Tolkien, Shakespeare, Trees, and The Lord of the Rings

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Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to Martin Simonson for his useful comments on an earlier draft.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 See Shippey for an extended argument with examples (Author 192–196; Road 177–178, 182–185). A summary of Tolkien’s opinion of Shakespeare in context is available in Scull and Hammond (1146–1148). This issue is also partly explored from multiple perspectives in Croft et al.

2 In Carpenter’s words, Tolkien enjoyed “declaring that Shakespeare had been unjustifiably deified” (Inklings 25).

3 For some additional updates, see Cilli’s second edition of Tolkien’s Library (2023). Unsurprisingly, Tolkien owned C. T. Onions’s A Shakespeare Glossary (Cilli, Tolkien’s Library [2019] 227). Cilli proposes that Tolkien might have even taught Shakespeare at Leeds (Tolkien’s Library [2019] 357). Although he fails to provide the year, Ryan asserts that Tolkien lectured on Hamlet during a Hilary term in Oxford, in collaboration with C. S. Lewis, H. V. D. Dyson, C. L. Wrenn, and N. Coghill (50).

4 In a 1958 letter to L. M. Cutts, Tolkien expressed again that one of the sources for the Ents was “my deep disappointment with Shakespeare’s Macbeth” (Sotheby’s 297).

5 “I am (obviously) much in love with plants and above all trees, and always have been; and I find human maltreatment of them as hard to bear as some find ill-treatment of animals” (Tolkien, Letters 320, #165).

6 See Cossio and Simonson for Shakespeare’s portrayal of trees, woods, and forests in some of his plays (85–97). See also Barton; Egan. As Carpenter notes about Tolkien: “His mother taught him a great deal of botany, and he responded to this and soon became very knowledgeable” (Biography 30). In an epistle to Miss E. Byrne, Tolkien confessed that most of his favorite books during his teenage years dealt with botany and that: “My most treasured volume was John’s Flowers of the Field [1908], an account of the flora of the British Isles” (Cilli, Tolkien’s Library [2019] 134).

7 For illustrative purposes, see Judd and Judd; Saguaro and Thacker; Hazell.

8 The word ‘envious’ in “Clamb’ring to hang, an envious sliver broke” (Shakespeare 4.7.145) is meant to increase the dramatic effect, though it also seems to imply some sort of agency on part of the willow, which is reminiscent of Tolkien’s Old Man Willow.

9 “There is a willow grows aslant a brook / That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream” (Shakespeare 4.7.138–139) cf. “a huge willow-tree, old and hoary […] its knotted and twisted trunk gaping in wide fissures that creaked faintly as the boughs moved” (Tolkien, LotR I.6.117).

10 See Hammond and Scull for Tolkien’s artwork (155; fig. 147).

11 Tolkien, with his ample knowledge of botany, was probably cognizant of the fact that the willow in Hamlet is clearly a native species of the Isles, and not the foreign weeping willow which arrived in England in the eighteenth century.

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Funding

This article was completed under the auspices of a Next Generation EU Margarita Salas postdoctoral grant (MARSA22/19), financed by the Ministry of Universities (Government of Spain) and the European Union, and by the research group REWEST (IT-1565-22), funded by the Basque Government and UPV/EHU.