The World is Too Much With Us by William Wordsworth

“Fangorn is My Name.” Merry and Pippin Meet Treebeard on a Hill in The Forest.

/ stephencwinter / 2 Comments

The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991,2007) pp. 600-607

Merry and Pippin make their escape from the Orcs up the Entwash into the Forest of Fangorn and at first they are driven by fear of their captors. But at last they pause, struggling for breath in the stifling stillness of the forest and try to assess their position. Which way should they go and what provision do they have for their journey?

A careful examination of their position would not give the hobbits much hope. They have only lembas to eat and enough for only five days and where will they go? But we have already seen that they are content to live in the moment and soon their curiosity about their immediate surroundings begins to grow and, for a while at least, concern for their prospects fades away.

It is the age of the forest that fascinates them and the feeling of age. Pippin likens the forest to the “old room in the Great Place of the Tooks”, where the Old Took, Gerontius, who Bilbo knew, lived year after year while the room grew old about him. “But that is nothing to the old feeling of this wood.”

The moment in which the young hobbits meet Treebeard for the very first time is handled very differently in Peter Jackson’s film than it is in Tolkien’s original telling of the story. The obvious difference is that Tolkien gives us no pursuing orcs. They are lying slain on the grass of Rohan by this point and Grishnákh was killed while trying to take the hobbits to Mordor. But the other difference is that there seems to be a complete absence of fear on the part of Merry and Pippin as they are lifted from the ground by “a large Man-like, almost Troll-like, figure, at least fourteen feet high, very sturdy, with a tall head, and hardly any neck.” I will come back to this strange absence of fear next week in my reflection. As always I do not consider it to be an oversight on Tolkien’s part, one that Peter Jackson corrects.

What we are given is wonder. The first thing that Merry and Pippin become aware of is Treebeard’s eyes and it is Pippin, the one who is normally unreflective, who tries to describe those eyes.

“One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long slow steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present; like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don’t know, but it felt as if something that grew in the ground- asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between root-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky 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.”

What Pippin seems to be describing is nature itself in all its heartbreaking beauty. I say heartbreaking because even as we read these words we are so aware of the fragility of the world that Treebeard expresses and represents. And in this Tolkien reveals himself as a modern writer who is aware that nature is standing at bay as a debased culture, orc like in its character, knows only one relationship to the natural world and that is dominance, abuse and rape.

One of my pleasures in writing these reflections is seeking for appropriate artwork to aid them. Although I enjoyed the films that Peter Jackson made and, in particular, loved the landscapes within which he set the story I have found much more help for my own work from the imaginations of artists. This week I have used an image by the excellent Anke Eissmann once again who finds such character in the faces of Merry and Pippin and I have found a wonderful depiction of Treebeard’s face by Alan Lee. If Eissmann always gives us character in her work Lee gives us mystery. There is a transcendent quality to all his work. Each image is a kind of portal to a reality beyond the surface that can be touched or simply regarded. This is certainly true of his depiction of Treebeard and as I looked at it I began to see a likeness to his depiction of the figure of Merlin in Bragdon Wood from C.S Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. Again, in future weeks, I want to come back to this likeness. I do not know if it was intentional on Lee’s part but that sense that something is awakening, emerging from the earth in both Treebeard and Merlin, is one that excites, even intoxicates me. I hope that you will enjoy this exploration with me and that, perhaps, you will share your insights and responses in the comments section below.

Saruman’s Long Years of Death are Finally Revealed in His Corpse.

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Tolkien offers us two different ways of responding to Saruman’s end at the door of Bag End.

The second is the simple anger of the hobbits who have just fought their first battle and lost friends and family to Saruman’s bandits. They seek that form of justice which is retribution.

The first is Frodo’s, his pity and his horror.

“I do not wish him to be slain in this evil mood. He was great once, of a noble kind that we should not dare raise our hands against. He is fallen, and his cure is beyond us; but I would still spare him, in the hope that he may find it.”

Frodo’s own story has been one of profound self discovery and he has learned the pity of which the 14th century mystic, Julian of Norwich speaks when she tells us of the God who “looks upon us with pity, not with blame”. He remembers the horror of Boromir’s transformation through his lust for the Ring, of the first encounter with Gollum when he realises what he would become if he gave into it and the journey through Mordor in which he tastes the endless living death that is the hopeless end of all its slaves.

Perhaps it is this last experience that he sees revealed in Saruman’s body when he gazes upon “the long years of death” that Saruman’s existence has become. It is Frodo’s eyes through which we look upon the corpse, not Sam’s and certainly not the hobbits who are veterans of just one battle. Sam faithfully walked with his friend through the valley of the shadow of death but even he did not taste it as Frodo did and learned the pity that comes from that taste. And when Frodo speaks of his hope for a cure for Saruman it is because he hopes for one himself.

That is the difference between Frodo and Saruman. That among many. Frodo longs for a cure and for rest. Saruman no longer has hope for a cure, for mercy, and has learned even to hate it. Frodo will not find a cure in Middle-earth, and Saruman knows that, but he will pass into the West, the true home from which Saruman once came but now despises and Saruman can no longer see even the possibility of the journey that Frodo will take. Frodo’s body will be healed in the West and even more than this he will find peace. He will be at peace with himself.

The poet William Wordsworth once looked out over the sea and wrote unhappily, “The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending we lay waste our powers”. The long dead, yet still existing, Saruman, is, in his entirety, the complete expression of one who has laid waste his powers. When Treebeard described him as a man with “a mind full of metal and wheels” it was more than a metaphor. Saruman has become that about which he has long thought. He is as lifeless as his machinery.

And what of the powers that he has laid waste? Perhaps here lies the greatest warning to the digitally obsessed minds of our own times. Compare Saruman to Gandalf. Gandalf has lived out his long sojourn in Middle-earth at the pace of its peoples. In his going out to each of them he has never sought to force them to his own will and he has waited for the inner and truest life of each to be revealed. Gandalf never goes beyond the power that is his gift. Neither should we. We do not have the power that is Gandalf’s but we have our own and it is far greater than most of us know and can only be found through years of humble self-discovery and sheer hard work and perseverance.

Saruman soon lost patience with the slowness of the Divine Spirit in Middle-earth just as Sauron did and he gave his life to the getting and to the spending that seeks the enslavement of others. Next week we will think about one who discovers his power through the time and work he gives to clearing up after the mess that Saruman has left.