Old Man Willow

• 1. Introduction

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  Old Man Willow is a willow tree that eats people. In J. R. R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, this tree-spirit lurks beside the River Withywindle in Tom Bombadil's Old Forest, and it is the first genuinely hostile creature the Hobbits meet after leaving the Shire. Not a Ringwraith. Not a servant of Sauron. A tree.

  What makes that strange is that Tolkien has a reputation as a lover of trees and forests. So why did he conjure an ancient willow whose heart, as he wrote, was rotten, whose thirsty grey spirit spread like fine root-threads through the ground until nearly every tree from the Hedge to the Downs obeyed it?

  The answer reaches back to a poem Tolkien published in 1934, through early drafts where a tree and a spirit had not yet fused into one being, and into questions that scholars have been wrestling with ever since: what does a malevolent forest mean inside a story told by a man who loved nature? And why did Ralph Bakshi, Peter Jackson, and several other adapters decide the world could do without this character entirely?

• 2. The Forest Trap

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  Frodo Baggins, Sam Gamgee, and Pippin Took leave Hobbiton in the Shire, pursued by mysterious Black Riders. They cross the Bucklebury Ferry over the Brandywine River and meet their friend Merry Brandybuck in Buckland. To shake off the Black Riders, the four friends decide to cut through the Old Forest.

  What follows is a quiet kind of horror. Old Man Willow casts a spell of drowsiness over the group. Merry and Pippin lean against the willow's trunk and fall asleep. Frodo sits on a root and dangles his feet in the water, then he too succumbs. Sam is suspicious of the tree and manages to stay awake.

  The tree moves. It traps Merry and Pippin inside the cracks of its own trunk. It tips Frodo into the stream. Sam pulls Frodo out, and the two of them start a fire out of dry leaves, grass, and bark to frighten the willow into releasing the others. From inside the trunk, Merry shouts that the tree is threatening to squeeze them to death if the fire is not put out.

  Their rescue comes from Tom Bombadil, who sings to the ancient tree until it releases Merry and Pippin. Once the hobbits are safe in Bombadil's house, he tells them plainly that the Great Willow is wholly evil, and has spread its domination across the Old Forest until almost all the trees from the Hedge to the Barrow-downs answer to it.

• 3. Roots in a 1934 Poem

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  A predatory tree appears in Tolkien's poem "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil", published in 1934 in The Oxford Magazine, years before The Lord of the Rings took shape. That poem was the first appearance of Old Man Willow in any form.

  The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger notes that in an early draft from 1938, the willow and the old man were still two separate things. Tolkien wrote of how a grey thirsty earth-bound spirit had become imprisoned in the greatest Willow of the Forest. The tree was a vessel; the spirit was a prisoner inside it.

  In the 1943 draft Flieger calls Manuscript B, Tolkien was still linking a tree and a spirit, a non-incarnate mind, which remained imprisoned in an individual tree. The creative problem Tolkien faced was how a spirit might become trapped inside wood and bark. His solution was to stop treating them as two things at all. Tree and spirit fused into a single indivisible being, and Old Man Willow as readers know him finally existed.

  Tolkien made a careful pencil and coloured pencil drawing of the character while writing the chapter called "The Old Forest". His son John suggests that it was based on one of the few unpollarded willows on the River Cherwell at Oxford. Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull describe the drawing as a fine example of the illustrations Tolkien made to support his creative writing, and note that with a little imagination a face can just be made out on the right-hand side of the tree above an arm-like branch.

• 4. Philology and the Twisted Name

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  Tolkien was a philologist, and Jason Fisher, taking up Edmund Wilson's description of The Lord of the Rings as a philological curiosity, argues that this is precisely one of its greatest strengths. Fisher traces the word willow back through Old English wiþig, which gives English the word withy, meaning a willow or flexible twigs twisted and woven into wicker baskets.

  The river name Withywindle carries its own layers. Windle is an old word for a wicker basket, from the Old English windel-treow, meaning the willow and the basket-maker's tree. It is also a cognate of the modern English verb to wind. Fisher reads Withywindle as perhaps meaning the willow-winding river.

  Fisher also draws a line between Old Man Willow and the Ringwraiths, noting that Tolkien's use of words meaning bent and twisted connects them. He quotes from the Middle English poem Pearl, which Tolkien translated: wyrþe so wrange away, meaning writhed so wrong away or strayed so far from right. In Fisher's reading, Old Man Willow has gone to the bad in exactly this sense, twisting away from what a tree should be, as the Ringwraiths twisted away from what men once were.

  The etymology works as a kind of moral map. The very syllables of Withywindle encode the character of the creature who rules it.

• 5. A Fallen Nature

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  Tolkien's image as an environmentalist tree-hugger has puzzled some scholars who encounter Old Man Willow. Saguaro and Thacker write that critics have been surprised by the character, because it does not fit that image.

  Their explanation turns to Tolkien's Catholicism. They argue that trees, like other creatures in Tolkien's world, are subject to the corruption of the Fall of Man. They point out that both the Old and New Testaments use trees as symbols: the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in Genesis, the cross, the tree of death in the Gospels, and the Tree of Life in Revelation. In their reading, Tolkien brings death, creation, sub-creation, and re-creation together through the tree.

  Paul H. Kocher frames the uncertainty differently. He notes that it is unclear whether the tree's malice comes from the Dark Lord Sauron at all, or is simply the tree's own natural hatred for destructive mankind. The hostility of Old Man Willow extends to all travellers, innocent and guilty alike. That indiscriminate hostility is part of what makes the character unsettling.

  The critic Jared Lobdell compared this treachery of natural things in an animate world to Algernon Blackwood's story "The Willows". And E. L. Risden observed that when the Ring and Sauron and the Ringwraiths and Saruman are finally gone, creatures like Old Man Willow are not destroyed but will fade into quietness, leaving a world that Risden calls blander, with more narrowly circumscribed limits.

• 6. Cut From the Screen

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  Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated film omits the Old Forest entirely, setting a precedent that Peter Jackson would follow. In his book From Book to Script, Jackson asked rhetorically what Old Man Willow actually contributes to the story of Frodo carrying the Ring, concluding that it is not really advancing our story and not really telling us things that we need to know.

  Earlier adapters took different approaches. Terence Tiller's 1955-1956 radio play did include Old Man Willow and Tom Bombadil, though Tolkien himself did not like the production and no recording survives. Morton Zimmerman's unproduced 1957 script, which Tolkien criticised for rushing rather than cutting, kept both characters too, with Bombadil taking the hobbits directly from Old Man Willow to the Barrow-downs in what seems to be a single day's action. John Boorman's unproduced script from around 1970 left them out; the hobbits getting high on mushrooms in their place.

  Jackson's films are not entirely without traces of the character. The map shown on screen in The Fellowship of the Ring does include Buckland, the Old Forest, and the Barrow-downs. The extended edition DVD of The Two Towers includes a scene with Old Man Willow, though it is set in Fangorn Forest rather than the Old Forest, and it is the Ent Treebeard rather than Tom Bombadil who releases him. John D. Rateliff argues this means that, as far as Jackson's film world is concerned, there could have been no Old Man Willow in the mapped Old Forest at all.

  The 1991 Soviet television play Khraniteli is the adaptation that stayed closest to the source on this point: Old Man Willow appears in the Old Forest and traps two of the hobbits, just as Tolkien wrote.