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You are here: Home / Political Science / Nature imitating art

Nature imitating art

July 8, 2018 By Michael O'Hare

It always does; never perfectly but well enough to teach us something.  At the end of The Lord of the Rings (the book, but not the movie), the evil wizard Saruman and his nasty, slinking sidekick Wormtongue Cohen arrive in the hobbits’ peaceable shire and spread ruin, fear, and mistrust. Along the way they cut down trees, destroying nature, and try to make an industrial wasteland out of it.  Eventually they are overcome, and in a final squabble resulting from Saruman disrespecting Wormtongue and betraying him to the hobbits, Wormtongue kills Saruman.

For some reason I am remembering this episode lately.

 

Filed Under: Political Science, The Arts, Woolgathering

Comments

  1. JamesWimberley says

    July 9, 2018 at 3:03 am

    Scott Pruitt as Bill Ferny?

  2. toby52 says

    July 10, 2018 at 12:35 am

    At the start of Lord of the Rings, Saruman/ Trump betrays his allies and joins Sauron/ Putin. In the film, he embarks on a policy of systematically trashing the local, beautifully wooded environment to facilitate rapid industrial development and jobs for his orcs.

    • JamesWimberley says

      July 10, 2018 at 4:24 am

      Tolkien's aesthetic hostility to industrialisation is clearly in the book, as in the Ents' muscular reversal of Saruman's transformation of Isengard. This attitude is not at all unusual in English writers, from Blake onwards ("dark satanic mills"). It's in Gerard Manley Hopkins, another Catholic, railing against the "base and brickish skirt" of expanding Oxford. England was a beautiful country in 1800, as parts of it still are.

      Orcs are GM-ed slaves; there's no pretence of concern by anybody on either side for their welfare.

      • toby52 says

        July 10, 2018 at 1:41 pm

        Quite. I was being facetious about the orcs. The villain who is too clever by half is an old trope, let us hope ir comes to pass.

  3. jjoel says

    July 10, 2018 at 7:08 am

    The analogy is flawed. Saruman was selfish and cruel, but he was certainly not stupid.

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