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 “[Saruman] has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not 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

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

Respect for the trees

     Evidently trees were very important to Tolkien. At least, they are in The Lord of the Rings, and throughout Tolkien’s legendarium. We see their significance in the ways the trees are personified, throughout the various forests pictured. We of course have the ents, the caretakers of the trees, and then there is the nature aesthetics of Lothlorien. The most striking aspect of Tolkien’s understanding of trees is simply their immense value. We get a sense throughout the stories that trees are so much more than simply a backdrop or setting, but a vitally important aspect of life. As Tolkien’s work celebrates the majesty of creation, trees are a terribly significant part of this. But why the significance? Ultimately the importance of trees comes down to both the relationship between trees and people and the sacred significance of trees and wood.

    Trees have a deep relationship with people. We couldn’t survive without them. They purify the air that we breath, and they grow the food that we eat. More often than not, however, humanity takes a stance towards the earth of possession and taking. We cut down the trees, we grow the food, we turn the land into something that serves our purposes. Tolkien, however, in his writing, requests an attitude towards the earth that is more thankful. This is perhaps localized most directly in the characters of the ents, as well as in the Old Forest and Old Man Willow. Here the Ents are the caretakers of the trees, which is necessary in light of people not caring for the trees. Trees are discarded, as well as the land used as orchards or groves, which the ent-wives care for. The Old Forest represents a body of trees malevolent towards “free creatures”, because of the evils they had been subjected to at their hands. We have a body of trees crying out against people for the ways the people have mistreated them. Tolkien does not create an idyllic people-earth relationship here, but instead imagines the trees speaking for themselves and having agency. It seems that was is being explored here is how we as people ought to relate to trees. Tolkien is arguing for a certain respect that is due something from which we receive. Trees provide for us, so we ought to provide for and respect them in return. It’s a curious philosophical statement, that says we owe something, even to something unmoving and silent. 

    The religious background of trees, would have been, for Tolkien, of immense importance. In the book of Exodus, the ark of the covenant, where God himself resides, is made of wood, covered in gold. Then again in the gospels, Christ dies on a cross fashioned from wood. So wood, in the scriptures, takes on a sacred quality. The wood of the cross on which Christ died continues to be venerated around the world as sacred. For Tolkien this is an intimate part of his understanding of the trees. The candelabra in Exodus is also described as treelike, having branches, and many kinds of trees and wood are mentioned throughout. This would have been of vital importance to Tolkien. Wood and leaf images are of great importance, as evidenced by the silver elvish brooch in the shape of a leaf. In the religious context, it is not only that we owe something to the trees, but that the trees are themselves sacred. What does it mean that the trees are sacred? This already gives them importance and value. It’s simply a way of saying that they are significant because of how they are made. In the same way that Tolkien might say that human beings are intrinsically valuable because they are created by God, so trees have the same significance and value, backed up by sacred uses in the scriptures.

    Ultimately Tolkien’s argument seems to be that trees are important, and that this demands a certain response. Tolkien himself had an immense love of trees, and this bleeds into every page of his writing. The sanctity of trees is in opposition to the way people treat and understand trees. The symbiotic relationship between trees and humanity demands that we steward and care for the trees. Tolkien represents this also by his connections between trees and Jewels, as mentioned earlier in the course. The significance of the trees, I think, is tied into a greater significance of the earth and everything in it. Throughout Tolkien’s legendarium there is a great significance to everything that exists. Nothing happens by chance and nothing is frivolous. This is immediately present in the songs and the importance of music, which finds its source in the very music of creation. It is also present in the fact that every story and character has a vital place in the immense backstory of the entire mythology. So for Tolkien, everything is significant and important, including the trees.

    What does this significant mean for us, the readers? It means respect. Respect for not only trees but everything we find in nature. It is bigger than simply what nature provides us and bigger than simply the fact that wood can have sacred uses, but it is the fact that nature is bigger than us. And this idea is bigger than Tolkien, but it is terribly important in Tolkien. Nature is greater than we give it credit for. All kinds of trees, massive forests, terrible forests all represent the deep, ancient reality that is nature. Humanity would do well to step into the earth learning from nature, rather than seeking to bend nature to its will. 

-CO

Given, Not Kept

One of the themes that we have been exploring this week in class is the role of light, gems, and the passing down of objects designed to keep evil away. These objects in Tolkien, as well as the biblical scripture that we read for our class, take the form of jewels, phials, and other beautiful but fragile things. What I found very interesting is how it was given and what follows from characters' choices. Whether given gracefully or hoarded through centuries, we can learn something not only about the giver and the receiver, but the symbolism of the light itself and what it represents. In Tolkien's Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings we are able to see this story in a new framework, focusing on the passage of light from being to being, and what that passage reveals about the one who carries it.

Let us start in the Silmarillion with one of the most important story points in the book: the crafting of the Silmarils. When Fëanor crafts them, he does something truly incredible. He manages to capture the light of the Two Trees into three brilliant gemstones. However, despite this, Fëanor chooses to be possessive of his craftsmanship, despite the hope that these gems would bring peace and beauty back into Arda. He is so possessive that he even refuses to give them to Yavanna when in dire need. His later vow to protect the Silmarils sets off centuries of madness and bloodshed. This is the first (almost) transition. In fact it is the refusal of transition. Fëanor sees the light and beauty as his own creation and thus poisons everything that the Silmarils were supposed to represent. The Silmarils do not represent evil; in fact they are so incredible that their light causes greed and jealousy to spread.

The story continues with Eärendil, who sails to Valinor to beg for mercy. This act is entirely different from that of Fëanor. Eärendil does not keep the Silmaril for himself, but rather uses its light as a light of hope. The light passes from place to place. It goes from being hoarded greedily to being shared in the sky by all of Arda.

By the time that light reaches Frodo in the form of the phial given freely by Galadriel, it is almost unrecognizable from the greed-inducing beauty that once defined these treasures. Galadriel gives the light freely to Frodo with no price, oath, vow, or curse. It is simply a hope given to a traveler on a doomed mission, offered with the blessing that it may be a light in dark places, when all other lights go out. At this point, the meaning of light has changed from mere beauty and power, as Fëanor hoped at the creation of the Silmarils. Instead it is a beacon of comfort and hopefulness to a weary traveler. The light that once inspired wars is now given with a blessing.

What makes this pattern feel so meaningful is the way it mirrors ideas already present in the biblical texts. In Revelation, the city of God is not just covered in gems but entirely constituted from them. Its foundations are twelve kinds of precious stone, its gates are pearls, its streets are translucent gold. The light is no longer kept in an object, but is everything and everywhere. Darkness ceases to exist. The jewels no longer have to be passed down. The preservation is over and light is all that exists.

Now this is a lot. What exactly does Tolkien try to communicate with this underlying story? Perhaps we are reading too far into this (but it is Tolkien, and impossible to read too far into). My best guess as to what he was intending to communicate is not merely a story of beauty, but one of morality in the face of great beauty. He challenges us with characters who do different things when confronted by infinite beauty. How does the character carry it? Fëanor holds it with greed. Eärendil holds it in compromise. Galadriel holds it long enough to give it away. And Frodo, who never even wanted it, carries it into the darkest place in Middle-earth and uses it to win.

The storyline shows us that light is no good to anyone if it is hoarded and kept secret. It only works when it is given freely to whoever needs it most.

—AM

Nature's Immersion

The thing about Tolkien’s nature is how interesting he makes it. It’s hard to write about nature, about the trees and grass and flora and fauna that make up the basic setting of almost every book, of almost every life out there, solely because it doesn’t normally do much. Nature, sure, is living, but it doesn’t really act upon us. It’s passive, especially in books, where it only appears to be traversed. And Tolkien subverts this in a few ways, most prominently by making the nature not passive – if anything, aggressive. We see this throughout the trilogy, most notably in the Old Forest, where the trees themselves come to life. Beginning of course with foreboding feelings – as “the trees became taller, darker, and thicker… they all got an uncomfortable feeling that they were being watched with disapproval, deepening to dislike and even enmity…” (LotR, pg. 111), the hobbits’ passage through the Old Forest peaks with an attack from Old Man Willow himself, who, as he attempted to trap the hobbits, “set up ripples of anger that ran out over the whole Forest” (pg. 118), even as the hobbits fought with the forest itself.

It's one of the great things about fantasy, the ability to bring the environment to life around the characters, creating a world that is not only more immersive for the readers, but also more immersive for the characters themselves. We talked in class about how the Hobbits themselves are isolated and shut off from much of the world, so as they learn about it, so too does the reader. And nowhere is this more clear than in their experiences with nature, with their surroundings. Not only the Old Forest, as discussed above, but every biome is populated by a variety of highly-intelligent species, from dwarves to elves to orcs, even to dragons such as Smaug, and as will be discussed below, ents.

And it’s clear that part of what allowed Tolkien to write like this was his understanding of nature, his ability to view it as truly alive. It’s seen across his writing – for example, in Letter 241 in The Letters of JRR Tolkien, he writes of a tree that “had gallantly grown new limbs – though of course not with the unblemished grace of its former natural self,” personifying this plant, this tree, that so many wouldn’t have looked twice at. This ability to see each tree as unique, as something interesting in and of itself, is how Tolkien is able to create such diversity from consistently similar backdrops. Across the forests of Middle-Earth, each one is treated differently, is written about differently – “Lothlórien is beautiful… the Old Forest was hostile… Fangorn Forest was old and beautiful, but at the time of the story tense with hostility… Kirkwood had fallen under the domination of a Power…” (Letters, Letter 339).

And this sentiment of Tolkien’s is of course backed by his own writing – the Old Forest, as discussed above, Lothlorien, with “no trees like the trees of that land. For in the autumn their leaves fall not, but turn to gold… the floor of the wood is golden, and golden is the roof, and its pillars are of silver, for the bark of the trees is smooth and grey” (LotR, pg. 335); Fangorn forest originally described as “untidy… most of the trees seem to be half covered with ragged dry leaves that have never fallen…” yet full of “the old feeling of this wood” (LotR, pg. 461), before meeting Treebeard.

Of course, the ents are Tolkien’s clearest version of nature itself truly coming to life, and you can see plenty of Tolkien’s love of nature bleeding through the book in some of these passages – for example, on page 475, Treebeard tells “rather a strange and sad story,” beginning when “the world was young, and the woods were wide and wild...”. This consistent portrayal of nature as this untamable force separate from humanity, or other similar species such as elves and dwarves, is key to what makes his work great, introducing the complexity of another player in every scene – the backdrop itself – while adding uniqueness to every setting, making every forest that is traveled through different – and, of course, the constant emphasizing of protecting nature is an amazing byproduct. Through this pattern, Tolkien creates a world that is both beautiful and immersive, mixing the best pieces of fantasy with bits of the real world and the beauty it contains. 

-MR

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

The paradox of creation

As we discussed yesterday, the Entwives move further east over the Second Age, crossing the River Anduin to pursue the work of cultivation. In doing so, they abandon their husbands the Ents and thus abandon the ability to have and raise children with them. In essence, they abandon the creative work of procreation for another creative endeavor, cultivation. 

This is far from the first time that readers can observe this tension in different creative desires. The example that immediately comes to mind for me is the story of Persephone and Hades. Like the Ents and Entwives, this is a story of marriage and of nature. Like the Ents and Entwives, it is also a story of paradox and of contradiction in creation. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Persephone is at once a kore (maiden/virgin) and Hades’ parakoitis (bed partner), but importantly, not his gamete (wife). Her pomegranate points to both male and female imagery, both a seed fruit and a womb shape full of bloody liquid. The floral symbolism both signals her untouched innocence and her fertility. However, most importantly, her marriage can never be fruitful. As the child of Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, the earth can only bear fruit when Persephone paradoxically leaves her husband. Her marriage, in an inversion, leads the fertility of the earth to wither as Demeter holds the crops in stasis. Therefore, Hades and Persephone never have children in the Homeric Hymn.

This same paradox is also (sort of) present in Genesis. Before the Fall, a crucial characteristic of the earth is its bountiful fertility: the plants yield seed, the birds and fish fill the skies and seas, and the earth brings forth wild animals in abundance (Gen 1:11, 22, 24). This all happens even before God has created Eve, so necessarily, fertility of nature pre-dates human fertility. 

However, I do not want to conflate cultivated bounty with natural bounty. Obviously, the difference between what the Ents and the Entwives do remains a central theme; the Ents create within the natural boundaries and the Entwives seek to bind nature by convention. What is so striking about Persephone and Demeter is that Demeter is the goddess of the harvest — necessarily something done by men with tools — not of nature itself. She also has divinity over the hearth, again, a place only created when men emerge from a natural state and start to establish formal homes (in Fustel De Coulanges’ The Ancient City, the author even suggests that the hearth is the basis of civil society). In contrast, Adam and Eve are told to “be fruitful and multiply” before the punishment of strenuous work is placed upon Adam for the Fall. Likewise, their own procreation is inhibited by the pain of childbirth. But here, the fertility of man and woman is limited at the same time that they find a need and gain access to tools. 

Despite these complications, in all three of these stories to one degree or another, we see a tension between the fertility of sexual union and fertility by cultivation of the natural world. What is behind this? Perhaps I am cursed by having written about immortality through marriage for my thesis, but I now see these principles everywhere. Something that Plato and Aristotle both bring up at many different points in their corpora is the notion that man has a natural drive to immortality. Plato specifically in the Republic and Symposium brings up three ways that this can be accomplished: through procreation, through fame, and through participation in eternal ideas (philosophy). I would also add that immortality with God through salvation can be a fourth way, obviously not present in Plato, but accessed through revelation. 

I’m sure we’ll get into this next class, but perhaps the Entwives and even we, through creation, attempt to preserve a piece of ourselves for eternity through a sort of fame. However, taking the principles from the Child and the Shadow, part of our own creation as a reflection of us is wrapped up in our profound relationship with evil. I don’t think it’s possible to reconcile these two types of immortality (procreative and creative) in a fallen world due to scarcity, both in time and in abundance. As stated above, the Fall specifically affects the fertility of both nature and man and thus also the bounty through cultivation. Likewise, Persephone’s descent makes her and the earth barren: she must choose cultivation over procreation. In this same way, the Entwives make this choice when they arrange their orchards away from their husbands. In a finite world filled with people who have a boundless desire for immortality, these stories show us the cost of picking one sort of eternity over the other.

(As an amendment, neither of these immortalities — procreation or fame/subcreation — last forever. Crops are consumed/wither, art is lost, family lines die out, nations fall. Of course, this reflects the point that all of our creations necessarily inherit our relationship with evil/death. Strauss, for example, sharpens Plato’s three immortalities to say that participation in philosophy is the only lasting form because it traffics in eternal ideas. However, a state built on philosophy is impossible too: philosophers must be compelled to participate in things of this earth. This is why he reads the Republic as an exhortation against political idealism. I think that I would conclude that immortality through God is the only lasting form but this is enabled only by extreme amounts of grace — i.e. power and goodness can only unite in God, the church and what she makes possible would not exist without constant supernatural favor. Is this a call to abandon lay vocations? I do not think so, but rather to recognize their limits. I’m sorry to have gone so far with the weird philosophical implications of this. Hopefully, this makes even a little bit of sense.) - KW

Juuls and Trees

This was just a terrible pun at first but with the suggestion and encouragement of Lioje I somehow ended up actually writing off of it.

Tolkien, defender of trees, venerates the bucolic lifestyle throughout The Lord of the Rings. It is deeply engrained in the Shire: rural England mythologized with its low, simple buildings, extensive fields and woods, and of course the hobbits’ gardens. This is why, in addition, “The Scouring of the Shire” can really hit home. The devices of Sauron and Saruman such as explosives and battering rams, their “mind[s] of metal and wheels” are perhaps acceptable to us in war but are heartbreakingly destructive when turned on the innocent hobbits. So, his position on Machines and industrialism are clear. Does that mean we must forsake all plants and wilderness, living in a state of almost fear of nature? Of course not; for one thing Tolkien is more realistic than that. Moreover the Shire he loves is a farming community, and without nature we would end up in precisely the world of metal and rock we were trying to avoid. Still, I think that the way we may use nature bears examination. The matter of ents and entwives sums up the whole debate nicely. For the ents, the right course is to coexist and let plants live undisturbed, or if anything give them some gentle guidance for the plants’ own good. They “ate only such fruit as the trees let fall in their path” and wandered among the forests. The entwives, though, took delight in growing and ordering plants, creating a manicured garden and farm over a wilderness. For Tolkien the optimal situation is probably a balance where we only farm as much as necessary, nurture gardens so that we can appreciate trees for their beauty, and leave the rest wild. But farm we must, and therefore I will look at what he might say about utilizing plants.

The people who seem most noble and respectful in this, contrasting with Saruman and friends, are those who are immersed in nature. I will return to the title for an example. The hobbits love their pipeweed, and spend long hours cultivating both the plants and the art or culture of smoking it. But they also are fond of walking in the countryside and tending their flowers; they depend on the land and know its patterns. Tom Bombadil says of Farmer Maggot “’There’s earth under his old feet, and clay on his fingers; wisdom in his bones, and both his eyes are open.” We can presume that the hobbits managed the pipeweed and other crops quite well, before the influence of Saruman crept in, because it comes as such a shock when Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin discover the shortage of food, drink, and smoke under Sharkey. Nor is it just the Enemy and his servants who do not truly appreciate nature. My meditations on pipeweed reminded me of the herb-master in the Houses of Healing. Here is a man who uses plants extensively in his daily work without knowing them. He is too wrapped up in lore and scholarship to recognize the virtues of kingsfoil recorded in old wives’ tales, and Aragorn suggests he would find no value in pipeweed either. His view of plants is as tools, within the city-fortress. It is Aragorn the ranger, who has survived in the wilds and experienced the landscapes of Middle-Earth, that is able to give these plants their due. In a way, Aragorn, Farmer Maggot, and probably many hobbits fall into the Green Man character. Not perhaps as a nature spirit of vengeance (like the Green Knight?) or rebirth (Tom Bombadil definitely) but a quasi-green man surrounded by nature – like leaves surround a green man’s face – and in tune with it.

Before I end this somewhat meandering post, I will bring up one more example of Aldarion and Erendis (related in The Unfinished Tales). The story has been puzzling me: it is basically the same as the ents and entwives, but with gender reversed. Erendis loves wild forests, while Aldarion values them for their ship-building material. Nonetheless he is the greatest forester of Numenor, planting tons of trees and cultivating forests in both Numenor and Middle Earth. I am still not sure whether either of them are supposed to be sympathetic characters, but if we are to dislike Aldarion perhaps it is because he fails to embrace the quasi-green man attitude. He does not take time to venture in the forests and understand them beyond the scientific understanding of forestry, nor even much the fields and other parts of the island, because he is too focused on their use in exploring the sea. Another conclusion, maybe, can be drawn from the fate of Erendis (vague spoilers!). She “dwindle[s]” and “falls down dim into her own twilight” of bitterness and loneliness. I have to wonder if this is the ultimate end of ents too – it does sound a lot like huorns and Old Man Willow now that I think about it. Will they too all end up as sad trees? The “Treegarth of Orthanc” gives me hope that they have found fresh purpose and energy. And yet, in doing so they have somewhat abandoned their stand. They have become like the entwives, growing a garden even with the appearance of a wild forest. Maybe this is the other side of the green man, then. You must understand nature to rightfully interact with it, but you must also interact with it to have purpose and to understand yourself.

- ᛸᚻᚹ

The Shepherds of Language: The Philological Roots of the Ents by Abe West

The Shepherds of Language: The Philological Roots of the Ents

Tolkien often insisted that the ents were not of his own invention but had rather slipped into the story and found their natural place therein without the design or knowledge of the writer, as he pointed out in a note during his letter to W.H. Auden: “with an effect … almost like reading someone else’s work” (Letters pg 212). Of course, how much of that is correct is up for debate but there is an important truth in Tolkien’s description of the ent’s conception. I use that term here as a reference more to the birth of the ents from Tolkien’s subconsciousness and sources rather thN in the sense that he actively invented them. Tolkien’s deep love and passion for his work Philology is the chief of these sources and it has left its mark throughout every aspect of the ents.

Philology for Tolkien is full of the growth and change of Language, which is not a tame thing. It is very powerful, very big, and in some ways very dangerous, but it is also a living growing thing: not stagnant in place or even bound to a small life-span as we humans are,  but instead continuously growing and evolving as the centuries pass. Tolkien often expressed regret that the current fields of Literary study so often treated language and Philology as means to an end, lesser tools for greater masters and arts, but for Tolkien the very words themselves contained their own beauty. This was specifically true of Welsh for him. He loved the cadence and sound of that language and often lamented its slow demise at the hands of the more prevalent English tongue. In fact, his love of Welsh and other languages, such as Finnish led early on to Tolkien’s first stories.

            
The ents represent the true core of Tolkien’s legendarium they are in a way the truest expression of the task which he set out to do far back in the haze of 1914 on the eve of the War. Tolkien’s entire legendarium grew out of a desire to invent his own language. However, because of his Philological nature, Tolkien rejected the standard course that would have led to an Esperanto type language because it would not be alive. “A living language depends equally on the ‘legends’ which it conveys by tradition” (letters pg 231). Tolkien of course set out to create that legend bringing the life that he so believed gave language its true power. The inventing gradually became more and more natural and just like any healthy language, seemed to Tolkien to take on a life of its own, reaching such a point that by the time he was writing the Lord of the Rings the ents just entered the story naturally: “I came at last to the point, and wrote the Treebeard chapter without any recollection of any previous thought: just as it now is” (Letters pg 231). Tolkien wrote that he seemed to be waiting to find out what happened instead of deciding it, that somehow the story was almost writing itself. In a way the ents mirror Tolkien in this, they also seem to be very keen on a life philosophy where they wait for things to happen, not in a passive way as the movies mistakenly suggest, but in a calm measured understanding of timing and proper action, in a sense the opposite of haste. An Ent treasures the act of speaking as much as the thought that it conveys. As Treebeard says “It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time to say anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a very long time to say “ (Lord of the Rings Book III Ch. IV).  They love to speak, to revel in their songs and poetry, and to describe perfectly and wholly everything they discuss.

               

Contrast this type of speech with the Hobbits who are quick to give their names and discuss their language with any who will listen. For them speech is merely a tool, a means to an end. They do not stop to think about how and why they speak just what they speak about. Treebeard is very startled by this genuine lack of care in their speech, cautioning them about their openness with their true names and their fast-paced introductions. The ent is a much more measured creature, but not in any way a complacent one.

The paradox of the ents is extremely important to understanding their true nature. Tolkien said they were formed from Philology, Literature, and Life and the result is that they seem to have two contrasting natures that mimic their linguistic roots. The name of these tree-shepherds is of course a part of this. It comes from the Anglo- Saxon and emphasizes their connection to stone, a rather surprising revelation due to their Tree-like appearance but there is a deeper reason for the title. Ents are a mix of wild, frightening strength, power, and free growth but they are also measured orderly and extremely civilized for a race of Tree-like, wild-loving beings. They have both the strength and ethos of stone but also the life and wisdom of trees. Remember that Tolkien describes Treebeard as Troll-like when he first introduces him, and there is some notion that the trolls with their tony ways are a mockery of the ents, but only of one half of them. 

It is interesting that ents share so much in common with giants and trolls and in fact, Treebeard was in some early draft a giant, seeing as these great oafs of legend come primarily from the Welsh Tradition, a language we discussed earlier was one of Tolkien’s favorite and a great inspiration on his own languages. However, it is important to note that ents have a power over stone which goes back to their nature as a sub-creation of Yavanna in response to the adoption of the Dwarves ( For more on their natural enmity see Letter 247). They are more than just stone because they are fully alive, but they can destroy the seemingly indestructible and they are imbued with great power to do so similar to the quiet but surprisingly great power of language itself.

Finally, I want to touch briefly on the entwives and the two contrasts they provide for Philology if we accept that as somehow inextricably tied to the nature of the ents. First of all, there seems to be a deep reflection on the difference between the attitudes of the two towards wild things. Tolkien sees some irreconciled divide that would keep them apart “the difference between unpossessive love and gardening” (Letters pg. 212). Tolkien seemed to feel a deep divide in the psyches of the two genders and that somehow the two were opposed, though they should not have been. There is a deep sadness in their estrangement that is poignant provides yet another example for Tolkien of the unnatural divides that grow up between differing natures, reflected in the famous passage about the power of the enemy being best seen in the division of those who oppose him. Perhaps the ent-wives would not have been destroyed had they not been divorced from the ents and that Sauron purposely struck a cruel blow to both when he conquered one and doomed the other to slow fading.

The other conflict the ents and entwives express is the negative side or gardening, not the nurturing and sub-creating that Niggle or Samwise or Galadriel undertake but the restriction and formulation of Language that produced Philology’s rival field: Lit. Tolkien was  of the mind that “books about Books” (Shippey pg 7) the constant defining and framing of language and the thought on language were a completely different type of stud from his own, represented for him by the A (oak) and B(beech) track rather than the lit. and lang. way of describing them. Tolkien often felt that Philology had somehow been dismissed and belittled by its more “sophisticated” counterpart. The true purpose of Philology was the wholistic study of language the why, who, where when what and how of the thing and was deeply concerned with its natural growth and interwovenness with history and culture but also a deep appreciation of its own stand-alone beauty. The ents are a perfect picture of this, treasuring and growing their language just as they shepherded and cared for the trees, not in a possessive, controlling way but in a very natural way. Literature is the natural enemy of free growth f language as it turns every part into a thing to be dissected, sucked dry of meaning and used to further some greater purpose, philosophy for example. Tolkien made his life’s work the study of the beauty of language and so the ents naturally represent that.