[davem]

Possibly, but I don't get any sense of the Old Forest being evil - not like the Barrow Downs (the place, not the site... oh, I don't know though...) or Mordor, or even Isengard. Certainly it is perilous, but Faerie, as Tolkien has said, is perilous. Certainly Fangorn is not an 'evil' place. Treebeard is speaking of specific trees as having 'black hearts', not the place itself.

Originally Posted by LMP

If you're not, then you seem to be saying that since Elrond says there wasn't evil in the beginning, there had to be moral choice. This does not follow logically. But nonetheless, there was a moral choice: Morgoth's. He corrupted Arda. Thus evil trees did not choose it but became it by his will. Unjust? Certainly. But it reflects reality.

I think for an individual to become evil must be the result of a moral choice, so it depends on whether the trees are individuals. You can't have individual 'evil' trees if they are evil as a result of Morgoth's choice - why aren't all the trees evil if that's the cause?

OMW is just as much tree as the trees you insist are inherently good no matter how black their hearts (or is that a misunderstanding on my part of what you're trying to say vis-a-ve trees and inherent goodness?). The degree of OMW's sentience is not given, nor is it important.

So, are all the trees of the Old Forest evil, or just some of them? The OF is sentient - & my feeling is that its not just the trees, but the earth & air of the place too. It has moods, emotions even. But it is not Mordor, not by any stretch of the imagination, nor an echo of it. Mordor is a place of death, of unlife, anti-life. The OF is not. In there life, the life of nature, is all powerful. It does not attack the Hobbits in the service of Sauron, but because they are unwanted, uninvited, tresspassers.

Let me try another angle: In the episode of the Old Forest & the Barrow Downs the Hobbits have strayed out of mythic history into a poem - 'The Adventures of Tom Bombadil', where OMW is a sentient being, who can think & act. He is a character, & plays his part. A poem has come to life & the Hobbits find themselves as characters in it. This poem-world has its own rules, & its own conditions . Higher morality does not play a part in this world, Good & evil, do not exist in the form they take in the rest of the book. Tom is not affected by the Ring because it does not belong in the world of the poem - what I mean is, what it represents, the threat it poses, has no 'reality' or relevance in that world. Just as Tom himself & Goldberry, & OMW & the Barrow Wight, don't have any 'relevance' outside their poem-reality ('Tom's country ends here, he will not pass the borders. The OF/BD are a self-contained little world, with its own rules, a secondary world, which can be entered & left (if the traveller is lucky), but is in itself self-contained (which is why so many dramatisations leave the whole thing out. Frodo & his companions may gain something from their experiences there, but that world will remain always intact, un affected by events in the 'outer world - just as Middle earth itself remains an equally 'intact' secondary world to us, whatever events occur in 'our' primary' world. M-e may be 'applicable', but it is not 'allegorical'. In the same way, to the Hobbits, the world of the OF/BD may be 'applicable', but it is not 'allegorical' - ie, it has no one-to-one relationship with the rest of M-e. Hence the fruitlessness of attempting to 'prove' Tom & Goldberry are Maiar - or attempting to fit the behaviour & actions of its in habitants in with the 'moral values' of M-e.

So, Tom is neither a maiar, nor the Trickster. Goldberry is neither maiar nor Trickster's consort. He is - Tom Bombadil. And equally, so is she. And so is OMW & the BW.

And if I've contradicted any earlier statements here I take refuge in my sig