Tree and Leaf: What I Learned from J.R.R. Tolkien

This post is to introduce my readers to a little-known, powerful resource for anyone interested in writing. Or reading.

In March my wife and I were in Panama and I had occasion to recommend this little book to someone who identified herself as a reader of Tolkien. And I realized I should blog about it.

My friend and colleague Darrow Miller put me on to this volume that contains three lesser known works by J.R.R. Tolkien. I’m writing here about the opening essay, “Tree and Leaf.” I thought I knew Tolkien until I read this astonishing composition. Reminds me of the first time I saw Crater Lake in southern Oregon and realized I had never seen the color blue until that moment. If you retain a sense of wonder and appreciate the careful use of language you need to read “Tree and Leaf.”

Tolkien begins very humbly. His first paragraph disarms the reader who, drawn into the charm of his prose, wanders into the essay heedless of the master’s spell. Too late, you realize you have been seized and carried off by beauty.

I propose to speak about fairy-stories, though I am aware that this is a rash adventure. Faërie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold. And overbold I may be accounted, for though I have been a lover of fairy-stories since I learned to read, and have at times thought about them, I have not studied them professionally. I have been hardly more than a wandering explorer (or trespasser) in the land, full of wonder but not of information.

Don’t let the term “fairy story” throw you. Think Lord of the Rings. He shows the natural connection between religion and mythology, between myth and history (“they are both ultimately of the same stuff”).

“Tree and Leaf” is to be read and re-read. It parts the curtain to peer into Tolkien’s imagination, his creation of Middle Earth. In fact, he notes in the introduction that this essay was written “in the same period (1938-9), when The Lord of the Rings was beginning to unroll itself and to unfold prospects of labour and exploration in yet unknown country as daunting to me as to the hobbits. At about that time we had reached Bree, and I had then no more notion than they had of what had become of Gandalf or who Strider was; and I had begun to despair of surviving to find out.”

I’m saving for other posts at least two themes from this essay: the work of the artist as sub-creator and the unlikely power of the adjective. I’ll end this post with just one more ravishing paragraph.

The analytic study of fairy stories is as bad a preparation for the enjoying or the writing of them as would be the historical study of the drama of all lands and times for the enjoyment or writing of stage plays. The study may indeed become depressing. It is easy for the student to feel that with all his labor he is collecting only a few leaves, many of them now torn or decayed, from the countless foliage of the Tree of Tales, with which the Forest of Days is carpeted. It seems vain to add to the litter. Who can design a new leaf? The patterns from bud to unfolding, and the colors from spring to autumn were all discovered by men long ago. But that is not true. The seed of the tree can be replanted in almost any soil, even in one so smoke written (as Lang said) as that of England. Spring is of course, not really less beautiful because we have seen or heard of other like events: like events, never from world’s beginning to world’s end the same event. Each leaf, of oak and ash and thorn, is a unique embodiment of the pattern, and for some this very year maybe the embodiment, the first ever seen and recognized, though oaks have put forth leaves for countless generations of men.