LotR -- Book 3 - Chapter 04 - Treebeard

[Bêthberry]

Fordim's suggestive comment about masculine and, by analogy, feminine approaches to time provides me with an opportune moment to introduce the other point I wished to make, which I promised way back on January 3. It is a long and winding point, replete with brambles along the way, so let me pick our way carefully through the thicket.

Tolkien's love for trees has become a truism devoutly acknowledged by all readers of the books. Indeed, his invocation to trees is rather unique I think and might bear some relationship to such Old English poems as "The Dream of the Rood" where Christ's Cross is given a speaking role and portrayed not as a piece of lumber but as a sentient, living tree, aware of its role in the torture of God. There is a darkness as well as a charm in the boreal canopy which Tolkien brings out both in Lothlorien and in Fangorn. What I find fascinating, though, is how he marries the forest with concepts of the pastoral. The pastoral is itself a literary tradition: simplicity of thought in a rural setting, mixed in with romance and shepherds. Perhaps a very early version of pastoral was Eden.

Yet if we search through LotR we don't find an Eden myth, although we find many other myths, wound together in Tolkien's magestic way. Lothlorien is a forest cornucopia rather than a garden, a place where time is held still by the power and strength of Galadriel and her ring. It would be Eden had there been no Fall, but the elves did fall and so we know that this version of the pastoral is a desperate one, not long for Middle-earth. But what of Fangorn?

Here is another forest, but this one a forest where time endures long. Fangorn is not static as is Lorien, but full of change.

Some of my kin look just like trees now, and need something great to rouse them; and they speak only in whispers. But some of my trees are limb-like, and many can talk to me. Elves began it, of course, waking trees up and teaching them to speak and learning their tree-talk. They always wished to talk to everything, the old Elves did. But then the Great Darnkess came, and they passed away over the Sea, or fled into far valleys' and hid themselves, andmade songs about days that would never come again. Never again. Aye, aye, there was all one wood once upon a time from her to the Mountains of Luen, and this was just the East End.

And of course that change is one which in part derives from a story of the Fall, the parting of ways of the ents and entwives. I put it to you that this story represents Tolkien's imaginative recreation of the Fall, with the discord between Adam and Eve.

The ents are those who are satisfied with 'the woods wide and wild', happy to glean the fruit which falls from the trees. Yet to the entwives Tolkien gives the desire to control and dominate.

They did not desire to speak with these things; but they wished them to hear and obey what was said to them. The Entwives ordered them to grow according to their wishes, and bear leaf and fruit to their liking;

Agriculture--gardening--becomes a version of the desire for fruit which follows the entwives' wishes, not the wishes of the pastoral idyll in which the ents are happy. And this desire of the entwives is linked with the Darkness.

Then when the Darkness came in the North, the Entwives crossed the Great River, and made new gardens, and tilled new fields, and we saw them more seldom. After the Darkness was overthrown, the land of the Entwives blossomed richly, and their fields were full of corn. Many men learned the crafts of the Entwives and honoured them greatly; but we were only a legend to them, a secret in the heart of the forest. Yet here we still are, while all the gardens of the Entwives are wasted: Men call them the Brown Lands now.

And Treebeard's prophecy clearly links the entwives' gardens with the darkness of Sauron:

For if Sauron of old destroyed the gardens, the Enemy today seems likely to wither all the woods.

Interestingly, Treebeard claims of the elven song about the separation that the Ents could have more to say: "But the Ents could say more on their side, if athey had time!" He is unable to imagine what more the Entwives might add to the elven song.

It seems that this is a story not only of the lack of communciation between the male and female genders but also of the greater propensity of the female aspect for succumbing to evil. Treebeard claims that the ents might be at fault for not seeking out the gardens of the entwives more strenuously, but the association of the Entwives's desire to control the nature world according to their wishes is clearly related to Sauron. Too much knowledge is a danerous thing! It leads to the dark side! And this mistake, this error is, like the fault of disobedience attributed to Eve, attributed to the female of the tree species. And whereas Eve was punished by being made subservient to Adam, the Entwives face a starker fate: they seem to have vanished from the face of Middle-earth.

I would not push this possibility too far, yet it is tantalizing to consider how Tolkien has melted the ancient stories of agriculture and horticulture with the garden, with Darkness, and with a melancoly version of the different perspectives of male and female.