Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are
The ghostly language of the ancient earth,
Or make their dim abode in distant winds. (The Prelude, Book II)

William Wordsworth writes frequently about stones, rocks, megaliths. He ponders the stories that stones can tell in ‘Michael’ (‘There is a straggling heap of unhewn stones’), and poets who ‘in their elegies and songs / Lamenting the departed call the groves ... And senseless rocks’ in ‘The Ruined Cottage’ (later The Excursion, Book I). He writes of casual inscriptions in ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’, to the ancient stone circle Long Meg and her Daughters in his Guide to the Lakes, and of course ponders Stonehenge in ‘Salisbury Plain’.

            In her influential, if flawed, book Romantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud (2012), Mary Jacobus makes a case for a number of objects, attributes, and activities that preoccupy Romantic poetry (particularly the poetry of Wordsworth) and which can change our perception of the world. This has since become a major area of interest in contemporary philosophy, notably in cultural environmentalism and in object-oriented ontology (OOO), both of which have swiftly generated a significant and wide-ranging bibliography.

            Although it would be a major undertaking to approach the entire corpus of Tolkien’s work in this way, several important points can be made to form an introduction to such an approach by building on Jacobus’s work and bringing it up to date with more contemporary thinking. This paper will therefore investigate one aspect – stones and rocks in The Lord of the Rings – arguing that Tolkien engages with a theme in Romantic poetry that, once neglected, now appears to be central to their conception of the natural world and the place of humans within it. From the enigmatic stone ruins that litter Middle-Earth to the new brick-built mill in Hobbiton, from the natural wonder of the bejewelled Glittering Caves to animate (and inanimate) beings such as trolls, to magical artefacts such as the palantíri and Silmarils, Tolkien develops a poetics of minerality that forms a bedrock to his work, part of the same stratum as Romanticism.