Quote:
Originally Posted by Huinesoron
The Taming of Smeagol
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For a long time, this was my favoured option. Treebeard is originally described as looking like a stump, there are references to both fir and birch at the Entmoot, and the Emyn Muil is directly adjacent to the Brown Lands. The idea of Suffragists being on the edge of a cliff, or willing to throw themselves off a cliff out of spite, sounds plausible as a Tolkien opinion. There's also the notion that Sam's rope (which was tied around one of the stumps) was untied by a kindly Entwife.
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I hate to come back to this, but on further consideration, I've swung back towards this passage. The key piece of evidence is the 'clusters of words' concept. Compare this:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Treebeard
In the face of the stony wall there was something like a stair: natural perhaps, and made by the weathering and splitting of the rock, for it was rough and uneven. High up, almost level with the tops of forest-trees, there was a shelf under a cliff. Nothing grew there but a few grasses and weeds at its edge, and one old stump of a tree with only two bent branches left: it looked almost like the figure of some gnarled old man, standing there, blinking in the morning-light.
[...]
They came at length to the edge of the shelf almost at the feet of the old stump; then they sprang up and turned round with their backs to the hill, breathing deep, and looking out eastward.
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With this:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by The Taming of Smeagol
Some way down they found a few gnarled and stunted trees, the first they had seen for days: twisted birch for the most part, with here and there a fir-tree. Many were dead and gaunt, bitten to the core by the eastern winds. Once in milder days there must have been a fair thicket in the ravine, but now, after some fifty yards, the trees came to an end, though old broken stumps straggled on almost to the cliff's brink. The bottom of the gully, which lay along the edge of a rock-fault, was rough with broken stone and slanted steeply down.
[...]
The outer fall was indeed no longer sheer, but sloped outwards a little. It looked like a great rampart or sea-wall whose foundations had shifted, so that its courses were all twisted and disordered, leaving great fissures and long slanting edges that were in places almost as wide as stairs.
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With that he stood up and went down to the bottom of the gully again. He looked out. Clear sky was growing in the East once more.
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He took up the rope and made it fast over the stump nearest to the brink...
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Teleporno made a big deal of 'clusters of words', and in these two passages we have a whole heap of matching pairs:
- 'Something like a stair' versus 'almost as wide as stairs'.
- 'Rough and uneven' rock versus 'rough with broken stone'.
- 'One old stump' versus 'old broken stumps'.
- 'Gnarled' old man versus 'twisted' birch.
- M&P 'looked out' eastward; Frodo 'looked out', also to the East.
- M&P move 'to the edge of the shelf almost at the feet of the old stump'; Sam ties his rope 'the stump nearest to the brink'.
Both quotes also make a point that very little grows where they are, and on a trivial level, both descriptions of the view (not quoted) include smoke.
I don't think Tolkien wrote the two sequences as intentional mirrors to each other (for one thing, you can see how broken up the description in Book 4 is), but I think it's entirely possible Teleporno thought he had. It fits with the claim that they're in danger from the Nazgul (we get a Nazgul screech in the Emyn Muil sequence), and, as I said before, the Emyn Muil is right where you would expect to find fleeing Entwives: on the edge of their old lands, run right up against a cliff.
But I still rank
vladimir's thicket as a close second. ^_^
hS