Tolkien, Trees, and other Thoughts

I got distracted by the light dancing across my book as I was reading The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien this afternoon.

I love the tree outside my bedroom window, almost as much as I love reading in the afternoon. I love sleeping with the window open so I can listen to the hush of the leaves in the night. I greatly enjoy all the little critters that visit me outside my window, from the birds that come to sing in the morning, to the family of squirrels that sometimes come to gawk at my cat. It is also my favorite place to take a nap, there in the tree filtered afternoon-sun.

Tolkien was himself a great lover of trees. Thus, it is no small wonder that The Lord of the Rings pays such special attention to them. Indeed, the trees are the personality of most every landscape in Middle Earth, be they of the hostile or illustrious variety. They are the constant dwellers, watching over passersby and temporary inhabitants that come and go throughout the years, such a short while in the long life of a tree.

Tolkien himself had a tree outside his window once which he claimed helped inspire his story Leaf by Niggle, an odd and wonderful tale that feels altogether dreamlike. He wrote about this tree in the books original introductory note, saying

"One of (the tale's) sources was a great-limbed popular tree that I could see even lying in bed. It was suddenly lopped and mutilated by its owner. I do not know why. It is cut down now, a less barbarous punishment for any crimes it may have been accused of, such as being large or alive. I do not think that it had any friends, or any mourners, except myself and a pair of owls."

Altogether, leafing through these letters written by a mentor that I will never get to meet has been wonderful, even more so than I expected.

Reading through his rambles –regarding such themes as the struggles of procrastination in the face of productivity, his constant anguish at the regrettable busyness of his schedule, and the woe brought on by a book that doesn't want to get done, have all made me realize that maybe I know what I'm doing after all. Self-doubt is no stranger to even the greats.

I sometimes feel small in comparison, so un-heightened by time, so stuck in the scope of the present with a book that is only as old as the files containing it on my computer; a book that is still so unlived in. But knowing that someone I so admire has struggled with the same things as I am toiling with now brings me an unexpected sort of comfort. All this is mostly normal, after all; as normal as the life of anyone who takes up writing can ever be.

Tolkien barely dared dream that so many would share in his delight for his Middle Earth.

Books are wrought only with great pain and frustration, for the imagination rarely complies well with the limits of our vocabulary and the hampered frame of the page.

But once the wrestling is through, and the writer sits back and cries in wonder and fear at what they have created, the book becomes severed from them. As Tolkien wrote:

"(The) goal was reached at last. It is finished... (but) now I look at it, the magnitude of my disaster is apparent to me. My work has escaped my control, and I have produced a monster."

Sometimes the book fades away after that, collecting dust on a back shelf, thought about from time to time only by they that sired it, sometimes with fondness, sometimes with regret. But every so often, if chance allows, a book will fly away to other horizons, where it finds other shelves, from that of a publisher, to possibly that of a reader.

Who can ever know for certain how many shelves a book can make a home in, nestled in comfortably, as if it's already forgotten they that toiled for it before it could stand up on its own. But, the writer won't know: not where it goes, nor how shelves it comes home to; much less how many readers might find a semblance of home in reading it.

Indeed, no one can ever truly guess what might happen when you release a wild book onto the vast world.

For now though, it is much nicer to simply read under the shadow of a tree, and dream of the day when my own book will forget about me and find a home on the shelf of another.