LotR -- Book 3 - Chapter 04 - Treebeard

[The Saucepan Man]

I find it interesting that this Chapter opens with some slightly conflicting messages in its description of Fangorn Forest. Merry and Pippin feel a "queer stifling feeling" come over them, but they are refreshed (and indeed healed) by the waters of the Entwash. The forest is dim and stuffy, yet it feels to Pippin like an old Hobbity room. It does not look or feel like Bilbo's description of Mirkwood (a pretty fearsome place), but the Hobbits don't imagine it to be a place for animals - or indeed Hobbits.

Pippin's comparison of the place to "the old room in the Great Smials" suggests to me that he does not feel threatened by it, but that he sees it as somewhere where he shouldn't be, like a child playing somewhere where he has been told not to go. An old room used by adults that is out of bounds, but nevertheless somehow comforting. Indeed, Pippin feels that he "almost likes the place".

And when Treebeard first speaks to them, it does not come across as threatening. It does, of course, come as a surprise (both to Hobbits and the reader), an effect which Tolkien achieves by starting a paragraph with his unbidden response to Pippin's comment. There is, perhaps, a moment of tension in the reference to Treebeard as "almost Troll-like". But it is quickly dispelled by the remainder of the description and, in particular, the reference to Pippin's subsequent attempts to describe his first impression of Treebeard’s eyes (suggesting that he will come to no danger here) and to his initial feeling of fear quickly disappearing. Like Pippin (and indeed Tolkien himself), we are amazed, rather than concerned, at the Ent's sudden introduction into the story.

I find all this interesting, because Tolkien could have used this moment to suspenseful effect: a giant, Tree-like being suddenly comes to life right next to the two young Hobbits. But he does not. We are very soon assured that Treebeard is a friend, or at least not someone who poses a threat to Merry and Pippin (having thankfully not mistaken them for small Orcs). And the fact that he does not use this as an excuse for a moment of tension suggests to me that, once he decided who Treebeard was (not, for example, an evil giant), he was quite concerned to portray him sympathetically right from the outset.

As for the slightly contradictory descriptions of the forest, these tie in with Treebeard's subsequent comments about its "hollow dales ... where the Darkness has never been lifted". There is both good and evil in this forest, so Tolkien steers away from portraying it as either too safe on the one hand, or too forbidding on the other.

It occurred to me that, in the absence of Hobbits from Treebeard's list of the free peoples and in Merry's rueful comment that:

We always seem to have got left out of the old lists, and the old stories ...

Tolkien is commenting wryly upon the absence of Hobbits from his own old stories. His tales of the First Age (as eventually compiled in The Silmarillion), at least in their original versions, considerably pre-date LotR. Hobbits did not feature in his reckoning until The Hobbit (the book) came along, and was incorporated into the Legendarium. And it was his readers' appetite for more tales of Hobbits that led him to embark upon its sequel, which eventually became LotR. Hobbits almost seem to have thrust themselves into the history of Middle-earth and, despite their absence from "the old stories", they become (in terms of the story) central figures in it and (in terms of Tolkien's own ideas) wonderful "devices" for his exploration of the "ennoblement" of the humble (as well as many other of his central themes, such as friendship, loyalty, sacrifice etc). And given how important they have become, it seems to me that, with the benefit of hindsight, Tolkien is here, on one level, commenting with some irony on the Hobbits’ absence from all that went before.

I do wonder, however, why this Chapter (as well as the previous one and, as I recall, those concerning Isengard) focusses primarily on Pippin's point of view, rather than Merry's. Is there something in Pippin's character that makes him a more suitable vehicle for observation of the events that they experience? Is this perhaps linked to the idea of Pippin being the more intuitive, the more "feeling", of the two?

Finally, I cannot let this Chapter go without commenting on the tragic story of the Ents and the Entwives. Quite apart from adding flavour and background to the Ents, it does seem to me that Tolkien is building on an earlier theme here, one that he hints at in the Letter quoted by Esty and A_Brandybuck above:

And into this has crept a mere piece of experience, the difference of the 'male' and 'female' attitude to wild things, the difference between unpossessive love and gardening.

We considered, in the discussion of The Old Forest, Tolkien's differing portrayals of nature in the Shire and the Old Forest, tamed on the one hand, and wild and unpredictable on the other. And it seems to me that this distinction is brought into sharp relief by Treebeard's tale of the Entwives. Like the Hobbits of the Shire, the Entwives are portrayed as wishing to tame nature:

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; for the Entwives desired order, and plenty, and peace (by which they meant that things should remain where they had set them.)

The identification of the Entwives with the Shire is further suggested by Treebeard's comment that it is a place that they would have liked.

This leads me to think of the conflict that occurred between the Hobbits of the Shire and the denizens of the Old Forest, starting with the encroachment of the trees on Buckland and culminating in the events which led to the Bonfire Glade. The same conflict, albeit emotional rather than physical, features in the differing approaches that leads to the estrangement of the Ents and the Entwives.

Treebeard, however, is clearly no Old Man Willow (although the suggestion is that there are worse things living in those dark hollow vales, and Pippin himself makes the point that Ents are not "quite as safe and, well, funny as they seem"). In the earlier discussion, I speculated whether, in Treebeard, we have someone who has learned a lesson that Old Man Willow has not: the necessity of living in harmony with his fellow inhabitants of Middle-earth. And perhaps it is the Ents' estrangement from the Entwives that has taught them this lesson.

It is interesting though that, in the differing (conflicting) attitudes of the Ents and Entwives (and as indicated in the Letter quoted above), Tolkien is suggesting that the difference here is between "male" and "female" attitudes to nature. Although it is a generalisation, there does seem to be something in this. I would hazard a guess, for example, that nicely ordered gardens appeal more to women, whereas men prefer nature in its wild, untamed state. On the other hand, on a more general level, men's brains do seem to be more prone to ordering and commanding, while the female brain might be described as being more passive and intuitive (and therefore, perhaps, more in touch with nature). (Before any feminists (or their male equivalents) start throwing fruit (whether it be wild or cultivated ) at me, I am, as I said, generalising here.) For some interesting thoughts on this issue, however, see: Are you an Ent or an Entwife?

In any event, I wonder which approach Tolkien felt more drawn towards. It seems to me that he had some sympathy for both. Neither the Ents nor the Entwives are portrayed as being "wrong", although the description of the Entwives' approach (involving, as it does, a rejection of love of something for its own sake) is perhaps the less sympathetic. And, while he had what might be described as an "unpossessive love” of trees, Tolkien also had a great deal of time for the landscape of rural England which was (and is), like the Shire, tamed to quite a considerable degree. So it seems quite possible to me that, in both The Old Forest Chapter and in this Chapter, with the tale of the Ents and the Entwives, he is working through his own feelings and attitudes to nature.

Hmm (or should I say Hroom). And I thought that this was going to be a short one.