Like so many people, I’ve read The Lord of the Rings and watched the movies and appreciated the elaborate world-building of J.R.R. Tolkien with its dragons and people even shorter than me and fake languages and second breakfasts and grotesque orcs and all that. I don’t think I’d count myself as a huge fan, necessarily – I think maybe there’s more unfair anti-orc propaganda going on there than usually gets let on – but I get why the series is so beloved. It seems that at the end of the year a new Tolkien work was published for the first time after remaining hidden for 60 years. The work, called The Bovadium Fragments, is a sort of satirical fantasy about academics from some future piecing together an old manuscript – those fragments referenced in the title – and the reason I’m mentioning it at all is because it seems to be a thinly-veiled anti-car screed.
That seems worth talking about, right? At least quickly? That one of the best-known fantasy writers in the world, maybe the best known, really seemed to hate cars. I suppose that’s not so surprising, really; for reasons I’ve never entirely understood, most of the famous works of fantasy fiction have pegged their universes at a level of technology around that of, say, the 1300s, maybe or so. I guess maybe it’s because technology is, in many ways, a great equalizer, and it maybe takes away some of the drama of “magic” when a machine you can order off Amazon does the same stuff a wizard does.
Take, for example, this scene where noted local wizard Gandalf makes a rock glow to act as a light in dark mines:
Note how he waves his hand with a certain amount of drama to excite that chunk of quartz or whatever into luminescence; if one of the hobbits reached into their backpacks and just pulled out a bright LED flashlight, I suppose you’d lose some of the atmosphere.
Maybe that’s part of why Tolkien didn’t seem to like cars. That and the realization that if Frodo had access to a well-maintained Land Rover, the whole long slog to chuck the ring into the volcano could probably have been reduced to a couple of days or so. But there seems to be much more specific reasons for Tolkien’s automotive revulsion. This is from the Los Angeles Review of Books’ review of The Bovadium Fragments:
J. R. R. Tolkien first arrived in Oxford as a student in 1911. At that time, it was still a quaint and quiet university town. But a couple years later, a motor manufacturing plant opened nearby. Soon, thousands of cars were being churned out and thousands more people were being drawn to the area to support this growing industry. That combination of a motorized culture and a population explosion transformed the city… In his 200-page report, Sharp explained what the city was like at that time: “To-day heavy traffic breaks up what once was an urban paradise into a crowd of islands surrounded by vehicular torrents.”
As a lover of nature and an enemy of the motor vehicle, Tolkien would surely have agreed with Sharp’s description. What he didn’t agree with, however, was Sharp’s solution. Sharp proposed building a new road through the unspoiled Christ Church Meadow as the only way to alleviate congestion in the center of the city. As Tolkien put it in one of his private letters, “the spirit of ‘Isengard,’ if not of Mordor, is of course always cropping up. The present design of destroying Oxford in order to accommodate motor-cars is a case.”
So, it looks like it was sort of personal for Tolkien, as he wanted Oxford to remain, I think, as it was sometime in the late 1800s, forever.
The book itself re-casts cars – as written about by the long-gone society of the fragments – as “monsters” known as Motores, in a nicely unsubtle way. Similarly, the relationship of the Bovadies to their Motores is described like this:
“[M]any of the citizens harboured the monsters, feeding them with the costly oils and essences which they required, and building houses for them in their gardens.”
and
“On the days formerly set aside for prayers and rites in the temples many would now wheel their Motores out upon a platform before their houses and there tend them and worship them, prostrate upon the ground.”
So, again, cars. With oil and gas and garages, and people working on them on Sundays. J.R.R. sure thought we were fools for our love of them, which just adds to my sneaking suspicion that J.R.R. must have been kind of a chore to be around, always saying things about you behind your back in Elvish, hoping you don’t know what “pen-channas” means.
Really, I suppose this shouldn’t be much of a surprise; anti-industrial sentiment is all over Tolkien’s works, and he even wrote and illustrated a book for his children that was written around 1936 but published in 1964. The book, Mr.Bliss, is about a guy with a fondness for really tall headwear who buys a car and then proceeds to have all sorts of disasters with it.
Honestly, it’s really less about how terrible cars are as it is about how you really should learn to drive before buying one.
So, there you go, all of you gearheads who are also Tolkien fans: if you ever get a time machine and decide to go back to talk to him, don’t bring up cars. He’s not one of us.
Top graphic image: Image: The Tolkien Estate
“Name is Smeagle, rock an AMC Eagle. And a Buick Regal…”
This made me think of a story (or possibly a poem?) that was included in one of those compilation textbooks that were so common in English classes back in the day. It was written from the perspective of overhead observers – implied to be space aliens – who had decided that the dominant form of life on Earth was vehicles, and described these ‘life forms’ as they moved about single file on lined surfaces, occasionally moving aside so more important ‘life forms’ (notable for their flashing lights) could pass.
This is why Arthur’s buddy alien in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy gave himself the name Ford Prefect when he came to Earth. He was trying to blend in with the dominant life form, which he assumed to be cars.
“[M]any of the citizens harboured the monsters, feeding them with the costly oils and essences which they required, and building houses for them in their gardens.”
shit…. not agreeing with it but shit… well said
Let me count the ways I care…. 0…. and I’m done. I just don’t care.
Ok, why is my comment getting flagged and awaiting approval?
I’m guessing that I would strongly share Tolkien’s opinion. I don’t think we understand what a shock the car would have been uopon its arrival. Loud, polluting, alarmingly fast and driven by people with marginal skill but a lot of confidence (boy, sounds familiar), it would have been unpleasant in a number of ways.
We’re used to cars now. But every time some dill weed roars down the street in their stupid modified diesel brodozer or some jerk in a Harley revs up his hog to earsplitting volume, as yourself if Tolkien wasn’t correct.
I’m guessing that I would strongly share Tolkien’s opinion. I don’t think we understand what a shock the car would have been uopon its arrival. Loud, polluting, alarmingly fast and driven by people with marginal skill but a lot of confidence (boy, sounds familiar), it would have been unpleasant in a number of ways.
We’re used to cars now. But every time some dill weed roars down the street in their stupid modified diesel brodozer or some Harley *sshole revs up his hog to earsplitting volume, as yourself if Tolkien wasn’t correct.