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Old 01-04-2007, 08:57 AM   #70
The Saucepan Man
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The Saucepan Man has been trapped in the Barrow!
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I love a good mystery, me.

I am afraid, phantom, that I do not find your proposition convincing in the least. In a fantasy world like Middle-earth, I have no difficulty in believing that an Elven rope could “magically” untie itself if truly willed to do so by its bearer. Moreover, there is nothing in the passage that you reference which could specifically relate to Entwives, save for the presence of gnarled trees. And Middle-earth is hardly devoid of trees, gnarled or otherwise.

However, three things in particular struck me when I read the long passage from Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit quoted by Ardamir:

… larches were green-fingered …”: The trees were green-fingered with foliage, but the descriptive term is an anthropomorphic one – trees with fingers. Further, “green-fingered” is a term also used to denote particular flair in the field of gardening. The Entwives, of course, were gardeners.

… the garden of Gondor …”: While a descriptive term for a place of natural beauty (like Kent – the garden of England), a garden is an ordered, rather than a wild, place of nature – more suitable for an Entwife than an Ent. Again, the gardening link.

…dishevelled dryad loveliness …”: Dryads are female tree spirits in Greek mythology.

This got me to thinking whether this might indeed be the passage that Teleporno was referring to (whether or not it was in fact intended by Tolkien to allude to the Entwives). Perhaps he concluded that the green-fingered larches were the Entwives, although the fact that the trees had fallen “into untended age amid a riot of careless descendants” suggests to me that, if Entwives were here in Ithilien, they had long since left (or fallen into irreversible slumber) by the time that Frodo and Sam arrived. Teleporno, on the other hand, declared:

Quote:
The Entwives are alive and living in The Lord of the Rings but you must look closely to find and decipher the riddle.
In any event, if this is the passage that he was referring to, he must also have perceived this “in-joke” that he mentions somewhere within it. What could that be? I have never quite understood what Teleporno means when he refers to this matter. He talks of “suffragists”, but the main cause of suffragists and suffragettes (women’s right to vote) had long since been won in England by the time Tolkien wrote this passage. Does he perhaps mean feminists in the wider sense? Although that is not necessarily the same thing as denoted by his other phrase “middle-class British women who don't tolerate the foolish behavior of men”.

Anyway, my random thoughts led me along the following lines of research (which represent pure speculation and are, admittedly, highly tenuous at times, although there may be something here that someone could pick up and run with).

A group which Tolkien might have relished lampooning and which was semi-contemporaneous with the date at which he would have written this passage was the Bloomsbury Set of English "bohemian" artists and scholars. Although by no means exclusively female, it did include many with feminist sympathies, Virginia Woolf, for example. It also advocated open marriages - and marriages between the Ents and the Entwives could certainly be described as being very open (although the phrase, in its commonly-used sense, is certainly not applicable).

Virginia Woolf was a prominent advocate of female independence (from men), famously writing in A Room of One's Own that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction".

Another member of the Bloomsbury Set (albeit on the fringes), and someone closely associated with Virginia Woolf, was Vita Sackville-West. (It has been suggested, I believe, that her name may in part have been the derivation of the Hobbit surname, Sackville-Baggins). Vita Sackville-West (1892 -1962) was an English poet, novelist and gardener. She was born at Knole House in Kent and is renowned for helping to create her own gardens at Sissinghurst Castle, Kent. Again, a gardening link and, as Ithilien is the garden of Gondor, Kent is the garden of England.

Sissinghurst Castle Garden is designed as a series of "rooms", each with a different character of colour and/or theme, the walls being high clipped hedges and many pink brick walls. I’m getting highly tenuous now, but this is slightly reminiscent of the scene described in the passage quoted by Ardamir, particularly the “grots and rock walls”.

Finally, Teleporno suggested that we “keep an eye on the clustering of certain types of words”. Possibly he meant the preponderance of trees and shrubs identified in this passage: “fir and cedar and cypress”, “larches”, “tamarisk”, “terebinth”, “olive”, “bay”, “juniper”, “myrtle”, “thyme”, “sage”, “marjoram”, “parsley”, “saxifrage”, “stonecrop”, “primerole”, “anemone”, “filbert”, “asphodel” and “lily”.

I can’t think of anything that links all of these plants, although many are conifers and/or evergreens and most are native to the Mediterranean region (although that is hardly surprising in a description of a region with the climate of Ithilien). Also, most have medicinal and/or culinary uses (again, hardly surprising given the name of the chapter in which the passage features).

One thing which may be of relevance: In Greek mythology, myrtle was considered to be sacred to Aphrodite. The tradition of brides (ie those who were to become wives) wearing a crown of myrtle on their wedding day was common in ancient Greece.

As I said, all highly speculative and at times rather tenuous. However, these musings have led me to believe that this is most likely the passage that Teleporno was referring to. I do rather agree with Child that, whatever he may have thought that he was on to, he was wrong, and that Tolkien did not deliberately place a subtle reference to the Entwives here.

But you never know …
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