Arda Inhabited: Environmental Relationships in The Lord of the Rings, by Susan Jeffers (review)

In my 2012 review of Liam Campbell’s The Ecological Augury in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien, I opined that there had not yet been a “complete study” on the topic of Tolkien and the environment and that I expected a fourth book-length survey of the topic to appear on the horizon before long (Larsen 88). My hope was that such a volume not only would be an analysis of three early works—Patrick Curry’s Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien, Myth, and Modernity (2004), Matthew Dickerson and Jonathan Evans’s Ents, Elves, and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien (2006), and Campbell’s 2011 volume—but would break significant new ground in the area of Tolkien’s environmental themes. Three years later, Susan Jeffers’s volume Arda Inhabited: Environmental Relationships in The Lord of the Rings crossed my desk, and I read it with much anticipation, expecting that it would be the fulfillment of my prophecy. But the work reveals itself to be significantly less than a complete study, due not simply to its limited focus on The Lord of the Rings but rather to the overall scope and development of the essential argument. Based on Jeffers’s master’s thesis at Abilene Christian University, the book could have been significantly expanded before publication instead of reproduced as the slender volume with which I was presented.

This book puzzles me on several other levels, the first being its title. “Arda” as a title for the world harks to The Silmarillion rather than The Lord of the Rings, as does the act of inhabiting said world. Indeed, “Arda” does not appear in the index of The Lord of the Rings. It is therefore surprising that it was chosen for the title.

Another point of confusion was made apparent in the first paragraph of the introduction, where Jeffers makes the claim that “the trees of Middle-earth have received relatively little critical attention” (1). A quick web search on the topic will turn up a number of papers and book chapters that have done precisely this. In terms of more general previous works on Tolkien and the environment, while Jeffers references the seminal volumes by Curry and Dickerson and Evans, Liam Campbell’s work is conspicuous in its absence, especially because Campbell spends a significant portion of his work discussing ecocriticism in relation to Tolkien’s environmental themes. Likewise, other works that I would have expected to have been referenced, such as Andrew Light’s “Tolkien’s Green Time: Environmental Themes in The Lord of the Rings” (2003), are regrettably missing as well. These apparent lacunae in the expected literature search can possibly be explained by one of the other disappointing aspects of this work, the list of sources. Rather than relying principally on primary texts or well-known secondary texts, half of the listed references are reprinted papers and excerpts of larger works published in anthologies and readers. It must be noted that similar works certainly do cite some of these same secondary sources, but the heavy reliance on them in this case is puzzling.

Returning to the general layout of the work, Jeffers offers us an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion. In her introduction, she defines her thesis in terms of “the connection between people and place,” based on the still-evolving literary framework of ecocriticism (2). Jeffers explains to the reader that her perspective in some ways parallels that of Dickerson and Evans but is specifically focused on The Lord of the Rings rather than the legendarium as a greater whole. Jeffers’s goal is to focus on “the power relationships that result from or are indicated by the way characters interact with their environments” (3). The remainder of the introduction is focused on an overview of ecocriticism (including common criticisms of ecocriticism) and positions Tolkien’s works within this philosophy as...