Leaf by Niggle

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"Niggle" redirects here. For a definition of the term "niggle", see the Wiktionary entry niggle.
"Leaf by Niggle"
Short story by J. R. R. Tolkien
English edition of Leaf by Niggle, HarperCollins, 2016
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish/Spanish
Genre(s)Fantasy short-story
Publication
Published inDublin Review
Publication dateJanuary 1945
Chronology
 
The Hobbit 		 
On Fairy-Stories

"Leaf by Niggle" is a short story written by

sub-creation
. The story came to him in a dream.

Context

Main article: J. R. R. Tolkien

Anglo-Saxon England and Northern Europe. His professional knowledge of works such as Beowulf shaped his fictional world of Middle-earth, including his high fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings.[T 2][1]

Plot summary

In this story, an artist named Niggle lives in a society that does not value art. Working only to please himself, he paints a canvas of a great tree with a forest in the distance. He invests each and every leaf of his tree with obsessive attention to detail, making every leaf uniquely beautiful. Niggle ends up discarding all his other artworks, or tacks them onto the main canvas, which becomes a single vast embodiment of his vision.

However, mundane duties constantly prevent Niggle from giving his work the attention it deserves, so it remains incomplete and is not fully realised. At the back of his head, Niggle knows that he has a great trip looming, and he must prepare for it, but Niggle's next door neighbour, a gardener named Parish, frequently drops by asking for assistance. Parish is lame, has a sick wife, and genuinely needs help. Niggle, having a good heart, takes time out to help—but he is also reluctant because he would rather work on his painting. Niggle has other pressing work duties as well that require his attention. Then Niggle himself catches a chill doing errands for Parish in the rain.

Eventually, Niggle is forced to take his trip, and cannot get out of it. He has not prepared, and as a result the trip goes wrong, and he ends up in a kind of institution, in which he must perform menial labour each day. Back at the home to which he cannot return, Niggle's painting is abandoned, used to patch a damaged roof, and all but destroyed (except for the one perfect leaf of the story's title, which is placed in the local museum).

In time, Niggle is paroled from the institution, and he is sent to a place "for a little gentle treatment". He discovers that this new place is the country of the tree and forest of his great painting. This place is the true realisation of his vision, not the flawed and incomplete version in his painting.

Niggle is reunited with his old neighbour, Parish, who now proves his worth as a gardener, and together they make the tree and forest even more beautiful. Finally, Niggle journeys farther and deeper into the Forest, and beyond into the great mountains that he only faintly glimpsed in his painting.

Long after both Niggle and Parish have taken their journeys, the place that they created together becomes a destination for many travellers to visit before their final voyage into the mountains, and it earns the name "Niggle's Parish".

Publication history

"Leaf by Niggle" was first published in the Dublin Review in 1945.[2][T 3] It first appeared in a book in 1964 alongside "On Fairy-Stories" in Tree and Leaf.[T 4] It has been republished in the collections The Tolkien Reader (1966),[T 5] Poems & Stories (1980),[T 6] A Tolkien Miscellany (2002),[T 7] and Tales from the Perilous Realm (2021).[T 8]

Analysis

Allegory

Tolkien made the general statement "I dislike

sub-creation] might come to be taken up into Creation in some plane in my 'purgatorial' story Leaf by Niggle."[T 10]

Of the journey of death

The Tolkien scholar and fellow-

Old Northumbrian poem Bede's Death Song. Those lines, he states, equate death to a journey, hinting to the reader to continue making such "equations" of things in the world to elements of the story; and further, that the reader of the story is meant to interpret the story in this way, every tiny detail exactly and entertainingly fitting the pattern.[3]

River Arno. Dante and Beatrice, by Henry Holiday
, 1883

A religious reading could lead to the conclusion that the allegory of "Leaf by Niggle" is life, death, purgatory and paradise. Niggle is not prepared for his unavoidable trip, as humans often are not prepared for death. His time in the institution and subsequent discovery of his Tree represent purgatory and heaven; Sebastian Knowles writes that the story "follows Dante's 'Purgatorio' in its general structure and in its smallest detail."[4]

Michael Milburn argues that

Earthly Paradise, the place for Tolkien as for Dante of final purification before heaven, Niggle's "mountains".[5] Tolkien had met Williams, as they were both members of the Inklings literary group. Further, Milburn notes, Tolkien, despite denying that Williams had been an influence, wrote a poem about him, in which he praises William's understanding of Dante, his romantic theology: "But heavenly footsteps, too, can Williams trace, / and after Dante, plunging, soaring, race / up to the threshold of Eternal Grace".[5]

Of Tolkien's life

An autobiographical interpretation places Tolkien himself as Niggle—in mundane matters as well as spiritual ones.

Faërie in some way, later in his life he came to doubt that he would "[rejoin] his own creations after death, like Niggle; he felt they were lost, like the Silmarils."[10] He adds that when Tolkien presents images of himself in his writings, as with Niggle and Smith, there is "a persistent streak of alienation".[11] Shippey lists several elements of the allegory in "Leaf by Niggle".[3]

Tom Shippey's analysis of "Leaf by Niggle" as an allegory of Tolkien's life[3]
Story element Aspect of Tolkien's life
Niggle the painter Tolkien the writer
Niggle's "leaf" The Hobbit, published 1937
Niggle's "Tree" The Lord of the Rings, still in work when "Leaf by Niggle" was written
The "country" that opens from it Middle-earth
The "other pictures ... tacked on to the edges of his great picture"
other works
which he fitted into his novel
"Potatoes" sacrificed to "paint" Medievalist research articles sacrificed to The Lord of the Rings

Of creation and sub-creation

Further information: Christianity in Middle-earth

"Leaf by Niggle" can be interpreted, too, as an illustration of Tolkien's religious philosophy of creation and sub-creation.

Arda is itself a subcreation designed to honour the true stories of the real world. Thus, The Lord of the Rings, despite its lack of overt religious elements, can be interpreted as a profoundly religious work.[14]

Surrealistic dream memory

Michael Organ, writing in the

Journal of Tolkien Research, notes that Tolkien stated in a letter that the story came to him one morning in 1939, shortly before the start of the Second World War, when he woke up with the story, which he called "that odd thing", in his mind "virtually" complete.[T 11][15] Tolkien stated in another letter that he then wrote it out "almost in a sitting and very nearly in the form in which it now appears", commenting that looking back at the story, he thought it "arose" from a combination of his love of trees and his concern that The Lord of the Rings would never be finished.[T 12] Organ describes the birth of "Leaf by Niggle" as "a frenzy of activity" resembling the automatic writing "popularised by proponents of Dada and Surrealism" in the early 20th century.[15] He notes, too, that Tolkien knew that dreams had an irrational side, and had commented that it was "exceptional" for fantasy to appear in dreams, as "Fantasy is a rational, not an irrational, activity".[15] Organ comments that Tolkien may have resisted "what he saw as the morbidity of surrealism" in connection with his story, precisely because "Leaf by Niggle"'s message is so positive.[15]

Visual imagery

Jeffrey MacLeod and Anna Smol write in Mythlore that while Tolkien defines sub-creation "in linguistic terms", he often links such verbal creation to visual images. For instance, in his poem "Mythopoeia", he mentions "script and limning packed of various hue", which they gloss as "writing and drawing, alphabet and image, the linguistic and the visual ... side by side." Similarly, they comment, in "Leaf by Niggle", the allegory uses the image of a painter. In his own life, Tolkien combined the writing of fiction with his artwork, while he defined imagination visually as the "mental power of image-making".[16]

References

Primary

  1. ^ Tolkien 1964, Introductory Note
  2. ^ Carpenter 2023, #131 to Milton Waldman, late 1951
  3. ^
    Jane Neave
    , 8–9 September 1962
  4. ^ Tolkien 1964
  5. OCLC 26059501
    .
  6. ISBN 978-0-0482-3174-1
    .
  7. ISBN 978-0-9654-6377-5
    .
  8. ISBN 978-0-3586-5296-0
    .
  9. ^ Carpenter 2023, Letter 131 to Milton Waldman, late 1951
  10. ^ Carpenter 2023, Letter 153 to Peter Hastings, draft, September 1954
  11. ^ Carpenter 2023, Letter 98 to Stanley Unwin, c. 18 March 1945
  12. ^ Carpenter 2023, Letter 199 to Caroline Everett, 24 June 1957

Secondary

  1. ^ Shippey 2005, pp. 146–149.
  2. Tolkien, Priscilla. "Leaf, by Niggle"
    . Tolkien: The Official Site of the Tolkien Estate. Retrieved 23 July 2023.
  3. ^ a b c Shippey 2005, pp. 49–50.
  4. ^ Knowles, Sebastian D. G. (1990). A Purgatorial Flame: Seven British Writers in the Second World War. University of Pennsylvania Press. pp. 140–141.
  5. ^ a b c d Milburn, Michael (2011). "Art According to Romantic Theology: Charles Williams's Analysis of Dante Reapplied to J.R.R. Tolkien's 'Leaf by Niggle'". Mythlore. 29 (3). Article 6.
  6. ^ Shippey 2001, p. xxxiii "'Leaf by Niggle' and 'Smith of Wootton Major' are in their different ways 'autobiographical allegories'".
  7. ISBN 0-8131-2301-1
    .
  8. ^
    OCLC 825560650
    .
  9. ^ Carpenter 1977, Part Seven "1959–1973 Last years", Chapter 1: "Headington".
  10. ^ Shippey 2005, p. 324.
  11. ISBN 0-8131-2301-1
    .
  12. doi:10.1353/esc.1998.0035
    .
  13. J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia. Routledge
    . pp. 134–135. The myth of the Dwarves' creation illustrates Tolkien's theory of subcreation as expressed in 'Mythopoeia,' and may indicate anxieties about the independent value of art.
  14. J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia. Routledge
    . pp. 639–640. While 'Lord of the Rings' contains many elements from Northern Mythology ... it has at its heart several Christian themes.
  15. ^
    Journal of Tolkien Research
    . 5 (1). Article 7.
  16. ^ MacLeod, Jeffrey J.; Smol, Anna (2008). "A Single Leaf: Tolkien's Visual Art and Fantasy". Mythlore. 27 (1). Article 10.

Sources

External links
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