elanor, athelas, niphredil, and mallorn, to landscapes like that in Book I, Chapter 6, where the four hobbits approach the River Withywindle:
Coming to the opening they found that they had made their way down through a cleft in a high steep bank, almost a cliff. At its feet was a wide space of grass and reeds; and in the distance could be glimpsed another bank almost as steep. A golden afternoon of late sunshine lay warm and drowsy upon the hidden land between. In the midst of it there wound lazily a dark river of brown water, bordered with ancient willows, arched over with willows, blocked with fallen willows, and flecked with thousands of faded willow-leaves. The air was thick with them, fluttering yellow from the branches; for there was a warm and gentle breeze blowing softly in the valley, and the reeds were rustling, and the willow-boughs were creaking.
The scene is not unlike that Tolkien would have found on the banks of the River Cherwell near Oxford, which he and his family would occasionally explore. Cerin Amroth, on the other hand, has no analogue in our world, but Tolkien permits his reader to stand in its midst through vivid description of its natural features:
They were standing in an open space. To the left stood a great mound, covered with a sward of grass as green as Springtime in the Elder Days. Upon it, as a double crown, grew two circles of trees: the outer had bark of snowy white, and were leafless but beautiful in their shapely nakedness; the inner were mallorn-trees of great height, still arrayed in pale gold …. At the feet of the trees, and all about the green hillsides the grass was studded with small golden flowers shaped like stars. Among them, nodding on slender stalks, were other flowers, white and palest green: they glimmered as a mist amid the rich hue of the grass. Over all the sky was blue, and the sun of afternoon glowed upon the hill and cast long green shadows beneath the trees. [bk. II, ch. 6]
Tolkien devotes almost a page to describing Ithilien in close detail, its abundance of plant life seeming Edenic after the Dead Marshes and the approaches to Mordor:
All about them were small woods of resinous trees, fir and cedar and cypress … with wide glades among them; and everywhere there was a wealth of sweet-smelling herbs and shrubs …. Here Spring was already busy about them: fronds pierced moss and mould, larches were green-fingered, small flowers were opening in the turf ….
Many great trees grew there, planted long ago, falling into untended age amid a riot of careless descendants; and groves and thickets there were of tamarisk and pungent terebinth, of olive and of bay; and there were junipers and myrtles; and thymes that grew in bushes, or with their woody creeping stems mantled in deep tapestries the hidden stones; sages of many kinds putting forth blue flowers, or red, or pale green; and marjoram and new-sprouting parsleys …. The grots and rocky walls were already starred with saxifrages and stonecrops. Primeroles and anemones were awake in the filbert-brakes; and asphodel and many lily-flowers nodded their half-open heads in the grass …. [bk. IV, ch. 4]
Above all, Tolkien felt a deep affection for trees. Photographs often show him in their company: of these the most notable are Lord Snowdon’s portrait of Tolkien reclining against the roots of a great tree behind his home in *Poole, and the last photograph of him taken by his grandson Michael George (see *Michael Tolkien) on 9 August 1973, in the Botanic Garden, Oxford, standing with his hand on the trunk of a Pinus nigra, one of his favourite trees (now unfortunately no longer standing). *Joy Hill recalled that the last time she visited him in August 1973 he did not want to work, but took her on a long walk. They visited the Botanic Garden, walked by the river to look at willows, then went through the Botanic Garden again. He asked her to bring a camera on her next visit, so that he could have photographs of the trees.
Tolkien was saddened to see so many trees ill-treated or felled in both countryside and town. He wrote in an autobiographical note for the Houghton Mifflin Company in the summer of 1955: ‘I am (obviously) much in love with plants and above all trees, and always have been; and I find human maltreatment of them as hard to bear as some find ill-treatment of animals’ (Letters, p. 220). His friend *George Sayer noted that Tolkien, during walks in the country while on a visit to *Malvern in 1947, ‘liked to stop to look at the trees, flowers, birds and insects that we passed’, but
his greatest love seemed to be for trees …. He would often place his hand on the trunks of ones that we passed. He felt their wanton or unnecessary felling almost as murder. The first time I heard him say ‘ORCS’ was when we heard not far off the savage sound of a petrol-driven chain saw. ‘That machine,’ he said, ‘is one of the greatest horrors of our age.’ He said that he had sometimes imagined an uprising of the trees against their human tormentors. [‘Recollections of J.R.R. Tolkien’, in Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien Centenary Conference 1992, ed. Patricia Reynolds and Glen H. GoodKnight (1995), p. 22]
By 1947 Tolkien had already written the chapters in The Lord of the Rings dealing with the march of the Ents on Isengard. Many readers have found the Ents, the shepherds of the trees, among Tolkien’s most original and most vivid creations. The chapter ‘Treebeard’ (bk. III, ch. 4), he said, seemed to write itself; and there the Ent Quickbeam’s lament for the rowan trees cut down by Saruman’s orcs certainly echoes Tolkien’s feelings. In a letter to the Daily Telegraph he wrote:
In all my works I take the part of trees as against all their enemies. Lothlórien is beautiful because there the trees were 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 machineloving enemy. Mirkwood had fallen under the domination of a Power that hated all living things but was restored to beauty and became Greenwood the Great before the end of the story. [30 June 1972, Letters, pp. 419–20]
In the same letter he commented on ‘the destruction, torture and murder of trees perpetuated by private individuals and minor official bodies’ (p. 420), perhaps thinking of the poplar tree which was an inspiration for his story *Leaf by Niggle. He told his Aunt *Jane Neave that ‘there was a great tree – a huge poplar with vast limbs – visible through my window even as I lay in bed. I loved it, and was anxious about it. It had been savagely mutilated some years before, but had gallantly grown new limbs – though of course not with the unblemished grace of its former natural self; and now a foolish neighbour was agitating to have it felled. Every tree has its enemy, few have an advocate’ (8–9 September 1962, Letters, p. 321). At the end of Leaf by Niggle the great tree that Niggle had attempted to paint, but could reproduce his vision only imperfectly, is made real, whole and glorious.
Trees figured prominently in Tolkien’s imagination no less than in Niggle’s. In *‘The Silmarillion’ the Two Trees that lit Valinor with their unsullied light are of primary mythical importance; the light provided by the Sun and Moon, created from the fruit and flower of the Trees after they had been defiled, is of lesser kind. In *On Fairy-Stories Tolkien refers to a symbolic ‘Tree of Tales’, which he himself drew several times (the ‘Tree of Amalion’, see Artist and Illustrator, pp. 64–5). He described it to Rayner Unwin on 23 December 1963 as ‘a ‘mythical “tree”, which … bears besides various shapes of leaves many flowers small and large signifying poems and major legends’ (Letters, p. 342).
In *Smith of Wootton Major a birch tree protects Smith from the Wind and is stripped of all its leaves. In The Lord of the Rings there are also the Party Tree at Bag End, the Old Forest and Old Man Willow, the holly trees at the entrance to Moria and the crescent moon-bearing trees on the doors of the west gate, Fangorn Forest, the woods of Ithilien, the White Tree embroidered on Aragorn’s banner and found by him as a sapling, and finally the trees felled by Saruman in the Shire and replaced by Sam.
Dylan Pugh discusses trees in myth and history in relation to Tolkien’s writings in ‘The Tree of Tales’, Mallorn 21 (June 1984). In ‘Tolkien’s Trees’, Mallorn
