Old Man Algernon

[Pitchwife]

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:

Originally Posted by The Willows

They [the willows] went on chattering and talking among themselves, laughing a little, shrilly crying out, sometimes sighing--but what it was they made so much t-do about belonged to the secret life of the great plain they inhabited. And it was utterly alien to the world I knew, or to that of the wild yet kindly elements. [...] I watched them moving busily together, oddly shaking their big bushy heads, twirling their myriad leaves even when there was no wind. They moved of their own will as though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own keen sense of the horrible. [...] The willows were against us.

Now wait a sec, I thought, doesn't this remind me of something else? Of course it did, hence the thread title; and since I was unlikely to be the first to notice, I dug around a bit and found a blog post on the matter: Dangerous Willows: Tolkien and Blackwood.

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), maybe we can talk about this. What parallels and differences do you see between Blackwood's and Tolkien's willows? Any other possible resoncances between the two authors that come to your mind? (If you like we can expand this to something like 'Tolkien and the weird/horror fiction of his time'.)

[Mithadan]

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."

[Pitchwife]

Hi Mith, thanks for chipping in! Yes, why willows? Their constant motion and sound, which you mention, may be especially likely to suggest animacy. Also they grow naturally near water, and in both cases the willowy weirdness is centred around a river - the Danube in Blackwood, the Withywindle in Tolkien. Now rivers in themselves may be liminal bodies (there's always a hither shore and a thither shore), but in neither case does the river itself seem to play a specially active part.


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.

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by Mithadan

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."

And let's not forget the idea of animated trees was introduced to Tolkien via Shakespeare:

Macbeth shall never vanquished be until Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill shall come against him.

Later on in the play, this prophecy became tangible when an army marched against Macbeth camoflaged with foliage and branches from Birnam Wood in order to make it seem as if a host of trees was roused to attack him.

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.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Originally Posted by Mithadan

Characterizing willows as evil may be a bit odd.

It is the case though that willows were a very common element in Victorian tombstone iconography, so there was apparently some association with death.

[Pitchwife]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

It is the case though that willows were a very common element in Victorian tombstone iconography, so there was apparently some association with death.

Yes! Also in Goethe's well-known ballad Der Erlkönig, it is 'the old willows grey' that appear to the bewitched boy as the Alder-Kings daughters. They seem to be associated with desolate places adjacent to what may be called the dark side of Faerie.

Originally Posted by Morthoron

And let's not forget the idea of animated trees was introduced to Tolkien via Shakespeare

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...".