September is an apt month to read and consider the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. He accepted the gift of Iluvatar to men on September 2nd 1973 and Bilbo and Frodo have their shared birthday on September 22nd. So, I thought I would share an essay I wrote seven years ago for Convivium. The editors there did a beautiful job of reworking certain aspects of my essay. You will get the rawer version here. The essay is a long one, just over 4000 words. So I’ll be posting half today and half next week. I hope you enjoy.
"By root and twig, but it is a strange business: up sprout little fold that are not in the old lists, and behold! the Nine forgotten Riders reappear to hunt them, and Gandalf takes them on a great journey, and Galadriel harbours them in Caras Galadhon, and Orcs pursue them down all the leagues of Wilderland: indeed they seem to be caught up in a great storm. I hope they weather it!"1
This is the line that first came to mind when I read the theme for this first issue of Convivium. Root and twig! Treebeard shouts as a kind of expletive akin to their dwarves' shout of "hammer and tongs!" Yet when one reads the passage it seems quite natural, not only because of the treesish nature of Ents, but because of how Treebeard's treeishness affects his whole vision of reality. He muses on the hobbits he has just met who seem caught up in things too great for them and he wonders whether they can weather the storm. This is an apt pondering for the a tree-herder who must often wonder if his flock can weather the storms that wrack Fangorn Forest. In this paper, I want to explore trees and their relations––particularly Ents and fairies––and see what we might learn about them, root and twig. I want to argue that we can do with a bit more treeishness in our own lives. I will begin with exploration into Tolkien's Ents and their nature. From there I will turn to "real" trees and explore Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees to help push the boundaries of our "normal" experience of trees. From there I will draw some comparisons between trees and people. My essay will then shift to the subject of sacramental ontology where I will pursue questions of how we might be able to read creation in general and trees in particular. I will use Tolkien's category of recovery, from his essay On Fairy-stories to argue that new ways of seeing trees can help us not only see the trees more clearly, but also ourselves. Finally, I will return to trees, humans, and discuss, ever so briefly, some of the trees closest friends, the elves.
Above we saw Treebeard's use of the expletive, root and twig, as he contemplated the two hobbits before him. I want to reiterate that Treebeard's whole speech in that moment is governed by his treeishness. It is for this reason he concludes by wondering whether the hobbits will be able to weather the storm in which they have found themselves. This very question is rooted in Treebeard's nature. Later in the story Treebeard will forget, for a moment, that Merry and Pippin are hobbits at all but will think them entings (young ents) instead. Now, of course, it must be remembered that Treebeard is decidedly not a tree. And while Ents can grow treeish and trees entish, there is, it would seem an ontological divide between the two. Nevertheless, there is something arboreal about Ent nature and it is that I want to explore now.
We know very little about Ents as they exist in Middle-earth. It seems they were, at one point in Tolkien's imagination, created by Yavanna to protect her trees from Aulë's illicit, but adopted, creations the dwarves2. What matters most is this, they are not themselves trees, but they are the shepherds of trees. What's more, it seems at least possible that they share a botanical history with trees. Treebeard attempts to help Merry and Pippin understand them by comparing Ents to men and elves:
"'For Ents are more like Elves: less interested in themselves than Men are, and better at getting inside other things. And yet again Ents are more like Men, more changeable than Elves are, and quicker at taking the colour of the outside, you might say. Or better than both: for they are steadier and keep their minds on things longer.'"3
You might almost say that Ents are like Trees, if we could conceive of Trees existing alongside Men, Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits as equals. That is, like Trees their lives are longer than those of Men, when left to their own devices. Like Trees they exist in better harmony with the rest of creation. But also like Trees, they change more quickly and more obviously (than Elves do), and a little thing can bring them down. As I have already said, their whole worldview is ultimately treeish.
We see this not only in Treebeard's expletive of root and twig, but later when he curses Saruman. "'Curse him, root and branch!'" he says, "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.'"4 Treebeard's anger at Saruman's wanton destruction of trees causes him to treat, ever so briefly, Saruman as a tree himself. Saruman is, of course, not a tree anymore than the Hobbits are, and yet Treebeard treats him as one, cursing him from his primary source of gaining nutrition, from his very foundation of his being to the proof of his growth. I dwell on these examples because they show how much treeishness inhabited Treebeard's worldview, if we can call it that. The whole idiom of his language, even in the common speech and not Old Entish, is treeish in nature. It would be as if a shepherd, who shared a more common ancestry with sheep than human shepherds do, cursed someone hoof and wool. But I want to turn from Ents in particular to Tolkien's outlook on trees in general.
Tolkien's love for trees is well-documented. The Ents are an obvious example of this. Yet he did not love only the idea of trees, but particular trees as well. His letters are replete with lavish descriptions of trees in bloom. Tolkien describes his own love of trees in many letters. In one he writes:
There are of course certain things and times that move me specially. The inter-relations between the 'noble' and the 'simple' (or common, vulgar) for instance. The ennoblement of the ignoble I find specially moving. 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.
I quote the paragraph in full for I think Tolkien is telling us something important here. His own treatment of trees, whether the twin trees of Valinor, the Ents, the Birch tree in Smith of Wooton Major, of the Tree in Leaf by Niggle, is one of a kind of ennoblement of the common. For in many ways, what is more common than a tree? They are the lungs of the earth, to be sure, but they are common nonetheless. Tolkien works to ennoble them, not because to be common is bad, but precisely because to be common is extraordinary. In truth I often find the strange, the heterodox, strangely bland. It is all too often too neat, to simple, too boring. But a tree? There is majesty and wonder. And this I think Tolkien clearly understood. But now I want to turn to the trees themselves, with the help of Peter Wohlleben. But despair not (or do) for I have not done with Tolkien yet and will return to him before the end.
Peter Wohlleben is a forester in the Eifel mountains in Germany. He writes in the introduction of his book, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World, "When I began my professional career as a forester, I knew as much about the hidden life of trees as a butcher knows about the emotional life of animals," which is, I hope, only true of the worst kind of butcher.5 It wasn't until he started giving tours through his forest that he began to see trees in a new light. He had forgotten how to see trees. He needed the help of his tourists who were enchanted by what they saw.
Wohlleben's book is one that ought to be read alongside Pope Francis' Laudato Si'. I don't know Wohlleben's faith, but his, perhaps I can call it phenomological, maybe even sophiological approach to the trees in his care is awe inspiring. At the very beginning of the book, which ultimately lays out the various aspects of the life of trees, he recounts a story I still find haunting. One day, as he was walking through his forest (and for all intents and purposes I believe it is his in the same way that Old Forest was Tom Bombadil's, not that he owned, but that he was Master), when came "across a patch of strange-looking mossy stones."6 While he had passed these stones many times, this time he decided to stop and take a closer look. His close inspection of these oddly arranged, moss-covered stones revealed something to him. They were not stones at all. It was the remains of a largely decayed birch tree. As he continued to investigate, he realized the "stone" was still attached the ground. So, he took a knife, "and carefully scraped away some of the bark."7 What he discovered surprised him. It was green. This meant it was still, in some sense, alive! It was being fed by its neighbors. While the middle of this one great tree stump had decayed and turned to humus, the outer-ring was being kept alive (likely by means of a fungal network) by its friends and relations.8
This scene haunts for numerous reasons. It tells us so many things about trees. In some way, trees care for one another, even for some of their fallen members. While this is unlikely to be altruism as we might ascribe to a human, since not all seemingly dead trees are kept alive by their friends and relations, it is nevertheless astonishing. Even more astonishing is the fact that the trees appear to do this by means of a fungal network––sometimes called the Wood Wide Web––which can not only pass along nutrients from one tree to another, but also warnings. Wohlleben also notes that trees can be friends or enemies. Some do not compete with others for branch space, while others do.9 But it is the picture of Wohlleben walking in a forest, a truly old forest, the likes of which the United States is not really capable, finding a ring of stones and discovering them to be the living remains of a tree. How beautiful, how haunting. First to discover that these stones aren't stones, that inanimate was not always so; then to discover that the once animate is animate still, that it is still alive. Vita ex morte! Life from death! And to find all of this in the so-called natural world. The allegories write themselves, but what is more they remind us that the world is to be read and thus to be interpreted literally, allegorically, anagogically, and tropologically.
1 Tolkien, LOTR, 472.
2 Find citation.
3 LOTR, 468.
4 LOTR 474.
5 Wohlleben, xiii.
6 Ibid. 1.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid. 2.
9 Ibid. 5..