Patrick Curry (HarperCollins pp206 £7.99 1998)
If Middle-earth were imposed on the map of Europe, The Shire would be somewhere on the Dutch/German border, and Mordor would occupy the Balkans. But the heroes of LORDS OF THE RINGS have a distinct taste for British, specifically English, lifestyles. In one of his letters Tolkien wrote "'The Shire' is based on rural England and not any other country in the world" and in another, Hobbiton "is in fact more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee." Although he constructed the trilogy during WW II he was looking back to the same period as other authors of fantasy such as Kenneth Graham's WIND IN THE WILLOWS, which suggests that Tolkien was defending Victorianism against modernity. Curry, though, prefers to see Tolkien lining up with contemporary ecologists - the tunnellers who are struggling against motorway building are at one with the Ents.
In order to argue that Tolkien has relevance Curry has to accept Tolkien's statement that he did not write allegory, but then argue that the effects of the devices in Tolkien's world are equivalent to those in this world. This leads him to argue that "the Ring epitomizes the strongest economic and political power in Middle-earth, which already threatens to dominate all others in one vast autocratic realm. There is no greater power in the material realm." He can then go on, quite reasonably, to identify the devastation of our industrial areas with those controlled by Sauron.
A question that must always niggle in the minds of readers is: what is the motive power in Sauron's munition works? Despite lots of smoke and steam and talk of wheels, his power is not steam engines, or even massive water-wheels - his energy sources remain unclear. Saruman offers Gandalf "knowledge, rule, power", something rejected in their everyday lives by the Elves or even by the Hobbits in The Shire. Curry, though, then calls in another source of power: magic, arguing that Tolkien compares magic and enchantment. A figure like Sauron uses magic, something almost scientific in its expected outcome from fixed rituals, while the good opposite is enchantment. But we, as readers, would have to be under an enchantment to accept that magic is a reasonable motive power. Oddly, although Curry can throw in some odd critical sources (Adorno and Horkheimer in this section), he fails to take "enchantment" as a key-word and refer to the standard work here, Bruno Bettelheim's THE USES OF ENCHANTMENT (a study of fairy stories and their relevance to the real world, written by a psychologist).
At the end of this quilt of a book, made of patches of all the authors he quotes, Curry argues that Tolkien provides a little hope that the world can be reconstructed: "On the one hand, of course, even Frodo fails the final test. On the other, the Ring WAS destroyed" (Curry's emphasis). I agree with what he says, but I am not so sure about the way he says it.