Introduction: The New Geopolitics

Summary

Anyone can conceive the fantastical image of a ‘green sun’, but to create a world inside which a green sun will be credible and command belief requires a special skill, ‘a kind of elvish craft’. Note the metafictional artifice: fairy tales, which so often have elves as their characters, are themselves a product of elvish magic or enchantment, the ability to create imaginary worlds that other people will take for the real one. Inside these worlds, what the world contains is true: it accords with the laws of that world. J. R. R.Tolkien distinguishes between magic and enchantment. The former aims to produce a change in the real world, what Tolkien calls the primary world. Modern technology, in the sense of machine technology, Tolkien regards as akin to magic, a desire for power and for making the will more immediately effective; the word he uses in this context is ‘bulldozing’, an act of destruction, levelling mountains and filling valleys.