The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 3: Reader’s Guide PART 2

In all my works I take the part of trees as against all their enemies. Lothlórien is beautiful because there the trees were loved; elsewhere forests are represented as awakening to consciousness of themselves. The Old Forest was hostile to two legged creatures because of the memory of many injuries. Fangorn Forest was old and beautiful, but at the time of the story tense with hostility because it was threatened by a machineloving enemy. Mirkwood had fallen under the domination of a Power that hated all living things but was restored to beauty and became Greenwood the Great before the end of the story. [30 June 1972, Letters, pp. 419–20]

In the same letter he commented on ‘the destruction, torture and murder of trees perpetuated by private individuals and minor official bodies’ (p. 420), perhaps thinking of the poplar tree which was an inspiration for his story *Leaf by Niggle. He told his Aunt *Jane Neave that ‘there was a great tree – a huge poplar with vast limbs – visible through my window even as I lay in bed. I loved it, and was anxious about it. It had been savagely mutilated some years before, but had gallantly grown new limbs – though of course not with the unblemished grace of its former natural self; and now a foolish neighbour was agitating to have it felled. Every tree has its enemy, few have an advocate’ (8–9 September 1962, Letters, p. 321). At the end of Leaf by Niggle the great tree that Niggle had attempted to paint, but could reproduce his vision only imperfectly, is made real, whole and glorious.

Trees figured prominently in Tolkien’s imagination no less than in Niggle’s. In *‘The Silmarillion’ the Two Trees that lit Valinor with their unsullied light are of primary mythical importance; the light provided by the Sun and Moon, created from the fruit and flower of the Trees after they had been defiled, is of lesser kind. In *On Fairy-Stories Tolkien refers to a symbolic ‘Tree of Tales’, which he himself drew several times (the ‘Tree of Amalion’, see Artist and Illustrator, pp. 64–5). He described it to Rayner Unwin on 23 December 1963 as ‘a ‘mythical “tree”, which … bears besides various shapes of leaves many flowers small and large signifying poems and major legends’ (Letters, p. 342).

In *Smith of Wootton Major a birch tree protects Smith from the Wind and is stripped of all its leaves. In The Lord of the Rings there are also the Party Tree at Bag End, the Old Forest and Old Man Willow, the holly trees at the entrance to Moria and the crescent moon-bearing trees on the doors of the west gate, Fangorn Forest, the woods of Ithilien, the White Tree embroidered on Aragorn’s banner and found by him as a sapling, and finally the trees felled by Saruman in the Shire and replaced by Sam.

Dylan Pugh discusses trees in myth and history in relation to Tolkien’s writings in ‘The Tree of Tales’, Mallorn 21 (June 1984). In ‘Tolkien’s Trees’, Mallorn 35 (September 1997), Claudia Riiff Finseth comments that Tolkien gives us in his fiction

all kinds of forests and groves in which to find adventure – and he does more. He ascribes to his individual trees and forests a fantastic variety of meanings and possibilities by drawing from and adding to the rich symbolism of trees that has developed throughout the history of literature. Tolkien describes the trees with which we are familiar – oak, birch, willow – so that we see them with a fresh eye. He creates new trees for us such as we have never seen growing on our earth. He gives us a chance to look at things from a treeish point of view, which is to say a fresh point of view, and from there he can give an added dimension to his human characters, who define themselves in part through their attitude towards trees.

Indeed, she comments that ‘as a lover of trees and a man who abhorred the needless destruction of them, Tolkien the writer often defined his characters as good or evil by their feelings about trees’ (p. 37).

Verlyn Flieger, however, in ‘Taking the Part of Trees: Eco-Conflict in Middle-earth’, in J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances (2000), points out some inconsistencies in Tolkien’s attitude to trees. She notes that the ‘well-ordered, well-farmed countryside’ of the Shire (The Lord of the Rings, Prologue) and even ‘Frodo’s peaceful sunlit garden … must at some earlier time have been wrested from what Tom Bombadil calls the “vast forgotten woods” [bk. I, ch. 7] of which the Old Forest is the sole survivor’ (p. 150). And she discusses whether there is any difference between hobbits cutting down and burning trees to prevent the Old Forest advancing into the Shire, and Saruman’s orcs felling trees in Fangorn, and between the Ents’ anger at the Orcs and the hostility towards Hobbits from Old Man Willow and trees in the Old Forest.

In Tolkien in the Land of Heroes: Discovering the Human Spirit (2003) Anne C. Petty comments that

Tolkien’s love of the outdoors and the wildness of the natural world took hold early and continued throughout his life. His role as a crusader for nature in the face of mechanized progress seems to have been triggered when his mother moved the family from rural Sarehole to industrial Birmingham, and escalated after his return from the war – an attitude you can see developing if you read his collected letters sequentially. Nature itself becomes a sentient character in Tolkien’s writings, and its destruction in his tales serves as a grand symbol for what he felt was wrong with society (whether modern-day industrialists or corrupted wizards).

The forces of evil are frequently associated with scenarios that demonstrate the horrible things done to the natural world, especially to trees. But rather than just creating ongoing lament for the death of trees Tolkien takes advantage of the printed page to provide an outlet for revenge. He creates champions and personifications of nature who can take up the crusade for him, righting the wrongs inflicted on hill and tree by those who mar the landscape with evil intent. Although his stance on defending nature and trees in particular, was notoriously embraced by the ‘green’ activists of the sixties and several more aggressive ecology movements since then, you won’t find any evidence that he supported these groups …. But the dismantling of Isengard by Ents and Huorns is one of the most satisfying acts of retribution committed to paper. In this sense Tolkien’s pen was definitely mightier than any sword he might have waved trying to stop the felling of trees or building of parking lots. [pp. 219–20]

See further, the rest of her chapter ‘In Defense of Nature’, pp. 219–43.

Patrick Curry has written (in ‘Nature’, J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, ed. Michael D.C. Drout (2007), p. 453) that one of the most distinctive marks of Tolkien’s fiction

is the extent to which its natural places are so individual, varied, and fully realised. Furthermore … they are never mere settings for the human drama; rather they participate in and help determine the narrative. The various places of Middle-earth could themselves be said to figure as characters in the stories of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

In Tolkien’s stories, no aspect of the natural world – geology, flora, fauna, weather, and the stars and Moon – is wholly neglected, and most receive respectful, even loving attention at some point. Nature is never abstract but rather as we actually expreince it, sensuous and particular. Thus, the power of place is paramount, just as it was in aboriginally mythic and enchanted nature – and still is, in so far as such a sensibility still survives.

In On Fairy-Stories Tolkien wrote of ‘the desire of men to hold communion with other living things …. Other creatures are like other realms with which Man has broken off relations, and sees now only from the outside at a distance, being at war with them, or on the terms of an uneasy armistice’ (*Tree and Leaf, pp. 19, 60–1). In his fiction men and animals often exist in close relationship. Huan the hound and Carcharoth the wolf are important to the ‘Silmarillion’ tale of Beren and Lúthien (*‘Of Beren and Lúthien’). Among Tolkien’s writings for children, Mr Bliss (*Mr. Bliss) interacts with bears, Farmer Giles (*Farmer Giles of Ham) with his dog Garm, Father Christmas (*The ‘Father Christmas’ letters) with the North Polar Bear, Beorn of The Hobbit with his animal servants. Birds, some of which can speak with humans, take active roles in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. And in the latter book, horses are featured as characters in their own right, particularly Shadowfax and Bill the Pony. Animals are also the subjects of several of Tolkien’s poems, such as *Fastitocalon and *Oliphaunt, drawn partly from the medieval bestiary tradition. Unusually, *Roverandom is told from the viewpoint of an animal, a dog who converses with other dogs, the gull Mew, and the whale Uin.

Some of Tolkien’s pictures made from nature – his talents as an artist were in landscape rather than portraiture – are also memorable, though one feels that, like Niggle, Tolkien often caught only a shadow of what his inner eye could see. Still, it would be difficult to think of any artist who could capture visually the Mallorn trees of Lothlórien (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 157; Art of The Lord of the Rings, fig. 64) which Tolkien described so hauntingly in words. Nor could his watercolour of Taur-na-Fuin (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 54; Art of The Hobbit, fig. 48) fully convey the claustrophobic picture of those woods Tolkien describes in The Tale of Turambar: ‘a dark and perilous region so thick with pines of giant growth that none but the goblins might find a track, having eyes that pierced the deepest gloom’ (*The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, p. 78).

Some of his more successful illustrations celebrating aspects of nature and landscape are The Gardens of the Merking’s Palace (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 76), with its depiction of an underwater world full of colour; ‘Mr Bliss on the Hillside’ (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 83), with a view into the distance similar to many in the Cotswolds Tolkien knew so well; four watercolours for *The Hobbit with contrasting landscapes – the well tended sunny fields of The Hill: Hobbiton-across-the-Water, the deep valley of Rivendell, the wildness of the Misty Mountains in Bilbo Woke Up with the Early Sun in His Eyes inspired by Tolkien’s 1911 visit to Switzerland, and the light glimpsed through an avenue of trees in Bilbo Comes to the Huts of the Raft-Elves (Artist and Illustrator, figs. 98, 108, 113, 124; Art of The Hobbit, figs. 11, 23, 39, 64); and the stylized late The Hills of the Morning (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 1). Tolkien also made topographical drawings and watercolours which suggest weather, season, or time of day: the detailed view of the garden at 20 Northmoor Road in Spring 1940, the rainstorm in the background of Lambourn, Berks, the light filtered through the trees in Foxglove Year, and the sky, clouds, and shadows in Summer in Kerry are particularly noteworthy (Artist and Illustrator, figs. 3, 11, 17, 29).

See further, Lara Sookoo, ‘Animals in Tolkien’s World’, J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, ed. Michael D.C. Drout (2007); and Gregory Hartley, ‘Civilized Goblins and Talking Animals: How The Hobbit Created Problems of Sentience for Tolkien’ in The Hobbit and Tolkien’s Mythology: Essays on Revisions and Influences, ed. Bradford Lee Eden (2014). See also *Environment.

Neave, Emily Jane (née Suffield, 1872–1963). From 1885 to April 1892 Emily Jane Suffield, commonly known as Jane, attended King Edward VI High School for Girls in *Birmingham. The convenience of the School to New Street Station allowed Jane to pass private messages from her elder sister Mabel (*Mabel Tolkien) to *Arthur Tolkien on the railway platform, before their father (see *Suffield family) would permit Mabel to be formally betrothed. In October 1892 Jane was appointed a mistress at Bath Row School, one of King Edward’s Schools for Girls. In 1893–6, concurrent with her teaching duties, she studied geology, botany, and physiology at Mason College, the predecessor of the University of Birmingham, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in 1895 under the examinations of the University of London. From ?1897 she worked in Liverpool, organizing a science school (or the science department of a school; the exact circumstances are not known), but returned to Bath Row School in June 1899. From 1900 to 1903 she was a member of the Church Party on the Birmingham School Board.

In spring 1895 Mabel Tolkien brought her two sons to England from *South Africa. She taught her boys many things, but it was Jane who instructed her young nephew Ronald Tolkien in geometry. At this time, and for the next few years, Jane still lived in the Suffield family home in the Birmingham suburb of Kings Heath. There she met a lodger, Edwin Neave (1872–1909), the son of a Salford pawnbroker, now or later an inspector for the Guardian Fire Insurance Company (later the Guardian Assurance Company): he would sit ‘on the stairs singing “Polly-Wolly-Doodle” to the accompaniment of a banjo and making eyes at Jane. The family thought him common, and they were horrified when she became engaged to him’ (Humphrey Carpenter, Biography, p. 18). (In *Finn and Hengest Tolkien speculates (p. 52) that the surname Neave ‘probably’ is related to the name Hnæf via Middle English neve ‘nephew’ and modern dialectal neve, neive.) In 1902 Edwin was promoted to agent in his firm and in 1904 moved to *Hove. Ronald Tolkien stayed in Hove with Edwin temporarily while his mother was in hospital.

In summer 1905 Edwin was appointed Resident Secretary (manager) of the Nottingham branch of the Guardian Assurance Company. This further promotion evidently enabled him at last to support a wife. Jane Suffield resigned from her teaching position on 31 May 1905, and she and Edwin were married in Manchester in August of that year. They settled in the village of *Gedling, from which Edwin could commute to Nottingham by train. Their marriage was cut short, however, by Edwin’s death from bronchial pneumonia on 11 May 1909.

Jane subsequently obtained the post of Lady Warden at University Hall, University of St Andrews, the first residence hall for women students in *Scotland (opened 1896). She was later praised for her ‘wise and gentle wardenship’ and for her learning: ‘Her vivid mental life knew no boundaries, her knowledge of English Literature was so vast that one felt she should have been a professor, perhaps of poetry, a scholar and the author of many books. But she loved her own subject best and followed with intense interest its philosophy and new developments all through her life’ (obituary in the St Andrews Alumnus Chronicle, quoted in Andrew H. Morton and John Hayes, Tolkien’s Gedling, 1914: The Birth of a Legend (2008), p. 17). Tolkien visited his aunt in St Andrews on at least two occasions. On one of these, probably in 1910, he made a drawing, St Andrews from Kinkell Brak, and on another, in 1912, he wrote a short poem, The Grimness of the Sea (*The Horns of Ylmir).

While in St Andrews Jane became close friends with James and Ellen Brookes-Smith (*Brookes-Smith family), whose daughters attended a school in the city. Ellen was a kindred spirit, and in July 1911 the two became joint owners of two farms and adjacent land in Gedling, Church Farm (renamed Phoenix Farm) and Manor Farm, following their auction that March when Jane had independently bid for Church Farm. The 1911 Census, conducted on 2 April, records Jane as a boarder at Church Farm, presumably to look at the property with its tenant farmer, Arthur Lamb.

In late summer 1911 Jane and her nephews, Ronald and *Hilary Tolkien, joined a walking tour in *Switzerland organized by the Brookes-Smiths. In 1912 she resigned her position at St Andrews and moved to Gedling; she is listed in a local directory for 1912 as a ‘farmer’. With Ellen Brookes-Smith she managed and worked Phoenix Farm and Manor Farm. Hilary Tolkien joined them there, having chosen a life in agriculture. Ronald visited his aunt and brother and the Brookes-Smiths at Gedling on several occasions, and made at least three drawings of Phoenix Farm.

The Neave–Brookes-Smith partnership was dissolved in 1922, a result, perhaps, of the deep depression into which English agriculture fell immediately after the end of the First World War. Jane then appears to have lived briefly in Devon before buying another farm, at Dormston, Inkberrow, Worcestershire. Known as Dormston Manor Farm as well as a variety of other names, most notably ‘Bag End’, it comprised just over 200 acres and included among several buildings an early manor house which had been substantially rebuilt in 1582. This was a substantial dwelling, brick at the front and half-timbered at the back, and with three wings. From 1923 until 1927 Jane worked the farm in partnership with Marjorie Atlee, a former pupil who had worked at Gedling as a ‘land girl’ and in 1927 married Jane’s nephew Frank Suffield (son of Mark Oliver Suffield). Jane’s father, John Suffield, spent much time at Bag End in his final years.

In 1931 Jane sold the Bag End farm except for two cottages. She let one of these and lived for a short while in the other (Church Cottage) before moving to Chelmsford in Essex. According to Andrew Morton (see references below), Jane now pursued an interest in medieval mysticism and moved to Chelmsford to be near the Diocesan retreat run by the mystic Evelyn Underhill. In 1937, however, she returned to Church Cottage, where she stayed for ten years. Later she lived in a caravan on Hilary Tolkien’s farm in Blackminster, and finally in Gilfachreda in West Wales with Frank and Marjorie Suffield.

Tolkien wrote of his Aunt Jane to Joyce Reeves on 4 November 1961: ‘The professional aunt is a fairly recent development, perhaps; but I was fortunate in having an early example: one of the first women to take a science degree. She is now ninety, but only a few years ago went botanizing in Switzerland’ (Letters, p. 308). Asked by Jane earlier that year ‘if you wouldn’t get out a small book with Tom Bombadil at the heart of it, the sort of book that we old ’uns can afford to buy for Christmas presents’, Tolkien assembled *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (1962). It was published just in time to delight his aunt a few months before her death.

See further, including photographs of Jane Neave, Morton and Hayes, Tolkien’s Gedling, 1914; Andrew H. Morton, Tolkien’s Bag End (2009); and Maggie Burns, ‘Jane Suffield’, Connecting Histories website.

Nesbit, Edith (1858–1924). Despite the death of her father when she was three, the English writer E. Nesbit enjoyed a generally happy childhood with her mother and siblings: she was the youngest of five surviving children. Her marriage in 1880 to Hubert Bland was unconventional: both had lovers, and Bland’s two illegitimate children were brought up together with the three surviving children of the marriage. Hubert and Edith were also founding members of the Fabian Society, formed to propagate evolutionary socialism. After Hubert’s death Nesbit married an old friend, Tommy Tucker, with whom she lived the rest of her life. Among Nesbit’s likely lovers, certainly a close admirer, was *R.W. Reynolds, one of Tolkien’s masters at *King Edward’s School, Birmingham. Nesbit dedicated her adult novel The Incomplete Amorist (1906) partly to Reynolds and used his Christian name for one of the Bastables in her children’s fiction.

To supplement family income Nesbit sold poems and juvenile and adult fiction to magazines, much of it hack-work. It was not until she was almost forty that she wrote the first of the children’s stories that brought her fame. Her stories of the Bastable family began to appear in 1897, and were published in book form as The Story of the Treasure Seekers in 1899. Tales of children trying to find ways to make money to amend the fortunes of their impoverished family, they were appreciated by readers of all ages. Further books about the Bastables followed, including The Wouldbegoods (1901) and The New Treasure Seekers (1904). *Roger Lancelyn Green notes in Tellers of Tales: Children’s Books and Their Authors from 1800 to 1964 (rewritten and rev. edn. 1965) that it was from her own ‘holiday life that Edith derived the joyous recollections of childhood’ evident in her work (p. 208). ‘She had, as perhaps no other author has quite possessed it, the power of becoming a child again, of thinking and inventing with her child characters, speaking and writing from their point of view – but with the skill and discrimination of a practised author’ (p. 206). The Railway Children, probably her best known story about ordinary children and their leisure activities, was first published (in book form) in 1906.

In 1900 eight short stories by Nesbit which had appeared in Strand Magazine the previous year were collected in The Book of Dragons. In writing of many of these dragons, comic figures that are no match for their child opponents, Nesbit may have been influenced by ‘The Reluctant Dragon’ by *Kenneth Grahame (1898), and Grahame’s story and Nesbit’s collection may have contributed in turn to the character of Chrysophylax in *Farmer Giles of Ham (1949).

Nesbit also wrote two stories about children travelling into their family’s past, The House of Arden (1908) and Harding’s Luck (1909). Virginia Luling has suggested (‘Going Back: Time Travel in Tolkien and E. Nesbit’, Mallorn 53 (Spring 2012)) that the first of these, in which the protagonists, Edred and Elfrida, find themselves living in the bodies of their ancestors, may have influenced Tolkien in writing *The Lost Road and *The Notion Club Papers.

But better known among Nesbit’s works are those in which contemporary children experience magical adventures, especially Five Children – and It (1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), and The Story of the Amulet (1906). Roger Lancelyn Green’s comment on the opening of the first of Nesbit’s dragon stories is also applicable to these: ‘And so straight into the realm of magic, with the prosaicness of everyday life that makes it absolutely real and acceptable; the mixture of fancy and observation which is the real child-world, the game come to life and the day-dream that stands up to the clear light of noon’ (Teller of Tales, p. 211).

On 31 August 1938 Tolkien wrote to C.A. Furth at George Allen & Unwin (*Publishers) that Nesbit was ‘an author I delight in’ (courtesy of Christopher Tolkien), and in drafts for *On Fairy-Stories he wrote of the ‘triumphant formula that E. Nesbit found in the Amulet and the Phoenix and the Carpet’ (*On Fairy-Stories (extended edn. 2008), p. 251). From The Story of the Amulet and the earlier Five Children – and It Tolkien borrowed the Psammead for his own *Roverandom (1998). In Five Children – and It, while digging a hole in a gravel-pit children find in sand at the bottom a strange creature: ‘Its eyes were on long horns like a snail’s eyes, and it could move them in and out like telescopes; it had ears like a bat’s ears, and its tubby body was shaped like a spider’s and covered with thick soft fur; its legs and arms were furry too, and it had hands and feet like a monkey’s’ (1912 printing, p. 14). It is a Psammead, or sand-fairy. It likes to sleep in warm sand, dislikes getting wet, and if disturbed can be rather gruff. Like Gandalf at the beginning of *The Hobbit it plays with the meaning of words and conventional phrases: when one of the children says that ‘now one comes to look at you’ she can see that it is a sand-fairy, the Psammead replies, with literal correctness, ‘You came to look at me several sentences ago’ (p. 16). The Psammead magically grants the children a series of wishes, almost all of which have unfortunate consequences, but luckily the magic lasts only until sunset. Similarly in Roverandom the dog Rover, who has been turned into a toy, meets a ‘sand-sorcerer’ called Psamathos Psamathides, ‘an excellent magician’ who ‘liked to lie buried in warm sand when the sun was shining, so that not more than the tip of one of his long ears stuck out’ (p. 11; ‘long ears’ was an emendation from ‘long horns’), ‘certainly was ugly’ (p. 13), and had ‘a fat tummy’ (p. 16) and ‘legs like a rabbit’ (p. 57). Psamathos saves Rover from the incoming tide, and sends him on excursions to the Moon and to the mer-king’s palace under the sea. In the earliest text of Roverandom the sand-sorcerer is actually called a psammead.