Leisure, Popular Culture and Memory: The Invention of Dark Age Britain, Wales, England, and Middle-earth in the songs of Led Zeppelin

In the period of high modernity, and in the process of establishing the imperial nation-state of Great Britain, historians, archaeologists and enthusiastic amateurs searched high and low for material evidence and primary sources from what was called the Dark Ages. There is a gap in knowledge about this past, and all discussion rests on finding meaning in fading inscriptions, or dark earth, or trusting completely the writings of Bede and Gildas. The search for an identity and history for the nation for Great Britain was based on nationalist beliefs about Englishness, Britishness or Welshness. In the twentieth-century, the problem of Englishness, place and myth led Tolkien to write his Middle-earth stories in his leisure time. At the same time, the problem of Welshness or Britishness saw a growth in interest – in film and books - in Arthurian traditions, and a tourist interest in the Celtic fringe of Britain. In this paper, I show how the songs and album covers of Led Zeppelin, and their film The Song Remains the Same, draw upon both the work of Tolkien and the Arthurian traditions to construct ideas of masculine belonging in some mythological medieval time and place. While this constriction is idiosyncratic to the artists, they are drawing on and justifying the wider problem of England, Wales and Britain in leisure and culture

Sustainable Fictions – Geographical, Literary and Cultural Intersections in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings

J. R. R. Tolkien s The Lord of the Rings (1954/1955), one of the founding texts of fantasy literature and the centrepiece of a number of writings about the geography, history and mythology of ‘Middle-earth’, has long become a cult phenomenon. We argue that in this influential text, Tolkien offers a fictional exploration of sustainability. Combining an application of Geographic Information System techniques with textual analysis and interpreting text and spatial data in conjunction, we show that there is a systematically varying distance between our real world and the physical features of Tolkien's ‘Secondary World’, as regards climate and vegetation patterns. There is an emphasis on land degeneration, a ‘missing forest problem’ which prompts a closer look at the role of woods and trees in Tolkien's work. It emerges that the preservation of trees is at the centre of Tolkien's sustainable fictions. For the author, it was a function of fantasy, which he sets against a dystopian and secular modernism as well as the destructive aspects of modernity, to provide (positive) ‘escape’, ‘consolation’ and ‘recovery’, which is achieved through a final vision of the successful preservation of the environment