Tolkien, Trees, and Saint-Simonianism

The French thinker Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Compte de Saint-Simon dichotomized history into critical and organic periods, critical periods being those in which the prevailing order is malleable, and the actions of men can have an outsize impact on the world, and organic periods being those in which the decisions made in critical periods are borne out. We can apply this framework to living things. Trees are perhaps the most organic, far more so than the already conservative hobbits. They are static in both the temporal and physical realms—they can live for thousands of years, unchanging except by the vicissitudes of critical beings such as humans, and they cannot move, meaning they cannot act on the greater world.

Tolkien had a well-documented love of trees, and they are replete in his mythos, from the Two Trees of Valinor to the Ents to Old Man Willow. But they are not critical actors. Stuff happens to them due to the actions of others, not due to their own actions. (Old Man Willow is, like the other elements of The Lord of the Rings appropriated from The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, a weird, nebulous exception to any rule.) Even the Ents, trees graced with the critical gift of ambulation, can’t escape this paradigm. Their inability to act or change renders them impotent, literally so: they lose the Entwives because the Entwives change and they cannot change with them. And metaphorically so: they would never have been moved to march on Isengard if not for the intervention of the critical actors Merry and Pippen. In this supposed demonstration of their agency, then, the Ents are organic tools of the critical actors. This can be seen in how Treebeard simply lets Saruman go. Saruman is perhaps the most critical character. He is an avatar of unfettered change, modernity, and industrialism, which destroyed the beloved forests of Tolkien’s childhood. He literally tries to change himself as “Saruman of the Many-Colors”. And, as Shippey writes, he talks like a politician. His power is in the critical nature of his voice, which the organic Treebeard is ultimately unable to resist, as Gandalf notes. Despite the Ents’ victory over Isengard, nature beating industry, Saruman has the final victory, showing that the organic is helpless in the face of the critical.

It is no coincidence that the story of Valinor starts with the Two Trees, while The Lord of the Rings starts with Old Man Willow. Trees are, to Tolkien, residue of an imagined past in which the world was blanketed with primeval forests. While these forests faded with time and progress, (leaving oases like Mirkwood almost alien and certainly faerie even to the fantastical Thorin and Company,) trees remain as a symbol of beginning. The hobbits sleep in a tree’s nooks on the first night of their journey and encounter Old Man Willow as their first tribulation. The Lord of the Rings is a story of progress, of the transition to the Fourth Age and the departure and fading of the Elves, of the faerie slipping into the imagined past so that Man can inherit the Earth. The Lord of the Rings starts with trees, but they fade as the fellowship progresses. Mordor is a dead land, Fangorn is being razed, and the White Tree of Gondor, the kingdom’s link to the Edenic past, lies dead.

The White Tree of Gondor is ultimately an offshoot of Telperion, the White Tree of Valinor. (While the Two Trees had no progeny, Gondor’s tree stemmed from Galathilion, made by Yavanna in Telperion’s image.) The story of the Two Trees and their descendants evokes The Dream of the Rood. In Tolkien’s mythos, Valinor is Eden, and the Flight of the Noldor parallels the Fall of Man. Galathilion, the replica of Telperion given to Finwë, the Adamic king of the Noldor, parallels the seed of the Tree of Knowledge bestowed upon Adam’s progeny. (Fittingly, given Tolkien's distaste for direct allegory, the tale is more akin to if the Serpent killed Adam and Cain willingly cast himself out of Eden in vengeance, which is rather more poetic. But the contours and motifs are there nevertheless.) Other aspects of the Two Trees mirror other aspects of the Dream. Their light is contained in the Silmarils, while their destruction is Melkor’s definitive sin and fall from grace. (They are also certainly trees of jewels and precious metals, just as the cross was in Christian imagery.) At the close of the Third Age, the White Tree stands dead, symbolizing the city’s degradation and moral abandon during the Stewardship. When Aragorn replants the tree, he is implicitly rebaptizing the city, restoring its ties to the Valar and to pre-fall Númenor. (The latter is of course also explicit, given his heritage.) 

In the same moment Númenor falls into apostasy, Sauron has Nimloth, the White Tree of Númenor, destroyed, symbolically severing the city’s link to the Valar. In a striking show of his gleeful perversity, he uses its wood to kindle the first tribute to Morgoth. The fruit taken and planted by Isildur marks him as one of the faithful, His surreptitious nurturing of the seedling arguably parallels the secret worship forced upon early Christians and later Jews. Unambiguous, though, is the parallel between what happens next and Noah’s flood. The few faithful—those literally carrying God’s light in the form of the seedling—are chosen to survive, on boats, while everyone else is drowned in a cataclysmic flood. (Parallels between Ba’al and Morgoth are also there.)

The White Tree and its offshoots, covenants as they are, do not act. Their inverse in this respect is the One Ring, with its dominating will. (Perhaps this mirrors how Tolkien’s evil seeks to dominate, while the Valar allow free will.) They are organic. Stuff happens to them. And so we should all be glad that, despite his love of trees, Tolkien did not feature them as major characters. A story cannot be a story without a conflict—it’s merely a history. A history without a conflict is analogous to a Sumerian spreadsheet, frightfully boring. I’d like to close with this passage by Tolkien’s funhouse mirror reflection, Terry Pratchett, showing what Tolkien’s mythos might have been from the perspective of his beloved trees. Note that the element that stops it from being unbelievably boring is the critical factor—the unseen humans with agency among the organic and entirely static trees.

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there’s nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber and, in some cases, backbone. This is probably fine from the species’ point of view, but from the perspective of the actual individuals involved it can be a real pig, or at least a small pink root-eating reptile that might one day evolve into a real pig. So the Counting Pines avoided all this by letting other vegetables do their evolving for them. A pine seed, coming to rest anywhere on the Disc, immediately picks up the most effective local genetic code via morphic resonance and grows into whatever best suits the soil and climate, usually doing much better at it than the native trees themselves, which it usually usurps. What makes the Counting Pines particularly noteworthy, however, is the way they count. Being dimly aware that human beings had learned to tell the age of a tree by counting the rings, the original Counting Pines decided that this was why humans cut trees down. Overnight every Counting Pine readjusted its genetic code to produce, at about eye-level on its trunk, in pale letters, its precise age. Within a year they were felled almost into extinction by the ornamental house number plate industry, and only a very few survive in hard-to-reach areas. The six Counting Pines in this clump were listening to the oldest, whose gnarled trunk declared it to be thirty-one thousand, seven hundred and thirty-four years old. The conversation took seventeen years, but has been speeded up. “I remember when all this wasn’t fields.” The pines stared out over a thousand miles of landscape. The sky flickered like a bad special effect from a time travel movie. Snow appeared, stayed for an instant, and melted. “What was it, then?” said the nearest pine. “Ice. If you can call it ice. We had proper glaciers in those days. Not like the ice you get now, here one season and gone the next. It hung around for ages.” “What happened to it, then?” “It went.” “Went where?” “Where things go. Everything’s always rushing off.” “Wow. That was a sharp one.” “What was?” “That winter just then.” “Call that a winter? When I was a sapling we had winters—” Then the tree vanished. After a shocked pause for a couple of years, one of the clump said: “He just went! Just like that! One day he was here, next he was gone!” If the other trees had been humans, they would have shuffled their feet. “It happens, lad,” said one of them, carefully. “He’s been taken to a Better Place, you can be sure of that. He was a good tree.” The young tree, which was a mere five thousand, one hundred and eleven years old, said: “What sort of Better Place?” “We’re not sure,” said one of the clump. It trembled uneasily in a week-long gale. “But we think it involves…sawdust.” Since the trees were unable even to sense any event that took place in less than a day, they never heard the sound of axes.

-LAL