The Wonders of Creation: Learning Stewardship from Narnia and Middle-Earth

Page, a biology professor at Wheaton College, debuts with an incisive look at how C.S. Lewis’s Narnia and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth can inform a Christian approach to addressing climate change. Lewis and Tolkien “demonstrate a well-developed land ethic in their writings and seem to be encouraging the reader toward some type of creation care,” Page contends, outlining how appreciating their fictional landscapes can animate readers to embrace “environmental stewardship.” She suggests that Lewis’s and Tolkien’s boyhood fascinations with the natural world influenced their work in the form of fictional environments that resemble the real one enough that readers can see Narnia and Middle-earth as familiar. Pointing to the hobbits’ agrarian society as a model of sustainability, Page posits that Frodo’s willingness to forsake his place in the Shire to save it exemplifies the valuable moral ethic of self-sacrifice for community gain. The author urges readers to view nature with “wonder and humility” so that they might “receive a glimpse of heaven here on earth.” Focusing on Narnia and Middle-earth makes for an enjoyable and creative way to address climate change, though the three “responses” by academics that close each chapter feel superfluous in their repetition of Page’s arguments. Still, this unusual volume on caring for the planet delights. (Nov.)