Ents

“Many Ents Were Hurling Themselves Against the Orthanc Rock; But That Defeated Them.” Why Couldn’t The Ents Destroy Orthanc?

/ stephencwinter / 14 Comments

The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 734-744

Last week we thought about how when the Ents destroyed the fortress of Isengard it was if the action of tree roots over a hundred years were “all packed into a few moments.”

But the Tower of Orthanc was different. After Saruman was able to make a hasty retreat into it, only just managing to escape the pursuit of Quickbeam, he got his machinery of war into action and Beechbone was killed by a kind of flamethrower. This threw the Ents into a terrible fury and they launched themselves into an attack upon Orthanc.

“Round and round the rock of Orthanc the Ents were striding and storming like a howling gale, breaking pillars, hurling avalanches of boulders down the shafts, tossing up huge slabs of stone into the air like leaves. The tower was in the middle of a spinning whirlwind. I saw Iron posts and blocks of masonry go rocketing up hundreds of feet, and smash against the windows of Orthanc. But Treebeard kept his head. He had not had any burns, luckily. He did not want his folk to hurt themselves in their fury, and he did not want Saruman to escape out of some hole in the confusion. Many of the Ents were hurling themselves against the Orthanc-rock: but that defeated them. It is very smooth and hard. Some wizardry is in it, perhaps, older and stronger than Saruman”s.”

Ted Nasmith imagines the Ents trying to destroy Orthanc.

But Orthanc was not built by wizards but by the Dunedain at the end of the Second Age when Elendil and his people escaped the destruction of Númenor and established the kingdoms of Gondor and Arnor in Middle-earth. As the power of these kingdoms began to wane it fell into the hands of the Dunlendings who were later allies of Saruman at the Battle of Helm’s Deep. Eventually Saruman offered to take possession of the fortress and his offer was gratefully received both by the King of Rohan and the Steward of Gondor and for years after he was a valuable ally to them both and Isengard was an important part of the defences of the West against the growing power that first began to arise in Dol Goldur.

Saruman inherited Orthanc but he built the fortress of Isengard; and it was this fortress that the Ents were able to destroy in a single night. But why did Orthanc remain impregnable? It was from a thought in the comments section following last week’s post that this question began to grow in my mind and I want to try to tackle it this week.

I think that there are two main themes in Tolkien’s thought at work here. One is that as a character begins to invest more and more of themselves, of their essence, into the things that they make, so that essence begins to waste away. A kind of entropy is at work. The greatest example of this is, of course, of Sauron and the Ring. Sauron puts so much of himself into the making of the Ring that when it is finally destroyed he falls with it. But the same principle is at work with Saruman and Isengard. When Merry and Pippin speak dismissively of the one who had them captured and who would have tortured them until he found out all they knew, Aragorn replies that “once he was as great as his fame made him. His knowledge was deep, his thought was subtle, and his hands marvellously skilled.”

Andrea Pipano imagines Saruman in his greatness.

The other principle is Tolkien’s sense that when we work in harmony with creation and not seeking mastery over it we are able to make something of real significance and of staying power. So we see the way in which Galadriel makes Lothlórien, a place that Sam Gamgee describes as like being inside a song. And we also listened to Gimli speak of the work that he would do in the glittering caves of Aglarond. Great sculptors speak of finding something within the material that they are working with; something that is essentially present. And in the city of Worcester in England near which I live we could contrast the difference between the gothic beauty of that city’s medieval cathedral and the modernist monstrosity that is the technical college next door to it. The conservative philosopher, Roger Scruton, was once asked to reflect on the unpopularity of new housing developments. His brilliant answer was that if a development were to have the quality of a city like Bath and its beautiful architecture then there would never be an objection to it.

The Royal Crescent in Bath. A beautiful example of Georgian architecture from the 18th century. And the interiors are just as beautiful as the facades.

Scruton, like Tolkien, makes beauty the centre of his thought on the things, and not functionality. When function is subordinate to beauty, in which something is made that is in harmony with the materials that are used and which has a transcendent purpose greater than the agrandisement of the maker then it will last. So Isengard is destroyed in a night and Orthanc is impregnable.

“The Songs Have Come Down Among Us Out of Strange Places.” Théoden Thinks About The Nature of Fairy-stories.

/ stephencwinter / 13 Comments

The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp.716,717

I promised last week that we would return from the doors of Isengard and their unexpectedly merry wardens in order to return to a conversation in the Deeping-coomb between Théoden and Gandalf.

The conversation takes place when Théoden’s company are about to begin their journey, with some reluctance, to Isengard. Legolas has seen eyes amidst the strange wood that has come from Fangorn such as he has never seen before and then three strange shapes come forward from the trees.

“As tall as trolls they were, twelve feet or more in height; their strong bodies, stout as young trees, seemed to be clad with raiment or with hide of close-fitting grey and brown. Their limbs were long, and their hands had many fingers; their hair was stiff, and their beards grey-green as moss.”

The Shepherds of the Trees and Gardens Too as imagined by Luca Bonatti

Tolkien describes Ents here as if we had never met them before although we spent some time among them in the company of Merry and Pippin. But now we see them through different eyes. We see them with wonder through the eyes of Legolas and with fear through the eyes of Gimli and the Riders of Rohan.

Gandalf speaks to Théoden. “They are the shepherds of the trees,” he says to him. “Is it so long since you listened to tales by the fireside? There are children in your land who, out of the twisted threads of story, could pick out the answer to your question. You have seen Ents, O King, Ents out of Fangorn Forest, which in your name you call the Entwood. Did you think that the name was given only in idle fancy?”

This is one of the moments in The Lord of the Rings when Tolkien speaks of the themes that he explored in his essay, On Fairy-Stories. As we noted last week this reflection takes place only in scenes involving the Rohirrim. Aragorn and Éomer speak of this when they first meet on the plains of Rohan and now Théoden and Gandalf speak of it together. They speak of “tales by the fireside”, stories told to children. I remember the pleasure of telling stories to my children when they were young. I remember how we would enter the worlds that these tales would evoke as real places. It was one of my favourite moments of the day when all my troubles would be forgotten for a little while. I did not want these moments to end and my wife would have to remind me that the children needed to sleep!

In his essay Tolkien tries to answer the question, “What is a fairy-story?” and as he skilfully dismantle dismantles various attempts to answer the question, offered by scholars or in anthologies of stories such as the collection published by Andrew and Leonora Lang, he draws us ever deeper, and disturbingly, into a realm that he describes as Perilous. He illustrates his point with reference to Walter Scott’s fine poem, Thomas the Rhymer. In it, Thomas, who himself is a poet, meets a beautiful lady who at first he addresses as “The Queen of Heaven”. She replies that this name does not belong to her and that “I am but the queen of fair Elfland, that am hither come to visit thee”. The Queen of Elfland takes Thomas with her to the Perilous Land and he spends seven years there in her company. She describes the road that they will travel together as being neither “the path of Righteousness”, nor “the path of Wickedness” but “the road to fair Elfland”.

Tolkien describes this realm as “wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; scoreless shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords.” In Tolkien’s own tale it is Lothlórien that is most Perilous. Faramir understands this well and in his meeting with Frodo and Sam says, “If Men have dealings with the Mistress of Magic who dwells in the Golden Wood, then they may look for strange things to follow. For it is perilous for mortal men to walk out of the world of this Sun, and few of old came thence unchanged, ’tis said”.

This is the world of which Théoden and Gandalf now speak and one that I will return to with you next week if you will. At least to think about it if not to go there in truth, for as I have been writing this piece I have been filled with longing to take “the road to fair Elfland” myself.

Galadriel as the Fairy Queen. Cate Blanchett conveyed this so well.

“The Land Had Changed.” Fangorn Forest Comes to Helm’s Deep. The Revenge of the Trees.

/ stephencwinter / 2 Comments

The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 705-707

It was Gandalf who understood what was happening first. As the host of Rohan rode from Edoras to Helm’s Deep he saw a “darkness brooding about the feet of the Misty Mountains” and asked Legolas to describe what he could see.

“I can see a darkness. There are shapes moving in it, great shapes far away upon the banks of the river; but what they are I cannot tell. It is not mist or cloud that defeats my eyes: there is a veiling shadow that some power lays upon the land, and it marches slowly down stream. It is as if the twilight under endless trees were flowing downwards from the hills.”

The forest moves down from the mountains before Isengard.

At first Gandalf mistook one form of darkness for another, seeing them all as one kind and that kind the darkness of Mordor but as he pondered more he began to realise what he was seeing and so rode towards Isengard. There he asked Treebeard for the help of his Huorns and with them rode back to Helm’s Deep.

Later on Merry spoke of the Huorns to other members of the Fellowship.

“I think they are Ents that have become almost like trees” he said… “There is great power in them, and they seem to be able to wrap themselves in shadow: it is difficult to see them moving. But they do. They can move very quickly if they are angry. You stand still looking at the weather maybe, or listening to the rustling of the wind, and then suddenly you find that you are in the middle of a wood with great groping trees all around you.”

In Peter Jackson’s film he moved the encounter that Merry and Pippin had with Old Man Willow in the Old Forest to one with a Huorn in Fangorn.

And it is these trees, or perhaps we should call them Ent-trees, that Legolas described to Gandalf and that are now in the Deeping-coomb, the valley below the Hornburg. The hosts of Isengard stand at bay before foes on every side. Théoden and his riders drive them towards the Huorns who block their retreat and Erkenbrand and a thousand men upon foot march towards them, the remnants of a once defeated army that had stood at bay at the Fords of the Isen now victorious once more as they drive their foes before them. And Gandalf rides down upon them revealed for a moment in power and his enemies fall upon their faces in terror. For if there is one thing that orcs understand, perhaps the only thing, it is power. Just an hour before they had been a proud army serving a mighty wizard and about to storm a fortress that had never fallen when defended. Now they are surrounded by power on every side. At last they flee into the mysterious forest and are never seen again.

When Treebeard described Saruman as having a mind of “metal and wheels” who “does not care for living things” he was not merely expressing a difference in taste between himself and the wizard but something much more fundamental. When Saruman emptied Isengard of its defenders in order to conquer Rohan he had no idea of the threat that lay on his doorstep and the reason for this was that he did not care for living things. There are two senses of meaning in the word care that Treebeard used. One is the sense of care as responsibility and it is certainly true that Saruman has no sense of responsibility for living things. But the other sense is that he simply did not think about them very much at all. He assumed that his technology was more potent and effective than any living creature that he had encountered with the exception maybe of Sauron himself and in this he utterly underestimated the forest and its power.

It is one of the greatest feats of Tolkien’s imagination to have thought about how a forest might behave if it were to be able to perform its essential actions not as a plant but as an animal. And what might happen if the growing resentment that a forest might feel about its abuse and mistreatment by others suddenly spilled over. This forest has been abused by a wizard and by orcs for a long time and now, roused by two young hobbits, it takes revenge upon its enemies. Tolkien concentrates the revenge of the living world into a brief period of time. We know that our living planet may move much more slowly than this but if we choose to behave like orcs or fallen wizards in our relationship with life itself our planet will defend itself against us and will eventually win albeit after a conflict with terrible losses. Maybe one day we, like the hosts of Isengard, will be cowering before its latent power.

For a brief moment the forest takes control of the plains of Rohan. All can enter it only by permission and protected by Ents.

“Their Coming Was Like The Falling of Small Stones That Starts an Avalanche in The Mountains”. Gandalf Speaks of the Awakening of the Ents.

/ stephencwinter / 4 Comments

The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 646-649

What a gift gentleness is to a world grown weary with the mere exercise of power. And so Merry and Pippin awoke a kindliness within the heart of Boromir the warrior, inflated as he was by fantasies of his own greatness, who sought to gain what he desired by abuse of his strength in the attempt to steal the Ring from Frodo. When Aragorn ordered Boromir to stay with the young hobbits and to protect them as best he could he was simply trying to find some order amidst the chaos of battle and to give himself space to do what he felt that he must do, to find the Ringbearer; but what he gave to Boromir in the giving of that order was the opportunity to find redemption for his failure in the laying down of his life.

This alone would have been sufficient reason for the contested decision to include Merry and Pippin within the Fellowship but Gandalf speaks of more.

“But that is not the only part they have to play. They were brought to Fangorn, and their coming was like the falling of small stones that starts an avalanche in the mountains. Even as we talk here, I hear the first rumblings. Saruman had best not be caught away from home when the dam bursts!”

The falling of small stones that starts an avalanche.

There are three occasions in which hobbits are captured by orcs in The Lord of the Rings. No other character has to suffer this indignity although Éowyn is threatened with imprisonment by the Witch King of Angmar, the Lord of the Nazgûl. The capture of Merry and Pippin in the breaking of the Fellowship is the first; the second is the capture of Frodo by Shagrat and Gorbag near Shelob’s Lair; and the third the capture of Frodo and Sam by the road to the Black Gate in Mordor. And on each occasion the capture serves only to carry the hobbits nearer to their goal. In the case of Frodo and Sam the goal is known to them. Somehow they must take the Ring to the Fire at Orodruin and they need a road to follow in order to get there. In the case of Merry and Pippin the Uruk-hai of Isengard carry them across the plains of Rohan in order to deliver them at the feet of Treebeard.

There is a delicious irony in this, of course. Gandalf speaks of this to Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli. “Saruman also had a mind to capture the Ring, for himself, or at least to snare some hobbits for his evil purposes. So between them our enemies have contrived only to bring Merry and Pippin with marvellous speed, and in the nick of time, to Fangorn, where otherwise they would never have come at all.”

The orcs bring Merry and Pippin to Fangorn Inger Edelfelt’s dramatic depiction of the hobbits’hard journey.

But there is something further to say in regards to Merry and Pippin. Gandalf again speaks of this to his companions when he tells them that Sauron, as well as Saruman, had tried to capture hobbits and to take them to Barad-dûr, either to retake the Ring or to keep them as hostages. Thankfully Sauron, as well as Saruman, failed to achieve their purpose and Gandalf adds: “Let us not darken our hearts by imagining the trial of their gentle loyalty in the Dark Tower.”

It is the gentleness of the hobbits that proves essential here. On the one hand it is a quality that is entirely disregarded by both Sauron and by Saruman. To them gentleness is merely an expression of weakness. But in delivering this quality to Fangorn the orcs of Isengard awaken the hearts of Treebeard and the Ents to their own destruction. It is gentleness of the young hobbits that delights the Ents, which reawakens them and reconnects them to their essential vocation, that of being shepherds.

The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep and in their reawakening the Ents are recalled to that duty. Sacrifice is something that the powers of darkness are incapable of doing or even imagining. By this we don’t mean that they are incapable of sacrificing others for their own ends. They do this constantly without giving it a second thought. But they have rendered themselves incapable of any action that even remotely approaches self-sacrifice and so Frodo’s choice to take the Ring to the Fire, Sam’s choice to go with him, Gandalf’s sacrifice of himself in the conflict with the Balrog at the Bridge of Khazad-dûm, Boromir’s sacrifice for the sake of Merry and Pippin, and the sacrifice that Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli make in their hopeless pursuit of the orcs who captured Merry and Pippin, all of these are simply incomprehensible to the dark powers and all of are essential to the ultimate victory of good over evil.

Gandalf did not mention his own sacrifice but it is crucial to the whole story.

“Come Back to Me! Come Back to Me, and Say My Land is Best!” The Search of the Ents for The Entwives.

/ stephencwinter / Leave a comment

The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 618-623

After Treebeard calms down following the outbreak of his rage against Saruman he begins to ponder how large a company of Ents he might be able to gather together to launch an attack upon Isengard. His hope is that he will be able to get together a “fair company of our younger folks” but, he laments, “what a pity there are so few of us”.

Pippin wonders why this should be so when the Ents have lived in Fangorn Forest for so many years. “Have a great many died?” he asks.

“Oh, no!” said Treebeard. “None have died from inside, as you might say. Some have fallen in the evil chances of the long years, of course; and many more have grown tree-ish. But there were never never many of us and we have not increased. There have been no Entings- no children, you would say, not for a terrible long count of years. You see, we lost the Entwives.”

“We lost the Entwives”. Luca Bonatti’s beautiful depiction of the Ents and the Entwives.

Treebeard’s story is the story of a breakup of a marriage. But not just between the two folk who once pledged their troth to one another but between the males and females of an entire species. And, we might say, between nature and culture themselves.

For with his sub creation of the Ents Tolkien has given us a race of creature in which the masculine and feminine principles seem to reside completely within the males and females of their race. Now we know this is not the case with human beings. In us there are feminine qualities in men and masculine qualities in women and, indeed, there are those who argue that one of our most important tasks in life is to bring these into unity with one another within us after having become clear which gender we are, whether we are male or female.

But in the Ents Tolkien gives us something different and in so doing he speaks of the nature of all growing things. As Treebeard puts it of the Ents, “they gave their love to things that they met in the world”. They loved “the great trees, and the wild woods, and the slopes of the high hills; and they drank of the mountain-streams, and ate only such fruit as the trees let fall in their path.” The Ents gave their love entirely to that which is wild and uncultivated. The Entwives, on the other hand, were in love with gardens. They “desired order, and plenty, and peace” Treebeard says. And then he adds, somewhat acerbically, that “they meant that things should remain where they had set them.”

Great trees and wild woods as beloved by the Ents.

We have been thinking in this blog of Treebeard’s home, Wellinghall, in the last couple of weeks of postings. We have seen that there is no clear delineation between the world outside his home and that within it. If there are walls then it is the trees of the forest that are those walls. The streams of the Entwash arise from the ground within the house and flow through it and there is no roof that lies between Treebeard and the open sky. He is content to live within weather and not to protect himself from it just as the trees of the forest do. He has no gardens in which he cultivates food. He is a gatherer and, most certainly not a hunter.

As he later remarks, Treebeard thinks that the Entwives would like the Shire because hobbits are gardeners. Indeed, as Frodo remarked to Galadriel, gardeners are held in high honour within that land and it is the name that Sam Gamgee will give to his family as they rise in honour in the Shire. Indeed I wonder if it might have been an Entwife that Sam thought he saw and which he tried to describe to Ted Sandyman in their argument in the pub at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings. Tom Bombadil is a gardener who lives at the edge of the Old Forest and he is contentedly married to Goldberry the daughter of the river although periods of separation from one another seem to keep that marriage fresh.

Farmer Maggot is a good friend to Tom Bombadil. Both are gardeners. Henning Janssen imagines his garden.

As we are left wondering whether there can be a reconciliation between the worlds of the forest and of the garden, between the Ents and the Entwives. In the song that the Elves made and which Treebeard sings the hope of a reconciliation is given but it is one that can only be achieved, it would seem, after catastrophe when the Ents and Entwives walk together into something entirely new. And can the forest and the garden do the same?

Together we will take the road that leads into the West,
And far away will find a land where both our hearts may rest.

“I Am Not Altogether on Anyone’s Side, Because Nobody is Altogether on My Side.” Treebeard, the Ents and Forests in The World of Middle-earth

/ stephencwinter / 2 Comments

The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 611-617

The homes in which people live tell you much about them. Of course, many people have little choice in the kind of home in which they live, but even when that choice is limited for people they will still seek to do something to tell a story about themselves. I remember when as a young man I taught in an African school in Zambia I would sometimes go to visit a student’s family in one of the villages nearby. One thing always stood out to me on these visits and that was that the family I visited may have possessed very little but everything was presented with great care and the simple hut was clean and life lived with great dignity. Those who know the descriptions of the simple homes of early settlers travelling west among the American continent will recognise this need for dignity. I came across great poverty in African villages but I did not encounter squalor until I worked as a parish priest in some run down neighbourhoods of Birmingham, England.

Treebeard’s home is an expression of his dignity as the oldest of the Ents and of a carefully crafted balance between earth, the flowing of water over the earth, that which grows in the earth, and light. It is the play of light upon stone, water and tree that gives Wellinghall its particular character. The name in its English form and therefore in the Common Tongue of Tolkien’s Middle-earth comes from the idea of a spring welling up from the earth beneath it and the hall that was built there.

An imagining of Wellinghall

“A little stream escaped from the the springs above, and leaving the main water, fell tinkling down the sheer face of the wall, pouring in silver drops, like a fine curtain in front of the arched bay.”

The “arched bay” had been shaped out of the lower slopes of Methedras, the last of the Misty Mountains and so we are brought into a home in which the worlds outside and inside flow together in a carefully crafted manner. If in a typical western home a great effort is made to create something which keeps the interior quite separate from that which lies outside this is most certainly not the case with Wellinghall.

Treebeard’s home is, as far as he can achieve it, an adaptation to the world of earth, water, tree and light in which he has lived since time immemorial. There is no agriculture or industry within his world. Even his food is derived from the welling waters of the young Entwash that flow through his home although there is clearly some kind of intoxicant that occurs within them, or has been added to them. But it is an intoxicant that energises rather than enervates. We remember that when Merry and Pippin first drank from the waters of the Entwash as they escaped into the forest from the orcs they did not notice that “the cuts and sores of their captivity had healed and their vigour had returned”.

A forest as a place of healing.

Perhaps what we see in the ecology of Fangorn Forest is what can happen when a very particular set of relationships are able to develop over a long period of time. It is important to note that Fangorn is never presented as a kind of paradise in a way in which Lothlórien appears to be. Treebeard himself speaks of the impact of darkness upon it and his work as the shepherd of the trees is both to protect the forest from external forces that seek to harm it and from the darkness that might destroy it from within.

Even as he speaks with Merry and Pippin we seem to see Treebeard become increasingly aware that he has failed to protect his forest. The depredations that first came with the return of the Númenorians in the Second Age and whose activities led to the large scale destruction of the forest that once had lain right across Eriador and of which the Forest of Fangorn was only its eastern end seem to have been something with which Treebeard had to learned to live with, albeit reluctantly. But now the deliberate destruction of the forest by Saruman is something that he cannot tolerate. It may be that a world in which no-one has really been on the side of the trees and their shepherds is one that has led Treebeard to stay out of the struggles for power and for freedom in the wider world about him. He has not been “altogether on anyone’s side” because “nobody is altogether” on his side but now he realises that unless he chooses a side his forest will be destroyed completely. He has to take action.

No-one is “altogether” on Treebeard’s side but some seek to destroy his world completely.

“We Are Tree-herds, We Old Ents.” Treebeard Teaches Merry and Pippin About His People.

/ stephencwinter / Leave a comment

The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 607-611

Ents are shepherds of trees, tree-herds as Treebeard puts it, and it is in the nature of shepherds to live so closely to the creatures they care for that they can anticipate any action that those creatures might perform. Of course, sometimes a sheep, or perhaps a tree, might do something that takes the shepherd by surprise and if that happens then they will do all that they can to put things right. As that ancient source of wisdom, the Bible, puts it, “the shepherd lays down his life for the sheep”. This does not just mean that the shepherd will die for the sheep although they are always prepared to do so if required but that they give their lives for their welfare from day to day and Treebeard has been doing this for a very long time indeed.

Treebeard, the shepherd of trees, by Alan Lee

His long life of service to the trees began with a prayer of Yavanna, the member of the Valar for whom the care of things that live and grow upon the earth was most dear. She prayed to Eru to provide for the care of trees. Her main concern then was with Dwarves and their axes, which rather puts into context the advice that Aragorn gave to Gimli about being careful how he used his. Indeed the only other recorded occasion apart from these events at the end of the Third Age in which Ents became involved in the affairs of the wider world was when the Dwarves of Nogrod went to war with the Elves of Doriath and sacked their stronghold of Menegroth.

Menegroth lay at the heart of Doriath, a forest kingdom ruled over for long years by Thingol and by his wife, Melian the Maiar. It was Melian who through her magic arts made Doriath a secret place and it was in that land that Luthien was born and nurtured and where Galadriel learned much from Melian so that the land of Lothlórien in many ways resembled Doriath. It was through the tragic greed of Thingol that led to his death and war with the Dwarves of Nogrod and led to so much destruction of that which had been so beautiful. The Ents fought alongside the Elves in this war and it is quite possible that Treebeard was one of those who fought. His motto of “Do not be hasty” may have been made in those unhappy days and he has kept it. He has not gone to war for thousands of years until the arrival of two young hobbits who come among the Ents as they seek to escape from orcs.

The death of Thingol in Menegroth.

Like trees themselves Ents are patient creatures. Treebeard is able to look back to a time when “there was all one wood… from here to the Mountains of Lune, and this was just the East End.” He ponders the sense of spaciousness that he enjoyed in former days. “Broad days,” he calls them when there was room and time just for breathing. “The woods were like the woods of Lothlórien, only thicker, stronger, younger. And the smell of the air! I used to spend a week just breathing.”

Although he regards the decline of the forests of Middle-earth with sadness we do not get the sense that he does so with resentment or bitterness. As Gandalf will say to him later on he has not plotted to cover the lands with his trees. But at the last he will become angry at the wanton destruction of trees by Saruman who does so simply for the sake of his own self-aggrandizement. His choice not to act hastily has guided him for many long years. He has not been passive in the face of evil but has devoted himself to the care of his Forest of Dark Night, his tauremornalómë, protecting unwary travellers from the worst of that dark and teaching those parts of the forest that have embraced darkness in hatred of the light to rest in darkness as a part of the natural rhythm of things, a time in which the forest can breathe in before exhaling once more in glad welcome of every dawn.

There are almost too many examples of the wanton destruction of trees in the world to name just one.

“My Name is Like a Story.” Treebeard Gives a Lesson in Language as Participation in Life.

/ stephencwinter / 9 Comments

The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) 603-607

Last week I wrote about the first encounter between Merry, Pippin and Treebeard as if they had met at a party and had begun the process of getting to know each other. Of course, my suggested image of a party has to be qualified by the possibility that Treebeard might have killed the young hobbits before any conversation took place. That really is some party!

But Treebeard hears the nice voices of the hobbits and decides not to act too hastily and once that decision has been made the whole business of getting to know each other can begin.

For Merry and Pippin this is a simple matter. “Nobody else calls us hobbits; we call ourselves that.” But for Treebeard a name is a very different affair altogether. One one level a name is something that one can present to another so that the business of getting to know a person can begin. “Well, I am an Ent, or that’s what they call me. Yes, Ent is the word. The Ent, I am, you might say, in your manner of speaking. Fangorn is my name according to some. Treebeard others make it. Treebeard will do.” All of this is mere preliminary to real communication. Nothing much has really been said as yet. The real business is yet to start.

Alan Lee conveys something of the mystery that is Treebeard in this beautiful picture.

“‘ I am not going to tell you my name, not yet at any rate’. A queer half-knowing, half-humorous look came with a green flicker into his eyes. ‘For one thing it would take a long while: my name is growing all the time, and I’ve lived a very long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say.”

Treebeard gives a clue about himself in speaking of Ents from the “old lists” of living things in which he tries, and fails, to find hobbits. The Ents are “earthborn, old as mountains.” Pippin later described Treebeard in these terms, “something that grew in the ground… had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years.” Ents are a part of the ancient story of the earth and are yet as immediate and sudden as waking up on a spring morning and finding that everything is alive once more.

Treebeard, like nature herself, takes a particular pleasure in the process of concealment. In speaking of concealment I do not mean deception. He is not trying to throw anyone of the track by pretending to be what he is not. What he does through concealment is to invite another into the long business of getting to know him. I am reminded of the beautiful thing that the great writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, said of his wife of many years. “I have known her for so long that she has become a complete mystery to me.” Marquez speaks of the particular pleasure that is gained in remaining in a relationship for a long time and yet never losing a curiosity in who the other is. The reward for this curiosity is not a series of facts that can be consigned to a database that can be forgotten until it becomes necessary to access the data contained therein. The reward is mystery. It is an invitation to go ever deeper and to know that one will never get to the end of the going and that each act of discovery will be a delight over which you can linger and enjoy.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mercedes Barcha delighting in the mystery of one another.

And language, for Treebeard, is a participation in the story of all things. It is not a dispassionate observation of observable facts, that quality that Treebeard describes as hastiness. It is an ongoing response to the hospitable invitation that another gives to get to know them, to listen to their story. And once Treebeard has decided not to kill the young hobbits the business of allowing the hobbits to get to know him can begin.

On Hearing The Music of the Ainur

/ stephencwinter / 29 Comments

Those who have been reading my Blog that seeks to distil wisdom from The Lord of the Rings will know that I have been reading the text carefully and then reflecting upon what I find there. I happen to think that Tolkien was a man of profound insight. I also think that he was an explorer and that what he discovered in his creation often surprised him. So it is that what we find when we read his work is not a carefully worked out philosophy imposed upon a narrative structure although Tolkien’s Christian faith is a springboard that is absolutely necessary for his explorations. Tolkien genuinely did not know in advance what his characters would do as the story developed. I think that is the reason why it took him so long to write his work. And perhaps one of the reasons why The Lord of the Rings speaks so powerfully to the modern mind is that none of its characters is capable of, or presumes to speak, authoritatively of God or the ultimate mystery of being and of life. You get the impression that Gandalf may know more than most but he does not tell. All that we learn from him is that there is a mystery that gives meaning to all that each character in the story chooses to do.

It was back in January 2013 that I wrote about Frodo in the halls of Elrond of Rivendell. At that time I wrote the Blog on my website http://stephenwinter.net/page6.htm#131194 and in that posting wrote about Frodo’s “dream of music that turned into running water, and then suddenly into a voice”. Music is Tolkien’s metaphor for the unfolding of history, one that he unfolds most fully in the first chapter of The Silmarillion, The Music of the Ainur. The Ainur are the angelic beings whose task it is to work with God (Ilúvatar) in the governing of his creation. I do not think therefore that Frodo’s “dream of music” is an accidental detail in the story. He connects for a moment with the Great Music and also with the Great Story for the voice that he hears as he emerges from the dream is Bilbo’s as he chants his own telling of the tale of The Voyage of Eärendil that is chapter 24 of The Silmarillion. Later when he takes the Ring at The Council of Elrond Frodo declares his own Yes to the Music and the Story. He cannot himself control the story to which he says Yes although because he bears the Ring of Power he is tempted to believe that he has the capacity to do this but he is carried by the story and by the music from the moment of choosing until the fulfilment of the choice at the Cracks of Mt Doom.

At the ending of one year and the opening of another I wanted to return to this story in Rivendell from my reflections at the ruined gates of Isengard. For we cannot drift aimlessly through life as if there were nothing to be discovered, no commitments to be made. When I started writing this Blog I intended to reflect on composers and writers who I believe to have made a connection to the Great Music and the Great Story and if my readers are interested then I will try to do so next week before returning to Isengard and to Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli as they are reunited with Merry and Pippin. Here I will just say that if 2015 is to be fruitful then it will be because of the commitments we make to the Music and the Story. If we are true to the wisdom of The Lord of the Rings then we will not seek to make authoritative statements about the Mystery but in our own commitments we will seek it out. It is because of his search that Frodo hears the music and the story in the halls of Elrond, that Merry and Pippin meet the Ents in the forest of Fangorn, that Gimli finds understanding in the words of Galadriel and heart breaking beauty in the caves of Aglarond. If we remain true to our own search then we too will find such wonders. You may remind me that I should not forget Frodo and Sam in Shelob’s lair or Merry and Pippin as prisoners of the orcs for if we are true to our Yes then our journey will take us to such places as well but what it will not be is some aimless and meaningless drifting. It will be a true adventure of Joy and Sorrow. We will be men and women who are fully alive.

Songs that Come to Us out of Strange Places

/ stephencwinter / 8 Comments

It is through the intervention of the Ents of Fangorn that victory is won at Helm’s Deep but this frightens the Riders of Rohan more perhaps than did the enemies they faced in the battle. For a kind of disenchantment has been at work among them for a very long time. You may remember that when Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli first encountered Eomer and his war band upon the plains of Rohan they met with mistrust and some fear. When Eomer heard that the friends had met Galadriel in Lothlorien he reacted with both wonder but also fearful hostility.

“Then there is a Lady in the Golden Wood, as old tales tell!” he said. “Few escape her nets, they say. These are strange days! But if you have her favour, then you also are net-weavers and sorcerers, maybe.”

Théoden’s reaction to his first encounter with Ents is less hostile, perhaps, after all he has just benefitted from their timely intervention, but it is hardly less ignorant! He declares that he knows nothing of them so Gandalf takes the opportunity to teach him a few home truths and he shows Théoden that they are indeed truths he once learned in his own home.

“They are the shepherds of the trees…Is it so long since you listened to tales by the fireside? There are children in your land who, out of the twisted threads of story, could pick the answer to your question. You have seen Ents, Ents out of Fangorn Forest, which in your tongue you call the Entwood. Did you think that the name was given only in idle fancy?”

Théoden’s response shows that he may be ignorant as are his people but that he does ponder things deeply.

“Out of the shadows of legend I begin to understand the marvel of the trees, I think…Songs we have that tell of these things, but we are forgetting them, teaching them only to children, as a careless custom. And now the songs have come down among us out of strange places, and walk visible under the Sun.”

Théoden’s musings tell the tale of our own times too. What we know call Fairy Tales are stories thought to be fit only for children and so the very word, Fairy, is considered childish and the culture in which these tales arose, the culture of our medieval ancestors, is thought to have been immature and in need of enlightenment. Indeed from the time of the Enlightenment onward such tales became, as Théoden put it, taught only to children “as a careless custom”.

Recently it has been noted by many critics that much of the best writing of our time has been written ostensibly for children though sadly one leading author in the UK commented that he was disturbed by the sight of adults on trains reading Harry Potter. In the packed church in which I watched a school nativity play this morning there was an atmosphere of delight as parents and grandparents gazed upon their young dressed as characters from the gospel stories. There is a general acceptance that faith is a good thing for children especially when linked to a moral education but one, sadly perhaps, that must be left behind on leaving childhood. And yet the word adult when used as an adjective to describe books, films, pictures etc. is used to denote a deeply immature sexuality that has perhaps a place in an occasional time of carnival as ancient societies knew but is deeply destructive of mature sexual relationships and mature societies when it becomes the norm.

Thankfully Tolkien himself created a mythology that speaks to both adults and children in our own time. His work has transformed the lives of many and sowed seeds of enchantment among many more that will bear fruit. I pray that we too may find songs coming down to us “out of strange places” that may “walk visible under the Sun.”