Tolkien's Green Man: The Racialised Cultural Other Within and Green Spaces in The Lord of the Rings.

The central impetus for this piece is my curiosity about how the pre-modern pagan mythological figure of the Green Man manifests itself in English literary genres that were very much pertinent to J.R.R. Tolkien's areas of scholarship. In my elucidations of the figure of the Green Man in the medieval Arthurian romance poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as translated by Tolkien as well as his fantasy cycle of The Lord of the Rings, I explore how the liminality of this figure in the English imagination can be used to reflect on discourses around literary representations of forms of Otherness. The sets of relationships under examination consist of those between Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Treebeard's dealings with the Hobbits and the specific interaction between the Druedain or the Woses represented by Ghân-buri-Ghân and the Men of Rohan, represented by Theoden on the eve of the War of the Ring. Informing my readings of these works is Verlyn Flieger's observation that "(t)he form and subject matter of J.R.R. Tolkien's major fiction clearly derive from the medieval genres of epic, romance and fairy tale", whereby he has reconceptualized many stock characters and reconfigured archetypal situations and contexts i.e. putting "a modern spin on many of his characters […] while at the same time keeping faith with the medieval types from which they derive" (Flieger, "Green Knight" 115). I read the figure of the Green Man as functioning as a palimpsestic device in these texts, in that it evokes pagan cultural sensibilities that connote natural forces as having considerable influence on more Christian worldviews that mark the English cultural contexts. Thus a pertinent question then would be: could the Green Man function as a transcultural contact zone (see Mary Louise Pratt 1992) in these texts to allow for ruminations on constructions of the Self and the Other? A salient component in my ruminations here on both these Tolkienian works will be an intersectional lens considering forms of masculinity, religious and cultural standpoints Christian and pagan positions as well as their accompanying forms of racialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]