Here Be Dragons (25 page)

A “second nature” created by human labor would not qualify as natural according to Lee's nature
_nh
or Soper's and Brennan's nature without
human impact. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to consider Cicero's “second nature” not only in terms of culture. A garden, for instance, could be considered to occupy a position between nature and culture.
¹⁷
In a garden, apple trees, roses, and lawns grow according to natural principles, and if they were not picked, trimmed, and pruned, they would grow out of control. It is the gardener's control that makes the garden what it is; and without control, the garden, as garden, would sooner or later cease to be. Rather than discussing nature only in terms of human
impact
, we can usefully look at nature in terms of human—or cultural—
control
as well.

Most people would agree that primary rainforest is part of nature but that shopping centers are not, and that a car is not natural but that an ancient oak is. But when it comes to bonsai trees, wheat fields, and pedigree dogs, there is not the same certainty. The difference between the former and latter examples is that the bonsai, wheat field, and dog have been subjected to human control. Their natural behavior has, in varying ways, been checked or changed, turning them into examples of Cicero's “second nature.” The rainforest and the ancient oak are (presumably) not culturally controlled but are what I term
wild
, part of a
wilderness
.
¹⁸
Once nature comes under our control, we tame it. We force the bonsai, the field, and the dog to develop and behave in ways that fit our culture. Gardens, parks, potted plants, agriculture, and pets are all examples of
tame nature
, nature under culture's control.
¹⁹
If that control were to cease, their tameness would give way to another state. The bonsai would grow larger leaves and branches, other plants (“weeds”) would mix with the wheat monoculture, and the dog's behavior, if not its appearance, would adapt to a life in the wild—and its offspring a few generations of uncontrolled breeding down the line would certainly no longer be pedigree animals. As culture's control ceases, wildness (re)asserts itself. This shift to a state of wildness and, eventually, wilderness is not restricted to borderline cases such as the ones just mentioned; brownfield land at former industrial sites exemplifies this process, as do the continual battles between gardeners and the invading forces of moss and weeds. If tame nature is not sufficiently controlled, it will not behave according to human wishes. It will go wild. That wildness which manifests itself when nature is no longer controlled is here termed
feral nature
. Over a year, a decade, or a century, wilderness returns, and even though traces of human impact may remain, control is gone; nature is again wild.

The relation between nature and culture varies from society to society.
In the actual world, whether the two are even opposed is open to question. According to Darwin and the theory of evolution, humans are the result of a natural process. To cut a long argument short, if we come from nature, and have developed through a natural process, then why should anything we do be unnatural? Or anything we make?
²⁰
Or is there a sliding scale between nature and culture? Are entities and behaviors more or less natural, more or less cultural? Then there is another notion, namely that humans are in some sense superior to the rest of the (natural) world. In Western society, this notion stems primarily from the Judeo-Christian tradition.
²¹
Genesis tells us that we “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
²²
The contemporary, and secular, view of
Homo sapiens
as standing “highest in a natural order of ‘lower life forms'” comes to us from the scriptures and from the concept of the
scala naturae
or “ladder of nature,” which was originally conceived by Aristotle and later brought into Christian learning.
²³
Two impulses thus compete in the Western view of how we and our culture are supposed to relate to nature. From a Darwinian perspective, we are a product of nature, not its masters, while religious tradition positions us above the rest of creation. This contradiction is one of the foremost reasons for our problematic relation between nature and culture.

In fantasy, and particularly in fantasy set in secondary worlds, neither Christian thinking nor Darwinism is a compulsory ingredient. Writers are free to construct their own relations between nature and culture. Tolkien thus uses a Christian foundation when his world, Arda, is explicitly created as the dwelling of the Children of Ilúvatar (elves and humans):

[T]he Ainur saw that [the creation] contained things which they had not thought. And they saw with amazement the coming of the Children of Ilúvatar, and the habitation that was prepared for them; and they perceived that they themselves in the labor of their music had been busy with the preparation of this dwelling, and yet knew not that it had any purpose beyond its own beauty. For the Children of Ilúvatar were conceived by him alone.
²⁴

The nature of Middle-earth is thus clearly separated from the cultures of elves and humans. In Aslan's creation of Narnia (C. S. Lewis,
The Magician's Nephew
[1955]), humans are even more external, as they come from outside the world. In both cases, a reading that sees culture as separate from nature is not only possible, it is imposed by how the worlds
are created. Other works present other approaches. In David and Leigh Eddings's The Dreamers series (2003–2006) and Terry Pratchett's
Eric
(1990), the world is created by divine labor, but its life develops through evolution. The fantasy genre offers alternative ways of relating to the nature–culture duality, including not regarding it as a duality at all, just as it offers alternative ways of dealing with and relating to any other concepts. When examining the construction of this duality in fantasy literature, my point of departure for each reading was that nature and culture formed separate domains; but as the four following examples demonstrate, that is not necessarily the case.

Returning to Bates's definition of culture, we find that he includes artifacts or “material objects.” The most palpable material object, or accumulation of material objects, that “the members of a society use to cope with their world”—that is, to control their surroundings—is the city. The division of labor developed in cities made possible the economies of specialization that led to the urban accumulation of capital (just as agriculture and food preservation allowed for a shift away from hunting and gathering), resulting in a society of specialist professions.
²⁵
In Occidental society, the city has become the locus of cultural interchange and could be considered the pinnacle of culture. The city limit is an obvious meeting point of nature and culture, of outside and inside; but it is also a boundary that, in various ways and in either direction, can be transgressed, permeated, or penetrated. It is a boundary in physical as well as nonphysical terms, and it is a boundary that confines as much as it protects.

Two points need to be made regarding the selection of the four cities discussed here: no assumptions as regards the relation between nature and culture found in them were made when they were chosen; and they were picked for their distinct differences rather than for any similarities they might have shared. It could even be argued that apart from belonging to the same literary genre, all they have in common is that they are imaginary cities. That trait is central to the discussion, however, because a study of the relation between nature and culture in works of fiction is by necessity a study of settings. If a story is set in (a version of) a city from the actual world, such as London or New York, no matter how fictionalized, the relations between nature and culture in the fantasy city could be influenced by circumstances in its actual-world counterpart. As this book aims to examine the relation in fantasy, such an admixture is undesirable. The four cities are thus all imaginary, even in the case of Newford,
which is set in a primary world. Apart from that, the four cities have very little in common. Tolkien's Minas Tirith is set in the portal–quest fantasy of
The Lord of the Rings
, in a culture that corresponds somewhat to early medieval Europe. Newford is a city that could well exist somewhere in today's North America. While Charles de Lint's many stories cover a wide range of fantasy, they are mainly of the intrusive type. New Crobuzon appears in immersive-fantasy novels, even though China Miéville's works also contain aspects of both quest and intrusion, and the industrial city is mainly based on Victorian London. Patricia McKillip's Ombria, finally, is a clearly immersive fantasy reminiscent of Renaissance Italy.

The quartet of cities I have selected thus demonstrates some of the many shapes and flavors that fantasy cities come in. In fantasy literature, we find cities scattered in the path of the questing hero, urban oases in the wilderness providing succor before the dangers of the road are braved again. Others are complete settings in themselves, not places to be visited but environments to be explored.
²⁶
Some are beautiful and pleasant; others are dark and oppressive. Some are empty and deserted, others are teeming with life. The vast majority are in some way perilous, threatened or threatening, and, as John Clute observes, “a city in fantasy tends to be a place where the action converges.”
²⁷
By looking at the relationship between the city and nature in various texts, we can discuss the relation between nature and culture in those texts and see how the nature–culture division is presented in these places of converging action.

THE RETURN OF THE TREE: BRINGING NATURE BACK INTO MINAS TIRITH
²⁸

The people of Middle-earth live in a wide variety of dwellings, from the comfortable hobbit holes of Hobbiton to the vast underground halls of Khazad-dûm, from Bree with its friendly inn to Edoras with its goldroofed Meduseld; but very few of these dwellings are called cities. Certainly, Khazad-dûm was once a light and splendid place, the realm and city of Dwarrowdelf;
²⁹
but when the Fellowship passes through, the place has long been called Moria, the Black Chasm. It is a ruin or ghost town rather than a city, inhabited by orcs and run by a dreaded balrog. Caras Galadhon, the capital of the Galadhrim, is a city of trees and lawns, and while it does not conform to traditional ideas of urbanity, contemplating it offers some interesting insights into an alternative relation between
culture and nature. The elven city is therefore briefly examined at the end of this section. Apart from Khazad-dûm and Caras Galadhon, however, most of the communities mentioned in
The Lord of the Rings
are villages or small towns.

The only city proper that the reader encounters in Tolkien's novel is Minas Tirith, the Tower of Vigilance, main city of Gondor after the fall of the original capital, Osgiliath. The city's central importance is stressed by the capital C that has been bestowed upon the word
City
whenever it refers to Minas Tirith in the text. There is what Tolkien calls a “basic opposition” between Minas Tirith and the Dark Tower of Barad-dûr,
³⁰
noticeable from the first time the city is mentioned at the Council of Elrond (FR, II, ii, 238). Minas Tirith is a city that defends itself, most manifestly from the forces of Mordor but also from the wilderness. Onionlike, the cultural center of the city, the great hall of the rulers of Gondor, is surrounded by ring upon ring of defenses. With each ring closer to the center, wild nature is further removed and the superiority of culture affirmed; and at the middle, in front of the hall, sits what must have been the ultimate symbol of a culture devoid of nature for Tolkien: an ancient, dead tree. Inside the hall, another symbol of similar meaning appears: a throne under a flowering tree—carved from stone.

Minas Tirith is set in a wilderness that is kept from the city by its outermost defense work and by the tame nature of the Pelennor fields. To the south are the mountains and vales of Lossarnach, and to the north lie Anórien and the Druadan Forest. The text indicates that Lossarnach has been slowly tamed over the years and partly turned into farmland; but it is still a forested country, and Minas Tirith's citizens plainly associate it with wilderness (RK, V, i, 754; viii, 845–46). The Druadan Forest, on the other hand, used to be under Gondor's control but has now gone feral. The wain-road running through it has been forgotten and overgrown, a road known only by the woses who live there (RK, V, v, 814–816). The woses offer a mirror image of the cultural Gondor citizen. Paul H. Kocher points out that Faramir refers to the woses as the lowest class of human civilization—the Wild Men, or the Men of Darkness—in a scale on which the men of Gondor are at the top.
³¹
If, as it seems to Merry, the woses are indeed related to the Púkel-men statues at Dunharrow that they so much resemble, they have lived unchanged in this part of Middle-earth since the Years of Darkness, more than six millennia earlier (RK V, v, 813–14, 816; iii, 777–78; Appx B 1058). In other words, they have lived in this area longer than the people of both Gondor and Rohan (the “High”
and “Middle” Men of Faramir's taxonomy) who are now its masters. The forest is clearly the true element of the woses; clad in grass skirts, they move silently and almost invisibly through it, a part of their natural surroundings. Their willingness to aid the Riders of Rohan despite having been dehumanized and hunted as beasts by the Rohirrim adds the woses' voices to Treebeard's in defense of the wilderness (RK, V, v, 815). From that position, the woses also function as criticism of Gondor's society. The men of Gondor, who style themselves as High, have forgotten their own history (the old wain-road); moreover, they have forgotten to live with nature in their City, which the woses refer to as the “Stone-houses.”