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Never a Willow

07 Wednesday Aug 2019

Posted by Ollamh in Fairy Tales and Myths, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods

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Babylon, Baltimore Consort, Chludov Psaltery, Dennis Moore, Desdemona, Euphrates, Hamlet, Highwaymen, humours, Israelites, JE Millais, Melancholy, Monty Python, Old Man Willow, Ophelia, Othello, Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, The Carman's Whistle, The Lord of the Rings, The Old Forest, Tigris, Tolkien, Tom Bombadil, William Shakespeare, Willow

As always, dear readers, welcome.

In our last posting, although we were talking about 18th-century highwaymen, somehow—we blame the “Dennis Moore” sketch—

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we included mention of a willow.

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In Anglo-American culture, the willow has long suggested melancholy, perhaps being somehow linked with Psalm 137, which laments the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 586BC and the so-called “Babylonian captivity” of the Israelites?

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

Under all of that heavy-handed Babylonian mockery is the simple fact that willows are water-lovers, so it would be natural that they would grow near the Euphrates and Tigris, the two major rivers of Babylon.

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If the Israelites are no longer singing, we would guess that parking their harps on the willows would be as good a place as any.  Certainly medieval manuscript illustrators had no trouble envisioning it.  This is from the 9th-century Chludov Psaltery (a collection of psalms).

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“Melancholy”, medieval/Renaissance people believed,

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came from an imbalance of the four “humours” which ran the body and its emotions and people in Shakespeare’s day and beyond appear to have so suffered from it that they consulted a famous and popular text, Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up.  That this was a pressing matter for the people of this age is clear from the length of the first edition of 1621—it’s nearly 900 pages—and later editions, which appeared within the next few years, were even longer.  This is the frontispiece of the 1638 edition–

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A common treatment for the problem (too much black bile in the system—the “melan-“ part is Greek for “black”—the “-choly” is the “choler”, or bile) was to listen to music, but clearly not all music was soothing, as we see in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1599-1601) , where Hamlet’s girlfriend, Ophelia, goes mad and spends her time drifting around the castle singing bits of unhappy songs and handing out flowers with significant meanings.  As music can be involved with melancholy, so, as we said, can willows and the two come together when Ophelia trusts a willow–

“There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.”  (Hamlet, Act IV, Sc 7)

image5ophelia.jpg

(This is a painting by JE Millais, 1851/2.  That “dead men’s fingers” should have been enough, we think!)

The melancholy continues in Shakspeare’s Othello (1604), Act IV, Scene 3, where the soon-to-be-murdered-by-the-title-character Desdemona sings a sad little song, beginning:

“The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree,
Sing all a green willow;
Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee,(45)
Sing willow, willow, willow.
The fresh streams ran by her, and murmur’d her moans;
Sing willow, willow, willow;
Her salt tears fell from her, and soften’d the stones”—

(It seems like this posting can’t escape including even more trees.  Sycamores are another water-loving tree,

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but the emphasis here is upon that willow and we’ll stick with it.)

Perhaps it’s the slumping shape, which might suggest despair, or at least grief, but the willow began to appear on tombstones here in the US at the beginning of the 19th century, sometimes by itself,

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sometimes shading other symbols of mourning, like an urn.

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It could appear in other funerary art, as well—as in pictures

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and even as part of another funerary—and life—custom of the time, the giving/exchanging of locks of hair.  In this mourning brooch, one can see a willow made from such a lock.

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With such a grim history, it shouldn’t be surprising, then, that a willow familiar to readers of The Lord of the Rings might have a sinister purpose.

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He’s not alone in being hostile foliage.  As Merry tells Frodo, Sam, and Pippin:

“But the Forest is queer.  Everything in it is very much more alive, more aware of what is going on, so to speak, than things are in the Shire.  And the trees do not like strangers.  They watch you.  They are usually content merely to watch you, as long as daylight lasts, and don’t do much.  Occasionally the most unfriendly ones may drop a branch, or stick a root out, or grasp at you with a long trailer.  But at night things can be most alarming…  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 6, “The Old Forest”)

Their journey through the Forest, intended to put some space between them and the danger of the Nazgul, provides its own dangers, as the place seems to move about of its own accord, confusing travelers—or worse:

“Suddenly Frodo himself felt sleep overwhelming him.  His head swam.  There now seemed hardly a sound in the air.  The flies had stopped buzzing.  Only a gentle noise on the edge of hearing, a soft fluttering as of a song half whispered, seemed to stir in the boughs above.  He lifted his heavy eyes and saw leaning over him a huge willow-tree, old and hoary.  Enormous it looked, its sprawling branches going up like reaching arms with many long-fingered hands, its knotted and twisted trunk gaping in wide fissures that creaked faintly as the boughs moved…”

We are a far cry from Monty Python here.  The willow then tries to drown Frodo, swallows Pippin completely, and the upper half of Merry, and, were it not for the appearance of perhaps the oddest character in The Lord of the Rings, it is difficult to imagine what would have happened next.

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What will happen in our next posting, however, you will see next week (hint:  the posting is entitled, “Never This Willow”).  In the meantime,

Thanks, as always, for reading and

MTCIDC

CD

ps

To treat any melancholy you might feel from reading this posting, please see below for a very merry Elizabethan song ably performed by the Baltimore Consort.

 

 

And here’s a LINK to a set of lyrics c. 1590 so that you can follow along.  You’ll notice that it includes melancholy, trees, and music, all in one.

 

 

The Woods for the Trees…

05 Wednesday Oct 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

A Wonder Book, Arthur Rackham, Enid Blyton, Ent, Fairy Tale, Fairytale Illustrators, Fangorn, Farmer Giles of Ham, Harmsen Van Der Beek, Hawthorne, John Bauer, Middle-earth, Mirkwood, Old Man Willow, Pauline Baynes, Rackham Tree, The Lord of the Rings, The Old Forest, The Wind in the Willows, Tolkien, Treebeard, trees

Dear Readers,

Welcome.

We’ve recently been admiring the illustrations of one of our favorite artists, Arthur Rackham (1867-1939). As a book illustrator, Rackham’s main focus was fairy tales, and for them, he developed a style which was described by E. V. Lucas in a letter to Rackham as his “grace and grotesque”. For us, what may be most striking about his work is the way he depicts landscapes and trees, with their distinctive “Rackhamesque” character.

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From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s A Wonder Book, 1922

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“Come Now, a Roundel” from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1908

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From Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, 1940

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From William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1908

 

As a tree admirer,

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He was certainly not alone.

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Being Tolkien people, this reminded us, of course, of JRRT’s own admiration of trees, of which he wrote in a sort of letter of introduction to Houghton Mifflin Co.: “I am (obviously) much in love with plants and above all trees, and always have been…” (Letters, 220).

JRRT himself was an illustrator of his own stories, and although he never cited Rackham as a direct influence, we know from Tolkien’s letters that he had seen Rackham’s work. He advised his illustrator Pauline Baynes to “avoid the Scylla of Blyton and the Charybdis of Rackham” (L 312).

Here is Pauline Baynes frontispiece for the first book which she illustrated for JRRT in 1949.

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Enid Blyton was an author of popular children’s books, but she was not an illustrator. We don’t know to what illustrations Tolkien might have been referring, but here is a Blyton book published in the same year, illustrated by the Dutch artist, Harmsen Van Der Beek. (The cover illustration reminds us of various illustrations for early translations of The Hobbit, illustrations which Tolkien hated.)

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When we look at Tolkien’s forests

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we are often reminded of the work of the Swedish artist, John Bauer

John-Bauer-Elk-Cotton3

but for all of Tolkien’s warning to Baynes about Rackham’s style, there is a strong influence there, still.  After all, Tolkien did find Rackham’s illustrations “really astonishingly good pictures” (261). Sharing a passion for fairy tales with Rackham, which JRRT called “one of the highest forms of literature”, it’s no wonder to us that he would have found some inspiration in an artist who had similar tastes.

The influence seems strongest when it comes to animate trees.  As we were looking at the same Rackham illustrations which Tolkien would have seen, we found pictures which immediately reminded us, for example, of JRRT’s illustration of Old Man Willow.

ar_rvw2

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Just as Rackham’s work seems to have influenced JRRT as an illustrator, he seems to have inspired JRRT’s writing, as well. Being visual people, we can certainly say that, when writing Across the Doubtful Sea, we looked at several images which helped us to imagine the events, places, and characters in our south seas adventure. If you look at Rackham’s The Hawthorne Tree, dear readers, does it remind you of something—or someone?

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It’s the wizened, knotted old face of Rackham’s Hawthorne Tree which made us think of this passage:

“They found that they were looking at a most extraordinary face. It belonged to a Man-like, almost troll-like, figure, at least fourteen foot high, very sturdy, with a tall head, and hardly any neck. Whether it was clad in stuff like green and grey bark, or whether that was its hide, was difficult to say. At any rate the arms, at a short distance from the trunk, were not wrinkled, but covered with a brown smooth skin… But at the moment, the Hobbits noted little but the eyes. These deep eyes were now surveying them, slow and solemn, but very penetrating.” (The Two Towers, “Treebeard”, 452)

treebeard

Treebeard is, in fact, not a tree, but an Ent. He is an ancient tree-like figure, however, and almost a description of Rackham’s illustration. Looking at Rackham’s paintings and drawings, it’s clear to us that they call out for story, and we wonder– is this how JRRT, with a passion for trees and an eye for illustration, felt about them, too?

Thank you, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC,

CD

 

Jolly Tom.1

09 Wednesday Sep 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Narrative Methods, Poetry, Tolkien

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Tags

Barrow-wights, Elrond, Gandalf, Hildebrandts, Nazgul, Old Man Willow, Peter Jackson, Ralph Bakshi, Sauron, Tales from the Perilous Realm, The Lord of the Rings, The Old Forest, Tolkien, Tom Bombadil

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always!

There has been lots of discussion, if not downright argument, about Tom Bombadil and The Lord of the Rings. Although he appears in the first BBC radio adaptation in 1955 (which Tolkien disliked, saying in a letter of the period that “I thought Tom Bombadil dreadful”) and in the 1979 American radio drama, he was excised from Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 animated feature and from the 1981 BBC radio production, although reappearing in the radio adaptation of the relevant material from The Lord of the Rings in Tales from the Perilous Realm (BBC 1992).

Then we come to Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). As anyone who has read our past postings knows, we have very mixed feelings about this and the subsequent films, but, in this posting, we want to take a completely different tack, not asking, as has always been the subject “why was Tom left out?” but, rather, “why might you keep him in?”

This is two questions, really, the first being “what would be his effect upon the story?” and, second, “just what of him would you keep?”

Lost in the Old Forest

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the Hobbits run afoul of Old Man Willow

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only to be rescued by Tom Bombadil

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As much as we love the Hildebrandts’ work, this is not one of our favorites—this illustration really makes us wonder what kind of magic mushrooms Tom has been trading with Farmer Maggot and which Grateful Dead album is running in his head. As an antidote, here’s one of our favorites:

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One could say that this is part of the pattern of increasingly-dangerous encounters the Hobbits are having as they try to leave the Shire—

the first encounter was with the Nazgul

hobbits-hiding-from-nazgul

This doesn’t justify including him, though, if he’s thought to be just one more in a series—and this is clearly an opinion held by a Jackson scriptwriter, who once said:

“Tom Bombadil is part of several false starts to Frodo’s journey, and you cannot have things happening quite so episodically; that’s not what storytelling is all about.” (quoted from The One Ring, “complete list of film changes”—see the link here)

If he’s not just a “false start”, what is his function—and may he have more than one?

One of those elements of The Lord of the Rings which runs always just below the surface is the great age of Middle Earth. This is an ancient place and that fact was clearly very important, to the author, who spent years building up that narrative infrastructure, and to the story. This is clearly not a quick, little, one-time adventure, but, rather, one more part of a very old tale, of the “long defeat” as Galadriel calls the struggle with Sauron.

As a living token of that antiquity—and the first, but hardly the last, they meet—on their journey, there is Tom Bombadil. As Elrond says of him:

“But I had forgotten Bombadil, if indeed this is still the same that walked the woods and hills long ago, and even then was older than the old. That was not then his name. Iarwain Ben-adar we called him, [“Old-young, fatherless”? see The Lord of the Rings Companion, 128 for more on his names) oldest and fatherless.” LotR 265.

Thus, one of his functions is to represent a distant past, though now as shrunken as the Old Forest, “but an outlier of its northern march. Time was when a squirrel could go from tree to tree from what is now the Shire to Dunland west of Isengard.” (Elrond—LotR 265) In this, he is akin to Fangorn/Treebeard, described by Gandalf (himself so old that he was created by Iluvatar before the Music of the Ainur) as “the oldest living thing that still walks beneath the Sun upon this Middle-earth.” LotR 499.

He also, in a curious way, might be understood to represent one possible—perhaps hopeful—form of the future. When Frodo asks him, “Who are you, Master?” he replies (and it strikes us as sounding like both a Middle-earth riddle and its solution):

“Eldest, that’s what I am. Mark my words, my friends: Tom was here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn. He made paths before the Big People, and saw the little People arriving. He was here before the Kings and the graves and the Barrow-wights. When the Elves passed westward, Tom was here already, before the seas were bent. He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless—before the Dark Lord came from Outside.” LotR 131.

Tom represents continuity, unchanging stability, then, although he is not all-powerful. As Glorfindel says:

“I think that in the end, if all else is conquered, Bombadil will fall, Last as he was First; and then Night will come.” LotR 266.

And yet he also, because of his immense age and ability to endure, might represent the unspoken possibility that, though Sauron is powerful, because he is not the creator nor rightful owner of Middle-earth, but rather an invader, he can be defeated: as there was a time before Sauron, could there not be a time after him?

(As an afterthought here, might we also add Tom’s complete immunity to the Ring? In a story full of people, from Gollum to Sauron, from Bilbo to Galadriel, so affected, in one way or another by it, is this another form of hope? That not everyone in the whole of Middle-earth wants the Ring or has to deny it strenuously lest the temptation overcome them?)

We want to continue this discussion in our next posting, but we want to end this one by considering the second part of this question, “Just what of him would you keep?”

Although the usual explanation for excising him has to do with his being a supposed “false start”, which has to do with the mechanics of plot, we believe that a real reason has to do with the large quantity of verse which appears when he appears. These verses signal that appearance:

“Hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong dillo!

Ring a dong! hop along! fal lal the willow!

Tom Bom, jolly Tom, Tom Bombadillo!” LotR 119

Although there has been verse earlier in the book, it has been scattered, not concentrated, and has seemed more apropos to what has been going on in the text. Much of this verse appears to come from nowhere, rather like Tom himself (and there’s more on 121, 122, 124, 126, and a final bit on 134—although, as a cry for help, it somehow fits better). In a story primarily in prose, with the occasional song, how would you present such a character believably on film or on tape? (Especially when one notices that even his speech is sometimes cadenced—“What be you a-thinking of? You should not be waking. Eat earth! Dig deep! Drink water! Go to sleep! Bombadil is talking!” LotR 120)

In fact, the character of Bombadil is not organic to the development of the plot of The Lord of the Rings. Tom Bombadil made his first appearance in The Oxford Magazine in 1934, when The Hobbit was being written, but three years before its initial publication. (See The Lord of the Rings Companion 124-129 for the poem and further information).

The basic plot of chapters 6 and 7 is simple: Tom frees the Hobbits from Old Man Willow, leads them to his house, the Hobbits eat and drink there and converse with Tom, but there’s little more to the two scenes. Thus, except for the distress call which Tom teaches the Hobbits on 134, does any of this verse do more than show us the poetic/almost manic side of Bombadil? If we wished to retain the character, might it be possible to cut away the verse (including a certain amount of rhythmicized prose), leaving only those elements which further the plot?

To us, this is a more pressing issue than it might at first appear—but see our next post, Jolly Tom.2, to understand our interest.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

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