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Of trees and truth: Tolkien on cultivating greenness

The literature of Herbert, Lewis and Tolkien all helps us see the seen and unseen better.

Jim is Director of the Marion E. Wade Center and Professor of English at Wheaton College, where he holds the Marion E. Wade Chair of Christian Thought. 

a row of flowers with green stalks and blue flowers.
Isabella Fischer on Unsplash.

Each Easter season I return to a poem called “The Flower,” written by the Anglican priest George Herbert and published shortly after his death in a collection called The Temple. In both its growth and its withering, the flower of the poem represents the poet’s spiritual life, and the verses speak powerfully to the renewal that only God can bring. “The Flower” opens in joyful exclamation— 

“How fresh, oh Lord, how sweet and clean  

Are thy returns! even as the flowers in spring” 

—but my favorite image appears at the start of the second stanza, where the poet marvels,  

“Who would have thought my shriveled heart 

 Could have recovered greenness?”  

C.S. Lewis took note of the second stanza as well. At the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College, Illinois, where I work, we care for nearly 2,500 of the books that Lewis had in his personal library, many of which include his notes and underlinings. Lewis’s copy of The Temple is no exception. The back pages of the book contain a carefully constructed index in Lewis’s own hand, and one of the index entries points us back to the concluding words of the second stanza of “The Flower.” Turning to the poem, we find a hand-drawn line, very likely added by Lewis himself, running down the page alongside the stanza. I find that line to be heartening—a pointer, perhaps, to a shared interest. And though the connection between poem’s verses and the book’s appearance is purely coincidental, I appreciate the fact that Lewis’s copy of The Temple has a weathered green cover.  

What I love about “The Flower,” and about Herbert’s poetry more generally, is that it helps us see the seen thing better, helps us pay attention to it, so that we may glimpse the unseen thing. By bringing the flower into clearer focus, Herbert helps strengthen the eyes of faith. Herbert does not present nature itself as divine—the flower is a metaphor, after all—but he does represent nature in ways that point to its beauty while testifying to who God is and who we are in relation to Him.  

How during this Easter season might we recover greenness in Herbert’s sense? The poetry of The Temple is an excellent starting place. But if you are looking for another literary guide, I recommend turning (or returning) to another writer whose works we collect at the Wade Center—J.R.R. Tolkien. Should you visit the Wade to pore over the annotations in Lewis’s books, you’ll also have the chance to examine the small oak desk upon which Tolkien penned The Hobbit.  

In a note to his American publisher in June of 1955, Tolkien wrote,  

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

The parenthetical “obviously” is significant. Though Tolkien didn’t view The Lord of the Rings as autobiographical, he was willing to admit that his love of plants and trees was on full display in his life and work.  

Tolkien’s faith was on display in his writing as well, as Holly Ordway argues in her remarkable book Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography. Ordway’s first chapter begins with Tolkien’s own words on the matter: “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.” As with Tolkien’s “obviously” so too with his “of course.” After calling our attention to the latter, Ordway persuasively demonstrates the truth of Tolkien’s words, exploring in detail how his religious convictions and practices were indeed fundamental to him and his work. “The Lord of the Rings is not an allegory of the Gospels or a tale didactically expressing Christianity,” she writes. “Rather, the whole world of Middle-earth and everything in it is infused with, rooted in, its author’s Christian vision of reality.” 

Ordway’s metaphor of rootedness is a fitting one, and—in our pursuit of Herbert’s greenness—it is worth exploring the entanglements between the obvious and fundamental aspects of Tolkien’s work: his love of “growing things” (to borrow a phrase from Treebeard) and his faith.  

Consider a few of the trees that we find across Tolkien’s writings.  

In his poem “Mythopoeia,” Tolkien responds to C.S. Lewis’s view (before Lewis converted back to Christianity) that myths are beautiful yet untrue. Tolkien begins the poem among the trees, expressing Lewis’s views as follows:

“You look at trees and label them just so,

(for trees are ‘trees’, and growing is ‘to grow’).”

The problem with viewing nature in such purely naturalistic terms, Tolkien goes on to suggest, is that it ignores the origins of terms like “tree.” It leaves out the humans who name the things of the world and develop myths about them and, more importantly, it leaves out the Source of such creativity. For Tolkien, human creativity finds its beginnings in God, and we reflect Him through acts of sub-creation. Thus he writes,  

“The heart of man is not compound of lies, 

 but draws some wisdom from the only Wise, 

 and still recalls him.”  

Whether it is the simple act of identifying a tree by name or the complex development of stories across time and place—what Tolkien describes elsewhere as “the intricately knotted and ramified history of the branches on the Tree of Tales”—our creativity flows from, and is a form of reverence for, the One who created all things. 

In The Lord of the Rings, we encounter not just trees but also the tree-like Ents. Referring to himself and the other Ents as “tree-herds,” Treebeard explains to Merry and Pippin that the Ents help the trees grow and develop:  

“We keep off strangers and the foolhardy; and we train and we teach, we walk and we weed.”  

In line with Ordway’s quotation above, Tolkien’s Ents are not meant to be read allegorically; however, the tree-herding activity of the Ents reinforces the theme of stewardship in The Lord of the Rings—a theme that echoes Scripture’s call to humans to care for creation and, just maybe, encourages us to take up similar work in our own places. (For further encouragement along these lines, check out Kristen Page’s book The Wonders of Creation: Learning Stewardship from Narnia and Middle-Earth, which grew out of Page’s lectures for our annual Ken and Jean Hansen Lectureship at the Wade Center.)  

And in Tolkien’s short story Leaf by Niggle, we encounter an artist desperately trying to work on his painting of, yes, a tree. This tree stands for our efforts to create art, which, though frequently frustrated and often motivated by self-interest in this life, may be purified and brought to fruition in the age to come.  

Tolkien’s trees testify to the beginning, middle, and end of Christian story. Among their roots and trunks and branches, we encounter illustrations of his views about creation, the proper ways to care for it, and its culmination.  

In a 1945 letter, Tolkien told his son Christopher about an essay by Lewis on the truth and beauty that we find in the story of Scripture. In the essay, which Ordway observes is likely his piece “Myth Became Fact,” Lewis argued that people of faith are, in the words of Tolkien’s letter, “meant to draw nourishment from the beauty as well as the truth” of the story. But what of the person without faith who “clings” only to its beauty? According to Tolkien, Lewis maintained that such readers “still in that way get some nourishment and are not cut off wholly from the sap of life.”  

Greenness for Herbert is ultimately the Lord’s doing. We should seek, therefore, to find nourishment in the truth and the beauty of Scripture, the source of the sap of life. Growing things spring up from these pages as well: fruit trees and fig trees and oak trees and olive trees; vines and branches; a new shoot springing forth from a stump, a crown of thorns, the wood of the cross. And as the Psalmist reminds us, the one who “meditates day and night” on the law shall be “like a tree.” When we read and digest the Word of life, we grow greener.   

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Why we should mourn the death of the semi-colon

In our busy, frenetic lives, we need that small pause more than ever.

Paul is a pioneer minister, writer and researcher based in Poole, Dorset.

A woman stands across a busy roads, looking up from her phone in a sad way.
Su San Lee on Unsplash.

In the morning news; a headline about the decline of a species. Thankfully not a rare rhino or butterfly this time. It’s a punctuation mark. The semi-colon is an increasingly endangered creature. According to recent research it has declined in use by 50 per cent in the past two decades. This on top of a 70 per cent slide in usage between 1800 and 2000. Further research suggests that 67 per cent of students rarely use it and over 50 per cent wouldn’t know how to anyway. 

I’m kind of indifferent on the merits or otherwise of the semi-colon. But I at least appreciate the option. So, its value feels worth defending. Who knows what unintended consequences in the ecology of language might occur if we lost it all together?  

The semi-colon was invented in the 15th century by a scholar and printer Aldus Pius Manutius the Elder (whose name might have benefited from a semicolon itself). A hybrid between a comma and a colon, the semi-colon invites a pause; it’s a moment to breathe. And it opens enough space to reflect on what might be being said between what went before and what comes after. It signals a kind of meaning in the gap. It creates a hint of resonance beyond the plain meaning of the words of a sentence.  

Despite its enthusiastic use by the likes of no less than Jane Austen and Charles Dickens it has certainly come in for some stick over the years. Kurt Vonnegut famously said of semi-colons ‘all they do is show you’ve been to college.’  Who knew two marks on a page could signal such elitism? The semi-colon says, ‘you're trying too hard’. Or it might just say, ‘why did you do that?’, since so many people fail to understand what it represents. Novelist John Irvine reckoned readers ‘think the author has killed a fruit fly directly above a comma’. 

So what is killing off the semi-colon? Well, if the statistics above are to be believed it could be as simple as a decreasing understanding on how to use it. Though of course there are feedback loops here. We learn grammar and punctuation as much by reading as by being taught. Others point the finger at the breathless world of social media. As more and more of our communication is constrained by space and time, the semi-colon’s quiet request for a pause for consideration is being largely ignored.  

We need semi-colons if our lives are to be more than just an incessant flow of connected moments .

If this is the case then the semi-colon is another species within a kind of mass extinction which is the result of the great acceleration of our age, alongside the coffee break, lunch break, walk round the block and long stare out of the window. These are simply things that we don’t have time for anymore; we wonder if they had any value in the first place. The semi-colon is largely being replaced by the dash. Which is pretty ironic when you think about it.  

Perhaps concern over the loss of this little mark is in an awareness that it’s a kind of canary in the gold mine of our culture of acceleration. The loss of the semi-colon is a sign of the loss of something far more significant: the rhythms and cadences of our lives that afford pause, reflection; that open up the kind of spaces where creativity; meaning; imagination; spirituality happen. 

The semi-colon reminds me, strangely, of the Hebrew psalms. The monastic tradition includes regular communal singing (or saying) of the psalms. Typically, these poems, which formed such a key part of Hebrew worship, work on the basis of what is known as parallelism. Essentially each thought in a psalm is composed as a sentence in two lines. The two halves of these sentences are parallel, in the sense that they both make statements about the same thing. Sometimes these statements say the same thing differently. Sometimes one half of the sentence builds on another. There are endless creative ways in which the psalmists use this simple device.  

When psalms are used in prayer or worship parallelism is often observed by introducing a pause at the end of the first half of the sentence. It's an odd tradition if you are not used to it. An established monastic community naturally feels the length of pause together. Visitors to a service in a monastery often end up coming in early.  

Yet, with time you begin to realise these pauses are a wonderful thing. The pauses create a rhythm and time signature that invites reflection. The pause says ‘take your time, there’s a lot of meaning here in all these similes and metaphors, what might they mean to you?’ Perhaps even ‘what, in this moment to breathe, might God be saying to you?’ 

There’s a feeling for so many of us that life is starting to feel a bit like the final chapter of James Joyces’ Ulysses: devoid of punctuation. We need semi-colons if our lives are to be more than just an incessant flow of connected moments. And we need to learn how to use them. We need practices that make space for the undervalued attributes of reflection, daydreaming, prayer. In that sense saying the psalms may be a practice worth giving time to. 

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This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

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