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#1 | |
Wight of the Old Forest
Join Date: Dec 2008
Location: Unattended on the railway station, in the litter at the dancehall
Posts: 3,329
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Sometime during these two Covid-stricken years behind us I made my first forays into the work of Algernon Blackwood, an author of whose fame I had been aware for a long time without getting around to actually reading him. One of the first tales I dug into, since it's one of his most famous, was The Willows, an account of two travellers on a canoe on the Danube who, in the course of their journey, are increasingly spooked, harrassed, beset and attacked by the strangely animate eponymous trees:
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So apparently Tolkien had read Blackwood, and not just The Willows (can somebody pinpoint where in Blackwood the phrase The Crack of Doom comes from?). And as Mithadan has justly complained on Facebook about a lack of new threads in the Books forum (see? social media has its uses ![]()
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Und aus dem Erebos kamen viele seelen herauf der abgeschiedenen toten.- Homer, Odyssey, Canto XI |
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#2 |
Spirit of Mist
Join Date: Jul 2000
Location: Tol Eressea
Posts: 3,352
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I am not at all familiar with Blackwood or his work. From his biography, which describes him as a well-known English broadcasting narrator, journalist, novelist, and a CBE to boot, I see no reason to doubt that Tolkien was familiar with him.
I would point out that the supernatural nature of old and dark forests is well-established in both folk tales and myth. Consider the Black Forest and its reputation, the wood of the suicides in Dante, the role of trees in druidic lore. Characterizing willows as evil may be a bit odd. From some quick research, willows are typically associated with healing. From personal experience, groves of willows are a source of constant motion and sound. The motion and sound are, indeed, relaxing and could easily induce drowsiness. Old Man Willow may be the proverbial "bad seed."
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#3 |
Wight of the Old Forest
Join Date: Dec 2008
Location: Unattended on the railway station, in the litter at the dancehall
Posts: 3,329
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Hi Mith, thanks for chipping in!
![]() The big difference I see is that in Blackwood, the willows are acting not on their own behalf, but as conduits for some extramundane supernatural power, whereas Old Man Willow seems very much his own tree and, for all his uncanny activity, deeply rooted in natural reality; which, I suppose, tells us a great deal abiut the difference in how the two authors viewed nature.
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Und aus dem Erebos kamen viele seelen herauf der abgeschiedenen toten.- Homer, Odyssey, Canto XI |
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#4 | ||
Curmudgeonly Wordwraith
Join Date: Jun 2007
Location: Ensconced in curmudgeonly pursuits
Posts: 2,506
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Tolkien, of course, loved the thought of marching trees; however, in letter 163 to W.H. Auden, Tolkien remarked about his "bitter disappointment and disgust" as a schoolboy watching Macbeth, and the "shabby" manner in which Shakespeare treated the "coming of ‘Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill.'" One could say Tolkien righted the wrong...and made an ent of it.
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#5 |
Loremaster of Annúminas
Join Date: Oct 2006
Posts: 2,307
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It is the case though that willows were a very common element in Victorian tombstone iconography, so there was apparently some association with death.
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The entire plot of The Lord of the Rings could be said to turn on what Sauron didn’t know, and when he didn’t know it. |
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#6 | |
Wight of the Old Forest
Join Date: Dec 2008
Location: Unattended on the railway station, in the litter at the dancehall
Posts: 3,329
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There's that, of course, and it's definitely where the Ents marching on Isengard came from. But I'm thinking more of the Old Forest, which seems to me haunted by echoes from Blackwood. In a shorter story, Ancient Lights, a wanderer loses his way in a copse that seems overseeable from the outside, but once inside he is led astray by the twisting path and the trees ever shifting around him, much like the Hobbits are nudged ever closer towards the Withywindle against their will. We learn that the fairies inhabiting the copse resent the land-owner's plan to cut the trees down, in which the wanderer is complicit in his profession as surveyor's clerk ('They do not like all that about ending and failing'...). But while Blackwood's fairies embody the will of the trees (or vice versa), the sprite of the Old Forest, Bombadil, is sovereign master of the trees and helpful to travellers in his realm. If Tolkien was indeed aware of these tales by Blackwood, the Old Forest chapters read, in my eyes, like a reply that says "Yes, but...".
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Und aus dem Erebos kamen viele seelen herauf der abgeschiedenen toten.- Homer, Odyssey, Canto XI |
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