LotR -- Book 3 - Chapter 04 - Treebeard

[Bêthberry]

Thank you, Estelyn, for keeping this thread on top for another week. I too think there is much we can still natter about, although it is a challenge deciding just where to jump in with so many excellent ideas already raised. SpM, however, has asked for more discussion about Pippin and about the entwives, and who am I to deny a gentleman such a polite request? So, for this post, on to Pippin!

There is a fascinating passage about Pippin, our peregrinating hobbit. Whether this relates to his alleged greater intuitiveness I cannot say, but I think it is part of Tolkien?s belief in the importance of story or of language. We have already discussed in a previous chapter how Tolkien suggests that Pippin will survive. (Being neither Ent nor Entwife, memory fails me now and I cannot remember if it is in ?The Riders of Rohan? chapter or ?The Uruk-hai.?) We have here a more extensive suggestion of what Pippin will make of his adventures. Settle down for a long read now?don?t be hasty--for this is a long quotation.

They found that they were looking at a most extraordinary face. It belonged to a large Man-like, almost Troll-like, figure, at least fourteen foot high, very sturdy, with a tall head, and hardly any neck. Whether it was clad in stuff like green and grey bark, or whether that was its hide, was difficult to say. At any rate the arms, at a short distance from the trunk, were not wrinkled, but covered with a brown smooth skin. The large feet had seven toes each. The lower part of the long face was covered with a sweeping grey beard, bushy, almost twiggy at the roots, thin and mossy at the ends. But at the moment the hobbits noted little but the eyes. These deep eyes were now surveying them, slow and solemn, but very penetrating. They were brown, shot with a green light. Often afterwards Pippin tried to describe his first impression of them.

"One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present; like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don't know, but it felt as if something that grew in the ground?asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between root-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years." my bolding

If I am reading this correctly (well, of course I think I am ) the first paragraph is spoken by the third-person narrator while the second is spoken by Pippin. The first paragraph reports Merry's and Pippin's first sight or perception about this wonderous strange new creature; it uses ?they? and talks about what the hobbits saw. The second paragraph is not part of the ?regular? narrative but reflects Pippin's future recollections, using the first person pronoun ?I? and the British form of the self-effacing first person pronoun, ?one.? This is personal recollection; it even addresses the Reader as "you". As such, this paragraph looks forward to the time when Pippin attempts to create story ought of this direct, personal experience.

And, more particularly, we see Pippin developing an extended metaphor to account for his perception of Treebeard's eyes. And not simply his eyes, of course, but of the effect of them and the particular springs of Entish nature. The first paragraph offers simple description, a listing of Treebeard's physical characteristics. The second paragraph supplies the comparison to the well of water illuminated by the light of ages and obviously will therefore include Pippin's further experience of Treebeard. This second paragraph of first person recollection extends our knowledge of the Ents beyond what a first, cursory perception would offer. Pippin's metaphor, as recollection after the fact, represents a summation of his experience of ents. All of his time with Treebeard and the other ents, the Entmoot and Quickbeam, and of course the subsequent events of the War of the Ring, are part of this metaphor.

Thus, Tolkien is able to suggest a depth of character to the Ent even at a first meeting with this remarkable character. He is also able to show a facet of Pippin beyond the "Fool of a Took" which characterised him early on in the Quest. Tolkien 'breaks' narrative time to do this in an extraordinary way. It is part, I think, of the many examples in this chapter which suggest his profound respect for story. It is through story that language and people live. This is the significance, I think, of the exchange between the hobbits and Treebeard over the hobbits' place in the old stories. Saucepan is right that this reflects Tolkien's own subtle play about reading the hobbits back into the legendarium, but it also reflects Tolkien's own concept of how stories are developed synchretically. This is a grammatical point and part of Tolkien's philological approach. (To provide a definition: ?the merging, as by historical change in a language, of two or more inflectional categories in a specified environment.? I am using this by analogy of course. from Random House College Dictionary.)

But how extraordinary to jump ahead in time, as it were, to provide a future recollection! (As this post is long enough, I think I shall have to return another time for the entwives.)