Treebeard

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

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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.

“O Rowan Dead, Upon Your Head Your Hair is Dry and Grey.” Quickbeam the Ent Teaches Us the Power of Lamentation.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991,2007) pp. 628-631

I have never known any fully mature rowan-trees and so sadly have never encountered in my own experience the description that Bregalad, or Quickbeam as he is called in the Common Tongue, gives of the mighty trees of his youth.

“And these trees grew and grew, till the shadow of each was like a green hall, and their red berries in the autumn were a burden, and a beauty and a wonder.”

A rowan-tree crowned in glory.

I may not have met a fully mature rowan-tree but I do share Bregalad’s love of the rowan and its beauty and I have enjoyed watching birds flock to them later in autumn as other sources of food begin to run scarce. It is a tree that sustains them well into winter and itt is a good tree to plant and grow in a town garden or to see upon a woodland walk in the country.

Merry and Pippin are introduced to Bregalad by Treebeard towards the ending of the first day of Entmoot.

“Are you getting weary, or feeling impatient, hmm, eh?” Treebeard asks. “Well I am afraid that you must not get impatient yet?” This is still only the first day of deliberations that will take three days to conclude. Bregalad has already made up his mind about what to do and needs no more debate and so he is given the task of looking after the young hobbits until all is done.

“I am Bregalad, that is Quickbeam in your language. But it is only a nickname, of course. They have called me that ever since I said yes to an elder Ent before he had finished his question. Also I drink quickly, and go out while some are still wetting their beards.”

I love the way in which Peet on Deviantart has captured Bregalad’s gentleness and delight in this picture.

The quickness that Merry and Pippin experience in Quickbeam, and which they delight in, is a quickness to sing and to laugh. The very last time we see the friends at the end of The Lord of the Rings as they bid farewell to Sam is as they go off together singing. Bregalad is of the same spirit and so he laughs when the sun comes out from behind a cloud and he laughs whenever he meets a spring or a stream but his singing is subtly different whenever he meets a rowan-tree. He halts a while “with his arms stretched out” and he sings and sways as he sings.

Bregalad is a lover in the sense that he delights in life, and he delights in the life of the forest in particular, and especially in rowan-trees amidst the life of the forest. He takes pleasure in the being-ness of rowan-trees, in the simple fact that they are, and he expresses his delight in his singing. He sings his joy in the beauty of these trees. 

O rowan fair, upon your hair how white the blossom lay!
O rowan mine, I saw you shine upon a summer's day,
Your rind so bright, your leaves so light, your voice so cool and soft:
Upon your head how golden-red the crown you bore aloft!

This is a song of praise for the glory of a fellow creature but his song does not end with praise but with lamentation. If, in Derndingle where the Entmoot meets, the mood is of growing anger which will eventually spill forth in songs of war, songs in which Bregalad will join, the mood of the song that he sings to Merry and Pippin is one of the deepest sadness. 

O rowan dead, upon your head your hair is dry and grey;
Your crown is spilled, your voice is stilled for ever and a day.

It is not only anger that rouses the Ents against the wanton destruction of Saruman and of the orcs of Isengard but sadness also. And the sadness goes deeper than the anger. With their anger the Ents will “split Isengard into splinters and crack its walls into rubble” but with the sadness that they sing in songs of lament they will labour to heal the land, to renew Fangorn and also to rebuild Isengard making it a place of beauty once again, a place in which earth, air, fire and water can live together in harmony with one another and in which living things that grow and which sustain life can thrive. Bregalad teaches us that we need more than anger if we are to transform the earth. There are other songs to sing than songs of war.

The rowan-tree both protects and heals.

“It is Likely Enough… That We are Going to Our Doom: The Last March of The Ents.” The Ents Go to War at Isengard.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp.623-635

The night that Merry and Pippin spend in Wellinghall is the first since they escaped from the Orcs and the first that they have had in a home, a place of safety, since leaving Lothlórien, and so they sleep long and refreshingly.

Treebeard takes them to Entmoot, the council in which the Ents will deliberate what course of action they must take.

“Deciding what to do does not take Ents as long as going over all the facts and events that they have to make up their minds about”, Treebeard says to the hobbits, and he estimates that this will take a couple of days or so. He sends Merry and Pippin off with a younger Ent called Bregalad or Quickbeam who has already made up his mind about what should be done and the hobbits spend those days in his company as the Moot continues.

It is on the third day, a bleak and windy day, in the afternoon, that all falls silent and then with a great crash and the quivering and bending of the trees that the Ents march towards them.

“We come, we come with roll of drum: ta-runda runda runda rom!”

The Ents are marching to Isengard and to war.

The Ents march upon Isengard

It is through Merry that we learn something about Isengard. Merry is the organiser of the four hobbits, the original company of the Ring that left the Shire some months before these events. He organised the purchase of Crickhollow in Buckland, and, as the real reason why Frodo is leaving Hobbiton became clear it is Merry who made secret preparation for leaving the Shire. He is rather proud that while Pippin spent his days in Rivendell idling away the time he tried to find out as much as he could about what might lay ahead.

“Isengard is a sort of ring of rocks or hills, I think, with a flat space inside and an island or pillar of rock in the middle, called Orthanc. Saruman has a tower on it. There is a gate, perhaps more than one, in the encircling wall, and I believe there is a stream running through it; it comes out of the mountains, and flows on across the Gap of Rohan.”

Saruman’s creation of Isengard around the Tower of Orthanc

Orthanc is not Saruman’s work but much older having been built by the Númenorians in the days of Elendil. It was a sign of their decline that during the first part of the Third Age it became a lawless place far from the authority of Minas Tirith and a thorn in the side of the new kingdom of the Rohirrim who had settled in the plains of Calenardhon that lay between the southern end of the Misty Mountains to the north and the mountains of Gondor to the south. So it was that when Saruman took possession of Isengard in 2759 of the Third Age both the Steward of Gondor and the King of Rohan welcomed him gladly seeing him as a valuable ally who would watch over the strategically vital Gap of Rohan.

It would seem that Saruman was able to keep his true intentions secret right until the moment he took Gandalf prisoner during the time in which Frodo was making preparations to leave first Hobbiton and then the Shire, although Treebeard seems to have been aware of these intentions for some time and the presence of orcs in Isengard. Even after going to war with Rohan Saruman was able to keep Théoden from making a strong response through the efforts of Grima Wormtongue his chief counsellor who was able to convince Théoden that Saruman’s true wish was for peace.

It is with the arrival of Merry and Pippin in their pure, gentle and artless simplicity that the dam finally bursts and the slowly simmering anger of the Ents finally comes pouring out of Fangorn and down to Isengard. It is as if Nature herself finally rises up against the powers that would destroy her. But even as the Ents march upon Isengard and upon Saruman Treebeard is aware that Nature may fail, that it is “likely enough that we are going to our doom: the last march of the Ents”. But, he adds, “if we stayed at home and did nothing, doom would find us anyway, sooner or later”. The possibility that disenchanted Nature could yet reawaken and rise against a world of “metal and wheels” was something that the Inklings pondered both through the character of Merlin in C.S Lewis’s That Hideous Strength and through Treebeard in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien allows such a revolt to take place but recognises the heartbreaking fragility of Nature that may yet fall before the walls of Isengard and before technology.

Alan Lee imagines Treebeard…
…and he imagines Merlin.

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

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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.

“He Has a Mind of Metal and Wheels; and He Does Not Care For Growing Things”. Treebeard Speaks of The Treason of Saruman.

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

The home that Treebeard has shown to Merry and Pippin is the fruit of exquisite patience. We might almost say the patience of Nature herself except, as we saw Treebeard speak of the hill upon which he first met the young hobbits, it had only stood there since that part of the world was shaped. There was a history before that moment too.

So, as I wrote last week, the Wellinghall that Treebeard shows to the young hobbits has been a careful crafting of earth, water, growing things and light over many years. It has as much in common with an art installation as it does a dwelling place and, although it has been ages in its making, if Treebeard had brought Merry and Pippin to it just a few days later it would be different. The spring that wells up from beneath the earth would have shaped it in a new way and as the year moved onwards into springtime so the rising of the sap within the trees that are the walls of Wellinghall would subtly transform them and would fill the air with a delicious aroma.

But Saruman is a different matter altogether.

“I think that I now understand what he is up to. He is plotting to become a Power. He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for living things, except as far as they serve him for the moment.”

Middle-earth Enterprises imagine the fruits of Saruman’s “mind of metal and wheels in their depiction of Isengard.

One could hardly find a greater contrast between any two beings than between the minds of these two neighbours. If Treebeard has lovingly worked with Nature for long ages of time both in the making of his home and in his work as a shepherd of the trees Saruman is impatient both with Nature herself and with all living things. As Treebeard puts it, in the mind of Saruman the one needful thing is that it must “serve him for the moment”; and it is worth noting that phrase, for the moment, for as W.H Auden spoke of factory workers, all are “put to temporary use”. Robots are taking the place of those who work in factories and doubtless if Saruman had lived long enough he would have replaced his specially bred orcs, the Uruk-hai, with robots. It might be that his orcs can withstand the sun in a way that other orcs cannot, but eventually it will be possible to create a robot that will be able far to outlast even the strongest orc. And whereas Saruman could not be completely confident about the obedience of his Uruk-hai he need never have any anxiety about robots. The temporary usefulness of any creature that serves him for the moment would have come to an end. And we might even add that the quality of malice which he required in his servants, which was so useful to him, but which required constant attention as with Uglúk’s need to keep reminding his troops that the prisoners were not to be harmed, could be programmed into a robot in a completely reliable manner.

Saruman’s Uruk-hai are “put to temporary use”.

Saruman’s impatient “mind of metal and wheels” is about to be put to the test by the shepherds of trees and by their Huorns, trees that are growing in awareness and becoming more like their shepherds as Treebeard put it. And when it is tested in this manner it will be his impatience that will be his undoing. His anxiety to defeat Rohan quickly will lead him to empty his fortress of Isengard not fearing any enemy nearer by; his weaponry will not be sufficient to drive away either Ents or Huorns; and whereas the Tower of Orthanc, rising out of the very bones of the earth itself and built by Númenorians at the very height of their powers, cannot be assailed by Ents, the walls of Isengard are a fragile thing and easily overthrown.

Perhaps all lovers of “living things” should be grateful for Saruman’s impatience. If he or any like him were able to wait long enough then life itself might be abolished. The Ring of Power is, of course, the ultimate expression of a mind of metal and wheels, a mind that is a machine, at least for that age of Arda. In our own age the principle that made the Rings of Power is at work in new ways and perhaps with even greater effectiveness.

“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

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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.

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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.

“Why Did Celeborn Warn Us Against Your Forest?” Treebeard Tells the Hobbits Something of The Story of Forests and Ents.

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

Carefully but firmly holding Merry and Pippin in the crooks of his arms Treebeard makes his way through the Forest of Fangorn. The hobbits have had plenty of experience of being carried in the past few days but the last one was by orcs, “seized like a sack” and crushed into their necks. Their arms were gripped like iron with orcs’ fingernails biting into their flesh. This is very different, soon Merry and Pippin begin to feel “safe and comfortable”, hobbit curiosity gets the better of Pippin and there is something he wants to know.

Alan Lee depicts the moment when Treebeard first picks up the hobbits. They are in his hands for careful examination. Soon they will be in the crooks of his arms for gentle carrying.

“Please, Treebeard,” he said, “could I ask you about something? Why did Celeborn warn us against your forest? He told us not to risk getting entangled in it.”

It is a theme that runs through The Lord of the Rings that its free peoples have become divided from one another so that there is a sense of hiddeness and wariness about each land in which strangers are treated with suspicion. So normal has this become that when Gandalf, who has worked harder than any to break down barriers between peoples, is confronted with the words pedo mellon a minna on the western doors of Moria he assumes that a secret password is required of him. In fact all he needs to do is to say the word, friend, mellon, and the doors open. This is a fact that I note was completely ignored in the recent Amazon dramatisation, The Rings of Power. We live in suspicious times once more and, like Gandalf, assume that doors will be closed against us. Even the stories that we tell tend to be of suspicion and wariness rather than friendship and openness.

Tolkien’s own drawing of Durin’s Doors. It shows that a door can either an invitation to enter or a warning to keep out.

Treebeard speaks of this as he ponders Celeborn’s own land, the Golden Wood, turning over Elven words as one might allow a fine wine to linger upon the tongue before swallowing it. Lothlórien too is a dangerous place, “and not for anyone just to enter in”. We might note that when Gandalf took Gollum prisoner it was to the realm of Thranduil that he took him and not Lothlórien. The secretness of that land needed to be preserved.

It is darkness that has divided the peoples of Middle-earth, darkness not as a welcome pause between periods of daylight in which rest can be taken and moonlight and starlight enjoyed for their own sake but as a thing of threat in which enemies might be hiding ready to do harm. Treebeard speaks of “the Great Darkness”, presumably referring to the time that followed the destruction of the Trees of Light in Valinor by Morgoth in the First Age, a time in which darkness did not merely mean an absence of light but had a quality of its own, the kind of hopelessness to which Dante refers in the motto that stands above the Gates of Hell in his Divine Comedy. It is this kind of darkness that entered parts of the realm of Fangorn just as it did in parts of The Old Forest near the Shire. Treebeard speaks of some trees in the forest especially in the valleys under the mountains that are “sound as a bell, and bad right through.”

The Ents have watched over the forest since time immemorial and they have tried to teach the trees about light, opening their hearts to it, softening those hearts. And they have tried to keep unwary folk away from danger. And it must surely be a fruit of their work that at the end of The Lord of the Rings Legolas takes Gimli upon a voyage of discovery through Fangorn that is a source of delight and wonder and not one of danger and threat. It is not just because of Sauron’s fall that the darkness has been lifted, the time for that has been much too brief, it is because through the work of the Ents that the forest is full of light. But perhaps Legolas and Gimli had the services of an Ent to guide them through the forest. We are not told. A guide such as Treebeard could take a guest into secret places safely, unfolding them to those who wish to take time to enjoy them. This would be a different way of getting to know a forest than to take a truck along a highway that has been driven through its heart like a sword thrust.

It takes time to enter the secrets of a forest. Perhaps a lifetime. Alan Lee depicts a part of the Forest of Fangorn .

Hill Is a Hasty Word for a “Thing That Has Stood Here Since This Part of The World Was Shaped.” Treebeard Calls Us to Learn to Speak With Less Haste.

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

Merry and Pippin begin to tell their story to Treebeard but soon Merry suggests that Treebeard put them down.

“You must be getting tired of holding us up,” he says.

Treebeard replies by saying that he doesn’t tire easily but that perhaps it is time to go, to leave the place on which they are standing. And then he ponders the name of this thing.

“Hill?” suggested Pippin. “Shelf? Step?” suggested Merry.

Treebeard repeated the words thoughtfully. “Hill. Yes, that was it. But it is a hasty word for a thing that has stood here ever since this part of the world was shaped. Never mind. Let us go.”

“You must be getting tired from holding us up.” Alan Lee’s wonderful depiction of the first encounter between the hobbits and Treebeard.

And so Treebeard, in just a few words, challenges us to examine the ways in which we use language, a way is usually unexamined, we might even say, thoughtless. We first learn the names of things from our parents and other adults; a code that we share in common with all who speak our mother tongue. Hobbits, in Tolkien’s world, abandoned their own original language and adopted the Common Tongue, or Westron, that enabled the peoples of Middle-earth, such as Ents and Hobbits, to speak with one another. It is another way in which Hobbits are able to be a kind of Everyman in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien did some work on the Westron language but unlike the languages of the Elves that emerged from a first principle of language, from the mythology that was the Elves first and essential experience of reality, Westron was a translation from English back into an invented language.

Merry and Pippin, like most hobbits, have very little understanding of the ancient languages of Middle-earth. They are modern people for whom language has lost its ancient connection to an experience of its world that is rooted in myth and mystery. Those who still speak Gaelic in Scotland are able, if they so choose, to walk about a Hebridean island and through the names of each place they come to, tell the story of their island. Tolkien, through his knowledge of Old English, could do something similar with the place names of England, particularly in the ancient shires of Worcester and Oxford. The name of the town near which I live in Worcestershire is Droitwich, from the Old English wic or village and dright which might be dirt (drit). English, unlike Gaelic which tells stories, has always been a practical language. We might say that it is a hasty language. It encourages you to get on with things. Gaelic encourages you to stop and ponder the stories of things.

The old High Street in Droitwich

Treebeard is not particularly interested in getting on with things. He has no gardens to tend or food to grow. As he says to the young hobbits his food is a drink “that will keep you green and growing for a long, long while” and unlike ale or beer this drink involves no manufacturing process. His task is to be a shepherd to the trees of the forest and like shepherds, or herdsmen, throughout the world for much of the time, the work requires a close attention to all that is going on and Treebeard has been paying attention for thousands of years. His language, perhaps more like Gaelic, invites you to stop and ponder.

His attentiveness and his long memory is expressed in the telling of stories and the hill on which he has been standing that day has a very long story indeed. Treebeard’s life is lived in long practiced harmony with the forest in which he has lived for long ages and his language is contemplative, an expression of that harmony.

The French Orthodox scholar, Olivier Clément, speaks of this kind of contemplation thus:

“Here is a little spiritual exercise by means of the humblest of sensations- of breathing, of rejoicing under the blue sky, of touching a stone, or the bark of a tree, of gazing… at the majesty of a tree- I try to reach the transcendence of a thing. The object is visible and at the same time invisible; I must seek its inner self, let myself be led by it”

Treebeard has been led by the “inner self” of his forest for a very long time.

Merry and Pippin begin to contemplate Fangorn in Alan Lee’s depiction.

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

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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.