyes unlike our own. In so doing, through the representation of voices and laughter found in Fangorn, the Shire and Hobbits themselves The Lord of the Rings endows nature with a polyphonic voice independent of human imposition. Thus, achieving the most salient depiction of ecocritical agency and subjectivity, returning the reader to a world where nature is not inert or passive. Where nature is no mere source of resources but an equal in dialogue, existence and meaning as humanity. Finally, by realising Tolkien’s ecocritical dialogue and laughter, his work does not stand as a warning about the loss of an equal in nature but burns bright as a promise for humanity in a living, breathing, and responding world.