On the ambivalence of fire in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings

Especially since the 1990s, the ecological significance of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work has been increasingly analysed. Despite the growing body of secondary literature on the topic, however, the problematic role of fire in Tolkien’s cosmos still remains to be clarified. In this article, I trace the ambivalent status of fire back to The Silmarillion, where Tolkien’s mythical universe is exposed in detail, and go on to assess the role of fire in both The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. To this end, I claim that the ambivalence of fire is present at an archetypal and at a civilisational level. At the archetypal level, fire can be primordial or elemental: while primordial archetypal fire functions as the fundamental principle of creation and life, elemental archetypal fire is part of the created natural world and can be wielded by supernatural beings. The civilisational aspect concerns how fire is put to use by the human and humanoid peoples of Middle Earth in order to build communities or civilisations, the problem being that, in Tolkien’s work, ecological devastation and desire for power are inevitably linked to the (mis)use of fire. By drawing on Erich Fromm’s distinction between biophilia and necrophilia (love of growing things vs. love of decay), I suggest that the excessive use of fire in Tolkien’s work fosters the emergence of necrophilous civilisations and that the best thing one can do is to try to contain the damaging potential of fire as much as possible.