Tolkien Trewsday Week 2: Trees – Tuesday 7 March 2023

Week 2: “Trees” – Tuesday 07 March 2023
#TolkienTrewsday #TolkienTuesday #Tolkien

Welcome to #TolkienTrewsday #TolkienTuesday.

The hub for this Twitter-based event can be found here.

Tolkien Trewsday (the Hobbit name for Tuesday!) invites the #Tolkien community to form a fellowship to collectively tweet about a pre-selected theme about Tolkien, his works and his life.

Each week a new theme will be selected, often via a poll or by a guest host/curator, and together we will build a collective outpouring of creativity, knowledge and love for J.R.R. Tolkien and the adaptions based on his works.

The inspiration for this comes from the highly successful #FolkloreThursday which engaged lovers of Folklore, academics, artists and more to use Twitter to discuss it.

We only ask that if you are joining in, please do so with courtesy and kindness in your tweets. This is a positive-action community event, open to all and supportive of fan diversity. Intolerance, racism, bigotry have no place here.

💬 This week’s theme
Week 2: “Trees” – Tuesday 07 March 2023

Following a poll, Tolkien Trewsday invites you to join us for a day focused on the theme of "Trees" (suggested by Yvonne Marjot). From Treebeard to the Old Forest to Tolkien's well-known love for trees, they have an important place in Middle-earth.

How to contribute

We are keeping it very simple. All you need to do to join is tweet something about the current week’s theme and use the following hashtags in your tweet:
#TolkienTrewsday #TolkienTuesday #Tolkien

Your tweet, besides following the theme, can be anything. Examples include:

• Tolkien's love of trees and ones important to him in life
• The trees of Valinor/Númenor/Gondor
• Trees as characters (good and evil)
• Tenders of trees: Entwives, ents, elvesTrees as part of a larger whole - Fangorn Forest, the Old Forest, Mirkwood
  
• Denizens of forests.

Elrond finding some solitude to compose a speech in Amazon Studio’s
“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” Episode 1 (“A Shadow of the Past”)

Trees: ancient rhymes remembering squirrel pathways

“Time was when a squirrel could go from tree to tree from what is now the Shire to Dunland west of Isengard.”

– Elrond, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two Chapter 2: “The Council of Elrond” by JRR Tolkien

Elrond’s remorse at the loss of so much forest in Middle-earth, indicated by the movements of squirrels, is also repeated by Treebeard:

“Aye, aye, there was all one wood once upon a time from here to the Mountains of Lune, and this was just the East End.”

– Treebeard, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Book Three Chapter 4: “Treebeard” by JRR Tolkien

Both Elrond and Treebeard hint that Eriador was once a vast forest and that Middle-earth suffered massive deforestation in the Second Age (and during other times) with just a few places left of a once-dominant forested landscape: The Old Forest, Fangorn, Mirkwood and Lothlorien being the best known.

The Tolkien Gateway entry for the Old Forest states:

“The Old Forest was one of the few remains of the vast primordial forests which covered most of Eriador before the Second Age.”

Elrond’s words about the squirrel crossing treetops from one place to another appeared, in a variant form, many years before as a citation in J.R.R. Tolkien and EV Gordon’s translation of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (1925):

“From Blacon Point to Helbree / A squirrel may leap from tree to tree” (p.94)

I sadly don’t have this version of Tolkien’s “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” and the current version is edited by Christopher Tolkien, not E.V. Gordon, and omits the above citation. It is however noted in Wayne C. Hammond and Christina Scull’s “The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion” (2008, HarperCollins: London) on p.254.

It should be noted now that during “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, the eponymous hero of the Arthurian tale traverses northern Wales, Anglesey and passes the edge of the “wilderness of Wirral”, placing the story within the landscapes of Wales and northwest England.

John Garth in “The Worlds of JRR Tolkien: The Places that inspired Middle-earth” (2020, Frances Lincoln) also notes Elrond’s words and talks of a variant of this saying placing the rhyme in the Forest of Arden (Warwickshire) which is now Birmingham. Garth highlights the key point, that Elrond’s words:

“…also taps into a foundational myth that England’s landscape was once all wildwood.” (Garth, 2020, p,128)

John Garth notes Jacquetta Hawkes’ book, “A Land” (1951), as a seminal work emphasising this foundational myth. Another book to put on my list!

The connection of the rhyme with Elrond and Gawain was recently noted at East Farthing Smial moot (12 February 2023) as noted on their blog here.

So J.R.R. Tolkien through his work on Sir Gawain and also in the words of one of his fictional characters is repeating what is considered an ancient rhyme hinting at deforestation in both Middle-earth and also England. Blacon Point is in Chester and Hilbre is an island off the Wirral coast at the mouth of the Dee Estuary. There are local (Merseyside/Lancashire/Cheshire) variations on this rhyme:

“From Blacon Point to Hilbre
A squirrel could leap from tree to tree.”

to

“The squirrels ran from tree to tree
From Formby Point to Hilbre.”

as noted by Gavin Chappell in various books including “The Sands of Dee: Legends and traditions of the Wirral Peninsula” (2014, Thor's Stone Press). Gavin links the rhyme to the remains of petrified forests that can be found along the Merseyside and Wirral coastline at Meols (Old Norse for Sandhills), Hightown and Formby. There are also prehistoric footprints along this coast.  

In the “Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire” we see Victorian writers talking about the rhyme as a tradition. A. Craig Gibson writes, in 1860, that:

“The more modest as well as the more common form assumed by this tradition, however, is to the effect that a squirrel could formerly traverse the space, generally considerable, between two given places without touching the ground.”

From - Gibson, A. Craig (1860), “Popular rhymes and proverbs connected with localities in Cumberland”, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Volume 13. Source. 

A tongue-in-cheek but also scientific paper by “Radagast the Brown”, the pseudonym of Dr. Dan Lunt, returns us to Middle-earth where Radagast states:

“Much of the rest of Middle Earth is covered with forests. This is consistent with reports I have heard from Elrond that squirrels could once travel from the region of the Shire all the way to Isengard.”

From - Lunt, Dan. (2013) “The Climate of Middle Earth”. Bristol: The Cabot Institute, University of Bristol. [Online] Source.

The article looks at climates across Middle-earth and climate change. In a geeky nod to Tolkien, the article is available in English, Elvish and Dwarvish!

The squirrel connection to all of this is bittersweet. In an earlier blog, “The Númenórean and the squirrel: adapting lore from J.R.R. Tolkien’s works” (for Squirrel Appreciation Day) I wrote about how Númenórean women would invite squirrels into their homes, in a similar fashion to historical accounts of squirrels as pets. Númenóreans in general had a great relationship with nature. This wasn’t to last.

The deforestation of Middle-earth mentioned above would be the result of the work of Númenóreans in their colonisation of Eriador, when their hearts turned greedy and led to the ruin of the natural world. The wars that raged between the Númenóreans, the elves and the armies of Sauron during the Second Age would further destroy many trees. Later conflicts and needs for wood from others would further remove the vast swathes of forest that allowed squirrels to be able to traverse Middle-earth from tree to tree.

Tolkien’s love of nature and especially trees shows in the pain of loss in real life instances, such as the felled Willow tree at the Sarehole mill-pool, and also fictional ones as when Saruman had Fangorn trees torn down to fuel his war machine and the Party Tree at Bag End is ripped from its roots. Tolkien sides with the Ents, perhaps too with the squirrels whose pathways across the land are now lost.

Squirrel taxidermy. Unknown source.

📚 Recommended reading

As well as all the books quoted above, there are academic works devoted to Tolkien and the environment, some recommended ones below.

📗 Conrad-O'Briain, Helen and Hynes, Gerard. Tolkien: The Forest and the City (2013). Four Courts Press Ltd. Amazon UK.

📗 Dickerson, Matthew and Evans, Jonathan. Ents, Elves, and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien (2006). The University Press of Kentucky. Amazon UK e-book.

📗 Hjulstad, Katrine L. A. “The Tale of the Old Forest: The Damaging Effects of Forestry in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Written Works” (2020) Journal of Tolkien Research Volume 10 Issue 2 [Online]. Accessed (06/03/23): https://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol10/iss2/7/

📗 Jeffers, Susan. Arda Inhabited: Environmental Relationships in the Lord of the Rings (2014). Kent State University Press. Amazon UK e-book.  

📗 Judd, Walter S. and Judd, Graham A. Flora of Middle-Earth: Plants of J.R.R. Tolkien's Legendarium (2017). OUP USA. Amazon UK.