Vision, Nature, and Goodness in Tolkien and Elsewhere

There have been a handful of moments in my brief life in which I am truly astonished by nature. Living in Colorado, it is quite easy to maintain a continuous relationship with the outdoors. Going backpacking or camping, hiking or climbing are the regular activities of my friends and family here. In many ways, living right next to the mountains is a gift. Most of the time when I am outside, I am simply outside. But, as I mentioned, sometimes it is truly astonishing.

When I think about those moments, I think usually of great vistas viewed from the top of a mountain, or magnificent skies. But also, what comes to mind are the smaller moments that I have always loved: finding a nice alcove of trees to camp in, the way small bugs and gnats flitter in the sunlight at the end of the day, a lovely river to put one’s feet in. Always, however, I notice that moments of deep appreciation for nature usually have to do with a view, an aesthetic. It is true that there is a lot that goes into that aesthetic: I can also smell the trees and hear the river, and my body had to climb or walk a great deal sometimes to get to those moments. But they all seem to culminate in sight, in vision.

It is perhaps no surprise, then, that we sometimes call the great people of this world visionaries — for they see something beyond that which the rest of us sees. Their visual horizon is larger, more comprehensive.

I asked a friend who moved to Colorado from New York City what the most significant difference was. He said that, in NYC, you simply don’t get the kind of great wide-open skies that you get in the West on a daily basis. Some may hate that wideness or be indifferent to it — but at least for my friend, it was chiefly the visual field that mattered most when comparing the two very different places. This wideness of the West, indeed, is the subject of a great many paintings of Western artists and Western films.

A Terrible Gaze

Tolkien, too, is very concerned with vision and its significance for our relationship with nature. Indeed, the spouse of the chief Valar Manwë, Varda, is blessed with endless eyesight. And, indeed, the great Enemy of The Lord of the Rings is embodied only as a horrible eye atop a tall tower. Sight is also deeply entangled with the palantíri, which gives men both the ability to see and be seen by powers beyond their own.

But how does Tolkien think of vision in relation to nature? The kinship is deep, right from the beginning. When learning of the Valar and their tasks or domains in the world in the Valaquenta, we learn of Irmo that he is the “master of visions and dreams. In Lórien are his gardens in the land of the Valar, and they are the fairest of all places in the world, filled with many spirits.” Already we see a harmony between vision and nature. In Irmo’s lustrous gardens with many spirits, we find the one who oversees the domain of “visions and dreams.” And Irmo’s wife is Estë, who is the “healer of hurts and weariness… rest is her gift.” In Tolkien, we find that the Valar are paired together with good reason, very dissimilar from the Greek or Roman pantheon in which gods and goddesses seem to be governed by the laws of human passion more than divine reason, not unlike many reality TV dramas. Therefore, we can assume that the domains of Irmo and Estë are in deep harmony: gardens, rest, healing, respite from weariness, vision, and dreams. No wonder, then, I find small alcoves in the trees for camping so wonderful — for, according to the Valaquenta, all the beings who reside in Valinor come to their garden to be refreshed!

Lórien’s domain does not end with the divine beings in Valinor, however. In Middle-Earth, it is reflected in Lothlórien (or, Lórien for short), the forested domain of the Wood Elves, sentinels of the natural world.

But there is a different kind of vision in Tolkien’s work, a more malicious one. There is the specific gaze of the Enemy which permeates both The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. Two elements embody this other kind of vision: Barad-dûr and the palantíri.

Barad-dûr is the tower of Sauron in Mordor, the point from which the Dark Lord rules over his cursed land and projects outward his dominating spirit. Atop the tower is the manifestation of Sauron’s eye which is revealed only rarely when the dark clouds of Mordor are parted. Tolkien does not elaborate on the nature of the eye or what it even looks like, but surely his brief description in The Return of the King should tell us its dark and shivering effects:

“…rising black, blacker and darker than the vast shades amid which it stood, the cruel pinnacles and iron crown of the topmost tower of Barad-dûr. One moment only it stared out, but as from some great window immeasurably high there stabbed northward a flame of red, the flicker of a piercing Eye; and then the shadows were furled again and the terrible vision was removed.”

The palantíri, also called the Seven Stones, are orb-like stones which grant the user a very peculiar kind of vision. Originally created by the Ñoldor, the stones ended up all over Middle-Earth by the Third Age (the years in which the stories of the trilogy took place). Palantíri means “far-seeing” in the original language in which they were crafted, and they allow communication and sight across vast distances. If one were to look into the stone from one side of the world, they could “see” what the other stone communicated at the other side of the world. Somehow — it is not explained to my knowledge — Sauron got hold of one of the Seven, and from there was able to see into the hearts and minds of many great people who desired infinite sight from their own palantír. For instance, Saruman’s fall began as an attempt to use the stone to see far and wide. In doing so, he was then subjected to Sauron’s malicious gaze whenever he interacted with the stone, which eroded and corrupted his mind over time. The same happened to Denethor, Lord of Gondor. But even Sauron could not master the capacity of the palantíri, and a “wiser” mind was able to penetrate into Sauron, driving fear into his heart and discovering his military plans. This someone, of course, is Aragorn.

So, in Tolkien, there is a strong kinship between the idea of vision, wisdom, nature, and goodness: in one’s vision, there are the other attributes. Or rather, wisdom, nature, and goodness are expressed in one’s vision. But what kind of vision is it that expresses these particular attributes? And what kind of vision is it that reveals and conveys the opposite qualities?

The Machines of Mordor

It would be difficult to doubt that nature is important to Tolkien. His books are filled with lustrous and wonderful descriptions of nature, sometimes winding for pages, vivid and full. Though Tolkien himself, philosophically appreciative of nature, was nothing like his friend CS Lewis, who would go on multi-day treks throughout the forest and meadows. But there was something else that he saw in the natural world which couldn’t help but grow through the very texts themselves.

Descriptions of the weapons and techniques of Sauron within The Lord of the Rings evoke images of an industrial, steam- and coal-powered city. The land of Mordor itself is always shrouded in dark clouds overhead, and we even find some startling descriptions of the weapons of the Enemy as mechanistic and as machinery. In the Battle of the Pelennor fields, we encounter some of the ‘war-machines’ in the form of catapults which launch flaming stones and other such devices. But in The Hobbit, we read:

“It is not unlikely that they [the goblins] invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them, and also not working with their own hands more than they could help; but in those days and those wild parts they had not advanced (as it is called) so far.”

In Middle-Earth during the events of the Third Age, equivalent to feudal and antiquity ages in Europe, these descriptions are surprising. Tolkien himself was rather concerned about England’s increasing reliance on technology and machinery and their capacity to erode more traditional and hand-based trades and local crafts.

There is something which happens to people when they use machines. It changes their relationship to their craft. Even now, typing this out on a computer has a different effect than writing with pen and paper. There is a level of mediation which is added to our relationship with our labor which changes the labor on three levels: on the outcome, on the process, and on the laborer.

I am interested chiefly in the third: How does machinery change the user? At the very least it alters the perceptions, how the task or object is perceived by the user. Let us begin where Tolkien did — with vision. How does vision change in this relationship?

Vision is deeply connected, as we noted above, to both morality (goodness and badness) and nature. Specifically, it is a certain kind of perception that determines the rest of the qualities. For the Valar and Elves, for instance, sight is largely expansive, associated with the good, and with an appreciation for the natural world. It rests upon the world as it gazes out. It lets be, it desires a harmonious and interdependent relationship with it. It is in no rush. Like Josef Pieper’s concept of Ratio in his 1952 essay “Leisure”: it “has an element of the non-active, purely receptive seeing.”

On the other hand, we have the vision of Mordor, associated with machinery and badness, corruption and smoke. Throughout the various texts of Middle-Earth, we find that Morgoth and Sauron and the whole of ‘the Enemy’ are after one thing: domination. The entire quest of the Fellowship, from the beginning, has been propelled by the destruction of the “One Ring to rule them all,” the ring crafted by Sauron to enslave and exert mastery over the rest.

Constricted Vision

However tempting it might be to jump too far ahead and associate machinery with malicious vision, this comparison does not fair very well in Tolkien’s world. In a wonderful essay by Gwyneth Hood, she notes that all people in Middle-Earth have some kind of relationship with technology.[1] The Elves, which have come to be associated with naturalistic ways of life — utopian to a fault — have a relationship to technology which Hood calls “angelic”. These techniques of life (for what else is technology?) are suited for their environments: forests and other floral arrangements which are paradisal which have goodness built into them. Elves, we might say, needn’t try too hard to stay on the good side of nature. The cards are stacked in their favor. The forests in which they live brim and grow with goodness, harmony, and peace. Technology, then, is conservative. It is an attempt to keep things as they are, to displace as little as possible. They have crafted rafts which can navigate rivers themselves, cloaks which blend into their surroundings, or small breads which do not lose their nutrients. Their technology — their machinery — reflects the philosophy of Mosscap in Becky Chambers’ A Prayer for the Crown-Shy: if it can be readily taken up back into the earth again, it is natural.

We also should consider the Hobbits! Though they use their technology is a less-than-naturalistic way than the Elves (for instance, digging large holes in the earth, farming and gardening, hunting, and so on), we are not yet at a vision of nature which demands the kind of relationship to machinery that Sauron displays. Hobbits are content with trowels and shovels, small workshops, and other pastoral equipment. Even still, Humans have a different relationship with technology. Because of the ‘gift of freedom’ given to them by Ilúvatar, Humans are always out of step with the natural world, with the rhythm of forests and plains and seasons. To survive in a disjointed world, they needed to be creative, to innovate and make the world a place they might find hospitable. Is their manipulation of nature ‘bad’?

All of this is to say that Tolkien is not simply an anti-technological reactionary. His approach to these questions and issues is a little more complicated. And so, therefore, is the meaning of sight and vision in his writing.

It is not until we get to Melkor in The Silmarillion and the Sauron-Saruman duet in the trilogy that we find a more explicit exploration of these themes. For instance, the invention of dragons by Melkor in the Second Age. Evil, in The Legendarium, cannot create or even sub-create (those roles are reserved for Ilúvatar and his creations, respectively). Dragons, and Ringwraiths and Orcs, were brought about through corruption: through taking something already existing (such as Great Eagles for Dragons or Elves for Orcs) and perverting their inherently good nature. In The Two Towers, Saruman catches the rage of the Ents — otherwise peaceful denizens of the forest — because his industrial-like ambitions breeding new versions of Orcs are requiring more land, water, and resources of the forest, driven “obsessed with what he sees as progress.”[2]

This is a primary concern of Tolkien, too, in his essay “On Fairy Stories”. There is the Primary World (that which we live in, created by God) and there are Secondary Worlds (those worlds which we sub-create, created by us). The one is the derivative of the other, reflecting different aspects of it but never taking its place. In The Silmarillion we find only one other attempt of a being to create: Aulë, unable to wait for the coming of Elves and Men, creates the Dwarves. He is rebuked by Ilúvatar, repents, and offers his creation to Ilúvatar himself.

Every creation after that is merely a sub-creative act. And the sub-creative acts of Melkor, Sauron, and Saruman are all uniquely perverse in that they do not bring anything new into this world: they take what is there and pervert it. Their vision is tainted by something black and terrible, corruptive and corruptible. This vision seeks, above all, domination. But domination without substance, without anything addition to offer, and so it must take what exists and try to make it its own.

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[1] Hood, G. (1993). “Nature and Technology: Angelic and Sacrificial Strategies in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.” Mythlore 19(4).

[2] Łaszkiewicz, W. (2017). “Into the Wild Woods: On the Significance of Trees and Forests in Fantasy Fiction”. Mythlore, 36(1).