The Great Tolkien Reread: The Old Forest

"Old Man Willow is Tamed" by Ted Nasmith

At length they made up their minds to go on again. The path that had brought them to the hill reappeared on the northward side; but they had not followed it far before they became aware that it was bending steadily to the right. Soon it began to descend rapidly and they guessed that it must actually be heading towards the Withywindle valley: not at all the direction they wished to take. After some discussion they decided to leave this misleading path and strike northward; for although they had not been able to see it from the hill-top, the Road must lie that way, and it could not be many miles off. Also northward, and to the left of the path, the land seemed to be drier and more open, climbing up to the slopes where the trees were thinner, and pines and firs replaced the oaks and ashes and other strange and nameless trees of the denser wood.

There's a gag that appears several times in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels: a character from the city ends up in the countryside, and is immediately baffled and appalled by how little in it conforms to the bucolic fantasies they were raised on. Cows and sheep do not utter polite "moo"s and "baa"s. Meadows are not soft and rolling. Trees are not clouds of green plopped on top of straight, orderly trunks. Everything is messier, smellier, and more obstructive than they were taught to expect.

Reading J.R.R. Tolkien always makes me think that all other fantasy writers must suffer from the same problem. Alone among writers in this genre—in any genre, really, except perhaps nature and travel writing—Tolkien understands the complexity of the natural landscape. A forest in his writing is never simply a forest, but a near-impassable accumulation of rocky outcroppings, sudden declivities, thick underbrush, and meandering paths. Moving through it requires intimate knowledge, and a great deal of luck. And sometimes you simply cannot get there from here.

"The Old Forest" begins the next stage of Frodo and the Ring's journey. The hobbits leave Crickhollow and the Shire and enter the titular forest, with the intention of cutting across it and picking up the East Road to Bree. Almost immediately they find their progress stalled. From a high vantage point it's easy to see their destination, and that the distance to it is not far. On the ground, the landscape keeps throwing up obstacles in their path, sending them completely in the wrong direction.

The afternoon was wearing away when they scrambled and stumbled into a fold that was wider and deeper than any they had yet met. It was so steep and overhung that it proved impossible to climb out of it again, either forwards or backwards, without leaving their ponies and their baggage behind. All they could do was to follow the fold—downwards. The ground grew soft, and in places boggy; springs appeared in the banks, and soon they found themselves following a brook that trickled and babbled through a weedy bed. Then the ground began to fall rapidly, and the brook growing strong and noisy, flowed and leaped swiftly downhill. They were in a deep dim-lit gully over-arched by trees high above them.

It's a short chapter, but nevertheless it takes a while to get through, because the passages describing the forest are just as clotted and full of obstructive detail as the forest itself. It's a frequently made criticism of Tolkien that his nature descriptions, and his depictions of characters moving through nature, are overly-detailed and even overbearing. Even as an experienced reader who has been through this novel many times, I won't pretend that it isn't more work to read something like "The Old Forest" than "A Long-Expected Party" or "Helm's Deep". But it seems to me that frustration with these more difficult passages often bubbles over into a dismissiveness that flattens Tolkien's accomplishment with them—he was just ("just") describing nature! When really, capturing the bewildering complexity of the natural landscape, and the near-impossibility of making one's way through it, is neither easy, nor an obvious choice.

It is, in fact, a little strange that an author who is so frequently lauded for his worldbuilding receives so little recognition of his nature writing as part of that worldbuilding. The complexity and challenges of the landscape—which is littered with remnants of the distant past that often create their own dangers, and other times are an inspirational reminder of better days—is a reflection of Middle Earth's history and present state. In The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales, we will encounter several characters from the distant past who are literally trapped by wilderness, not daring to venture far from their home, because they will almost certainly get lost and die of starvation or exposure. The world that the hobbits move through has, in comparison, been tamed, with roads and watchtowers and other remnants of the great empires who sought to make it traversable. But those empires are gone, and the landscape has begun, once again, to assert its supremacy.

In "The Old Forest", that assertion is literal. The trees of the Old Forest are at the very least aware, if not sentient, and their awareness is not a friendly one (as Merry explains, not without cause—a dispute with the Bucklanders ended in a great bonfire). The hobbits are not simply thrown off their path, but enchanted and lured to the willow grove, where Old Man Willow traps and devours them. On one level, this is yet another example of Tolkien seeding hints of future story developments long before their significance becomes clear. As we will eventually realize, Old Man Willow, and the walking elm tree that Sam's cousin saw crossing the Shire (as reported several chapters ago), are both ents. For the time being, however, the forest's behavior is simply one of the attributes of the novel's world. Nature, in Middle Earth, is not impersonally hostile. Sometimes it simply does not want to let you through. And sometimes, it wants to eat you.

Next time: We reconvene on February 24th to discuss "In the House of Tom Bombadil". In which the hobbits live, but at what cost

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