Review: Flora of Middle-Earth: Plants of J.R.R. Tolkien's Legendarium

Flora of Middle-Earth: Plants of J.R.R. Tolkien's Legendarium by Walter S Judd
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book makes a very nice addition to the library of those who find Middle-earth compelling. It will be an especially welcome reference for those of us who lack an extensive knowledge of the flora of the world in which we live. The entries are informative, both for Tolkien's Middle-earth and our own, and are well illustrated with images by Graham A. Judd in the style of woodcuts. The author also refers, a good touch this, to Tolkien's own illustrations of the flora, Old Man Willow, for example. which appear in J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator. References to the scenes in The Lord of the Rings in which the various plants appear or play a role are copious and detailed. There is even a section on hobbit names, so many of which, both first and last, spring from the names of flowers. So far so good. Yet the lack of a separate entry on Ents and Entwives might frustrate some, Yavanna not least, though it would not surprise her. One inexplicable blemish, however, needs to be pointed out. Athelas, or Kingsfoil, arguably most important plant to the plot of The Lord of the Rings is everywhere misspelled athelias.

Achilles ... terrifies us with his violent shouting.

Reconstruction of the Shield of Achilles by Kathleen Vail © All Rights Reserved

If you've really read The Iliad through, slogged through the sometimes horrid tedium of the so called battle books, the deaths of both Sarpedon and Patroclus hit you hard, with all the weight of how different it could have been for them thrown into the scales of Zeus. And now, with Patroclus' death, Achilles' wrath has a cause that even we these days can grasp fully, the needless and unexpected violent death of one we love. The rage that comes soaring up from within him, shouting 'now for wrath, now for ruin, and a red nightfall' as it were, can blow you away. As it did the Trojans, as it did me. (But then fuimus Troes.) Tennyson's version of this explosion of wrath at Iliad 18.202ff. is a marvel. Read it out loud.

Achilles Over the Trench SO SAYING, light-foot Iris pass’d away. Then rose Achilles dear to Zeus; and round The warrior’s puissant shoulders Pallas flung Her fringed ægis, and around his head The glorious goddess wreath’d a golden cloud, And from it lighted an all-shining flame. As when a smoke from a city goes to heaven Far off from out an island girt by foes, All day the men contend in grievous war From their own city, but with set of sun Their fires flame thickly, and aloft the glare Flies streaming, if perchance the neighbours round May see, and sail to help them in the war; So from his head the splendour went to heaven. From wall to dyke he stept, he stood, nor join’d The Achæans—honouring his wise mother’s word**— There standing, shouted, and Pallas far away Call’d; and a boundless panic shook the foe. For like the clear voice when a trumpet shrills, Blown by the fierce beleaguerers of a town, So rang the clear voice of Æakidês; And when the brazen cry of Æakidês Was heard among the Trojans, all their hearts Were troubled, and the full-maned horses whirl’d The chariots backward, knowing griefs at hand; And sheer-astounded were the charioteers To see the dread, unweariable fire That always o’er the great Peleion’s head Burn’d, for the bright-eyed goddess made it burn. Thrice from the dyke he sent his mighty shout, Thrice backward reel’d the Trojans and allies; And there and then twelve of their noblest died Among their spears and chariots.

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** Achilles' mother, Thetis, had asked him not to enter battle until Hephaestus made him new armor.

The title of this post of course comes from C.P. Cavafy's allusion to this moment in his poem Trojans.

And go visit Kathleen Vail's Shield of Achilles website. It's worth every minute.

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Postscript: 

One of the most powerful moments I have ever had in a classroom was discussing The Iliad for weeks, and then watching the 1989 film Glory. I wept.  It also gave me the idea for what was my favorite exam question. I quoted the scene in The Odyssey, where the ghost of Achilles tells Odysseus that he would rather be the slave of the lowest man on earth than king of all the dead, and asked my students if they thought the men of the 54th Massachusetts would agree.

It Wants To Be Found

Near the beginning of his chapter on 'The Heavens' in The Discarded Image, C. S. Lewis quotes from Chaucer to illustrate the view of Medieval science that '[e]verything has its right place, its home, the region that suits it, and, if not forcibly restrained, moves thither by a sort of homing instinct':

Every kindly thing that is
Hath a kindly stede ther he
May best in hit conserved be;
Unto which place every thing
Through his kindly enclyning
Moveth for to come to.  

(Chaucer, Hous of Fame, II, 730 sq.) 

'Kindly' here has its old meaning of 'natural' or 'innate' -- every natural thing has a natural place and a natural inclination to go there.  This is not anthropomorphism, but metaphor, just as it is a metaphor to say (as Lewis also points out) that an object falls to earth when released because it is 'obeying the law of gravity'. Moderns aren't attributing sentience to the object when they speak thus, any more than Chaucer would have been if he said that a stone had a 'kindly enclyning' -- 'a tendency, a propensity, a bent' -- to fall to earth.

I have long been dubious of the position we often encounter, in various forms and places, that the One Ring is in some way sentient. At one extreme, in Peter Jackson's films, we are not just told that 'the Ring is trying to get back to its Master. It wants to be found', but presented with a Ring that can even whisper the names of those it would corrupt. We may also see view of the Ring in William Senior's more sober entry in The Tolkien Encyclopedia: 'as an extension of Sauron, it appears to have a power and sentience of its own' (484). Most scholarly and daunting of all is Tom Shippey. In The Road to Middle-earth (2003), he argues that The Lord of the Rings may be understood as an 'attempt to reconcile two views of evil, both old, both authoritative, both living, both seemingly contradicted by the other' (140).  The view of St Augustine and Boethius is that 'evil is nothing', that it has no independent existence and cannot create, and that it will in the end be 'redressed' by good. The other view holds that evil is in fact 'real, and not merely an absence' (140-41). Our own experience of this world makes the latter view a tempting one to embrace. Shippey continues:

Tolkien's way of presenting this philosophical duality was through the Ring. It seems in several ways inconsistent. For one thing it is notoriously elastic, and not entirely passive. It 'betrayed' Isildur to the arrows of the orcs; it 'abandoned' Gollum, says Gandalf, in response to the 'dark thought from Mirkwood of its Master'; it all but betrays Frodo in The Prancing Pony when it slips onto his finger and proves his invisibility to the spies for the Nazgûl then present. 'Perhaps it had tried to reveal itself in response to some wish or command that was felt in the room', thinks Frodo, and he is clearly right. For all that it remains an object which cannot move itself or save itself from destruction. It has to work through the agency of its possessors, and especially by picking out the weak points of their characters.... These two possible views of the Ring are kept up throughout the three volumes, sentient creature or psychic amplifier. 

(142)

As we can see, it's a very simple matter to come up with quotations from the book that point in the direction of sentience if we take them literally. Even the film's 'It wants to be found', which does not occur in the book, is a reasonable extrapolation from the book's choice of active verbs -- 'betrayed' (FR 1.ii.55), 'abandoned' (56), 'is trying' (55) and many, many more -- to describe what the Ring is 'doing'. Indeed it is difficult to think of a way to speak of the effect the Ring has without making it sound as if the Ring is sentient. Which brings us back to 'obeying the law of gravity' and 'a kindly enclyning.'

What I wonder is this: what if we consider statements such as those Gandalf makes about the Ring betraying Isildur and abandoning Gollum and trying to get back to its Master from the perspective Lewis describes? As he tells us, such a way of speaking was Medieval, and Tolkien was, after all a Medievalist. Sauron made the Ring and 'let a great part of his former power pass into it', so much so that destroying it will undo him forever. Given this, Chaucer might well say that the hand of Sauron is the Ring's 'kindly stede' to which it would, of its nature, try to return, just as a stone returns to earth and fire to heaven.

But the Ring is not a natural thing, someone might object, unlike the stone Pippin which drops in the well in Moria. True enough. But surely even our benighted age does not yet require a demonstration that any object will fall if let go, regardless of whether it is a work of nature or craft? That palantír plummets rather nicely (TT 3.x.583-84); Frodo drops his sword at Weathertop (FR 1.xi.196); Gollum his fish at the forbidden pool (TT 4.vi.689); and, as everyone knows, 'not idly do the leaves of Lórien fall' (TT 3.ii.424).

How would our understanding of the problem of evil in The Lord of the Rings change if we took these expressions of what the Ring is 'doing' as metaphors? If we step back and say 'the Ring slipped off Isildur's finger' or 'the Ring fell out of Gollum's pocket,' doesn't the burden of evil shift? A complete answer would, I think, involve a long and complex examination of the Ring and all those affected by its 'gravity', both individually and together, and especially Bilbo, Frodo, and Gollum. I think I've been moving in this direction for a while. Let's see where it leads. 

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Works Consulted

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Justice Is Indivisible

I think of myself as Irish-American first of all, both of those things one and inseparable. I think about the history of my country and the country of my ancestors, beyond which I think of the history of Europe because that is where my people come from and that is the civilization that had the largest influence on the culture I live in. And just because these cultures are important to me doesn't mean I believe they are immaculate, or alone in the contribution they make to the world.

About the last thing I consider of any importance is the color of my skin, which I like just fine, but it doesn't make me better than anyone else. Admittedly, there are lots of things I don't have to worry about much, if at all, because of the color of my skin. The same goes for my being a straight male. And let's not forget that I am a Christian as well (though not a particularly good one). These accidents of birth confer undeserved privileges on me. As little privileged as I feel, it's hard to fail to see that others have a harder time, sometimes a terribly hard time, without them.

But what kind of idiot would I have to be to think that I am being threatened because others want the same privileges as I was born with? If others can reach a point where they don't have to worry about violence and discrimination because of their color or gender or religion or sexuality, how does that harm me? How is my 'race' diminished? Is there somehow only a finite amount of justice or decency or safety or even just plain courtesy in this world? So some of us have to lose justice in order for others to gain it? 

That's stupid, just plain stupid. I'll just stay Irish-American, if that's what it means to be white. I have nothing in common with people who think like that. Nor do I wish to. There's so much I don't understand about the world today, about people and how they see themselves and what they think is important, but 'I know that justice is indivisible. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.'

Dol biþ se þe eaðmod leofaþ?

This morning I sat down to finish The Seafarer. As I usually do, I copied out the lines I was going to translate, trying to get a sense of them as write. Almost at once something seemed a bit odd to my still uncaffeinated eye. (The pot was on, just not there yet.) The first sentence made sense grammatically, but even in the world turned upside down in which we now live it just didn't fit its context, as follows:

Dol biþ se þe eaðmod leofaþ; cymeþ him seo ar of heofonum. 

Foolish be he who lives meekly; to him comes grace from heaven.

So, foolish are the meek, but they get rewarded anyway? That didn't seem even vaguely beatitudinous. I double-checked my vocabulary. I double-check the text I'd written out. Those were the meanings of the words, and those were the words I'd written. As I continued on through the next lines, that first seemed even stranger. It fit less and less with what the poet said. 

What was I missing?

A whole line, as it turned out:

Dol biþ se þe him his drythen ne ondrædeþ: cymeþ him se deaþ unþinged.
Eadig biþ se þe eaþmod leofath; cymeþ him seo ar of heofonum. 

Foolish be he who does not fear the Lord: to him comes death unlooked for.
Blessed be he who lives meekly; to him comes grace from heaven.

Since I copy out three or four words at a time, my eye must have skipped because three of the first four words are the same. 

So once again my respect and sympathy for those in the scriptorium grows. Alcuin said there'd be days like this.