The Lord of the Rings and the Trees

This talk deals with a minor but still very important aspect of LOTR: What view does the novel express of the environment, and of how we can live in it?

It is well known that Tolkien held what would now be called “green” views. As early as 1974, a critic wrote:

Tolkien was ecologist, champion of the extraordinary, hater of ‘progress’, lover of handicrafts, detester of war long before such attitudes became fashion- able.1

Tolkien expressed his private views on nature in several letters:

I am (obviously) much in love with plants and above all trees, and always have been; and I find human maltreatment of them as hard to bear as some find ill- treatment of animals.2

In a letter to the Daily Telegraph Tolkien expresses his views that humans are natural enemies of trees:

[N]othing [the Forestry Commission] has done ... compares with the destruc- tion, torture and murder of trees perpetrated by private individuals and minor official bodies. The savage sound of the electric saw is never silent wherever trees are still found growing.3

When an old tree near his house was going to be felled, Tolkien wrote several letters about it, one in September 1962:

There was a great tree – a huge poplar with vast limbs – visible through my window even as I lay in bed. I loved it, and was anxious about it. It had been savagely mutilated some years before, but had gallantly grown new limbs – though of course not with the unblemished grace of its former natural self; and now a foolish neighbour was agitating to have it felled. Every tree has its enemy, few have an advocate. ... I believe it still stands where it did.4

In the introduction to his book Tree and Leaf, in 1964, though, Tolkien writes:

One of [the] sources [of Tree by Niggle] was a great-limbed poplar tree that I could see even lying in bed. It was suddenly lopped and mutilated by its owner, I do not know why. It is cut down now, a less barbarous punishment for any crimes it might have been accused of, such as being large and alive. I do not think it had any friends, or any mourners, except myself and a pair of owls.5

In LOTR, too, ecological themes are frequently foregrounded. One of the manifestations of evil is the destruction of the environment: trees must give way to industry, and industry is often directed at destruction. In the film, we can see this clearly in the deeds of Saruman’s orcs and his words, as he walks through his subterranean factories. Lord of the Rings: Some Themes 2

Obviously, Tolkien’s love of trees comes through when he talks about Lothlórien or Fangorn. and the kind of rage he felt when the poplar tree in front of his house was felled also comes through in Treebeard’s words, when he talks about Saruman’s creation of an arms industry:

‘Down on the borders they are felling trees – good trees. Some of the trees they just cut down and leave to rot – orc-mischief that; but most are hewn up and carried off to feed the fires of Orthanc. There is always a smoke rising from Isengard these days. ‘Curse him, root and branch! Many of those trees were my friends, creatures I had known from nut and acorn; many had voices of their own that are lost for ever now. And there are wastes of stump and bramble where once there were singing groves. I have been idle. I have let things slip. It must stop!6

In the second film Treebeard seems so far to be unaware of the destruction that Saruman has wrought; he is so angered when he finally sees it that he spontaneously decides to attack Saruman’s stronghold with his fellow ents; and since ents had been carefully portrayed as not doing anything spontaneously, we can guess how angry this has made him.

When the Hobbits leave the Shire, the place appears to be totally idyllic, a rural paradise, but when they come back, it has been badly affected by Saruman’s industrialisation. Farmer Cotton complains to Sam:

[S]ince Sharkey came they don’t grind no more corn at all. They’re always a- hammering and a-letting out a smoke and a stench, and there isn’t no peace even at night in Hobbiton. And they pour out filth a purpose; they’ve fouled all the lower Water and it’s getting down into Brandywine. If they want to make the Shire into a desert, they’re going the right way about it.7

And it is the trees that have particularly suffered:

The trees were the worst loss and damage, for at Sharkey’s bidding they had been cut down recklessly far and wide over the Shire; and Sam grieved over this more than anything else. For one thing, this hurt would take long to heal, and only his great-grandchildren, he thought, would see the Shire as it ought to be.8

And it is not the least part of the Healing of the Shire when Sam uses Galadriel’s gift to bring the trees back:

So Sam planted saplings in all the places where specially beautiful or beloved trees had been destroyed, and he put a grain of the precious dust in the soil at the root of each. He went up and down the Shire in this labour; but if he paid special attention to Hobbiton and Bywater no one blamed him. And at the end he found that he still had a little of the dust left; so he went to the Three- Farthing Stone, which is as near the centre of the Shire as no matter, and cast it in the air with his blessing. The little silver nut he planted in the Party Field where the tree had once been; and he wondered what would come of it. All Lord of the Rings: Some Themes 3

through the winter he remained as patient as he could, and tried to restrain himself from going round constantly to see if anything was happening. Spring surpassed his wildest hopes. His trees began to sprout and grow, as if time was in a hurry and wished to make one year do for twenty. In the Party Field a beautiful young sapling leaped up: it had silver bark and long leaves and burst into golden flowers in April. It was indeed a mallorn, and it was the wonder of the neighbourhood. In after years, as it grew in grace and beauty, it was known far and wide and people would come long journeys to see it: the only mallorn west of the Mountains and east of the Sea, and one of the finest in the world.9

Similarly, the re-establishment of the Kingdom of Gondor is symbolised by Aragorn replanting a sapling of the White Tree of Gondor in Minas Tirith.

The evil consequences of industrialisation are also frequently described in LOTR, and some of these, unlike the ones in the Shire, are also beyond healing:

Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about. High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained, stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows, slowly revealed in the reluctant light. They had come to the desolation that lay before Mordor: the lasting monument to the dark labour of its slaves that should endure when all their purposes were made void; a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing – unless the Great Sea should enter in and wash it with oblivion. ‘I feel sick,’ said Sam. Frodo did not speak.10

And this is only the area outside the Black Gates of Mordor, the Morannon plain. Mordor itself is no better, of course:

Frodo and Sam gazed out in mingled loathing and wonder on this hateful land. Between them and the smoking mountain, and about it north and south, all seemed ruinous and dead, a desert burned and choked.11

These descriptions are, of course, based on the slag-heaps, the ashes, the poisoning of the ground Tolkien would have experienced himself in England, the result of mining and of the industrial revolution.

For some people, all this has made Tolkien a kind of patron saint of ecology, somebody who has practically written the gospel of the Green Movement. This view has been particularly strongly expressed in a book by Patrick Curry, Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien – Myth and Modernity.12 This book is not really so much a look at Tolkien’s views but a ‘Green’ tract or sermon that takes its supporting text from Tolkien. Curry mentions Tolkien’s opinion on trees, and goes on to tell us about the situation of British forests, of Canadian timber forests, and of tropical rainforests; and about the ecological and psychological consequences of this dis- Lord of the Rings: Some Themes 4 appearence of forests. I find nothing wrong with the views expressed in there, and I share most of them; but in its single-minded ecological stance, I feel it misrepresents Tolkien. It could be seen not so much as a study of Tolkien’s work but as a study of its reception in a particular context. LOTR had of course been read before, during the Vietnam war, as an antiauthoritarian manifesto, where Sauron and/or Saruman were equated with the American military-industrial complex and the hobbits as individualists who would not give in to it, and people found personal significance and relevance in it.

Reading LOTR as a “Green” manifesto, though, as gospel to give support to statement about ecological politics, canonising Tolkien as a “Green” saint, cannot find total support in the text.13 Tolkien does not really see the fight against evil, ecological or otherwise, as one that can finally be won: Galadriel describes herself and Celeborn as fighting the long defeat.14 Our very mode of being ensures that we, unlike the elves, cannot be at one with nature.

Let us look at Treebeard’s description of Saruman’s destruction of trees again:

Down on the borders they are felling trees – good trees. Some of the trees they just cut down and leave to rot – orc-mischief that; but most are hewn up and carried off to feed the fires of Orthanc.15

In the letter I quoted before, where Tolkien talks about the destruction, torture, and murder of trees, he also talks about various forests:

Lothlórien is beautiful because there the trees were loved; elsewhere forests are represented as awakening to a consciousness of themselves. The Old Forest was hostile to two legged creatures because of the memory of many injuries. Fangorn Forest was old and beautiful, but at the time of the story tense with hostility because it was threatened by a machine-loving enemy. Mirkwood had fallen under the domination of a Power that hated all living things but was restored to beauty and became Greenwood the Great before the end of the story.16

‘The Old Forest was hostile ... because of the memory of many injuries.’ While this is not explained directly in LOTR, it is easily enough understood. The injuries, however, were not in- flicted on it by orcs or uruk-hay in the service of a machine-loving enemy but by another party altogether, by a peaceful rural community that lived in harmony with nature: by the hobbits and their predecessors in the Shire. When the travellers first leave the Shire and reach the Old Forest (NOT IN THE FILM), Merry explains:

‘They do say the trees do actually move, and can surround strangers and hem them in. In fact long ago they attacked the Hedge: they came and planted themselves right by it, and leaned over it. But the hobbits came and cut down hundreds of trees, and made a great bonfire in the Forest, and burned all the ground in a long strip east of the Hedge. After that the trees gave up the attack, but they became very unfriendly. There is still a wide bare space not far inside where the bonfire was made.’17 Lord of the Rings: Some Themes 5

Slashing and burning? Hobbits? This is orc-work, but an agricultural community cannot really tolerate primeval forests: these have to be cleared before agriculture can start. For the trees, of course, it does not matter whether they are cut down to make room for agriculture or for in- dustrialisation. As Tom Bombadil, who comes to rescue them from a particularly hostile tree, Old Man Willow, explains to the hobbits, in words given to Treebeard in the film:

Tom’s words laid bare the hearts of trees and their thoughts, which were often dark and strange, and filled with a hatred of things that go free upon the earth, gnawing, biting, breaking, hacking, burning: destroyers and usurpers.18

In other words, those cultivators of the land. All the great forests of Middle-earth, Fangorn as well as Mirkwood and the Old Forest are survivors of massive clearing efforts by humans, clearing efforts which Tolkien has to accept when he describes the shire as idyllic.

The tension between agricultural societies and the forests, between tame and wild nature is, of course, symbolised in the separation of ents, the tree-herds, and entwives, the gardeners and cultivators, and it is perhaps characteristic that the duet of ent and entwife does not offer a resolution of this tension in Middle-earth, but only in a Beyond:

ENT. When Winter comes, the winter wild that hill and wood shall slay; When trees shall fall and starless night devour the sunless day; When wind is in the deadly East, then in the bitter rain I’ll look for thee, and call to thee; I’ll come to thee again!

ENTWIFE. When Winter comes, and singing ends; when darkness falls at last; When broken is the barren bough, and light and labour past; I’ll look for thee, and wait for thee, until we meet again: Together we will take the road beneath the bitter rain!

BOTH. Together we will take the road that leads into the West, And far away will find a land where both our hearts may rest.’19

So perhaps I ought to leave the last word to Treebeard, who puts it very aptly:

I am not altogether on anybody’s side, because nobody is altogether on my side, if you understand me.20

Or as he says in the film, more absolutely:

I am not on anybody’s side, because nobody is on my side, little orc!

Notes

1.Paul Kocher, Master of Middle-Earth: The Achievement of J. R. R. Tolkien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974) 26.

2.J. R. R. Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter, with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien (London: HarperCollins, 1995) No. 165. Lord of the Rings: Some Themes 6

3.Tolkien, Letters No. 339.

4.Tolkien, Letters No. 241.

5.J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964).

6.LOTR Bk III Ch 4.

7.LOTR Bk VI Ch. 8.

8.LOTR Bk VI Ch 9.

9.LOTR Bk VI Ch 9.

10.LOTR Bk IV Ch 2.

11.LOTR Bk VI Ch 2.

12.Patrick Curry, Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien – Myth and Modernity (New York: St Martin's, 1997).

13.See Verlyn Flieger, "Taking the Part of Trees: Eco-Conflict in Middle-earth," J. R. R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances, ed. George Clark and Daniel Timmons (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000) 147-58.

14.LOTR Bk II Ch 7.

15.LOTR Bk III Ch 4.

16.Tolkien, Letters No. 339.

17.LOTR Bk I Ch 6.

18.LOTR Bk I Ch 7.

19.LOTR Bk III Ch 4.

20.LOTR Bk III Ch 4.