The Imagery of Nature and Technology in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit

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Forest decline, oil leakages, holes in the ozone layer. Pollution on land and under water, topics like these have dominated the news since the end of the twentieth century. People are becoming more and more aware of the side effects of their desperately wanted progress.
From a consider-the-environment reminder at the bottom of every email to a compulsory waste separation: Educational advertising and environmental thinking has started to influence almost all parts of everyday life. Therefore it is not surprising that ecocriticism as a literary discipline has been enjoying great popularity since the late 1980s, starting in the US the criticism smoothed its way to Europe not much later (Curry 238).
Even if ecocriticism is claimed to be a relatively young literary approach, artists like the British poet William Wordsworth or the American writer Henry David Thoreau had filled their works with descriptions of the beauty of nature and its need for protection far before those topics were shown on the news (ibid. 239). Another of those ahead-of-his-time artists was also the British writer J.R.R. Tolkien. His major works The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings-Trilogy (1954-55) are especially famous for their sometimes several pages long descriptions of the sublime nature of Middle-earth. Tolkien was not the first writer to create a fantasy world, but in contrast to novels like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) or Through the Looking-Glass (1871), Tolkien’s world is far more complex and connected. He gave his fantasy-world its own past, languages and human as well as non-human cultures. But Tolkien especially avoided a pure symbolical reading of his work by connecting it to reality, particularly using his description of nature...

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... Tolkien Studies. Vol. 4 (2007): 238-244.
20.December 2013
Oxford English Dictionary (OED): “Green Man.” 24. December 2013

Shippey, Tom: The Road to Middle-earth. How J.R.R. Tolkien created a new Mythology.
Revised and Expanded Edition. NY: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003.
Steward, W. Christopher: “The Lord of Magic and Machines. Tolkien on Magic and
Technology.“ The Hobbit and Philosophy: For when you've Lost your Dwarves, your
Wizard, and your Way. Gregory Bassham and Eric Bronson, eds. The Blackwell
Philosophy and Pop Culture Series. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2012, 147-160.
Tolkien, J.R.R.: The Hobbit or There and Back Again. Repr. London: HarperCollins, 2006.

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