And now we enter Ithilien, and become acquainted with Herbs and Stewed Rabbit (no, I’m not going into Tolkien’s cooking skills), and we first meet the Men of Gondor, and Faramir. Rather than focus on all that, I am going to call your attention to two early paragraphs in this Chapter, in which he gives a detailed description of the botany of Ithilien.
Right now, I am reading a book called The Nature Instinct, by Tristan Gooley. In it, the author discusses the “instinctual” understanding of the small details of nature – tree trunks bent, position of Orion and the Big Dipper, bird calls – that can tell us time of day or night, location and direction, oncoming weather, dangers, and so on – that we have lost but native tribes have not, and that we can regain. I view this as the highest form of understanding of Nature. Below that is the botanist’s or naturalist’s view, in which every step is alive with the knowledge of the trees, the plants, and sometimes the animals, and how they fit together in an ecology. And below that is the hiker’s world, far more accessible to all, but still blind to much of the depth of Nature.
Recently, a botanist named Walter Judd published a book called Flora of Middle Earth, in which he details the craft behind the 141species of plant mentioned in LOTR. He finds that even the made-up ones were created plausibly and as a reasonable fit to their environment. As is fitting for an author who spent a fair amount of time obsessing over whether the phases of the moon described in LOTR were all correct and consistent.
It appears to me that this is the first point in LOTR – and maybe the most obvious point – where this botanical view of the world really comes to the fore. It effectively introduces and encapsulates Ithilien for us, as a land of “disheveled dryad loveliness.” Dryad – a mythological nymph of trees. The essence of Ithilien is the botanist’s world of loved trees and plants.
And it is a world of smell as well as sight and touch. The herbs listed draw on our memories of cooking herbs and how they smell, bay leaves, sage, parsley, as well as the smells of flowers and pine-tree resin. And it is a world whose plants and trees and as far as we can tell animals are without magic. Go there? I would – like a shot – except that it’s already here. It’s out there, somewhere in our world, for us to find. And hopefully to learn botany, to learn how to appreciate.
And it seems to me that in some sense these two paragraphs round out, they complete as far as Tolkien can complete them, the picture of Nature that Tolkien presents to us in LOTR. The picture of Nature as omnipresent, or needing to be so. Of weather and Nature reflecting our moods, and causing them. Of seeing the world with a hiker’s eye. Of feeling trees and rocks and weather as living beings, just as much as ourselves. And now, of seeing Nature in all its detail at every step.
I like to imagine this completed world of Tolkien’s as like stepping and swimming under the surface in a world-spanning sea of Nature. The watery medium I walk through with swimming strides is like all my new senses unleashed, and my hands parting the water feel the new smells, while my eyes see with different hues the familiar trees and vines and herbs and flowers, intertwined in new and fascinating ways, swaying as if with a new form of life. And all the while camping and cooking and worries and dangers and strange men like Mablung draw my attention away from this world – but it is always there, in the foreground or in the background, always the medium through which I see and feel the world, and always the core of my life.
Since I view these paragraphs as a completion of Tolkien’s world of Nature, I will have less to say about Tolkien and Nature after this. I hope I have conveyed my belief that this completed world of Nature is an act of great literary genius, for which I feel profoundly indebted to Tolkien, far beyond any other author I know of, of any genre, and why I think this. I will close with this thought:
O brave new people, those of us who have this world within us!
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Like You’ve Never Heard It:
- The First of a Series of Ramblings About JRR Tolkien
- Part II. Pre-Psychology Writing, Poetry, and a New Hero
- Part III. Torture, Enlightenment
- Part IV. Weather, Mushrooms, Leaders
- Part V. In the Moment, Sam the Obscure
- Part VI. Folk Songs, Master, First, Fair
- Part VII. Hiking, Curses, Noble Language
- Part VIII. The Hiker’s Extrasensory Writing
- Part IX. Torture, Elves, Endings
- Part X. Your Highness
- Part XI. Business Meetings, Dwarves
- Part XII. Horns of Wild Memory
- Part XIII. Ecstasies of the Dwarves
- Part XIV. Valaraukar, the Third Touch of God
- Part XV. Memory, Nature, Passion
- Part XVI. The Gift of Enchantment
- Part XVII. Frontier Maturity
- Part XVIII. Pity, Decisions, Endings
- Part XIX. Into the Shadow, Kings, Names, Winds
- Part XX. People of the Morning, Child Soldiers
- Part XXI. Herdsmen and High Trees
- Part XXII. The Faith of God
- Part XXIII. Theoden’s Law
- Part XXIV. Helm’s Deep, Zangra, and A Life Worthy of Song
- Part XXV. Book of Marvels, Book of Friendship
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