Tag: tolkien

In Tolkien’s legendarium, when the world had not yet begun, there was Ilúvatar. And this being had thoughts.

He gathered around him the Ainur, who were great spirits born of his thoughts, and proposed to them a theme for a song. And the Ainur sang. And it was in this music that the world was made: In Tolkien’s world, every mountain, every sea, every creature that would ever live, first existed as sound sung by an Ainur before it existed as matter.

One of the Ainur, Melkor, decides he’s the main character and introduces his own theme of loud, clashing dissonance which overwhelmed those singing around him. Melkor is later called Morgoth, which means something like Black Foe/ Black Tyrant, etc. by inhabitants of the created world.

Among the Ainur who shaped the world was also one named Nienna. She is barely present in the stories. She doesn’t fight battles or forge alliances or make beautiful things. She weeps- for every wound that the world has suffered in the marring of Melkor, for every act of destruction and cruelty, for every beautiful thing broken. “So great was her sorrow, as the Music was played, that her song turned to lamentation long before its (the song’s) end, and the sound of mourning was woven into the themes of the World before it began.” So that world was not just full of the destruction of beauty, but sorrow that the beauty was destroyed.

Discord is built into Tolkien’s world from the very start, and thanks to NIenna’s tears, so is sorrow.

Like Arda (the name of the created world), grief and sorrow are also human inheritances in our own world. This is a piece about grief. About why it is rational to feel it, and what it means that we do.

The World As We Found It
Middle Earth in the Third Age, where those of you who have seen the films join us, is a world past its prime. The great civilisations of the First and Second Ages have drowned, literally: Beleriand, the continent where the most extraordinary events in the history of that world took place, lies under the sea. Númenor, the island kingdom of the greatest Men (Tolkien chooses to call humans “Men”) who ever lived, was swallowed by the ocean in a single Manwë-induced catastrophe (Manwë is another Ainur). What remains of Middle Earth is diminished. Smaller. The Elves, beings of extraordinary beauty and power, some of whom knew the light of the Two Trees before the Sun existed, are leaving to the Undying Lands, because Middle Earth no longer has a place for them, and Middle Earth is the poorer for every ship that departs.

Morgoth’s (and now Sauron’s, the Dark Lord of the films’) forces of darkness are another matter. Orcs swarm the land. These are creatures who were once, according to the darkest reading of the mythology, Elves themselves: captured by Morgoth in the earliest ages, broken and corrupted and remade into something that could only destroy. This is perhaps the most unbearable grief in the whole of the legendarium: that which marches against the light was once of the light.

After the earliest wars against Morgoth, the Valar^{(the Valar are just the Ainur who chose to enter Arda)} retreated to Valinor and raised the Pelóri: vast mountain walls, separating their paradise from the rest of the world. They lit it beautifully. They built their undying lands and their great cities and their gardens, and they waited.

Five wizards were sent to Middle-earth to help in its hour of need. Only one, Gandalf, is doing what he was sent to do at this point in the story.

And the fate of the world rests on two hobbits who don’t know the way to Mount Doom.

This is the world Tolkien gave us. A world of accumulated loss, diminishment, and long defeat, and yet one in which the gardener plants his seeds, a hobbit who can barely walk is lifted on the shoulders of his friend, and the Elf-queen gives her own place on the last ship to a wounded Ring-bearer.

The question the entire mythology is built around is not will everything be saved? It won’t. It is: given that everything will not be saved, what do we do?

The State of the World
It is April 2026. The climate negotiations that were supposed to matter have produced agreements that are being honoured approximately as well as climate agreements usually are. The Arctic is warming at four times the global average rate. We crossed 1.5°C of warming as an annual average, which was supposed to be the line we held. We did not hold it.

In the last two years, wars that did not need to happen have consumed resources- human, material, carbon- at rates that would take careful stewardship years to offset. A single large bomb releases roughly the equivalent of several tonnes of CO₂, along with countless precious lives. Sustained military campaigns run the carbon arithmetic in the wrong direction for months. The people conducting these campaigns are not calculating the carbon budget. They are not thinking about it at all.

There is a particular kind of worker in the climate space, the person who runs the numbers, writes the briefings, builds the advocacy campaigns, pushes the policy frameworks through institutions that move like glaciers, who is experiencing something that researchers have only recently begun to properly name. It is called ecological grief, or climate grief, or solastalgia: the distress caused by environmental change in one’s home environment, or by the knowledge of what is coming.

But there is a specific intensification of this grief that I haven’t seen named as clearly: the grief of watching your careful work be casually undone by forces that are not only larger than you but entirely indifferent to the values that animate your work. The grief of the long game player watching short game players wreck the board.

What Grief Is
Grief is the emotional response to loss. Not only death, but the loss of anything that held meaning: a relationship, a capacity, a future you had imagined, a world that was supposed to get better. Psychologists have mapped its stages, though the stages are less sequential than the famous model suggests and more like weather systems that arrive and depart without warning. What they agree on is this: grief that is not processed does not disappear. It persists.

And recovery? What is that? In my world it has been the finding of a way to live in the world as it now is, rather than as I wanted it to be.

The alternative, which is grief refused, grief undischarged, is Denethor staring into the palantír, Fëanor immolating his entire family through an incredible oath, the calculation that seems to say: what is the point?

How Grief Finds Us
Grief arrives in different sizes, and I’ve sometimes made the mistake of thinking the small ones don’t count because the large ones exist.

There is my small, almost laughable, grief of watching a cricketer I have loved for years approach the end. It is the grief of watching a supernova– a colossal, luminous explosion that outshines entire galaxies, and knowing this is the most beautiful thing you’ll ever see.

There is the shocking, thick grief of parents who get ill, and the long months of nursing them back. The frustration and then grief of a body that breaks and must be patiently rebuilt, mixed with the fear of never knowing whether it will ever be strong again. The grief of friendships that reveal themselves, over time, to have been one-directional until you realise you are alone in a forest of echoes.

And then there are the large griefs: the moral grief of watching the planet, our home planet, the one we are all on together, be treated carelessly, by people with bombs and profit margins and no particular interest in the carbon arithmetic. The grief of the person who has spent years trying to build something careful, and watches someone careless undo it in an afternoon.

There is the grief of truly understanding that all lives are not equal.

These are not the same grief. But they are made of the same material. The seed is identical: the feeling of watching something you love deteriorate. Whether through willful destruction, or through the natural arc of a mortal and magnificent thing approaching its end, the emotional structure is the same. Something that mattered is being lost. I cannot stop it.

Tolkien and the Grief of the Ecosystem
Tolkien watched his England disappear in his lifetime. The industrial revolution had been doing its work for a century before he was born; by the time he was writing the Lord of the Rings, the countryside he loved was being consumed by machines and efficiency and the imperatives of the modern world. He was not subtle about his feelings. Mordor is an industrial wasteland. Saruman’s Isengard, a factory (“all trees cut down, the ground torn up, holes dug and walls built, wheels turning and fires burning.”).

But his most precise and most moving portrait of ecological grief is the Ents. They are the last of their kind, and they know it. And so they decide on valour. A last stand perhaps not as outwardly desperate as as the Battle for Helm’s Deep, but certainly the last stand of an elder race that knows it’s dying out.

The Ents’ march on Isengard is not optimism. Treebeard does not believe they will win. “We may help the other peoples before we pass away.” He marches because the alternative- to remain in the forest while the forest is destroyed- is not really an alternative at all. Not for something that loves trees the way Treebeard loves trees.

The Valar Behind Their Mountains
But here is the thing about Tolkien’s world that I find simultaneously the most angry-making and the most Earth-like: the Ainur, the great powers who sang the world into being, who shaped it, who knew its design from the beginning, largely withdrew.

Meanwhile, in Middle Earth, Elves were being captured and broken into Orcs. Men were waking into a dark world with Morgoth’s shadow already over it and no one to explain otherwise. The careful, beautiful work of creation was being systematically unmade, and the ones with the power to act were behind their mountains, weaving threads into histories.

But think now of the Ents, who knew they were the last of their race, and the Ainur, the most powerful beings on Arda, and think of courage. Because from where I am, one of them has it.

What Happens When We Cannot March
Not everyone marches. Not immediately. Sometimes never.

Some grief freezes. Thranduil closed his borders for centuries after watching his father charge too early at Dagorlad and die, taking half his people with him. His grief became policy: we will not march in someone else’s war again. This is a completely comprehensible response to a real wound. It is also a kind of diminishment: the Wood-Elves withdrew from the wider world, and something was lost.

Some grief burns. Fëanor made an Oath in his grief and rage that he could not keep and could not escape, and it consumed him and his children.

Some grief numbs. Théoden, under Wormtongue’s influence sat in his hall and diminished.

Other grief brings rage: think Éomer when he thought his sister brave but dead.

And some grief simply stops the hands.

I have not written anything for a while, have I? Not because I think the climate doesn’t matter. Not because I have run out of things to say. But because there are days when the question arrives and I do not have an answer: what is the point of writing carefully about carbon budgets when a bomb drops and takes a week of the planet’s annual carbon budget with it?

This is not Fëanor’s burning. It is not Thranduil’s closed borders. It is nothing spectacular. It is something more mundane: a grief that has not yet found its form. I am grieving the planet. And I am grieving the particular loss of believing that careful work accumulates, that each article, each brief, each advocacy conversation adds to something, and then watching that accumulation be casually interrupted by forces that are not careful and are not interested in being careful.

I don’t understand why I try. Why any of us do.

Nienna’s Gift
Tolkien, as usual, comes to the rescue.

In Valinor, the paradise the Valar had walled off behind their mountains, they had made two Trees that lit their world with golden and silver light. In what is a very on-brand act of ecoterrorism, Morgoth and a giant spider destroyed them. Nienna wept at the loss, as usual, and Yavanna sang. And from Yavanna’s song and Nienna’s tears together, came what became the Sun and the Moon. The Trees still died. The loss is real and permanent and not undone. But the grief, held and witnessed rather than refused or weaponised, made something new that otherwise could not have existed, and this is Tolkien’s and Nienna’s true gift: hope.

Endurance in hope means something harder and more honest: the capacity to remain present to the grief, to witness it fully, and to continue making things anyway. Because the making is what we are. Because Maglor threw his Silmaril into the sea and walked the shores of the world and kept singing, and the singing mattered even without resolution, even without an audience, even without an ending. Because even when there is nothing else, there seems to be hope.

Nienna is also, remember, the teacher of Gandalf. The most consequential figure in the salvation of Middle Earth learned everything that mattered from the Vala known mostly for her tears.

Because understanding is the first step to acceptance. So: I understand that I am grieving. I understand that the grief is rational, that it would be stranger not to grieve the things I have lost, and the things we are all in the process of losing. I understand that grief unprocessed doesn’t go away. It waits.

The trees died. The Moon still rises.

And I tell myself, grief is not the end of meaning. It is the proof that meaning once existed, and might still be made again. And so we remain, half dust, half deity.

Sources
No sourcing for this. I’m dust today.