When the Forest Remembers: Tolkien’s Trees and the Fall of Saruman

In Letter 339 to the Daily Telegraph Tolkien sounds almost offended that anyone would “use [his] name as an adjective qualifying ‘gloom’” (Letter 339), especially in relation to trees. He responds that “In all my works I take the part of trees as against all their enemies” (Letter 339), which sounds funny but also quite serious, beyond an affinity for trees he poses as trees capable of having enemies. They can stand on one side of a moral conflict, they seem alive enough to have a side and be injured or remembered or defended and even potentially avenged. 

I was able to participate in a discussion group last week focused heavily on the root of evil within Tolkien’s, and trees, unexpectedly, seem relevant for the continuation of this discussion of this discussion. We had a hard time attempting to pin down evil in Tolkien’s world, we see categorized version of evil, with monsters like Shelob being based on appetite and worse evils based on domination with Sauron and Saruman. And, although the root of evil remains difficult to locate, the manifestations of evil are a lot clearer in Tolkien’s world. Evil turns relation into use, evil begins to show itself when a thing is no longer encountered as itself. A tree is no longer a tree, this creature with memory and relation, but something flattened into purpose. And, although this is not yet violence it is the conditions that makes violence possible. 

Treebeard says it best “[Sarumon] has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment” (The Two Towers, Book III, Ch.4 “Treebeard”). There is real accusation here “except as far as they serve him”, it’s more than this idealized “machine-loving enemy” (Letter 339) we often attribute to Saruman, Treebeard’s horror is that Saruman understates trees at the moment they become useful to him. A tree is allowed to matter as fuel, heat, smoke or military supply, but not as a living thing with its own duration. That means that a tree has already been reduced before it is felled, the axe only makes visible the violence that has already happened in thought. And Treebeard offers the exact opposite form of knowledge from Saruman. When Merry and Pippin first see him, Pippin feels that behind Treebeard’s eyes there is “an enormous well”, filled with “ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking” (TT, III, Ch.4) His own name is “growing all the time” because he says, “my name is like a story” (TT, III, Ch. 4). Tolkien isn’t making Treebeard old; he is imagining a form of consciousness shaped by duration, Treebeard is absorbed in survived time. This changes what it means to “know” a tree in Fangorn, Treebeard knows beings historically. His slowness in this chapter that often bring some comedic relief it brings a different moral tempo. Trees are not mute objects waiting to be used; they are lives that require patience before they can be understood. 
 
We come to understand Saruman’s evil quite clearly the trees being removed is translated into the language of his system. Treebeard says the trees are being left “to rot” or to be carried away “to feed the fires of Orthanc” (TT, III, Ch.4). The rotting trees show waste, destruction without even the excuse of need, while the trees brought to Orthanc show this conversion of living wood to heat, smoke and production. Treebeard line feels quite personal “Many of those trees were my friends, creatures I had known from nut and acorn; many had choices of their own that are lost for ever now” (TT, III, Ch.4). The “nut and acorn” reaching the smallest beginnings of a trees life beyond it can be useful or even visible. So Tolkien makes this loss not merely visible of the tragedy of the loss of a beautiful landscape but a deeper loss that seems almost linguistic. A speaking world has been silenced, Saruman’s evil is a violence against a world in which non-human things can answer and be known for the history they have witnessed. 
This is also what drives the Ents’ to march on Isengard, Treebeard realizes that staying still would not preserve the forest but abandon it, since Saruman’s destructive will would continue all the trees are left to be of use. In “Flotsam and Jetsam”, Pippin explains that Saruman “made the great mistake of leaving them out of his calculation” (TT, III, Ch. 9)/ Saruman’s defeat comes exactly from the same failure as his evil. He calculates based on the worlds he has reduced, he can count on the armies and fires and walls and machines he has created but cannot account for the possibility of the trees themselves acting. The living things he treats as material are able to become historical actors. Merry’s description of the Ents breaking Isengard further sharpens this, it was “like watching the work of great tree-roots in a hundred years, all packed into a few moments” (TT, III, Ch.9). The image here shows that the Ents defeat Saruman not by becoming another version of him, but using their force as tree-force, root-force, and this slow natural pressure being able to be accelerated into judgement. Isengard falls because of a kind of life Saruman ignored, becoming a force too powerful to remain in the background. The cleansing of Isengard with water makes this even clearer, Treebeard says that the waters will pass through “until all the filth of Saruman is washed away. Then Isen can run clean again” (TT, III, Ch. 9), the river had to run clean again to clean out Saruman’s inner corruption that has taken environmental form. 

Exodus 25 and The Dream of the Rood help us to complicate this argument that Tolkien is simply opposing “nature” to “making”. Exodus is full of human craft, the Israelites bring “gold, silver and bronze,” “olive oil”, “onyx stones” and “acacia wood”(Exodus 25:1-7), so wood that is shaped and overlaid with gold to make the ark, while the lampstand is hammered into the form “almond flowers with buds and blossoms” (Exodus 25:34). This making begins as an offering from “everyone whose heart prompts them to give,” (Exodus 25:2), and its purpose is dwelling “have them make a sanctuary for me, and I will dwell among them” (Exodus 25:8). Wood becomes a site of presence, gold taking on the form of organic life, material have been transformed into a place of divine meeting. Orthanc consumes organic life to feed its fires, the lampstand imitates organic life. In Dream of the Rood, where the tree has been violently cut down, but the poem gives the wood memory, speech and makes it a sacred witness rather than reducing it to an object (Williamson Translation, The Dream of the Rood, line 33). The rood first appears as “a wonderous tree lifting up in the air” (Dream, line 5), which soon becomes unstable: “Sometimes it was stained with sweat, / Drenched with blood, sometimes finely / Dressed with gold” (Dream, line 26-28). And, it is capable of speaking of its own history, “Many years ago- […]/ I was cut down at the edge of the forest, / Severed from my trunk, removed from my roots” (Dream, line 31-33). This line brings the poem in direct conversation with Tolkien, the tree does not simply become the cross; it remembers the violence by which it was made into the cross. But the tree has taken its rooted life and forced into human violence, made to bear “outlaws” and “criminals” (Dream, line 36). But the poem refuses to let this be the meaning of the wood, because the rood bears Christ, its suffering becomes witness rather than mere use.  It is made to participate in the Crucifixion, and it can later “rise up high in heaven, a tower of glory” (Dream, line 95). The rood has been used far from Saruman’s sense of use, but that of Tolkien’s view, where transformation of wood must restore meaning and not strip it away. 

During the battle in chapter 7, Saruman’s forces carry “two trunks of mighty trees” as battering rams (TT, III, Ch. 7, “Helm’s Deep”). We see dead trees are turned into instruments of assault, exactly as the manifestations of evil entail. But by morning, “the land had changed,” and where the green dale had been, “there now a forest loomed” (TT, III, Ch. 7). The army that uses dead trees as tools is trapped before living trees as judgment, Tolkien makes the reversal exact: first the tree as object, then the tree as actor. Saruman’s hosts cower “in terror of the king and in terror of the trees” (TT, III, Ch. 7). The phrase is strange and wonderful because it gives trees a political and moral force on the battlefield. They are not just part of the setting of doom; they are part of the doom itself.

That brings me back to the question of evil. If the root of evil in Tolkien remains difficult to name, its manifestation here is unmistakable. Evil appears when a living world is made mute, when beings with memory and voice are converted into materials, when knowledge becomes extraction and craft loses reverence. Saruman’s crime against trees is not a side issue or a decorative environmental theme. It is one of the clearest forms his evil takes. He reveals that he has forgotten how to see them and in Tolkien, that failure of vision is already a kind of fall.

- LMN

Telperion, Fangorn, and Menorah

 Tree imagery is so ubiquitous in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth that it can be easy to lose sight of what each instance means. The Ents, ancient and wise shepherds of the forests, embody trees as things enduring and mysterious in a way that feels inaccessible to those who live among them. And their resistance to Sauraman and his destructive forces at Isengard seems to suggest either a normative claim that nature ought to be left alone—their destruction being ultimately downwind of Sauron’s evil influence on the self-styled Wizard of Many Colors—and/or that it is folly to think that nature can be destroyed without consequence. Perhaps not dissimilarly, the threat posed to the hobbits by Old Man Willow as they first leave the Shire and enter the mythic world beyond positions trees as a symbol of an untameability in nature, even if Tom Bombadil—whatever it is he may be—comes along and chastises Old Man Willow into compliance. Meanwhile, in the twin trees of Valinor, trees seem to represent goodness, emitting light that stands in opposition to the darkness of the world, an image that Tolkien uses frequently to symbolize evil. Their descendant in the White Tree of Gondor, meanwhile, seems to represent salvation, both as its image is emblazoned on Aragorn’s heraldry as he approaches Minas Tirith in its time of need and as its restoration represents the titular return of the king. And yet the instantiation of the light that Telperion and Laurelin gave off—the Silmarils—seems to stand largely as objects of folly and temptation. In this vast confusion of images, it seems that trees represent something wholly different to Tolkien in almost every instance. Looking at the history of trees as symbols, however, helps to illustrate that this may not be the case. Rather, trees to Tolkien appear to represent various aspects of the divine in all its forms.

It is helpful to survey the way in which trees have been used throughout history to represent certain things. For the Greeks and Romans, specific varieties of trees were planted at temples to represent the different gods that were to be worshipped there. The trees were not supposed to be manifestations of those gods in a direct sense, but they did reflect something about their character and held symbolic significance, as epitomized in the laurel leaves of Nike/Victoria, the goddess of victory, crowning triumphants. For the Norse, the entire world was built around one great tree, Yggdrasil, that existed at the center of the universe and gave substance to all Creation. The tree superseded the personae of the individual gods of the Norse, the Aesir, and allowed for them to have life too. Insofar as there is a parallel between the Norse Aesir and Tolkien’s Valar and Maiar as gods, elementals, or angels, Yggdrasil seems in some ways to parallel Iluvatar, Tolkien’s God figure, or at least the world, Arda, His chief creation. Its strength, splendor, and steadfastness draw clear parallels between God and trees.

In Judeo-Christian tradition, as well, trees are closely linked to the divine. Some older Christian tales, such as the poem “The Dream of the Rood,” which features the cross upon which Christ was crucified telling of the glory of his sacrifice, place great emphasis on the tree that hosted what is perhaps the single most important moment in Christian theology, at least after Creation itself. Perhaps the most striking parallel, however, is that between Laurelin and the golden Menorah (or candelabrum) described in Exodus, both described as golden trees of light. The Menorah was to be wrought of gold and made to resemble a tree in its branches (Exodus 25:31–40). It was placed in the Temple at Jerusalem both to illuminate the inner sanctum and to serve as a reminder of God’s constant presence there through an ever-shining light. Laurelin, too, is a golden tree that emits light, glorifying Creation and driving off the fallen, becoming a target of the evil Melkor when he wants to strike back at his fellow Valar. Even if Telperion is not clearly representative of Iluvatar/God, unlike the Menorah, its opposition by those who are against Him suggests at least some association. These trees, at least, seem certainly to be symbols of the divine.

But not all instances of trees, in both Tolkien and Scripture, are so clearly positive. But it should be remembered that the forbidden trees in the Garden of Eden, eating from one of which led to the Fall of Man, were also manifestations of divine aspects in themselves, just taken in spite of divine will. Surely the Trees of Knowledge and Life represented attributes that applied to God. They are not in themselves sinful, but their violation was. This is, after all, at least the way that St. Augustine seems to conceptualize sin: as a violation of the divine or its will. Thus, it does not break the parallel between trees in both corpora that the Silmarils led Feanor and others into folly despite being, in a meaningful sense, fruits of the divine trees. If anything, the folly inspired by just such trees strengthens the parallel. The image of two holy trees in Valinor closely resembles that of two in Eden. Drawing this parallel more exactly would require a closer reading that is beyond the scope of this reflection, but it is difficult to imagine that Tolkien was not aware of it when he was writing The Silmarillion.

Indeed, the fact that the relationship between the Silmarils and the trees of Valinor as objects of folly akin to the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge helps demonstrate how all the seemingly confused traits detailed above are indeed best understood as attributes of the divine. In addition to showing beauty that can lead people with free will to fall if they do not pursue it properly, the salvation represented by the White Tree of Gondor, in both its physical reappearance in Gondor and symbolically in Aragorn’s heraldry, is easy to connect with images of the divine as a savior. So too for the ancient majesty and mystery—and the benevolence—of Treebeard and the Ents at Fangorn. Their assumption, too, of agency in the will of nature also seems to point to God’s demonstration of His wrath when His will is too severely violated. This particular aspect of God as wrathful is more closely associated with His “Old Testament” appearance, but it should be remembered that if Middle-Earth exists in anything resembling Tolkien’s Catholic cosmology, this is still the form of God that operates until a much later age. Indeed, it appears that trees throughout Tolkien’s corpus represent various aspects of the divine appearing throughout the main narrative of The Lord of the Rings and elsewhere. Providence does not clearly feature much in Tolkien’s stories, but perhaps the image of the tree—greater and older than man, wiser and kinder, and yet unknowable even if vulnerable to folly and greed at human hands—is how people relate to God in their real lives anyway.

— JZ

“But You Are Not For Arda”: Diminishment, Mortality, Memory, and Paradise

Through the different natures of Elves and Men, Tolkien sought to explore death and the proper way to interact with the world of Creation. In Letter 181, Tolkien all but confirms this when he writes:

“Elves and Men are just different aspects of the Humane, and represent the problem of Death … In this mythological world the Elves and Men are in their incarnate forms kindred, but in the relation of their ‘spirits’ to the world in time represent ‘experiments’, each of which has its own natural trend, and weakness” (Letters, pg. 341).

Beyond confirming that Elves and Men have different natures, this quote hints at why those distinctions arise on a metaphysical level: the similar “incarnate forms” and different “spirits” of Elves and Men. I believe these distinctions are critical to understanding the different roles and fates Tolkien envisages for Elves and Men in his universe. Tolkien most clearly develops these ideas in the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, where he introduces the concepts of hröa (body) and fëa (soul). To begin with hröa, Tolkien writes in Letter 181 that “Elves and Men are in their incarnate forms kindred,” thus implying that they share the same hröa (Letters, pg. 341). This is confirmed in the Athrabeth, when Finrod tells Andreth both Elves and Men “drew [their] hröar and their sustenance” from “the matter of Arda” (Athrabeth 309). The hröar of both Elves and Men are fundamentally of Arda. For Tolkien, both species needed this hröa to experience the world. 

        As we discussed in class, an existence as fëa only, but not as hröa, would not be satisfying. To prove this, we considered Sauron: after the Ring is destroyed, Sauron does not die. Rather, he loses his physical body, his hröa, and becomes solely fëa, taking the form of a menacing thunderstorm. Yet, in this form, he is unable to influence Arda and is blown away by wind from the West. Thus, beings need hröa to experience and influence Arda. As Ilúvatar would obviously want his Children to be able to enjoy His Creation, all beings thus have hröa. To be able to enjoy Arda specifically, their hröar need to be of Arda. This is why Elves and Men are common in this respect. They are even common in being affected by Arda Marred. Finrod tells Andreth that “you live in Arda Marred, as do we … all the matter of Arda was tainted” by Melkor (Athrabeth 309). Not even Aman has been free of the Marring since the Trees were destroyed. As a result, the hröar of Men are “weaker than they should be,” and the “health and stature” of Elvish hröar “is diminished” (Athrabeth 309). Regardless, the purpose of Elves and Men sharing hröar is clear: both are meant, at a baseline level, to experience Arda.

However, Elves and Men experience Arda in different ways, because they have different roles and different fates. As Elvish and Mannish fëar differ (Letters, pg. 341), unlike their hröar, to understand these differences and their consequences, we must look to fëar. In the Athrabeth, Tolkien explains the two key tenets of both Elvish and Mannish fëar. Elvish fëar are “bounded within … the Time of Arda” and are “unable to leave [Arda], while it lasts” (Athrabeth 331). Mannish fëar, on the other hand, “le[ave] Time … and never retur[n]” and were “not designed to stay long in Arda” (Athrabeth 331). This difference in fëar is directly responsible for the different fates of Elves and Men. Because Elvish hröa is of Arda, and Elvish fëa is bound to Arda, the Elves are therefore immortal within Arda while it lasts (Athrabeth 331). Finrod puts it best when he explains to Andreth that the Elves “belong to Arda (in hröa and fëa)” (Athrabeth 308) – they are fundamentally of Arda. Even if he dies, an Elf’s hröa and fëa both remain on Arda, so he can be reborn if he wishes. Men, on the other hand, while their hröa is of Arda, their fëa are not. As Finrod says, the “fëar of Men are not … confined to Arda” (Athrabeth 308). Rather, Mannish fëa leaves Arda after the hröa dies. Because the fëa leaves Arda, Man is mortal: his fëa is not within Arda and cannot thus be reembodied in the left-behind hröa. 

It is clearly this difference in fëa that explains the different “natural trend[s]” (Letters, pg. 341) of Elves and Men. Finrod says as much:

“Each of our kindreds perceives Arda differently, and appraises its beauties in different mode and degree. … To [Men] all things that he sees are new and strange, and in that degree lovable. To [Elves] all things are familiar, the only things that are, his own, and in that degree precious” (Athrabeth 315).

So, Elvish immortality means that to the Elves, “all things are familiar”, and therefore they are largely content with their surroundings. Further, because the Elves are immortal, they can pursue the “artistic, aesthetic, and purely scientific aspects of the Humane nature raised to a higher level than is actually seen in Men” (Letters, pg. 341) (they are exempt from much of the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, essentially). As a result, they have a “devoted love of the physical world, and a desire to observe and understand for its own sake” (Letters, pg. 341). Men, on the other hand, because they are mortal, constantly experience new things and are thus never content with their surroundings. In the constant struggle for survival, they seek to understand the natural world not for itself but as a “material for use or as a power-platform” (Letters, pg. 342). It is this basic difference in nature that explains many of the differences between Elves and Men. For one, while the Elves are content with their surroundings, Andreth says “no heart of Man is content” (Athrabeth 307). This is precisely why Men look to nature as a “material for use.” The Eldar, then, say that Men “look at no thing for itself; that if they study it, it is to discover something else” (Athrabeth 316). Men are thus inherently curious beings (Tolkien, it seems, would be a fan of the Life of the Mind). It is perhaps this feature that makes Men uniquely predisposed to Melkorianism in the Elvish view. There is a very thin line between studying something to understand it and to use it for your own ends (as we saw with Aulë and the Dwarves and Fëanor and the Silmarils). 

The Elves’ love of the natural world instills in them their unique “weakness” (Letters, pg. 341): a deep-seated “unwilling[ness] to face change” (Letters, pg. 342) and an attendant desire to “preserv[e] the past” (Letters, pg. 342). Hence, Sauron was able to deceive the Elves into forging the Rings of Power: he played upon their desire to prevent their realms from naturally decaying over time. However, such a thing is impossible in the mortal lands of Middle-earth. We see this with Galadriel, who is an Elf and thus is of Arda. With her power boosted by Nenya, she recreates Aman to an extent in Lothlórien. Yet even her real recreation of paradise must fail, because no one can escape the passage of Time. Hence, Galadriel laments that:

“The leaves are falling in the stream, the River flows away. 

O Lórien! Too long I have dwelt upon this Hither Shore 

And in a fading crown have twined the golden elanor” (The Lord of the Rings 485).

Galadriel does not get to indulge in her escapism: she must either return to the real paradise, Aman, or remain a powerful figure in Middle-earth while accepting the diminishment of her artificial realm. In this way, Tolkien seems to be harkening back to his essay “On Fairy-Stories”: he is directly rejecting the notion that memory and stories are escapism. The usage of the Ring Nenya here is also very interesting to me. By using the Ring to stop the flow of time (in a sense) in Lothlórien, Galadriel has attempted to bend Arda to her will. To me, that seems like a distinctly Mannish activity, based on the two natures laid out previously. 

Farewell to Lórien by Ted Nasmith

Beyond the Rings, the Elves have two ways of “avoiding” the change they fear, though neither is truly effective in mortal Middle-earth. The first, more palliative than preventive, is through memory of the past and stories. The second, and more literal, is sailing West to the Undying Lands of Aman, or paradise. However, this method is in a way contingent upon memory as well: Eärendil only reaches Aman because he gets the Silmaril, which, as we discussed, is the memory of the Light of paradise in Aman before Morgoth marred it. As a natural expression of their main weakness, memory seems to be especially the province of the Elves. As Finrod says:

“In memory is our great talent, as shall be seen ever more clearly as the ages of this Arda pass: a heavy burden to be, I fear; but in the Days of which we now speak a great wealth” (Athrabeth 319-320).

The Elvish desire to recall memories of a higher past is directly contrasted with the Mannish desire to explore the present and future throughout The Silmarillion. When Beren enters Doriath, he is described as “doomed to roam,” and “lonely still to roam” (The Lord of the Rings, pg. 251). Lúthien, meanwhile, dances happily on the greens of Doriath, singing to the music of Daeron. When the Green-elves of Ossiriand first find Men, they tell Finrod that Men are “hewers of trees and hunters of beasts; therefore [they, the Green-elves] are their unfriends” (The Silmarillion 142). While the Green-elves seek to exist in harmony with Arda, and venerate the past beauty in which they found it (and preserve it), Men seek to understand that beauty and use it

Man’s hunger for new things becomes Man’s “weakness” (Letters, pg. 341) when it becomes excessive hunger. We are told that the Men who arrived in Beleriand, fleeing from the East, “were eager to learn the lore of the Elves” (The Silmarillion 147). This makes sense, as the lore of the Eldar would constitute new knowledge. This is shown more directly with Beren. As he retrieves a Silmaril from Morgoth’s crown, he is overwhelmed by its Light. He is the first mortal to behold the Silmarils, and suddenly, he is captured by the desire to have more, and so he decides to cut the other Silmarils from the crown (The Silmarillion 181). This insatiability leads to the awakening of Angband, the loss of his hand, and eventually, Beren’s very death. The idea of paradise comes in here as well: the Silmarils, as we discussed, are the memory of the Light of paradise. Perhaps Beren’s sudden desire is a rekindling of the Mannish desire to attain the Light over the sea they are unable to possess. Beren is not satisfied with one Silmaril, with the memory of the Light of the Trees; rather, he wants to gather all three Silmarils, all the Light of the Trees left on Arda, all of their paradise that is physically left. 

Beyond Beren, Faramir tells Frodo that the Kings of Gondor died out because they spent their days “in high cold towers ask[ing] questions of the stars” (The Lord of the Rings 886). They thus became too focused on the mysteries of Arda and the stars, and ancient heraldry, and not focused enough on the outside world. Their desire for knowledge became unbalanced in one particular direction. The Stewards, Faramir says, have been “wiser” for that very reason: “they recruited the strength of our people from the sturdy folk of the sea-coast” and focused on defending Gondor (The Lord of the Rings 886) while also preserving Gondor’s lore (Denethor, for example, is very learned). Thus, Tolkien thinks Men should pursue new things, knowledge, and stories of the past, but there is a limit: as with Galadriel, memory should not become escapism; the outside world still exists. In this way, Tolkien harkens back to “On Fairy-Stories” once again. While both Man and Elf may rely on memory and stories for sustenance and empowerment, neither can use them to ward off the inevitable flow of Time.

- WRM

Green Trees, Temptation, and Worldliness

It would be folly to address Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a tale lacking in Christian themes, made obvious even at the beginning’s Christmas festivities. So too does any passing knowledge of Arthurian legend tie itself to Christ, by way of the Holy Grail typically being a relic of Jesus Christ. However, the Green Knight as a character (as well as his household) goes beyond the New Testament, and arguably as far back as one can take the Bible: Genesis.

Somewhat oddly, this takes us to Tolkien as well, though less oddly were one to also be aware of his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. As Flieger notes on page 92 of Scholarship and Fantasy: Proceedings of the Tolkien Phenomenon, the Green Knight and the ent Treebeard share a very superficial similarity. Those are notably being the green hue (though varying in saturation between the characters) and beard, the latter of which Fangorn receives his English name from. The characters are thus tied together into something primordial, something wild, made more overt in the case of the ents. Further, in stanza 10 of Tolkien’s translation of Sir Gawain, the Green Knight is noted to wholly lack armor. One may harken back to the contrast of the arboreal pastoralism of Fangorn and the metallurgical industrialism of Isengard.

Chapter 3 of Genesis details the ages-old tale of Adam and Eve falling from God’s grace, by way of eating the forbidden fruit at the behest of the serpent (in Eve’s case) and later Eve herself (in Adam’s case). The boons gained are that of knowledge, and to quote Sir Francis Bacon, knowledge itself is power. So here we are left with (an) individual(s) who fall prey to temptation for the sake of power. The One Ring may be brought to mind here, and perhaps rightfully so, but this had little else to do with trees. In stanza 74, Sir Gawain is tempted by power, not the power of knowledge, but of immortality. In 81, this is made even more apparent in his utilization of the sash in the face of death. The Green Knight himself draws such a parallel in stanza 97, comparing Gawain to Adam and other men that have shown themselves to be temptable. Gawain here fills a composite role of Adam’s and Eve’s Original Sin, while the lady fills the similarly composite role of the Serpent’s and Eve’s agent of temptation. As with the first man and woman, Gawain is forever marked with his own original sin, the scar on his neck that he shows with shame to the Round Table in stanza 100. This does beg the question of what role the Green Knight plays. Though he does take a Godly role as the arbiter of sin under his domain, the pagan Green Man-undertones do call this into question. What the Green Knight is ultimately characterized by is his association with the greenery by which he gets his name. As he works through the lady, his wife, the sash is therefore originating from him. And so the Green Knight exists as a liminal character between the role of God and the Tree of Knowledge.

Where then does Treebeard fit here in regards to temptation? Old Fangorn has little to do with the One Ring directly, and yet he is cut from the same cloth, or perhaps foliage as the archetypes discussed prior. In chapter 4 of The Two Towers’s first book, eponymously named Treebeard, Merry and Pippin dine at Fangorn’s residence, and sup on his aptly-named ent-draughts. Herein lies the temptation Treebeard offers. The stakes are obviously somewhat lower, bordering on the prosaic of mere height increases. However, in the ninth chapter, Flotsam and Jetsam, Legolas and Aragorn note a peculiar and mysterious nature regarding the otherwise mundane-appearing water. Though again, all that occurs is taller hobbits, the mysterious and possibly dangerous nature of boons from trees is shared with the forbidden fruit and sash. If anything, it provides a liminal role, as Fangorn does between the Green Knight and biblical figures.

The sash is ultimately implied to be useless; had Gawain kept it, it is doubtless that his head would have been parted from his shoulders despite the lady’s words. It is mundane and harmless, harmful only in the lie. On the contrary, the forbidden fruit strips mankind of its innocence. They are temptations that offer power, but give only worldliness. As Gawain returns wearing the sash, he returns a worldlier man with a greater grasp of virtue. Adam and Eve are cast out from the garden worldlier by their knowledge of and capacity for evil. So too do Merry and Pippin return to the Shire worldlier, and more obviously, taller. This is the first thing most obvious, and is a gift of Fangorn the tree-man. Gawain’s sash is what is most prominent to the Knights of the Round Table, and the story comes later. So too is this a gift of the Green Knight, the tree man. Adam and Eve walk the earth as sinners, a poisoned gift of the Tree of Knowledge. All are fundamentally changed in profound ways, ways which transform the soul. Yet those who bear witness to them first notice a physical change. Tall halflings, a scarred neck, and mortality. All are marks of the fruits of the foliage, and all are marks of temptation embraced. Merry and Pippin ought to be glad ents are kinder than snakes in the canopies above.

-RLC

 

Tolkien and Gawain in the Green World

When Treebeard appears in book III of The Lord of the Rings, he is a reminder of an archetypal concept in literature that harkens back to Shakespeare and beyond: the green world. Verlyn Flieger alludes to its influence in “The Green Man, The Green Knight, and Treebeard,” and the way in which Tolkien’s description of the Ents alludes to the image of the woods as a uniquely fantastical place. But closer examination of Merry and Pippin's arc reveals how he echoes the particular storytelling mode of the green world. Tolkien draws on these mythic archetypes in a way that makes his depiction of journeying into the wilderness all the more powerful, because he is following in a style that dates back all the way to Sir Gawain in the fourteenth century.

The green world is defined by Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism as his “fourth phase of comedy,” one of six phases of comedy he identifies between irony and romance. He describes them in the context of Shakespearean comedies like Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and Merry Wives of Windsor. He describes it in association with fairy and magic in particular, identifying the forests in those plays as “the embryonic form of the fairy world.” Its story is “assimilated to the ritual theme of the triumph of life and love over the waste land,” with a particular seasonal context as the spring returns to triumph over the cold winter. The story of the green world follows a consistent structure, where “the action of the comedy begins in a world represented as a normal world, moves into the green world, goes into a metamorphosis there in which the comic resolution is achieved, and returns to the normal world.” The characters are transformed by the inversions that occur within the green world, and emerge renewed, at which point there is some kind of celebration. 

Frye does not mention Sir Gawain in his discussion of the green world, although it is as emblematic an example of the archetype as any of the Shakespeare plays which he cites. Flieger herself cites it as an example in noting the commonality of the “wood as a place of mystery and otherness.” In form a chivalric romance, following the quest of Gawain to fulfill his obligation to the Green Knight, Sir Gawain follows the same comic style of plays like Midsummer. The story hinges on the game played between Gawain and the Lord where they exchange gifts, leading to the comic inversion. The Lord is revealed to have been the Green Knight who did not intend to execute Gawain but only sought to test his resolve. The nick he delivers is punishment for not giving a gift in exchange for the girdle. Notably, the Knight has come into existence through magic from Morgan le Fay, thus signifying the role of the fairy in bringing this particular green world into existence. This is followed by Gawain returning to Camelot, having been symbolically reborn with the coming of the new year and his learning a lesson on honesty. Frye notes that the green world “charges the comedies with the symbolism of the victory of summer over winter” and identifies as an example Falstaff's comic punishment in Merry Wives, where he is subjected to a mock pagan ritual as humiliation. The narrator notes that Gawain imparts this insight to his fellow knights, inspiring them to wear the green baldric as a reminder to be honest, thus bringing the lesson back to the normal world and civilization.

That same archetypal story emerges when Merry and Pippin stumble into Fangorn. Treebeard is its emissary to draw them into the world, much like the Green Knight with whom he shares many physical similarities. Notably, both of them are compared in size to trolls (Sir Gawain: “that half a troll upon Earth I that row he was”; LOTR: “a large Man-like, almost Troll-like, figure,”) and beards which are compared to bushes (Sir Gawain: “a big beard like a bush over his breast hanging”; LOTR: “face was covered with a sweeping grey beard, bushy, almost twiggy at the roots.”) They are creatures formed from nature even as they appear as men, to bridge the gap between the two worlds. But these resemblances, which strongly suggest deliberate allusion, reveal they share a similar role within the story in drawing the protagonists into the green world.

Just as important as the appearance of the Knight is the transformation he ultimately brings. For Gawain, this is the lesson of the sash, which inspires the knights of Camelot to join his penance and beckons them into a new year. Tolkien mirrors this through the profound alteration of Merry and Pippin within Fangorn Forest. Having consumed the draughts of the Ents and absorbed the "un-hasty" wisdom of the Entmoot, the Hobbits are physically and attitudinally transformed. They have literally outgrown their former selves. Here, we see the particular magic of the fairy world which acts upon those who enter. This personal growth enables the larger resolution of the Treebeard storyline, as the two hobbits convince the Ents to march on Isengard, the clear representation of industry and Saruman’s cold rationalism. By flooding the stronghold and reducing its machinery to a primeval swamp, the Ents achieve the final victory of the green world over the mechanical. When Merry and Pippin announce themselves as the new doorwardens of Isengard, they signal not merely a comic reversal of hierarchy but the completion of their transformation to become the active agents of the restoration they once only observed. The moment of triumph, incidentally, occurs in the early spring (March 3) to make the rebirth with the coming of spring even clearer.

Tolkien’s noted disdain for literary critics (see his “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”) suggests a justified resistance to analyzing his work through one of these archetypal frames. While he would acknowledge the parallels between his own work and Sir Gawain, he might reject Frye’s impulse to catalog literature through a system that seeks to exhaustively identify these patterns. Such a categorization would strike Tolkien as not dissimilar to destroying that "tower of art" to point out that our favorite works are endlessly repeating the same archetypes. For Tolkien, this raises a fundamental objection: why can we not simply appreciate the unique integrity of these stories and engage with them directly, as readers of both Sir Gawain and Lord of the Rings evidently have? Frye might respond that by identifying those structures we understand why those narratives remain so resonant over time, and how they remain powerful from the 14th century to the 20th. Whether we label the journey a movement through Frye’s "green world" or a passage through a Tolkienian wilderness, the structural map only serves to confirm the enduring vitality of the place itself.

- IAG