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CHAPTER 3 – TOLKIEN, THE TWO TREES AND THE GREEN MEN
J.R.R.Tolkien is considered the most prominent fantasy writer of the twentieth century. The Lord of the Rings [1954-1955] presents a benchmark in high fantasy. This work also reveals, more so than The Hobbit [1937], his love of trees. Indeed, Tolkien himself referred to The Lord of the Rings as ‘my own internal tree’ (2000:321). However, his self-professed affinity for trees as personally significant demonstrates that he is susceptible to including them in his works, primarily for the purpose of representing them as potent beings in his Secondary World in order to counter their Primary World fragility. Tolkien’s description of trees aligns itself to the veneration of trees in ancient Rome and Greece as sites of historical or mythological importance. However, the influence of politics and industry has corrupted Nature, and it is this imbalance that Tolkien wishes to address in his stories of Middle-earth. In a letter to the Editor of the Daily Telegraph, dated 30 June 1972, Tolkien demonstrates how the forests of Middle-earth stand in contrast to the images of industry and political corruption in The Lord of the Rings as follows:
In all my works I take the part of trees as against all their enemies. Lothlórien is beautiful because there the trees were loved; elsewhere forests are represented as awakening to consciousness of themselves. The Old Forest was hostile to two legged creatures because of the memory of many injuries. Fangorn Forest was old and beautiful, but at the time of the story tense with hostility because it was threatened by a machine-loving enemy. Mirkwood had fallen under the domination of a Power that hated all living things but was restored to beauty and became Greenwood the Great before the end of the story.
(2000:419) Like William Blake, who, in ‘Milton’, observed the ‘dark Satanic Mills’ (2004, 8) of England breaching the boundaries of the ‘green & pleasant Land’ (2004, l. 16), Tolkien distinguishes humans or humanoid beings from trees, depicting the former as destructive in their exploitation of the latter. However, like Blake, Tolkien anticipates a restoration of the vitality Nature once possessed prior to the adversity it encounters throughout his Middle-earth narratives. In addition, Tolkien also reveals a spirit of absolute optimism in translating this achievement from the Secondary World to the Primary World by concluding his letter with a sceptical comment:
It would be unfair to compare the Forestry Commission with Sauron because as you observe it is capable of repentance; but nothing it has done that is stupid compares with the destruction, torture and murder of trees perpetrated by private individuals and minor official bodies. The savage sound of the electric saw is never silent wherever trees are still found growing.
(2000:419) Tolkien’s awareness of how his secondary-world positioning and treatment of trees demonstrates his taking sides against the human exploitation of them, but does not necessarily guarantee that he invests them with agency.
There seems to be an ongoing struggle between his desire to ‘take the part of trees’ (Tolkien, 2000:419), and honour the ‘myth… and above all for heroic legend’ (Tolkien, 2000:144). Trees are, therefore, still vulnerable to mastery from various human or humanoid sources, but also, more importantly to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the mythological precedent to serve the Hero’s Journey. This struggle evident in, for example, Tolkien’s early work Leaf by Niggle [1945]. Despite the narrative adding to Tolkien’s treatise of love and admiration for trees, he still places the most prominent of these, the protagonist Niggle’s own Tree, as submitting to the capacity of human or humanoid imagination, and contained within art. Tolkien writes:
Before him stood the Tree, his Tree, finished, If you could say that of a Tree that was alive, its leaves opening, its branches growing and bending in the wind that Niggle had so often felt or guessed, and had so often failed to catch.
He went on looking at the Tree. All the leaves he had ever laboured at were there, as he had imagined them rather than as he had made them; and there were others that had only budded in his mind, and many that might have budded, if only he had had time… the most perfect examples of the Niggle style….(1979:94-95)
Tolkien offers the reader his view of the connection between trees and the imagination, but also suggests that arboreal beings thrive when placed under the right human guardianship. Though this story contains a strong ecological presence, I am reluctant to call it ecocentric. Under the care of Niggle and Parish, the land of the Tree and the Forest thrives, eventually being called by their names: Niggle’s Parish. The leaves of the Tree that were ‘as [Niggle] had imagined them’ and the Forest, described as ‘distant… yet [Niggle] could approach it’ (Tolkien, 1979:95), demonstrates Niggle’s own sense of the space being his or accessible to him. Leaf by Niggle does, contrary to The Lord of the Rings, align trees to the human psyche and the individual human journey, and so demonstrates that Tolkien is capable of incorporating the psychological dimension of trees into his narratives. However, he chooses not to do so in The Lord of the Rings, and this is probably due to his preference for universal applicability over allegory, as previously discussed (2001:xvi-xvii).
This chapter will scrutinise to what extent Tolkien invests his Middle-earth trees with agency, and how characters’ movements within and beyond forested ecosystems are indicative of considerations regarding Kantian transcendence and Deleuzian immanence. In addition, this chapter will consider how characters’ movements strongly relate to the negotiation between anthropocentric and ecocentric perspectives, as indicated by the presence of what I shall term Tolkien’s Green Men. I will postulate that the effect of Tolkien’s treatment of trees primarily informs the mythological and ecological dimensions rather than the psychological dimension of their liminality, because of Tolkien’s tendency to promote greater sociocultural and environmental responsibility.
In considering the above, I propose the following graphic representation of the dimensional distribution of Tolkien’s treatment of trees:
Though Tolkien, in his letter to the Editor of the Daily Telegraph, professes to take the side of trees in his works (2000:419), there is an inherent bias in what he says. The bias is revealed in how he places trees within The Lord of the Rings narrative. While they serve as prominent threshold spaces along the mythological journey to destroy the One Ring, they are, as myth requires, also positioned in such a way as to be transcended. The central heroic characters do not linger in the woods, but choose to move beyond them and onwards on their quest. In turn, these woods are presided over by arboreally characterised masters, namely Tolkien’s Green Men. Eminent Tolkien scholars and artists, such as John Howe, have commented on the Green Man inclusion and adaptation in Tolkien’s work. Howe represents a Tolkienesque Green Man as follows:
Does the presence of the Green Man mean that bowing to myth undoes Tolkien’s intention to ‘take the part of trees’ (2000:419)? Tolkien does not shy away from the ambivalence of purpose that is generated by the Green Man presence. Do they serve myth because they are drawn from Pagan folkloric tradition, or do they serve as Nature’s counter-voice? There are three key examples of Green Men in Tolkien’s work: Beorn, Tom Bombadil and Treebeard. While I will include Beorn in my analysis because he offers a prototype of Tolkien’s arboreal representation, since he appears in the first Middle-earth novel, The Hobbit, I will focus more on Tom Bombadil and Treebeard in The Lord of the Rings.
In his essay ‘Beorn and Bombadil: Mythology, Place and Landscape in Middle-earth’ Justin T. Noetzel particularly comments on liminality in relation to two Green Men: Beorn in The Hobbit and Tom Bombadil in The Fellowship of the Ring [1954]. Noetzel highlights Beorn and Bombadil’s origins in medieval narratives and myth, and observes how these connect the two characters to arboreal liminality. He writes:
This is a case of the sums being greater than their parts, because the mythical background, environmental focus, and narrative value supplied by Beorn and Bombadil are greater than the effect of simply adding medieval heroes and folktale spirits to adventurous bedtime stories.
(2014:161-162) Noetzel notices that Beorn and Tom Bombadil both possess liminal qualities as a result of their development through the author’s experience and education. As authorial creations derived from both historical lore and present experience, they are temporally liminal characters. Beorn, in particular, is a liminal persona with a specific link to dwelling between the mountains and the forest and being protected by ‘a belt of tall and very ancient oaks’ (Tolkien, 1996:107). Tolkien’s use of the word ‘belt’ (1996:107) is also particularly interesting in that he, whether intentionally or unintentionally, anthropomorphises the trees in their capacity to protect and support. Noetzel provides the following insight with regards to Bilbo and Gandalf first meeting Beorn, and the effect the description of this encounter produces:
Bilbo and Gandalf first see Beorn with his ‘thick black beard and hair, and great arms and legs with knotted muscles… leaning on a large axe,’ and with this tool he is in the process of lopping the branches from the ‘great oak-trunk’ beside which the wizard and hobbit find him …. Beorn’s dismantling of the oak tree is a microcosm of his entire character, because his existence is one roughly hewn out of the hard landscape in the liminal space between the awe-inspiring peaks of the Misty Mountains and the dark gloom of the Mirkwood Forest.
(2014:165) Noetzel sees Beorn as occupying a liminal space, but also establishes him as a guardian of that space: a liminal persona drawn from Norse and medieval mythology, and closely associated with the masculine oak. In Trees in Anglo-Saxon England: Literature, Lore and Landscape, Della Hooke’s entry on the oak tree emphasises the oak’s potential to symbolically bridge the natural world and the realm of the supernatural contained in myth. Her explanation is worth quoting at length because it establishes how the veneration of the oak’s symbolic value persists across multiple Western cultures, reinforcing its archetypal inclusion in the Campbellian ‘monomyth’ (2004:28) from which authors like Tolkien draw inspiration. She writes:
The oak… is often met as a boundary landmark…. In many cultures, it was seen as the tree of longevity and might, therefore, be linked to ancestral symbolism and perceptions of permanence. It appears to have played a major role in early forms of tree worship and in pre-Christian religion… thus in Greek mythology oak-tree spirits were known as dryads. The tree itself was the tree of Zeus, Jupiter, Hercules, the chief of the elder Irish gods known as the Dagda, ϸórr, Allah and, in part, of Jehovah. In ancient Greece, many sacred groves were oak, including the most hallowed sanctuary of Dodona. Here was a far-spreading… oak tree with evergreen leaves and sweet edible accords, which stood within the grove, with a spring of cold crystal water gushing from the foot of the tree. There are obvious similarities here with the Norse Yggdrasil, but that was reputed to be an ash: both trees were obviously closely linked in tree symbolism but far-removed from the real tree. The oak was also sacred to the ancient Hebrews…. In legend, Merlin continued to work his enchantment in a grove of oaks, using the topmost branch as his wand…. (Hooke, 2010:193-194)
Hooke highlights the liminal function of the oak, its mythological importance and connection to the ‘male procreative force of the universe’ (2010:193).
The oak is, therefore, not only mythological, but also patriarchally-aligned. To transpose this understanding of the oak onto Beorn’s context, the mythological patriarchy provides the liminal space to protect him against the absolute influence of Nature. However, to introduce him as felling a large oak also indicates that he is master of all: over the mythological order that venerates the oak, and over Nature itself. Therefore, Tolkien’s initial representation of a Green Man promotes Master as his ideal form.
Does the presence of the Green Man mean that bowing to myth undoes Tolkien’s intention to ‘take the part of trees’ (2000:419)? Tolkien does not shy away from the ambivalence of purpose that is generated by the Green Man presence. Do they serve myth because they are drawn from Pagan folkloric tradition, or do they serve as Nature’s counter-voice? There are three key examples of Green Men in Tolkien’s work: Beorn, Tom Bombadil and Treebeard. While I will include Beorn in my analysis because he offers a prototype of Tolkien’s arboreal representation, since he appears in the first Middle-earth novel, The Hobbit, I will focus more on Tom Bombadil and Treebeard in The Lord of the Rings.
In his essay ‘Beorn and Bombadil: Mythology, Place and Landscape in Middle-earth’ Justin T. Noetzel particularly comments on liminality in relation to two Green Men: Beorn in The Hobbit and Tom Bombadil in The Fellowship of the Ring [1954]. Noetzel highlights Beorn and Bombadil’s origins in medieval narratives and myth, and observes how these connect the two characters to arboreal liminality. He writes:
This is a case of the sums being greater than their parts, because the mythical background, environmental focus, and narrative value supplied by Beorn and Bombadil are greater than the effect of simply adding medieval heroes and folktale spirits to adventurous bedtime stories.
(2014:161-162) Noetzel notices that Beorn and Tom Bombadil both possess liminal qualities as a result of their development through the author’s experience and education. As authorial creations derived from both historical lore and present experience, they are temporally liminal characters. Beorn, in particular, is a liminal persona with a specific link to dwelling between the mountains and the forest and being protected by ‘a belt of tall and very ancient oaks’ (Tolkien, 1996:107). Tolkien’s use of the word ‘belt’ (1996:107) is also particularly interesting in that he, whether intentionally or unintentionally, anthropomorphises the trees in their capacity to protect and support. Noetzel provides the following insight with regards to Bilbo and Gandalf first meeting Beorn, and the effect the description of this encounter produces:
Bilbo and Gandalf first see Beorn with his ‘thick black beard and hair, and great arms and legs with knotted muscles… leaning on a large axe,’ and with this tool he is in the process of lopping the branches from the ‘great oak-trunk’ beside which the wizard and hobbit find him …. Beorn’s dismantling of the oak tree is a microcosm of his entire character, because his existence is one roughly hewn out of the hard landscape in the liminal space between the awe-inspiring peaks of the Misty Mountains and the dark gloom of the Mirkwood Forest.(2014:165) Noetzel sees Beorn as occupying a liminal space, but also establishes him as a guardian of that space: a liminal persona drawn from Norse and medieval mythology, and closely associated with the masculine oak. In Trees in Anglo-Saxon England: Literature, Lore and Landscape, Della Hooke’s entry on the oak tree emphasises the oak’s potential to symbolically bridge the natural world and the realm of the supernatural contained in myth. Her explanation is worth quoting at length because it establishes how the veneration of the oak’s symbolic value persists acros multiple Western cultures, reinforcing its archetypal inclusion in the Campbellian ‘monomyth’ (2004:28) from which authors like Tolkien draw inspiration. She writes:
The oak… is often met as a boundary landmark…. In many cultures, it was seen as the tree of longevity and might, therefore, be linked to ancestral symbolism and perceptions of permanence. It appears to have played a major role in early forms of tree worship and in pre-Christian religion… thus in Greek mythology oak-tree spirits were known as dryads. The tree itself was the tree of Zeus, Jupiter, Hercules, the chief of the elder Irish gods known as the Dagda, ϸórr, Allah and, in part, of Jehovah. In ancient Greece, many sacred groves were oak, including the most hallowed sanctuary of Dodona. Here was a far-spreading… oak tree with evergreen leaves and sweet edible accords, which stood within the grove, with a spring of cold crystal water gushing from the foot of the tree. There are obvious similarities here with the Norse Yggdrasil, but that was reputed to be an ash: both trees were obviously closely linked in tree symbolism but far-removed from the real tree. The oak was also sacred to the ancient Hebrews…. In legend, Merlin continued to work his enchantment in a grove of oaks, using the topmost branch as his wand….
(Hooke, 2010:193-194) Hooke highlights the liminal function of the oak, its mythological importance and connection to the ‘male procreative force of the universe’ (2010:193).
The oak is, therefore, not only mythological, but also patriarchally-aligned. To transpose this understanding of the oak onto Beorn’s context, the mythological patriarchy provides the liminal space to protect him against the absolute influence of Nature. However, to introduce him as felling a large oak also indicates that he is master of all: over the mythological order that venerates the oak, and over Nature itself. Therefore, Tolkien’s initial representation of a Green Man promotes Master as his ideal form.
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ARBOREAL THRESHOLDS – THE LIMINAL FUNCTION OF TREES IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY FANTASY NARRATIVES
