Like the trenches of The Great War
Or the desolate, dead places pollution and industry nave created.
Besides, “not having vegetation”, so being literally devoid of life is a theme encountered in many of the folk sagas, Tolkien wanted to imitate.
Tolkien, from everything I’ve read, was particularly anti-industrial. It was a continuing theme in his writing. The hobbits were the traditional English country folk of lore, loving their gardens and gossiping with their neighbors, the elves were the magical masters of nature, the dwarves were more of a mixed bag, and the humans were kind of forked depending on their lineage.
I believe he was also fairly racist. If you read the descriptions of the orcs and of the armies of the “southern” men and compare them with the descriptions of the tall, blond northerners, elves, and so on, I think it’s pretty apparent that descriptions like dark skin are signifiers of evil.
Well, that’s all the subject of almost endless debate among literature scholars. Firstly: It’s crucial to never draw conclusions about the stance of an author from his writing alone. Secondly, the premise behind the Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion was to invent a body of folklore in an imaginary geographic body that was just like the UK. Something that the British literature canon sorely lacks, especially when compared to the rather cohesive stories around the Nordic Gods (even if the Edda is mere fabrication by Catholics and probably takes more liberties than they should make the Norns look bad and Christ look spectacular), or the Greek/Latin Gods.
Tolkien was a very learned linguist and literature professor. So there is no way to tell if he chose things like the skin colors or the descriptions out of a moral message he wanted to convey, or if he merely copied things he assumed would be in such works.
He very famously strongly opposed Nazi-Ideology and Eugenics, as well as British propaganda as soon as that turned racist as well (Picturing the Germans as the same kind of sub-human the Germans thought everybody else was). So it’s highly debatable if he really had anything racist in his mind or if we interpret stuff with our current mindset into works of the past, which we can and should not do.
The same goes for descriptions of Nature and such. Was he really anti-industrialist, or did he describe a land he imagined the people in this imaginary Britain-esque place would find? Furthermore, if he was anti-industrialist (or pro-nature): How much of that did make it into the Lord of the Rings? We simply cannot tell, so we shouldn’t try to. He expressed some notions in that direction in private letters, but we cannot guess from the Lord of the Rings.
Jeez guys I was just thinking of the SW
