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
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