Write a 4 page essay on 1. Many people have claimed that some form of forms of social critique are at work in the lord of the rings. Critics have considered tolkiens writing as a response to industria

Write a 4 page essay on 1. Many people have claimed that some form of forms of social critique are at work in the lord of the rings. Critics have considered tolkiens writing as a response to industrialization modern warfare, corrupt political sysytems and more. and deve.

Consequently, Tolkien’s exposure to modern warfare, industrialization and the victimization of the natural world imbued The Lord of the Rings with poignant social commentary.

Tolkien grew up in the village of Sarehole, a community not far from the industrial northern English city of Birmingham.

The Shire, the land of the Hobbits, was closely modeled on the pastoral world that informed Tolkien’s ideas about Nature and man’s relationship to the land. One of the most affecting scenes in The Lord of the Rings is the ruin of the Shire, a fertile, beloved landscape transformed by smokestacks and burned fields. Frodo, Sam, Pippin and

Merry return to a home they barely recognize, which survived the war against Sauron but couldn’t escape the deprivations of those who cared nothing about preserving the beauty of the Hobbits’ beloved homeland. who cared nothing about preserving Nature. The sight that met the Hobbits as they approached Bag End and Bagshot Row was like a nightmare vision from Tolkien’s youth, years when he watched the factories, slag heaps and cheap suburban housing of nearby Birmingham slowly overtake and ruin the tidy, green fields of Sarehole. “It was one of the saddest hours in their lives. The great chimney rose up before them. and as they drew near the old village across the Water, through rows of new mean houses along each side of the road, they saw the new mill in all its frowning and dirty ugliness: a great brick building straddling the stream, which it fouled with a steaming and stinking outflow” (Tolkien, 313).

This, then, was Tolkien’s experience: the slow death of small farms, of small woodlands and bucolic streams. In The Lord of the Rings (and The Hobbit), Tolkien visits retribution upon those who abuse Nature the way the industrial barons of Birmingham ruined his home.