Tree by Tolkien Read Free Page A

Doom, but the children seemed to lose interest until we got back to Frodo and Sam.
    Finally—in considering 'influences'—one should point out the relationship between Tolkien and T. S. Eliot. The Waste Land is an attack on the modern world, and Eliot turns to the past for his symbols of a superior order of reality—the Fisher King, the Rhine maidens, the Grail legend, 'inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold'.
    'What does the world say, does the whole world stray in high-powered cars on a by-pass way? ...'
    In the essay on fairy tales, Tolkien has some strong words defending the fairy story against charges of 'escapism'. He mentioned that he recently heard 'a clerk of Oxenford' declare that he welcomed 'the proximity of mass-production robot factories, and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic because it brought his university into "contact with real life" ... .' This view obviously makes Tolkien see red. 'He may have meant that the way men were living and working in the twentieth century was increasing in barbarity at an alarming rate, and that the loud demonstration of this in the streets of Oxford might serve as a warning that it is not possible to preserve for long an oasis of sanity in a desert of unreason by mere fences, without actual offensive action (practical and intellectual). I fear he did not. In any case the expression "real life" in this context seems to fall short of academic standards. The notion that motor cars are more "alive" than, say, centaurs or dragons is curious; that they are more "real" than, say, horses is pathetically absurd.' One sentence has a positively Chestertonian ring: 'Fairy stories may invent monsters that fly the air or dwell in the deep, but at least they do not try to escape from heaven or the sea'. He argues that talk about 'escapism' is a misuse of language: why shouldn't a man in gaol try to escape? What he is arguing here—although he does not put it in so many words—is that there is escape from reality and escape to reality, and that what interests him is the escape to reality. It is Yeats's argument with the 'socially conscious' writers of the thirties all over again (expressed most typically, perhaps, in Lapis Lazuli ). Tolkien argues at some length about street lamps and their ugliness, speaking of his 'disgust for so typical a product of the robot age', and on the next page uses one of his favourite images of life, a tree: 'How real, how startlingly alive is a factory chimney compared with an elm tree; poor obsolete thing, insubstantial dream of an escapist.' It is amusing to remember the use Chesterton made of the lamp versus tree image in The Man Who Was Thursday , when the anarchist declares that the lamp is a symbol of order, ugly and barren when compared with the tree, 'anarchy, splendid in green and gold.' Gabriel Syme, Chesterton's mouthpiece, replies: 'All the same, just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.'
    In the same volume as the essay on fairy stories ( Tree and Leaf ) Tolkien includes a short fable, 'Leaf by Niggle', written shortly after publication of The Hobbit (1937). This is an odd little work, almost Kafka-esque. It begins typically 'There was once a little man called Niggle, who had a long journey to make'. But this is not another story of man's search for fairy land. Niggle is a painter who is engaged on a picture that sounds like an illustration for Lord of the Rings —mountains, forests, lakes, with an enormous tree in the foreground, a kind of Tree of Life. Niggle is often interrupted by a tiresome neighbour, Parish, a lame man with a sick wife. Parish's only interest is in digging his garden, and he finds Niggle's neglect of his own garden annoying. When he calls on Niggle, he does not even glance at the picture of the tree and fairy landscape. So far, the symbolism is clear enough: Niggle, the visionary artist, but nevertheless a modest