Old Man Willow
![Historic drawing of the character](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c9/Old_Man_Willow.jpg/330px-Old_Man_Willow.jpg)
In J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy The Lord of the Rings, Old Man Willow is a malign tree-spirit of great age in Tom Bombadil's Old Forest, appearing physically as a large willow tree beside the River Withywindle, but spreading his influence throughout the forest. He is the first hostile character encountered by the Hobbits after they leave the Shire.
Tolkien made a drawing of Old Man Willow while writing the chapter about him; his son Christopher suggests it was based on a tree by the River Cherwell at Oxford. A predatory tree appears in a 1934 poem, but Tolkien did not arrive at the malevolent Old Man Willow, both tree and spirit, for some years. Scholars have debated the nature of the tree; some have been surprised by it, as Tolkien is seen as an environmentalist. The character was omitted by both Ralph Bakshi and Peter Jackson from their film versions of The Lord of the Rings.
Context
The protagonist
Old Man Willow first appeared in Tolkien's poem "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil", published in 1934 in The Oxford Magazine.[2]
Character
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Sketch_Map_of_The_Shire.svg/500px-Sketch_Map_of_The_Shire.svg.png)
Old Man Willow is a malign tree-spirit of great age in Tom Bombadil's Old Forest, appearing physically as a large willow tree beside the River Withywindle, but spreading his influence throughout the forest. As Tolkien explains in the narrative of The Lord of the Rings:[T 4][3]
But none was more dangerous than the Great Willow: his heart was rotten, but his strength was green; and he was cunning, and a master of winds, and his song and thought ran through the woods on both sides of the river. His grey thirsty spirit drew power out of the earth and spread like fine root-threads in the ground, and invisible twig fingers in the air, till it had under its dominion nearly all the trees of the Forest from the Hedge to the Downs.[T 5]
Narrative
In the story, Old Man Willow casts a spell on the
Drawing
![A large willow tree where Tolkien used to walk](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3e/Willow_view_-_Flickr_-_Orchids_love_rainwater.jpg/290px-Willow_view_-_Flickr_-_Orchids_love_rainwater.jpg)
Tolkien made a careful pencil and coloured pencil drawing of Old Man Willow while he was writing the chapter "The Old Forest"; Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull call it "a fine example" of the drawings he made to support his creative writing. They note that "with a little imagination"[1] a face can just be made out on the right-hand side of the tree above the arm-like branch. Tolkien describes it as a "huge willow-tree, old and hoary"; to the hobbits it seemed enormous, though Hammond and Scull observe that it does not seem so in the drawing. Tolkien's son John suggests that it was based on one of the few unpollarded willows on the River Cherwell at Oxford.[1]
Analysis
Etymological connotations
Tolkien was a philologist. Jason Fisher, writing that "all stories begin with words", takes up Edmund Wilson's "denigrating dismissal" of The Lord of the Rings as "a philological curiosity", replying that to him this is "precisely one of its greatest strengths".[4] Fisher explores in detail the connotations of Tolkien's use of words meaning bent and twisted, including Ringwraith as well as willow or withy (a willow, or flexible twigs from it twisted and woven into wicker baskets), this last from Old English wiþig. "Windle", too, is an old word for a wicker basket, from Old English windel-treow, the willow, the basket-maker's tree, as well as a cognate of the modern English "to wind". Thus, Old Man Willow's Withywindle is perhaps the "willow-winding" river.[4] Fisher comments, too, that Old Man Willow could be said to have gone to the bad, like the Ringwraiths or in the words of the Middle English poem Pearl that Tolkien translated, wyrþe so wrange away, "writhed so wrong away" or "strayed so far from right".[4]
Interpretations
The Tolkien scholar
Saguaro and Thacker comment that critics have puzzled over Tolkien's description of Old Man Willow, as it does not fit with Tolkien's image as an
Paul H. Kocher writes that it is unclear whether the tree's malice derives from the Dark Lord Sauron, or is simply the tree's own "natural hatred for destructive mankind", and notes that the hostility extends to all travellers, "innocent and guilty alike".[9]
The scholar of literature James Obertino comments that "'Every obstacle that arises' in the hero's path 'wears the shadowy features of the
E. L. Risden states that the elimination of
Adaptations: appearing or disappearing
![A frame from the Russian television play Khraniteli](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/b1/Khraniteli_Old_Man_Willow.jpg/220px-Khraniteli_Old_Man_Willow.jpg)
Old Man Willow, like the Old Forest and Tom Bombadil, was not included in Peter Jackson's films of The Lord of the Rings. Justifying the excision, Jackson asked rhetorically in From Book to Script "So, you know, what does Old Man Willow contribute to the story of Frodo carrying the Ring? ... it's not really advancing our story & it's not really telling us things that we need to know."[12]
Of the earlier adaptations,
Morton Zimmerman's unproduced 1957 highly-compressed script, criticised by Tolkien for rushing rather than cutting, similarly included them: Bombadil takes the hobbits straight from Old Man Willow to the Barrow-downs, all the action in the episode seemingly occurring in one day.[12]
Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated film omits the Old Forest altogether, setting a precedent for Jackson.[12]
Although the hobbits do not pass through the Old Forest in Jackson's film of The Fellowship of the Ring, the map shown on screen earlier in the film does include Buckland, the Old Forest, and the Barrow-downs; however, in the extended edition DVD of The Two Towers, the
Old Man Willow, however, does appear in the Old Forest in the 1991 Soviet television play Khraniteli, where he traps two of the hobbits.[13]
Notes
References
Primary
- ^ Tolkien 1954a book 1, ch. 3, "Three is Company"
- ^ Tolkien 1954a book 1, ch. 4, "A Short Cut to Mushrooms"
- ^ Tolkien 1954a book 1, ch. 5, "A Conspiracy Unmasked"
- ^ a b c Tolkien 1954a book 1, ch. 6, "The Old Forest"
- ^ a b Tolkien 1954a book 1, ch. 7 "In the House of Tom Bombadil"
Secondary
- ^ OCLC 34533659.
- Tales from the Perilous Realm.
- ^ ISBN 978-1-137-26399-5.
- ^ ISBN 978-1-4766-1486-1. Retrieved 28 November 2021.
- ^ a b Flieger, Verlyn (15 October 2013). "How Trees Behave-Or Do They?". Mythlore. 32 (1). article 3, pp. 23–25.
- ISBN 978-0-415-96942-0.
- ISBN 978-0-415-86511-1.
- OCLC 54767347.
- ISBN 0140038779.
- ^ JSTOR 40246877.
- ISBN 978-0-7864-8473-7.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-7864-8473-7.
- ^ "Хранители: Часть 1: Телеспектакль по мотивам повести Д.Р.Р.Толкиена" [Keepers: Part 1: Teleplay based on the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien] (in Russian). Leningrad Television. 5 April 2021. Archived from the original on 5 April 2021. The scene is at 40:31 in Part 1.
Sources
- OCLC 9552942.