Love and Loss, or the Life of a Wraith

The idea that death was a wound has always seemed obvious to me. I have been fortunate enough not to have lost many people who are close to me, but the ones I have lost so far have hurt deeply. While the “Gift of Eru Illuvatar” sounds like a gift on paper, experiencing it does not make it feel much like a gift. When reading the Athrabeth, Finrod’s arguments sounded noble and high minded, but Andreth’s arguments made a lot of sense to me as a human. As a human, loss is certain, and that feels far more like a curse than a gift. With my disposition towards death being bad, I am captivated by the stories of Beren and Luthien and Aragorn and Arwen. From my negative view on death I can’t imagine what kind of strength of love would have Arwen and Luthien trade endless life for the certainty of loss and a grave. Finrod explains it from the Elves’ view, that immortality may not in fact be all positives, an immortal being with just a fëa (spirit) and no hröa (body) is a fate worse than death, as one remains bound to Arda. However, I still struggle to understand how the type of endless life that the Elves possess and knowing you will see your family and loved ones again, even with its drawbacks, can be a worse bond than the certainty of grief that Andreth faces.

It really stuck with me in class when it was said that, “She traded endless twilight for the brightness of one mortal lifetime filled with love, laughter, scraped knees, bedtime stories, and the wild, irreplaceable joy of watching her child grow.” Neither the marriages of Beren and Luthien or Aragorn and Arwen are “happy ever afters,” they both involved bitterness and loss. The story of Aragorn and Arwen is especially sad as Arwen dies alone in the now abandoned forests of Lorien. As she says during the tale “As wicked fools I scorned them, but I pity them at last. For if this is indeed, as the Eldar say, the gift of the One to Men, it is bitter to receive." (Appendix A, Part I) Finrod can speak of it as a gift, for he will never have to face the loss, which Arwen understands now is why Humans speak of it as a curse, yet she knew it was a certainty when she made her choice and chose it all the same. 

This is where Letter 43 enters the picture. On the surface it may come off as a grumpy letter about the failings of love and the inherent limitations of the genders, but going under that I think it is cutting to the core of what marriage is. As humans we are going to die, getting married is guaranteeing yourself or your partner an immense amount of pain in death, and yet choosing to get married anyway. Choosing not to get married would save you some pain, but it would be like choosing not to interact with the world. With that logic we could try and forgo all bonds of relationships with others to escape pain, but then we would be like wraiths. Not interacting would be the worst of both worlds, one would be like a wraith described by Finrod as a fate worse than death, but then still dying anyway. It would be like receiving that one day of a human life time and choosing to waste it. In today’s world that could look like refusing to make friends because friends can leave or refusing to fall in love because it will inevitably cause pain. The point is not that these refusals fail to save us from pain, to some extent they might, but they will also prevent us from experiencing the things that would make the pain worth bearing. As Haldir states in the Fellowship of the Ring “and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.” (Book 2, Chapter 6) I am beginning to wrap my head around the fact that maybe loss is what makes love so special. When Edith died, Tolkien wrote Luthien on her grave and when he died, Beren was inscribed under his name on the tombstone. The entire story of The Lord of the Rings is only possible because of the very marriage between Beren and Luthien. The descendants that result from Luthien trading that eternal twilight for one human day and a child, with all of the joy and sadness attached, play key roles in Sauron’s defeat.

Towards the end of the Athrabeth, after Andreth argues that maybe Eru is a far off king letting princes do as they will, Finrod speaks of something stranger: the Creator entering into Arda and healing it from within. Over the course of the discussion they have logically arrived at the idea of the Incarnation. In Christianity, God does take a body, a hröa, as Jesus Christ and allows it to be destroyed on the cross. If death is a wound, it is something that God entered his own creation to share with us. If Jesus dies with us, then death must somehow be a gift. That's a part of the class that I am still processing, and the idea of death still scares me and I suspect it will for a long time, but maybe Finrod is right, and death is what makes life meaningful. Wouldn't a single day that changes be more meaningful than an eternal, never changing twilight?

-EN

Old Hope: Re-enchantment in a Disenchanted World?

“Elves and Men are just different aspects of the Humane,” Tolkien noted in Letter 181. That is to say, he did not construct and depict Elves and Men as two separate and independent species. Rather, in Middle-earth, Tolkien was observing and portraying two different modes of human existence.

“Death” functions as the anchor where these two modes of being both meet and diverge. Mortal Men are doomed to die, while Elvish “immortality” is not truly eternal life. Elves will also perish eventually, but only with the end of Arda. Death for them is so distant as to become almost unimaginable, producing a mode of existence that ostensibly resembles infinity. Their distinct modes of being yield two radically different psychologies, in which Men and Elves experience history differently, approach Eru differently, and ultimately participate in Arda differently. More importantly, both of these worldviews can still be found within modern humanity itself. Tolkien’s construction of Men and Elves is therefore not escapist mythology, but a genuine reflection — even a prophetic reflection — of real-world human existential conditions.

At the turn of the millennium, philosopher Susan Buck-Morss argued that the central project of the twentieth century had been “the construction of mass utopia.” The crisis of modernity was the collapse of traditional authority — religion, monarchy, transcendence itself. In response, humanity attempted to construct dreamworlds of its own.

For a moment, it seemed as if we had succeeded. Not because our dreams had been fulfilled, but because we once again believed that history possessed meaning, direction, and destiny. History had its subject — not one guaranteed by God, but one discovered and justified by humanity itself: technological progress, revolution, liberation, communism (even fascism, in the case of the Third Reich). The world remained enchanted because it still appeared intelligible, and because we believed ourselves to be progressing toward a future already visible on the horizon.

In both premodern religious societies and the ideological dreamworlds of the twentieth century, one finds a profound sense of confidence — even passion (fanaticism, in its extreme forms). Where there is certainty about the structure of reality, there is little room for weariness.

“There is no weariness in the eyes of the Elves” (“Athrabeth” 316).  The Elves, in many ways, resemble this enchanted condition. In the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, Andreth’s anxiety and despair stand in stark contrast to Finrod’s almost instinctive certainty. Finrod possesses an unwavering trust in Eru and in the coherence of His Creation. Everything belongs within the design of the One. Even death, for the Elves, ultimately remains part of a meaningful cosmic order.

This is the crucial point: although Elves will eventually perish with Arda, they never truly experience death as existential anguish. Death remains comprehensible, integrated into the structure of the world. Moreover, the death of the Elves comes with the death of the world itself. They are never burdened with confronting the terror of an unknown world (or afterlife of soul) continuing without them.

Men, however, are different. As Andreth says: “we have no certainty, no knowledge” (“Athrabeth”311), Men are perpetually haunted by uncertainty because death may arrive at any moment. They cannot rehearse or prepare for its arrival, nor can they fully conceptualize what lies beyond it.

If Elves embody a state of enchantment, then Men embody disenchantment. They no longer possess confidence in the intelligibility of the world. In its place emerge frustration, melancholy, and radical skepticism. And this condition feels profoundly reflective of our own age.

After the collapse of the twentieth century’s dreamworlds since WW2 and Cold War, humanity was once again thrown into a vacuum of authority and meaning. We no longer believe that history necessarily progresses toward a utopian redemption. We have lost our dreams, and in many cases, we have even become exhausted by the very act of dreaming itself. Suddenly Andreth’s questions no longer sound mythological — they sound exactly contemporary:

Are we the Children of the One?
Are we not cast off finally?
Or were we ever so?
Is not the Nameless the Lord of the World? (“Athrabeth” 320)

While the Elves are still speaking of Eru, Estel, and divine Creation, Men have begun to suspect that the foundation itself may already be broken. This is what makes Tolkien’s portrayal of Men astonishingly prescient. Writing within the twentieth century — an age still filled with ideological passion and historical confidence — Tolkien had already begun imagining the spiritual condition of the twenty-first: life in a disenchanted world.

Yet Tolkien does not simply advocate a return to enchantment, and this becomes clearest in the “Old Hope” of Men.

According to Andreth, some believe that Eru himself will enter into Arda and heal the Marring of Melkor from within history itself. Since Melkor’s corruption is structural and permanently woven into the fabric of the world, Arda cannot save itself through its own internal logic. Redemption must come from outside — from the foreign, the transcendent. Once again, Tolkien redirects us toward Men, the Guests of Arda, who remain perpetually disenchanted yet still long for re-enchantment, precisely because they belong somewhere beyond the world they inhabit.

Yet the truly remarkable moment comes from Finrod. For the first time, the Elf who had previously spoken with complete certainty begins to hesitate. His language changes — he begins to say “maybe,” “I guess,” “I propound,” and so forth. He does not abandon faith in Eru’s design, but he comes to realize that perhaps the design is not something static and completed, but something gradually unfolding: Eru’s plan may not operate like a finished blueprint, and Arda itself may still be in the process of becoming.

Here Tolkien moves away from deterministic futurism altogether. As the Ainulindalë declares, “in every age there come forth things that are new and have no foretelling, for they do not proceed from the past.” Even Men, the Second Children, emerge as something unforeseen, beyond the vision of the Valar.

And perhaps this is Tolkien’s deepest warning against modern ideological enchantment. Having witnessed the catastrophes of the twentieth century, Tolkien understood how easily attempts to restore absolute meaning, historical certainty, and collective destiny can harden into totalizing ideologies.

Thus Tolkien does not offer re-enchantment in the traditional sense. He does not secure and restore to us a stable “subject of history.” Instead, he leaves us with something more fragile, but perhaps also more humane: the possibility that meaning emerges not from certainty about history’s predetermined destination, but from our openness to becoming itself — a condition of perpetual unfolding and transcendence. In a disenchanted world, what we require is not renewed faith in a fixed historical destiny, but faith in humanity’s capacity to continue participating in an unfinished world.

Work Cited:

Tolkien, J. R. R. “Ainulindalë.” The Silmarillion, edited by Christopher Tolkien, Houghton Mifflin, 1977, pp. 15–30.

Tolkien, J. R. R. “Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth.” Morgoth’s Ring: The Later Silmarillion, Part One, edited by Christopher Tolkien, vol. 10 of The History of Middle-earth, Houghton Mifflin, 1993, pp. 303–66.

Tolkien, J. R. R. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter, Houghton Mifflin, 1981. Letter 181.

An Unexpected Gift

    Thursday’s class brought forward death and tried to make sense of it as a gift and in connection to love. I think that we can use the questions and examples presented by Tolkien’s elves to help understand the love in human death from a Christian perspective. Conveniently, I have recently been spending a lot of time meditating on St. Thérèse of Lisieux's thoughts on death, specifically, her acceptance of it. Day 8 of her Novena focuses on this theme and directs our attention to the Catechism's statement about death, which describes that in “departure" which is death the soul is separated from the body” (Catholic Church 1005). St. Therese finds comfort in this, reflecting, “well, I have no fear of a separation which will unite me forever with the good God” (“The “Little Flower” Novena”). Thinking about death by focusing on a separation, a subsequent gain, and finally a unification rather than a complete loss greatly helps explain why death is a gift, yet it is easy to remain unconvinced that this gift could outweigh the loss of everything known. However, the Catechism states, this is only a temporary separation which will be undone at the end of times when souls are brought back to their bodies. This reversal, I believe, helps validate Finrod’s point in Morgoth's Ring: the later Silmarillion, part 1, the legends of Aman, which argues that “the separation of fëa and hröa is ‘unnatural’” (Tolkien 330). In both the cases of The Fall and the ‘Marrying of Arda’, the soul’s separation was unprecedented and only a result of these disruptions. However, what is unnatural is not always wrong, and this separation should not be seen as a way to cast negativity onto humans’ new existence. Andreth uses the separation of body and soul as an argument for disharmony in Man, stating that this means “his parts would not be united by love” (317) and furthermore that the body is an “imposition indeed, not a gift” (317). Well, if these bodies are a hindrance rather than a gift, it seems quite easy to understand why death would then be a gift. A release from the disharmony of our clashing body and soul, unnatural to the ground we walk on and live on. Except that is certainly not what it feels like. The love experienced through flesh, the warm sun, the shade of a tree, a sip of water, a hug from a friend, and so much more. All these experiences are examples of love experienced through the unification of body and soul, so love must exist in the union as well. The body is a gift that allows connection to all of its related creations. “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14). Even Jesus Himself came to Earth in a body with a soul, which He describes as in anguish before His death, as noted in John 12:27 and Matthew 26:38. When He dies, His body is left behind, and when He returns, His body is regained. It is made abundantly clear by Thomas’s touch of Jesus that Jesus returned to His flesh, but why would He do so if the body was a true imposition? The body is a blessing that allows him to touch and interact in a way that the soul alone could not provide. Jesus’s time physically on Earth demonstrates the love held in a body through the love He gives. We can look to His human example to understand the love that unites body and soul. 

    The body is a gift to experience love. But how, then, can death be a gift as well? I think now is a good time to turn to Lúthien and Beren and the unique death that accompanies their love. The union of Lúthien and Beren, along with that of any elf-human couple, requires a choice not necessary between couples of the same being. The elf must give up their immortality to fully experience love and thus receive the gift of death. In this case, though the sacrifice is great, we can see death more clearly as a gift because it allows for such a powerful union. In Book 1 of The Lord of the Rings, when Aaragorn tells the tale of Beren and Lúthien to the company, he says that after Beren died, Lúthien chose “to die from the world, so that she might follow him… together they passed” (Tolkien 189). I think what is to be emphasized in this story is that their union is most emphasized in their death. At least in this telling, though Beren and Lúthien share this tale, they are only described as “together” during their death. Only death was able to unite them, and is that not the greatest gift? To be united with what is loved most. The cost is what we know, but the reward remains to be fully understood, and there lies the struggle. The elves who chose mortality realized the value in death, which is love. 

    Yes, death is a separation, but it also ends the separation between life and the greatest love. Furthermore, the separation of the body and soul will come to an end, and our current loss will be regained. What seems unnatural about death is remedied by all it provides, but earthly mystery makes the gift unclear, wrapped in a package most easily opened at our own death. However, it is not impossible to open the package while living by practicing faith and becoming closer to God; Arwen, Lúthien, and others, for example, were able to see the gift of the love they sacrificed for. While the love they departed for was more visible than the love between God and humans (in the sense that they were able to physically see their partner), there was still a great unknown in leaving the rest of their life behind. We can look to these elves as examples in our own experiences of death as a reminder to trust in the love that awaits.

-AHW

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