Popular Science Feature - A Scientist in Middle Earth

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Feature - A Scientist in Middle Earth by Henry Gee

When I told people that I was writing a book called The Science of Middle-earth, J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy location for The Lord of the Rings, they said one of two things. First, that I should have very little to write about. Second, that as Tolkien was famously anti-science, almost a patron saint of tree-huggery, the exercise was at best sterile, at worst pointless.

In the first case, people were evidently wrong. The Science of Middle-earth grew out of an occasional science column I’d been writing for TheOneRing.net, a leading Tolkien fan website. Tolkien fans asked the webmaster many questions that demanded scientific expertise to answer – on the relationship of hobbits and humans, on the remarkable eyesight of the elves, and so on – many questions that I could address with reference to science, and at the same time shedding new light on Tolkien’s work.

Even so, the book that resulted contains six times as much material as ever appeared on the website, material that just flooded onto the page over a five month period, while I was finishing a book called Jacob’s Ladder: The History of the Human Genome. In no sense was I scratching around for ideas to fill a book – they assaulted my brain, demanding entrance. Even today, the mines of Middle-earth are far from exhausted: I continue to write about science for TheOneRing.net, and have no plans to stop. There just seems so much to say, and more importantly, so much to say that is worth saying.

The second objection seems, on the surface, more serious. People would point to a scene early on in The Lord of the Rings, when the wizard Gandalf (a good guy) castigates the technological ambitions of Saruman (a good guy in the process of going bad) that a person who takes something to bits to learn its function has left the path of wisdom, or words to that effect. This one line has been taken as a succinct damnation of the reductionism of science, in which scientists really do take things to bits – animals, rocks, atoms – to find out how they work.

The mantra has been repeated so often that it has become a slogan representing everything on which Tolkien felt exercised – urbanization, pollution, the flight from humble rustic pursuits towards industrial materialism. To be sure, Tolkien felt strongly about all these things, but in equating Gandalf with Tolkien – blithely assuming that Tolkien put his own undiluted opinions into the mouth of one of his characters – critics have made a serious mistake.

Any more than a cursory reading of Tolkien reveals a more complex view, from which it emerges that Tolkien had enormous respect for science and the acquisition of knowledge. What troubled him was its appropriation or misuse to exert power over others (and in that, most scientists would agree).

Turning from The Lord of the Rings to the altogether terser Silmarillion – a summary, compiled after Tolkien’s death, of the immense myth-cycle that Tolkien had worked on all his adult life – it’s easy to see that the entire story turns on how the brightest and best, searching for ever greater and more refined knowledge, are corrupted by their own ambition, their refusal to use their knowledge for the greater good.

But the anti-science slogan had become so pervasive that despite Tolkien’s popularity, nobody had thought that there might be another view, a scientist’s view of Middle-earth that could offer a fresh look at Tolkien’s fiction. Most remarkably, the insights I discovered in Tolkien did not come from studying manuscripts that nobody had ever seen, information accessible to me alone. Everything I saw I took from Tolkien’s published work – either in his own lifetime or after his death, edited by his son and literary executor, Christopher Tolkien. You can find it in any bookstore, reprinted millions of times over – hidden, in plain sight.

The desire to reinterpret Tolkien in a new way is one reason I decided to write The Science of Middle-earth. At its simplest level, it adds the growing canon of ‘Science Of’ books – The Science of the Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Real Science behind the X-Files, The Physics of Star Trek, The Science of Discworld, even The Science of Harry Potter. But that’s not why I wrote it. Without wishing to disparage any of these books (several of whose authors are my friends, and some of whom owe me lunch), the ‘Science Of’ subgenre could be dismissed, sometimes with justification, as an excuse to use popular culture to write about the kind of science that you could write about anyway, but less profitably – in other words, to jump on a bandwagon.

It’s a fair cop – but if applied to the Science of Middle-earth, this is a bandwagon I should have jumped on two years ago, when Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings were the talk of the town. And if that was all there was to it, I could have written a bald ‘how-to’ guide – how the Ring works, how dragons breathe fire and so on – and just moved on. To be sure, The Science of Middle-earth contains plenty of that sort of thing (after all, working out the aerodynamics of Balrogs is fun, and that’s all there is to it), but had that been my choice exclusively, I’d have done nothing to refute the urban myth that Tolkien hated science. Such an exercise would have seemed not only sterile and pointless, but a disservice to Tolkien. And that’s not something I’d have done willingly. No, I was after bigger game.

One of my targets is the Tolkien industry itself, which has taken the equation of Tolkien with cosy rustic nostalgia at face value, accepting it without question. This is surprising for two reasons. One is that Tolkien’s plain statements on other subjects have been examined extensively, and shown to be less plain than they seem at first (his well-advertised dislike of allegory, exploded by Tom Shippey in J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, is a case in point.) The second is that critics seem to have missed the scientific aspects of Tolkien’s own work as a philologist – a scientist of words – as a motivation for his fiction. Everyone has noticed the uniqueness of Tolkien’s approach, that is, that he built his entire myth cycle on invented names and languages, when to every other author, names are subsidiary to plot and character. But nobody has remarked on Tolkien’s view of himself as a scientist – an admission he makes more than once in his published letters. And not without reason: philology is all about taking words and languages apart, to see how they work – precisely the activity damned by Gandalf.

Why has this gone unnoticed? The reason is historical, and academic. In Tolkien’s day, university English curricula were divided into ‘Language’ – tracing the origins of English from the earliest times, up to Chaucer in the fifteenth century – and ‘Literature’, commenting on English after that time, when it had assumed, more or less, the forms we use today. Students of English Language were expected to do more than muse vapidly about plot, character and motivation. They had to master Old and Middle English, as well as Old Norse, not to mention Medieval Welsh, the various antique forms of German, and bits and pieces of other languages -- a working knowledge of Latin and Greek was assumed -- and assimilate the uncompromising rigors of nineteenth-century, Germanic comparative philology. Faced with such a schedule, it is no wonder that trainee novelists and dramatists sought something less demanding.

As a result, old-style English Language studies were going out of fashion even when Tolkien started his academic career in the early 1920s. It is no surprise, therefore, that modern literary critics, who majored in English Literature, have completely missed the essential, scientific qualities of Tolkien’s own approach to his work (and explains why, in part, most professional literary critics find Tolkien incomprehensible). But as I explain in The Science of Middle-earth, old-fashioned philology has a great deal in common with modern science, especially comparative biology. It is more appropriate, in some ways, for a scientist to assess Tolkien than for a modern literary critic to do so.

When you look at Tolkien’s work in the light of science, all sorts of major, important themes come into view – literary themes that enrich our understanding and enjoyment of Tolkien as a whole, something that might (if I flatter myself) be of more lasting value than a ‘how-to’ guide to Elvish artefacts.

One is the overwhelming sense of loss that pervades everything Tolkien wrote. There are all kinds of non-scientific reasons why Tolkien’s work is – as he wrote about Beowulf -- “weighted with nostalgia and regret” – but when you add modern scientific perspectives on evolution, extinction, climate change, geology and the processes of technological acquisition and retreat – the sense of loss becomes overwhelming.

Another is the attitude of the various characters in The Lord of the Rings to technology. The book is written from the point of view of the hobbits, whose technological capacity is stated, quite explicitly, right at the start of the book (so we’re not left in any doubt), as being at the level of the water-mill and the forge-bellows. Anything more sophisticated they view as magical, but once the conceit is realized, the magic of rings is less magical than technological. As Arthur C. Clarke wrote, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic – but it remains technology for all that, and this realization allowed me to take a detailed look at how the technology of the Elves is so advanced that it is, in essence, contiguous with nature. The Elves do not simply live in a sylvan landscape, for that is an illusion created by our relative lack of sophistication. No, the Elves have shaped the landscape. If there was genetic engineering in Middle-earth, the Elves would have used it to modify their own environment so thoroughly that we’d hardly notice. The science of the Dark Powers – Saruman and Sauron – is, by contrast, sooty and destructive, a cheap knock-off of the Elvish originals. This is science gone bad, science harnessed in the cause of power and domination, the science Tolkien hated. There is a lesson here for environmentalists who champion Tolkien but abhor advanced science. The Elves use science to the highest degree – the difference is that they use it for the general good, not to concentrate power in a few hands.

My main target, however – and the main reason I wrote the book – was the scientific establishment itself. Or, rather, that tendency in the scientific establishment, especially in Britain, that has set itself up as the guardianship of all knowledge, and the dictators of all we, the unwashed masses, should learn, know and understand. In the cause of trying to cajole an unwilling public into appreciating science more than it does, some scientists have claimed with some stridency that we should abjure all fantasy and cleave unwaveringly to a set of concrete facts that they will obligingly set out for us. In the same scene in which we see Gandalf criticizing Saruman’s reductionist tendencies, Saruman tries to persuade Gandalf that his motives are of the highest – to impose order on Middle-earth for the general good – the same patronizing attitude espoused by many science educators today.

In the final chapter of The Science of Middle-earth, I expose such attitudes as antithetical, not only to Tolkien’s view of science, but to science itself. All science relies at its most fundamental level on fantasy. Every scientific endeavour, be it ever so humble, starts with a thought-experiment, a ‘what-if’ question, in which scientist imagine themselves making discrete changes to some set of circumstances and then working out the consequences. What if I point my telescope here rather than there? What would happen if I mixed these two chemicals together? Science is built on such creative acts, in which scientists imagine, however fleetingly, a world for them to inhabit and explore, a world every bit as logical and consistent as Oz, Narnia, the Looking-Glass Garden and, most of all, Tolkien’s Middle-earth. For this reason, I argue that fantasy is something that scientists should cultivate, not repress.

If there is a bandwagon I seek to jump on, it is this. 2005 is the centenary of a scientific paper entitled (in its English translation), On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies. This paper, written by a lowly office worker and scientific amateur, contains no references, no experiments, and a few equations that would hardly tax most secondary-school maths students. It starts with a simple thought experiment, which boils down to this – what if the train you took to the office travelled at the speed of light? What would you then see? In one (and the most important) sense, Electrodynamics is a work of utter fantasy. And yet it in fewer than 30 short pages it proved that the speed of light was finite; overturned the mechanical Universe of Newton; abolished the centuries-old notion of the ‘luminiferous ether’, and established the Special Theory of Relativity. The author was Albert Einstein.

Henry Gee's book The Science of Middle Earth is published by Cold Spring Press in the US and Souvenir Press in the UK. You can find out more about Henry, his writing and his speaking engagements at his website www.henrygee.org.uk

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