Tolkien, Ents and Imagination

 

Tolkien's Tree of Amelion

“I had very little particular, conscious, intellectual intention in mind at any point,” J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to W.H. Auden about his inspiration for The Lord of the Rings. [1]

Take the Ents, for example, I did not consciously invent them at all. The chapter called ‘Treebeard’ from Treebeard’s first remark [chapter 4 in The Two Towers] was written off more or less as it stands, with an effect on myself (apart from labor pains) almost like reading someone else’s work. And I like Ents now because they do not seem to have anything to do with me. I dare say something had been going on in the ‘unconscious’ for some time and that accounts for my feeling throughout, especially when stuck, that I was not inventing but reporting (imperfectly) and had at time to wait till ‘what really happened’ came through. [2]

He goes on to say that his passion for philology no doubt played a role. the Ents "owe their name to the eald enta geweorc of Anglo-Saxon, and their connection with stone", in reference to a line meaning "the old creations of giants" from the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Wanderer”. And that his dislike of the depiction of Great Birnham wood in Macbeth may have fueled a subliminal desire to produce a more robust picture of trees going to war in a just cause.

As time passed, Tolkien reviewed how things arose from his “unconscious”. He allowed that his Ents may have had subliminal progenitors in the animate trees in the Fairy Land George MacDonald created in Phantastes, the book that Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis said had ignited his imagination. Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger, following Tolkien’s son Christopher, has traced how Treebeard evolved in Tolkien’s sketches and drafts from a stumbling giant who sided with the evil Sauron through a kind of Green Man to an Ent. [3]

Some sources were very much above ground. Those who knew them both were well aware that Treebeard’s booming voice was inspired by the way C.S. Lewis spoke. [4]

Tolkien presents trees and tree-beings as complex living subjects. There are many woods.

Lothlórien is beautiful because there the trees are loved; elsewhere forests are represented as awakening to 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 dominion of a Power that hated all living things but was restored to beauty and became Greenwood the Great before the end of the story. [5] 

Tolkien drew and painted many scenes that he wrote up as stories. He does not seem to have drawn an Ent, though he created vivid word pictures. As he appears in The Lord of the Rings, Treebeard, the oldest of thes shepjherds of trees, is “man-like, almost Troll-like…at least fourteen feet high…with a tall head and hardly any neck. He wears “stuff like green and grey bark. " His is lower face "covered with a sweeping grey beard, bushy, almost twiggy at the roots, thin and mossy at the ends," and having "large, knob-knuckled" hands.  He is "bound by use and love to trees." And his role is that of “shepherd of trees" [6]

Tolkien's Willow Man

He did draw other trees, including Old Willow Man. This tree being is emphatically not an Ent. The predatory, rotten Willow Man is the first hostile character the Hobbits encounter after they leave the Shire and enter the sinister Old Forest where forces draw them in a dircetion they do not wish to take.  Willow Man drugs and cages Merry and Pippin inside its trunk and tries to drown Frodo. Their situation is relieved by Sam, who stays awake, and then they are all saved by the mysterious Tom Bombadil.

Why Tolkien had it in for the willow is a mystery. In his early manuscripts, a huge willow becomes host to an evil spirit that is bound to it: “that grey thirsty earth-bound spirit had become imprisoned in the greatest Willow of the Forest.” [7]How and why Tolkien seemed unable to explain. In later drafts, tree and spirit are fused, and the creeping malevolence is of the willow itself. As he talks about it to the hobbits, Tom Bombadil sows the thought that trees might have reason to hate humans and humanoids:

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... None were more dangerous than the Great Willow: his heart was rotten, but his strength was green, and … his song and thought ran through the woods on both sides of the river. His grey thirsty spirit drew power out of the earth and spread like fine root-threads in the ground, and invisible twig fingers in the air, till it had under its dominion nearly all the trees of the Forest. [8] 

Readers might recall at this point that Hobbits cut down hundreds of trees and made a big bonfire in the woods when they were planting their Hedge.

Tolkien’s son John thought he had modeled his sketch of Willow Man on one of the few pollarded willows that survived by the Cherwell river in Oxford.  Did Tolkien sense something off during one of his walks there?

In general Tolkien loved trees and wished to be a speaker for them against the constant assault of machines and human greed. He was often photographed sitting or standing with a tree. The last photo taken of Tolkien shows him standing companionably next to one of his favorite trees, a black pine, with a hand pressed flat against its gnarly skin.

Over many years Tolkien drew multiple versions of a tree which bore a variety of flowers and leaves. He called it the Tree of Amalion. It was his Tree of Tales. Each leaf and flower represented a story or poem that was growing in his mind, more than he could ever bring to fruition and deliver to the world. .

 Shifting the arboreal metaphor just a little, Tolkien described how a story or a whole legendarium  “grows like a seed in the dark  out of the leaf mold of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps”. [9]

References

1. Tolkien, J.R.R.,(2006)  Letters  ed. Humphrey Carpenter  with Christopher Tolkien. (London: HarperCollins, 2006) 211

2. ibid 211-2 n.]

3. Verlyn  Flieger, "How Trees Behave-Or Do They?," Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature Vol. 32: No. 1 (2013)  25-6

4. Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography (New York: William Morrow, 2000) 258

5. Tolkien, Letters: 419–20

6. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings 2nd edition. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004) vol. III The Return of the King, 463.

7. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the Shadow: The History of the Lord of the Ring s, Pa rt One. The History of MiReferencesddle-earth, vol.6. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988) 120-1 

8. Lord of the Rings vol. 1 The Two Towers. 130

9. Carpenter, Tolkien. 126.

The Fairy of the Copper Beech Keeps the Lost Girl Safe

A tall, elegant woman from Vienna traveled to Prague to take part in one of my workshops. Her name was Elisabeth. She said she had come because she wanted to find and follow the paths of her soul. I introduced a series of shamanic journeys, and she embarked on all of them with courage and high enthusiasm. She learned how dreams reveal the paths of soul, and how we can use a dream we remember as a portal to realms of soul healing and soul remembering. She traveled with the group on joint expeditions to very special places in nonordinary reality. These included the Magic Library.
     The Magic Library is a real place in another order of reality, one I often call the Imaginal Realm. It is a realm of true imagination. Palaces and temples and schools and pleasure gardens are constructed here through creative interaction, and they may be visited by prepared and invited travelers over centuries or millennia of human time.
     In the Magic Library, access to any form of knowledge is possible. So is contact with master teachers in any field. In introductory workshops, I often invite participants to use their life memories to open the portal. Think of a favorite library or bookshop, museum or gallery where your imagination came alive in the presence of fresh images and ideas. Picture yourself at the threshold. When the drumming begins, step through the door. You'll find yourself in a deepening space. Its contents and possibilities go far beyond the memories you used to come here. Information may be stored here in many forms.
     Elisabeth picked a used bookstore that she loves, in her native city . When she went inside the bookshop (as she told me) she found that a wall of books "peeled back", revealing a garden behind.
     She stepped out, with delight, into the garden, and then into the wood behind it. She paused at a certain tree because someone up in its branches was throwing sticks down at her. When she examined the sticks, she recognized Celtic designs that had been carved on them. Maybe they were Ogham sticks.
     She looked up, and saw a druid perched in the tree.
     She remembered one of the assignments I had suggested for this group journey. She told him, "I am looking for the story I am now living. Can you help me?"
    "Your story is about a Lost Girl," he responded. "When you were young, a tree  fairy took part of your spirit because your world was not safe and it lacked joy. Ever since then, the tree  fairy has kept that girl safe, inside a tree you know." The druid proceeded to identify the tree, and the park where it stands in her native city. Elisabeth remembered the tree, and the park, very clearly from childhood. The tree was a copper beech.
    "You must go to that tree and find your Lost Girl," the druid instructed.
     She promised she would do that, as soon as possible after she goes home. We discussed how, in Celtic folklore, people often sing to bring a soul back home, sometimes from a tree where it has been sheltered and is nesting like a bird. She agreed she would find the right song to sing for her Lost Girl, under the copper beech, to entertain the tree fairy and prove that she was ready to be a lively companion for her child self.

    Elisabeth did what she had promised.  She decided to visit the copper beech on her birthday, a month after the workshop in Prague. In preparation, she journeyed again to the wood behind the Magic Library, with the aid of my shamanic drumming CD, to talk to the druid some more.  She found him waiting for her. He gave her his name. He told her that to meet the tree fairy she must bathe and then smudge herself thoroughly and dress beautifully – taking special care to put on elegant high-heeled shoes. “Go to the tree with innocence and expect nothing. Take some small presents. Carry the song you will find in your heart.”
     She did not yet have her song. She felt it would be sad and wistful. After her return journey to the druid, she dreamed in the night that she was running from her childhood home to the park. She was carrying many carved wooden sticks, like the one the druid had thrown at her.  She came to a playground with a big heap of sand. She remembered playing here as a child, and that there was a kind of cave under the sand. She jumped in the sand and was disappointed to find the cave was not there anymore. She dove deeper, hollowing out a new space with her hands. A little boy appeared, but did not seem to be able to see her. He checked out her cave, and announced it was stable.  Elisabeth felt the presence of another companion, a child friend invisible to her. She knew, in the dream, that it was vitally important to “stabilize” the cave, so she could play with her friend – perhaps her Lost Girl – inside. To accomplish this, she needed “the soul of a tree”.
     She still lacked her song. But a sleep dream the following night gave her a clue. She found herself walking and talking with a charming, creative man. She was surprised to find they were on a train together. Waking, she realized the artist reminded her of George Harrison. She proceeded to take a Beatles song she loved ("Something in the way she moved") and had used for meditation as the tune for the song she would carry to the copper beech, fitting fresh words of her own to the music.
    On the eve of her birthday, she stayed at a family house  near the park. She followed the druid’s instructions. She took a hot bath with lavender oil and smudged her body with Palo Santo wood. She wrote the text of her song on pink paper, decorated it with drawings and folded it as a gift. She rehearsed the song.  Shortly before midnight – which she thought would be a good time for fairy encounters – she dressed in a glamorous sexy dress with high heels.
     It was a very cold night and she found herself alone in the park, except for the jackdaws wheeling and screaming over the nearby monastery. She remembered how the bells of the church had seemed cruelly oppressive to her when she shared her first kiss, aged fourteen, under the copper beech. She placed the little gifts she had brought near the roots of the copper beech. She sat down under the tree, leaning her back against the trunk, and reflected on her purpose: to find a lost part of her soul the now thought might be the scared teen who had kissed her first boyfriend in this place. She started singing her song, over and over. Sadness welled up in her . She sat in the cold for a long time, waiting for something to happen. She heard odd clicking sounds in the tree branches and hen a loud hissing sound behind her left shoulder. She asked the tree fairy to contact her in her dreams and walked back to the house.
     She returned to the tree before dawn. She did not have a new dream but immediately she had a new sign. As the sun rose, she noted the initial E and H inside a heart carved in the bark of the tree. H was the first initial of her boyfriend’s first name. She circled the tree three times, singing her song, feeling rising confidence.
     She went back to the house for a nap and returned to the park in the afternoon. The park was now alive with families and children, running and playing. She remembered what the druid had told her: Come with innocence and expect nothing.
    It was her birthday and she needed to celebrate. She went to her favorite pastry shop and ordered a pot of coffee and angel’s kisses. She made new  friends and walked on the bank of the Danube with them before she returned to the park, singing and inventing new rhymes spontaneously, snapping pictures with her camera, feeling good.
     At sunset, the squalling of the jackdaws was with her again. But the part was still crowded with children. Their laughter reverberated from the playground, and she remembered her dream of the cave under the sand. She sat down on a bench opposite the copper beech, relaxed and in good spirits.
     She closed her eyes. Immediately she was back inside the dream where she learned that she needed the soul of a tree to make a safe space to be with her younger self. The happy noise of the kids in the playground was having the same effect as shamanic drumming, powering her deepening journey into another world. Here is Elisabeth’s account of what followed:

I enter the cave under the hill of sand, which is kept hollow by the soul of a tree. I find the path to another cave under the roots of the copper beech. There I see a beautiful young girl sitting with blond, shoulder-length hair, a miniskirt, silk stockings and black high heeled shoes. She seems to be tied to the tree roots. Then I recognize the real situation. The fine, pink wings of a fairy are wrapped around this girl. I feel good. I embrace the girl. I feel a surge of hope for a freer life, for the power to follow my heart’s desires.
     I ask the girl whether she wants to come with me. She tells me she would like to go dancing with me and that she would love to sing along with me when I play the guitar. And she wants to go to the bakery with me and eat those cookies.
    The fairy is standing very close to the girl. When I greet her, the fairy says that I can take the young Elisabeth with me for dancing and music and visits to the bakery. However, she says firmly, young Elisabeth will be best protected if she continues to live with her. That way, she can keep her power intact and believe in herself fully. The problem seems to be that there are still disturbances and confusion in my life.
     The fairy assures me that I will be welcome whenever I come to visit their hill and their cave. She tells me my own roots are here, under the copper beech, and that this is more my home than the family place where I stayed overnight. Here, under the tree, is where my soul can always  and recover. I chose this tree in this park as my refuge and soul shelter when I was a child. Here I will always find home.
     The fairy tells me to find a beautiful red leather book and write the stories of my life in it, starting with this one. In German, “red book” (rotes Buch) is basically the same as “copper beech” (Rotebuche).
     Then I danced with her and the young Elisabeth. As we moved together, the fairy draped magical garments around us. We rose up into the air, dancing. The wind carried us higher and higher. We floated and wheeled over the park, the forest, the city, the river. I enjoyed the cold winter wind streaming over my skin, lifting my hair, as we fluttered like butterflies in widening circles.
     Rain started to fall, and the drops helped bring us down again, to the fairy hill and the cave beneath the tree roots. We embraced and said farewell, for now..

     Finding myself back in my body on the bench, I kissed the bark of the copper beech, gently, where the initials were carved inside a heart. I walked from the park humming the song I had made for the fairy. I went back to the bakery and bought a lot of angel kisses, for the Lost Girl who is now found, and for me.

Watch what stories you are carrying

I see that I must be more careful about the books I select as my travel companions. This week it felt like a mischief-making tree spirit leaped out of a book onto the train track in front of me.
    On Monday I set off to New York City on Amtrak. This was the first time in ages I had gone to the city by train. It can be a beautiful ride. The line runs along the Hudson River most of the way, and it was a fine day to view the fall foliage and the play of light on the water.
    My attention flitted back and forth between the shifting landscapes through the window and my first literary selection, an excellent collection of cross-cultural studies on the practice of dreaming. among indigenous peoples titled Dream Travelers and edited by Trent University anthropology professor Roger Ivar Lohmann. If you consider a scholarly text safe reading, read on.
    I was soon immersed in Lohmann's account of his own fieldwork among the Asabano of Papua New Guinea. They consider dreams to be real experiences; you make visits and you receive visitations. Dreaming is a field of interaction with beings of various kinds, including the dead,  the fairy-like wobuno, wild nature spirits and witches. "Supernatural encounters are frequent; nevertheless, they are odd and exciting. They are long remembered, the source of many tales around the hearth." *
    In dreams, spirits might provide guidance that would lead to a successful hunt, especially when the hunter made certain offerings. Dreams could also reveal when a malevolent spirit was the source of illness or misfortune. It seems that in this part of the island, tree spirits are especially engaged with humans. Before recent Christianization, an elder told Lohmann, "When a man was sick, people would dream that a tree spirit or other thing had hurt him."
     I was startled by the idea that a tree spirit might attack a human. I read on, in the New Guinea elder's account, "I myself have dreamed when someone was sick that the tree spirits made him or her sick."**

     At this precise moment, less than fifteen minutes into my journey, the Amtrak train came to a shuddering stop. After a long pause, it was announced over the crackling intercom that "a big tree fell across the track." After another pause, a conductor rushed up and down the aisle yelling that the tree was on fire. "There's smoke!" We couldn't see what was going on, but we were next told that the "big tree" had brought down some power lines.
    After a long wait, we were told that the train was going back to Albany-Rensselaer, where we had started. We had to shunt in reverse the whole way, agonizingly slowly. Back at our point of departure, we were left to meditate upon life for a long time before we received word that railroad crews had succeeded in clearing one of the two tracks leading to New York City, but we would now have to wait for an incoming train to come through before we could leave.
    I got to Penn Station nearly four hours late. A ride scheduled to take 2 hours 25 minutes took over six hours. When our train resumed the journey interrupted by the falling tree, I put the anthropology book that did not seem able to contain tree spirits back in my overnight bag.
   I contemplated the demonic cat on the cover of the second book I had brought with me. It is one of my favorite novels, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, in which the Devil comes to Moscow with an amazing entourage. I reread it for pleasure every few years.
    But not today. I recalled that in the opening scene the Devil, traveling as a foreign professor, makes the accurate prediction that a certain person will be beheaded before the end of the day - by a tram. Not a train, but near enough.
    Over a late dinner in Manhattan, I mused with a Russian friend about a recurring pattern in my travels: the stories I am carrying proceed to play out in my experience of the physical world.
    I once  took off from Bucharest with a Romanian fantasy anthology that included Mircea Eliade's story "With the Gypsy Girls". I was drawn deep into Eliade's eerie tale, in which a man is lured into a bizarre alternate reality from which he cannot return. I found by the end of that first flight that I had been drawn into a very strange parallel reality of my own. I wandered lost all night, stranded at Warsaw's Chopin airport among Russians and Ukrainians who lacked Schengen visas and lay sprawled on every surface like the dead on a field of battle. I managed to extricate myself only two days later. I wrote about that here.
     On another plane, I was reading a memoir by one of Churchill's bodyguards when a stranger dressed as Indiana Jones took the seat beside me. When I asked him about his costume, he declared that it was "the real thing." He proceeded to tell me that his clothes were made by "Churchill's former bodyguard" - Peter Botwright, who designed the costumes for the Indiana Jones movies. That was just one element in an amazing episode that seemed custom-made for me by some designing minds just behind the curtain of the world. I tell the whole story in the introduction to The Three "Only" Things.   
   At a newsstand at Prague’s Vaclav Havel airport, I once found a new bilingual edition of the folktales of Czech writer Karel Jaromir Erben. This became my reading on the first leg of a very long trip home from Europe that ended in a weird limbo of late-night train stations that were not part of my itinerary. My journey took on the coloration of Erben's dark, compelling verse fantasies in which (for example) a woman leaves her husband's bed every night to lie with the dead. You can find that story here.   
    There was the time I was reading A Story Waiting to Pierce You (Peter Kingsley's book on Tibetan-Mongolian shamanism) and got, for my neighbor on another plane....a dominatrix wearing a top hat and Death's heads on the backs of her gloves. The full story is in Sidewalk Oracles
    Back to my latest story. Late Monday night, after walking uptown from Penn Station and checking into my hotel, I was sitting with my Russian friend in El Mitote, a lively Mexican restaurant on the upper West Side. I sipped a margarita and quoted Borges: "The mind is dreaming. The world is its dream."
    "Good thing you did not spend too much time today with The Master and Margarita today," my friend observed. "Strange things are known to happen when people get involved with that book."

    In the Mexican restaurant, the Dia de los Muertos had come early. Skeletons in flouncy skirts and tight jackets were dancing on the wall.
    In the light of the morning, I found Dante standing in a little triangle of green between my hotel and Lincoln Center. Of course. Story within story, all unfolding within the great Commedia. At the television network where I recorded a show, I was greeted by a young woman named Angel. Things seemed to be looking up.
    Memo to self: when you travel, check what themes and plots you are carrying with you.

*Roger Ivar Lohmann, "Supernatural Encounters of the Asabano in Two Traditions and Three States of Consciousness" in Lohmann (ed) Dream Travelers: Sleep Experiences and Culture in the Western Pacific (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) 191.
** ibid, 193.

When a tree faery keeps your child soul safe

Prague

She came to my Shamanic Dreaming workshop because (she told us) she was seeking to find and follow the paths of her soul. She embarked on all our journeys with courage and high enthusiasm. What was quite unexpected, and life-transforming, was what happened when she accepted an invitation to visit the Magic Library.
     This is a real place in another order of reality, one I often call the Imaginal Realm. It is a realm of true imagination. Palaces and temples and schools and pleasure gardens are constructed here through creative interaction, and they may be visited by prepared and invited travelers over centuries or millennia of human time.
     In the Magic Library, access to any form of knowledge is possible. So is contact with master teachers in any field. In introductory workshops, I often invite participants to use their life memories to open the portal. Think of a favorite library or bookshop, museum or gallery where your imagination came alive in the presence of fresh images and ideas. Picture yourself at the threshold. When the drumming begins, step through the door. You'll find yourself in a deepening space. Its contents and possibilities go far beyond the memories you used to come here. Information may be stored here in many forms.
     The traveler I wish to celebrate picked a used bookstore that she loves, in her native city in another part of Central Europe. When she went inside the bookshop (as she told me) she found that a wall of books "peeled back", revealing a garden behind.
     She stepped out, with delight, into the garden, and then into the wood behind it. She paused at a certain tree because someone up in its branches was throwing sticks down at her. When she examined the sticks, she recognized Celtic designs that had been carved on them. Maybe they were Ogham sticks.
     She looked up, and saw a druid perched in the tree.
     She remembered one of the assignments I had suggested for this group journey. She told him, "I am looking for the story I am now living. Can you help me?"
    "Your story is about a Lost Girl," he responded. "When you were very young, a tree faery took part of your spirit because you world was not safe. Ever since then, the tree faery has kept that girl safe, inside a tree you know." The druid proceeded to identify the tree, and the park where it stands in her native city. She remembered the tree, and the park, very clearly from childhood.
    "You must go to that tree and retrieve your Lost Girl," the druid instructed.
     She promised she would do that, as soon as possible after she goes home. We discussed how, in Celtic folklore, people often sing to bring a soul back home, sometimes from a tree where it has been sheltered is is perching like a bird. She readily agreed she would sing for her Lost Girl, at the tree from her childhood, to entertain the faery and prove that she was ready to be a lively host for her child self. I am eager to hear the next installment.

For instructions on how to access the Magic Library, which I sometimes call the Secret Library or the Dream Library, please see Dreaming the Soul Back Home.

photo (c) Robert Moss