Old Man Willow

Last updated

Old Man Willow, drawn by Tolkien while he was writing the chapter on the Old Forest. A face can just be made out on the right-hand side of the tree above the arm-like branch. Old Man Willow.jpg
Old Man Willow, drawn by Tolkien while he was writing the chapter on the Old Forest. A face can just be made out on the right-hand side of the tree above the arm-like branch.

In J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy The Lord of the Rings , Old Man Willow is a malign tree-spirit of great age in Tom Bombadil's Old Forest, appearing physically as a large willow tree beside the River Withywindle, but spreading his influence throughout the forest. He is the first hostile character encountered by the Hobbits after they leave the Shire.

Contents

Tolkien made a drawing of Old Man Willow while writing the chapter about him; his son Christopher suggests it was based on a tree by the River Cherwell at Oxford. A predatory tree appears in a 1934 poem, but Tolkien did not arrive at the malevolent Old Man Willow, both tree and spirit, for some years. Scholars have debated the nature of the tree; some have been surprised by it, as Tolkien is seen as an environmentalist. The character was omitted by both Ralph Bakshi and Peter Jackson from their film versions of The Lord of the Rings.

Context

The protagonist Frodo Baggins and his Hobbit companions Sam Gamgee and Pippin Took set out from his home at Hobbiton in the Shire. They are pursued by mysterious Black Riders. [T 1] They travel eastwards and cross the Bucklebury Ferry over the Brandywine River, meeting their friend Merry Brandybuck. [T 2] They rest briefly in Buckland, [T 3] deciding to shake off the Black Riders by cutting through the Old Forest. [T 4]

Old Man Willow first appeared in Tolkien's poem "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil", published in 1934 in The Oxford Magazine . [2]

Character

Sketch map of the Shire. The Old Forest is on the right; the River Withywindle runs through it. Sketch Map of The Shire.svg
Sketch map of the Shire. The Old Forest is on the right; the River Withywindle runs through it.

Old Man Willow is a malign tree-spirit of great age in Tom Bombadil's Old Forest, appearing physically as a large willow tree beside the River Withywindle, but spreading his influence throughout the forest. As Tolkien explains in the narrative of The Lord of the Rings : [T 4] [3]

But none was more dangerous than the Great Willow: his heart was rotten, but his strength was green; and he was cunning, and a master of winds, and his song and thought ran through the woods on both sides of the river. His grey thirsty spirit drew power out of the earth and spread like fine root-threads in the ground, and invisible twig fingers in the air, till it had under its dominion nearly all the trees of the Forest from the Hedge to the Downs. [T 5]

Narrative

Tom Bombadil frees the Hobbits from Old Man Willow. Scraperboard illustration by Alexander Korotich, 1981 Tom Bombadil frees the Hobbits from Old Man Willow.jpg
Tom Bombadil frees the Hobbits from Old Man Willow. Scraperboard illustration by Alexander Korotich, 1981

In the story, Old Man Willow casts a spell on the hobbits, causing them to feel sleepy. Merry and Pippin lean against the trunk of the willow and fall asleep, while Frodo sits on a root to dangle his feet in the water, before he also falls asleep. The willow then traps Merry and Pippin in the cracks of its trunk and tips Frodo into the stream, but the latter is saved by Sam, who, suspicious of the tree, manages to remain awake. After Frodo and Sam start a fire out of dry leaves, grass, and bits of bark in an attempt to frighten the tree, Merry shouts from the inside to put the fire out because the tree says it is going to squeeze them to death. They are saved by the arrival of Tom Bombadil who sings to the ancient tree to release Merry and Pippin. The tree then ejects the two hobbits. [T 4] Once they are safely in his house, Bombadil explains to the hobbits that the "Great Willow" is wholly evil, and has gradually spread his domination across the Old Forest until almost all the trees from the Hedge to the Barrow-downs are under his control. [T 5]

Drawing

Tolkien may have based his drawing of Old Man Willow on a tree beside the River Cherwell in Oxford, like this one in the University Parks there. Willow view - Flickr - Orchids love rainwater.jpg
Tolkien may have based his drawing of Old Man Willow on a tree beside the River Cherwell in Oxford, like this one in the University Parks there.

Tolkien made a careful pencil and coloured pencil drawing of Old Man Willow while he was writing the chapter "The Old Forest"; Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull call it "a fine example" of the drawings he made to support his creative writing. They note that "with a little imagination" [1] a face can just be made out on the right-hand side of the tree above the arm-like branch. Tolkien describes it as a "huge willow-tree, old and hoary"; to the hobbits it seemed enormous, though Hammond and Scull observe that it does not seem so in the drawing. Tolkien's son John suggests that it was based on one of the few unpollarded willows on the River Cherwell at Oxford. [1]

Analysis

Etymological connotations

Tolkien was a philologist. Jason Fisher, writing that "all stories begin with words", takes up Edmund Wilson's "denigrating dismissal" of The Lord of the Rings as "a philological curiosity", replying that to him this is "precisely one of its greatest strengths". [4] Fisher explores in detail the connotations of Tolkien's use of words meaning bent and twisted, including Ringwraith as well as willow or withy (a willow, or flexible twigs from it twisted and woven into wicker baskets), this last from Old English wiþig. "Windle", too, is an old word for a wicker basket, from Old English windel-treow, the willow, the basket-maker's tree, as well as a cognate of the modern English "to wind". Thus, Old Man Willow's Withywindle is perhaps the "willow-winding" river. [4] Fisher comments, too, that Old Man Willow could be said to have gone to the bad, like the Ringwraiths or in the words of the Middle English poem Pearl that Tolkien translated, wyrþe so wrange away, "writhed so wrong away" or "strayed so far from right". [4]

Interpretations

The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger writes that Old Man Willow first appears as "a predatory tree" in the 1934 poem "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil", and that the character is developed in The Lord of the Rings, as documented in The Return of the Shadow . In an early draft from 1938, she writes, the "Willow" tree and the "Old Man" character had not yet become a single "indivisible being". Instead, Tolkien writes of "how that grey thirsty earth-bound spirit had become imprisoned in the greatest Willow of the Forest." [5] Flieger writes that in this draft and in the 1943 "Manuscript B", Tolkien links "a tree and a spirit, a 'non-incarnate mind'" which is "imprisoned" in an individual tree. She comments that Tolkien solved the problem of how a spirit might become trapped in this way by turning them into a single being, at once a tree and a spirit. [5]

Tolkien, a Roman Catholic, believed that living things such as trees had been affected by the Fall of Man. Medieval statuary of the Fall at Notre Dame de Paris Temptation Adam Eva.jpg
Tolkien, a Roman Catholic, believed that living things such as trees had been affected by the Fall of Man. Medieval statuary of the Fall at Notre Dame de Paris

Saguaro and Thacker comment that critics have puzzled over Tolkien's description of Old Man Willow, as it does not fit with Tolkien's image as an environmentalist "tree-hugger". They write that trees (like other creatures in Tolkien's world) are subject to the corruption of the Fall of Man, mentioning Tolkien's Catholicism. They state that while Tolkien's writings on the meaning of trees verges on the pagan, both the Old and the New Testament use trees as symbols – the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Book of Genesis, the cross, the tree of death in the Gospels, and the Tree of Life in Revelation (22:2). In their view, Tolkien succeeds in "bring[ing] all these elements together" in The Lord of the Rings: death, creation, sub-creation, re-creation. [3] Dickerson writes that Old Man Willow indicates both that nature, like Man, is fallen, and that it is actively hostile to Man. [6] The Tolkien critic Jared Lobdell compares the "treachery of natural things in an animate world" seen in the character of Old Man Willow to Algernon Blackwood's story "The Willows". [7] [8]

Paul H. Kocher writes that it is unclear whether the tree's malice derives from the Dark Lord Sauron, or is simply the tree's own "natural hatred for destructive mankind", and notes that the hostility extends to all travellers, "innocent and guilty alike". [9]

Frodo's encounter with Old Man Willow has been described as a catabasis, a journey into the Underworld, like that of Virgil's hero Aeneas. Scene from Virgil's Aeneid; the Cumaean Sibyl leads Aeneas t Wellcome V0042049.jpg
Frodo's encounter with Old Man Willow has been described as a catabasis, a journey into the Underworld, like that of Virgil's hero Aeneas.

The scholar of literature James Obertino comments that "'Every obstacle that arises' in the hero's path 'wears the shadowy features of the Terrible Mother'", who in Aeneas's case is the goddess Juno, in Frodo's "the darkness that is Old Man Willow", along with that of the Barrow-wight and Moria. [10] Obertino likens Frodo's encounters with these darknesses to catabasis, the descent into an underworld, complete with psychological interpretations of personal development, of a hero such as Virgil's Aeneas. He adds that Frodo initially finds comfort in the darkness, "in danger of succumbing to the charm of uroboric incest", as he slumbers beside Old Man Willow, and again in the Barrow-wight's deathly dwelling-place. [10]

E. L. Risden states that the elimination of the Ring and Sauron along with his servants the Ringwraiths and Saruman removed the most powerful sources of evil in the world. Others like Old Man Willow were not removed, "but they too will now fade into quietness. The remaining world, blander, has more narrowly circumscribed limits." [11]

Adaptations: appearing or disappearing

Old Man Willow with the four Hobbits, two of them trapped inside the tree, in the 1991 television play Khraniteli Khraniteli Old Man Willow.jpg
Old Man Willow with the four Hobbits, two of them trapped inside the tree, in the 1991 television play Khraniteli

Old Man Willow, like the Old Forest and Tom Bombadil, was not included in Peter Jackson's films of The Lord of the Rings. Justifying the excision, Jackson asked rhetorically in From Book to Script "So, you know, what does Old Man Willow contribute to the story of Frodo carrying the Ring? ... it's not really advancing our story & it's not really telling us things that we need to know." [12]

Of the earlier adaptations, Terence Tiller's 1955–1956 radio play did include Old Man Willow and Bombadil, in a production not liked by Tolkien, though no recording survives. [12]

Morton Zimmerman's unproduced 1957 highly-compressed script, criticised by Tolkien for rushing rather than cutting, similarly included them: Bombadil takes the hobbits straight from Old Man Willow to the Barrow-downs, all the action in the episode seemingly occurring in one day. [12]

John Boorman's unproduced c. 1970 script did not include them; the hobbits "getting high on mushrooms" instead. [12]

Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated film omits the Old Forest altogether, setting a precedent for Jackson. [12]

Although the hobbits do not pass through the Old Forest in Jackson's film of The Fellowship of the Ring, the map shown on screen earlier in the film does include Buckland, the Old Forest, and the Barrow-downs; however, in the extended edition DVD of The Two Towers, the Ent Treebeard speaks a version of Bombadil's unlocking words to Old Man Willow in Fangorn Forest, so, argues John D. Rateliff, as far as Jackson was concerned, there can have been no Old Man Willow in the mapped Old Forest, and no Bombadil, as the action takes place elsewhere. [12] [lower-alpha 1]

Old Man Willow, however, does appear in the Old Forest in the 1991 Soviet television play Khraniteli , where he traps two of the hobbits. [13]

Notes

  1. ↑ The scene is on The Two Towers extended edition, disk 1, from 1 hr 10.15 to 11.04, lasting some 50 seconds. [12]

Related Research Articles

The Nazgûl, introduced as Black Riders and also called Ringwraiths, Dark Riders, the Nine Riders, or simply the Nine, are fictional characters in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. They were nine Men who had succumbed to Sauron's power through wearing Rings of Power, which gave them immortality but reduced them to invisible wraiths, servants bound to the power of the One Ring and completely under Sauron's control.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tom Bombadil</span> Middle-earth character

Tom Bombadil is a character in J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium. He first appeared in print in a 1934 poem called "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil", which also included The Lord of the Rings characters Goldberry, Old Man Willow and the Barrow-wight, from whom he rescues the hobbits. They were not then explicitly part of the older legends that became The Silmarillion, and are not mentioned in The Hobbit.

Goldberry is a character from the works of the author J. R. R. Tolkien. She first appeared in print in a 1934 poem, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, where she appears as the wife of Tom Bombadil. Also known as the "River-woman's daughter", she is described as a beautiful, youthful woman with golden hair. She is best known from her appearance as a supporting character in Tolkien's high fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings, first published in 1954 and 1955.

Barrow-wights are wraith-like creatures in J. R. R. Tolkien's world of Middle-earth. In The Lord of the Rings, the four hobbits are trapped by a barrow-wight, and are lucky to escape with their lives; but they gain ancient swords of Westernesse for their quest.

"The Scouring of the Shire" is the penultimate chapter of J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy The Lord of the Rings. The Fellowship hobbits, Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin, return home to the Shire to find that it is under the brutal control of ruffians and their leader "Sharkey", revealed to be the Wizard Saruman. The ruffians have despoiled the Shire, cutting down trees and destroying old houses, as well as replacing the old mill with a larger one full of machinery which pollutes the air and the water. The hobbits rouse the Shire to rebellion, lead their fellow hobbits to victory in the Battle of Bywater, and end Saruman's rule.

In J. R. R. Tolkien’s fictional universe of Middle-earth, the Old Forest was a daunting and ancient woodland just beyond the eastern borders of the Shire. Its first and main appearance in print was in the chapter of the 1954 The Fellowship of the Ring titled "The Old Forest". The hobbits of the Shire found the forest hostile and dangerous; the nearest, the Bucklanders, planted a great hedge to border the forest and cleared a strip of land next to it. A malign tree-spirit, Old Man Willow, grew beside the River Withywindle in the centre of the forest, controlling most of it.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late</span> Poem in The Lord of the Rings

"The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late" is J. R. R. Tolkien's imagined original song behind the nursery rhyme "Hey Diddle Diddle ", invented by back-formation. It was first published in Yorkshire Poetry magazine in 1923, and was reused in extended form in the 1954–55 The Lord of the Rings as a song sung by Frodo Baggins in the Prancing Pony inn. The extended version was republished in the 1962 collection The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the real-world history and notable fictional elements of J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy universe. It covers materials created by Tolkien; the works on his unpublished manuscripts, by his son Christopher Tolkien; and films, games and other media created by other people.

The fictional races and peoples that appear in J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy world of Middle-earth include the seven listed in Appendix F of The Lord of the Rings: Elves, Men, Dwarves, Hobbits, Ents, Orcs and Trolls, as well as spirits such as the Valar and Maiar. Other beings of Middle-earth are of unclear nature such as Tom Bombadil and his wife Goldberry.

Meriadoc Brandybuck, usually called Merry, is a Hobbit, a fictional character from J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium, featured throughout his most famous work, The Lord of the Rings. Merry is described as one of the closest friends of Frodo Baggins, the main protagonist. Merry and his friend and cousin, Pippin, are members of the Fellowship of the Ring. They become separated from the rest of the group and spend much of The Two Towers making their own decisions. By the time of The Return of the King, Merry has enlisted in the army of Rohan as an esquire to King Théoden, in whose service he fights during the War of the Ring. After the war, he returns home, where he and Pippin lead the Scouring of the Shire, ridding it of Saruman's influence.

Peregrin Took, commonly known simply as Pippin, is a fictional character from J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings. He is closely tied with his friend and cousin, Merry Brandybuck, and the two are together during most of the story. Pippin and Merry are introduced as a pair of young hobbits of the Shire who become ensnared in their friend Frodo Baggins's quest to destroy the One Ring. Pippin joins the Fellowship of the Ring. He and Merry become separated from the rest of the group at the breaking of the Fellowship and spend much of The Two Towers with their own story line. Impetuous and curious, Pippin enlists as a soldier in the army of Gondor and fights in the Battle of the Morannon. With the other hobbits, he returns home, helps to lead the Scouring of the Shire, and becomes Thain or hereditary leader of the land.

Frodo Baggins is a fictional character in J. R. R. Tolkien's writings, and one of the protagonists in The Lord of the Rings. Frodo is a hobbit of the Shire who inherits the One Ring from his cousin Bilbo Baggins, described familiarly as "uncle", and undertakes the quest to destroy it in the fires of Mount Doom in Mordor. He is mentioned in Tolkien's posthumously published works, The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales.

<i>The Fellowship of the Ring</i> 1954 part of novel by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Fellowship of the Ring is the first of three volumes of the epic novel The Lord of the Rings by the English author J. R. R. Tolkien. It is followed by The Two Towers and The Return of the King. The action takes place in the fictional universe of Middle-earth. The book was first published on 29 July 1954 in the United Kingdom. The volume consists of a foreword, in which the author discusses his writing of The Lord of the Rings, a prologue titled "Concerning Hobbits, and other matters", and the main narrative in Book I and Book II.

<i>Hobitit</i> Finnish live action fantasy television miniseries

Hobitit is a nine-part Finnish live action fantasy television miniseries directed by Timo Torikka, originally broadcast in 1993 on Yle TV1.

The poetry in The Lord of the Rings consists of the poems and songs written by J. R. R. Tolkien, interspersed with the prose of his high fantasy novel of Middle-earth, The Lord of the Rings. The book contains over 60 pieces of verse of many kinds; some poems related to the book were published separately. Seven of Tolkien's songs, all but one from The Lord of the Rings, were made into a song-cycle, The Road Goes Ever On, set to music by Donald Swann. All the poems in The Lord of the Rings were set to music and published on CDs by The Tolkien Ensemble.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trees in Middle-earth</span> Trees and forests in the fictional works of J. R. R. Tolkien

Trees play multiple roles in J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy world of Middle-earth, some such as Old Man Willow indeed serving as characters in the plot. Both for Tolkien personally, and in his Middle-earth writings, caring about trees really mattered. Indeed, the Tolkien scholar Matthew Dickerson wrote "It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of trees in the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien."

The prose style of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth books, especially The Lord of the Rings, is remarkably varied. Commentators have noted that Tolkien selected linguistic registers to suit different peoples, such as simple and modern for Hobbits and more archaic for Dwarves, Elves, and the Rohirrim. This allowed him to use the Hobbits to mediate between the modern reader and the heroic and archaic realm of fantasy. The Orcs, too, are depicted in different voices: the Orc-leader Grishnákh speaks in bullying tones, while the minor functionary Gorbag uses grumbling modern speech.

<i>Khraniteli</i> Live-action Soviet teleplay adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring

Khraniteli is a Soviet television play miniseries based on J. R. R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring. It was broadcast once in 1991 by Leningrad Television and then thought lost before being rediscovered in 2021. It includes scenes of Tom Bombadil and Goldberry that were omitted from the 1978 film and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings film trilogy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Psychological journeys of Middle-earth</span> Analysis of J. R. R. Tolkiens fictional characters

Scholars, including psychoanalysts, have commented that J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth stories about both Bilbo Baggins, protagonist of The Hobbit, and Frodo Baggins, protagonist of The Lord of the Rings, constitute psychological journeys. Bilbo returns from his journey to help recover the Dwarves' treasure from Smaug the dragon's lair in the Lonely Mountain changed, but wiser and more experienced. Frodo returns from his journey to destroy the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom scarred by multiple weapons, and is unable to settle back into the normal life of his home, the Shire.

Scholars have described the narrative structure of The Lord of the Rings, a high fantasy work by J. R. R. Tolkien published in 1954–55, in a variety of ways, including as a balanced pair of outer and inner quests; a linear sequence of scenes or tableaux; a fractal arrangement of separate episodes; a Gothic cathedral-like edifice of many different elements; multiple cycles or spirals; or an elaborate medieval-style interlacing of intersecting threads of story. Also present is an elaborate symmetry between pairs of characters.

References

Primary

  1. ↑ Tolkien 1954a book 1, ch. 3, "Three is Company"
  2. ↑ Tolkien 1954a book 1, ch. 4, "A Short Cut to Mushrooms"
  3. ↑ Tolkien 1954a book 1, ch. 5, "A Conspiracy Unmasked"
  4. 1 2 3 Tolkien 1954a book 1, ch. 6, "The Old Forest"
  5. 1 2 Tolkien 1954a book 1, ch. 7 "In the House of Tom Bombadil"

Secondary

  1. 1 2 3 4 Hammond, Wayne; Scull, Christina (1995). J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator . London: HarperCollins. pp. 155–156. ISBN   978-0-261-10360-3. OCLC   34533659.
  2. ↑ Scull, Christina; Hammond, Wayne G., eds. (2014). The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. New York City: HarperCollins. p. 123. ISBN   978-0-00-755727-1.. They were later included in Tales from the Perilous Realm .
  3. 1 2 3 Saguaro, Shelley; Thacker, Deborah Cogan (2013). Chapter 9. Tolkien and Trees J. R. R. Tolkien The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. Palgrave Macmillan (New Casebooks). pp. 138–154. ISBN   978-1-137-26399-5.
  4. 1 2 3 Fisher, Jason (2014). "Tolkien's Wraiths, Rings, and Dragons: An Exercise in Literary Linguistics". In Houghton, John Wm.; Croft, Janet Brennan; Martsch, N. (eds.). Tolkien in the New Century: Essays in Honor of Tom Shippey. McFarland. pp. 97–114. ISBN   978-1-4766-1486-1 . Retrieved 28 November 2021.
  5. 1 2 Flieger, Verlyn (15 October 2013). "How Trees Behave-Or Do They?". Mythlore . 32 (1). article 3, pp. 23–25.
  6. ↑ Dickerson, Matthew (2013) [2007]. "Trees". In Drout, Michael D. C. (ed.). The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia . Taylor & Francis. pp. 678–679. ISBN   978-0-415-96942-0.
  7. ↑ Nelson, Dale (2013) [2007]. "Literary Influences: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries". In Drout, Michael D. C. (ed.). The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia . Routledge. pp. 372–377. ISBN   978-0-415-86511-1.
  8. ↑ Lobdell, Jared (2004). The World of the Rings: Language, Religion, and Adventure in Tolkien. Open Court. p. 9. ISBN   978-0-8126-9569-4. OCLC   54767347.
  9. ↑ Kocher, Paul (1974) [1972]. Master of Middle-earth: The Achievement of J.R.R. Tolkien. Penguin Books. p. 66. ISBN   0140038779.
  10. 1 2 3 Obertino, James (1993). "Moria and Hades: Underworld Journeys in Tolkien and Virgil". Comparative Literature Studies. 30 (2): 153–169. JSTOR   40246877.
  11. ↑ Risden, John D. (2011). "Tolkien's Resistance to Linearity: Narrating The Lord of the Rings in Fiction and Film". In Bogstad, Janice M.; Kaveny, Philip E. (eds.). Picturing Tolkien . McFarland. pp. 70–83. ISBN   978-0-7864-8473-7.
  12. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Rateliff, John D. (2011). "Two Kinds of Absence: Elision & Exclusion in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings". In Bogstad, Janice M.; Kaveny, Philip E. (eds.). Picturing Tolkien . McFarland. pp. 54–69. ISBN   978-0-7864-8473-7.
  13. ↑ "Хранители: Часть 1: Телеспектакль по мотивам повести Д.Р.Р.Толкиена" [Keepers: Part 1: Teleplay based on the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien] (in Russian). Leningrad Television. 5 April 2021. Archived from the original on 5 April 2021. The scene is at 40:31 in Part 1.

Sources

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.