4. Treebeard (with A Detour into Intuitive Writing)
Fangorn shares similarities with the Old Forest, but while the latter teemed with maternal imagery, this forest has a more masculine character. “Great trailing beards of lichen hung from [the trees],” is among the first things mentioned. (“Fangorn” means tree-beard.) They bathe their feet in the stream, just as Frodo did in the Old Forest, but here there is nothing to threaten them. We note that the water is crystal clear, whereas it was brown in the Old Forest. Merry and Pippin climb a staircase carved into the rock, which is a distinctly masculine image. Another parallel between the forests is that while the willow-woman seized Frodo and pulled him toward the water, Treebeard seizes Merry and Pippin but carries them gently upward.
The Old Forest and Fangorn were once parts of the same great forest, but they have since been separated over time. This image is reinforced by the male ents having “lost” the female entwives. One might speculate that the old willow-woman is one of the latter, lost in the darkness of the unconscious and, as a result, absorbed into the Terrible Mother. As we have seen many times, femininity is unconscious (yin) and masculinity is conscious (yang), leading to the one-sidedness that characterizes the saga and the resulting conflict between these two forces. Jung says:
“Always the leading idea of the conscious … is the Yang, because it is light; it shines, it is differentiated, it appears on the surface of the earth, in the minds of men. And it is always contrasted – and counteracted – by the opposite, the shadow, darkness [Yin].”[1]
Since the ents have lost the entwives, much of the chapter revolves around another theme in the saga, namely longing. A separation has occurred, followed by a sense of loss expressed in yet another way. We saw how Frodo, through the adventure and rite of passage, separates himself from the Great Mother and encounters the longing Aragorn. The one-sidedness resulting from separation leads to the feeling that something is missing.
We can briefly note that the conflict between the ents and entwives stemmed from the former wanting to wander and explore, while the latter wanted everything to remain as it is—“order, abundance, and peace.” Like the elves, the entwives sought to preserve the existing good order. This is an archetypal theme that recurs in the saga, where the Mother is conservative, restraining, and resistant to change, while the Father strives for change.[2] As mentioned, this is the backdrop to Frodo being stuck in his cul-de-sac (the Mother), and Gandalf (the Father) prompting him to leave it. In the commentary on “Fog on the Barrow-Downs,” we discussed the fathers’ initiation rite to separate the boy from the mother’s world. Since the initiation rite leads to consciousness (masculine, yang), the next step, as we have seen in this saga, is to reconnect with the feminine, or yin, on a conscious level, which we have described as the union of opposites at a higher level.
We don’t have much more to say about this chapter (though we will return to the ents) and will therefore dedicate most of the space to “intuitive writing.” It is fitting to do so here, as the ents came as a surprise to Tolkien:
“I did not consciously invent [the Ents] at all. The chapter called ‘Treebeard’, from Treebeard’s first remark ... was written off more or less as it stands ... almost like reading some one else’s work. … I daresay something had been going on in the ‘unconscious’ for some time, and that accounts for my feeling throughout, especially when stuck, that I was not inventing but reporting...”[3]
A Detour into Intuitive Writing
Our starting point is that Tolkien did not “invent” his novel but rather wrote down the story with the door open to the unconscious, which, combined with his particular temperament and ability, meant that the book was largely written intuitively. In other words, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote what he himself saw, what came to him from within. This is what we call intuitive writing.
“I have long ceased to invent ... I wait till I seem to know what really happened. Or till it writes itself.”[4]
Of course, Tolkien used his intellect to connect the images and organize them in a primarily rational way, as well as to work out the dramatic dynamics (many scenes are dramaturgically masterful) so that the story functions as a literary work; and naturally, he edited his book and rewrote sections as new information reached him. But at its core, the stream of images he experienced was more like a dream than his own conscious inventions.
According to Jung, there are four so-called functions of consciousness – thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition – which, simply put, we use to navigate the world. What distinguishes intuition is that it conveys impulses from the unconscious.[5] Artists, in other words, typically have a prominent and thus well-developed intuition in this sense, often at the expense of other functions.
It is a logical consequence, but also our own experience, that those with underdeveloped intuition (but, for example, a well-developed sensation function) struggle to understand how intuitive writing or creation might work. They lack experience of the phenomenon, and the idea is considered “irrational,” meaning dismissed. But phenomena may exist in the world even if one has not personally experienced them.
I myself have written several novels, primarily driven by an inner image or, let’s say, an idea that came to me. When I was young and took a smoke break at work, I contemplated a novel I was writing when I suddenly saw a smiling young man unexpectedly step onto the stage I had in my mind’s eye. I was so surprised that the fantasy broke, and I immediately wanted to explore this figure (in fact, a symbol) through prose, to understand and develop the idea it represented. After several failed attempts, I decided to stop inventing stories and instead put a man on a train into town to meet the trickster, just to see what happened. I immediately wrote 120 pages in a short time in an almost feverish state – and then the “inspiration” vanished. I sat perplexed with an unfinished manuscript. I didn’t know what it meant or where the story was headed. Eventually, the inspiration returned, coming in waves over several years until I was finally done. Since I didn’t know what the story was about, I had to rewrite the manuscript time and again, understanding more with each revision until I finally reached its core and could realize the story as intended. I had no success with the manuscript, but through this experience, I understand what Tolkien means when he says, for example, “... always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there’, somewhere: not of ‘inventing’.”[6] I remember how I sat for hours writing what unfolded before my gaze; I transcribed dialogues rather than invented them.
“Parts seem rather revealed through me than by me ...”, says Tolkien.[7] Everyone knows that the unconscious creates images and stories, as no one denies the existence of dreams. This creativity of the unconscious in dream-making is, for some intuitive individuals, also accessible while awake under favorable conditions. Suddenly, an image or idea may come to us, whether during a smoke break or while grading papers; a symbol that fascinates and demands expression – one might compare it to Gandalf arriving and causing a stir.
“All I remember about the start of The Hobbit is sitting correcting School Certificate papers in the everlasting weariness of that annual task forced on impecunious academics with children. On a blank leaf I scrawled: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ I did not and do not know why.”[8]
In our analysis of the work, we thus assume that Tolkien wrote with the door open to the stream of images from the unconscious. They often surprised him, but he organized them and, when necessary, rationalized them to create this epic tale that was his calling to fulfill. As previously mentioned, this means we do not believe the saga’s images are analogies to the author’s external world or psychoanalytic riddles concerning his inner world. Instead, we argue that the saga’s symbols are archetypal images that, while colored by the author’s psychology, are more about our shared psychological culture (or rather its undercurrents) than, for example, political events on one hand or personal traumas on the other. Tolkien is a conduit for an underground stream of images that do not necessarily have much to do with himself.
We believe this intuitive writing is the background for, for example, the saga’s associative coincidences. We may recall that when the hobbits left Bag End, several coincidences occurred, described as “queer.” We remember that the Ringwraith was replaced by the elves, the willow-woman by Tom Bombadil, and so on. But we also have mirrorings of the kind where “one thing corresponds to another,” which we don’t believe Tolkien “invented” either; for example, the similarities in Pippin’s experience of wandering with the elves versus wandering with the orcs, with the difference, of course, that the elves were maternal while the orcs were tyrannical.
We also recently saw how Éomer associates Galadriel with nets, weaving, and thus (implicitly) a spider, as these symbols belong to the mother image. We saw how Tom Bombadil held the Ring to his eye and looked at the hobbits through its circle, as if for a moment representing the Dark Lord; we recall that Frodo saw Sauron in Galadriel’s mirror. Did Tolkien, so to speak, know what he was doing, or did he simply “see” these scenes and write them down?
We know that Tolkien had no thought of ents before they spontaneously appeared in his story, but why does the tree where Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli camp seem to live as a creature in the chapter before – was that just a playful fantasy? Did he have tree-creatures in mind when the hobbits enter Fangorn and see trees that seem to have beards of lichen, or was that too a small ripple on the surface of the unconscious waters from which the ents were about to emerge? There are numerous examples in the book, some of which we have pointed out, where an image of seemingly limited significance appears almost randomly, only to be followed later by an amplified counterpart of great importance; like a foreshadowing breeze preceding the storm of the archetypal image. This might deserve its own text, but these spontaneous associations (which often don’t work rationally), where one thing always corresponds to another, are further signs of how the saga is already woven within the author, who only gradually discovers it. This is one of several reasons why the saga feels ingenious – how could a philologist come up with all this?
“Though praised for ‘invention’ I have not in fact any conscious memory of sitting down and deliberately thinking out any episode ...”[9]
This is neither mysterious, strange, nor unique. To take a related example: When Jung had just completed the epic book Symbols of Transformation, a true tour de force of symbolic interpretation that marked his intellectual break with Freud, he drew a line and wrote, puzzled: “What have you written, what is this now?”[10] The daimon drove Jung to write this significant work while he himself was unclear about what he was doing or what it meant. “What have I done? Where did this come from?”
Another example close to us is Bob Dylan, who, during a few years in the 1960s, wrote dozens of absolutely phenomenal songs as if it were nothing—they simply poured out of him. “Where did it come from?” asked interviewer Ed Bradley when Dylan was over sixty years old.[11] “It just came,” Dylan said. “Straight from the well of creativity, I suppose.” He elaborates: “All those early songs were almost magically written. ‘Darkness at the break of noon, shadows even the silver spoon, a handmade blade, the child’s balloon…’ Try sitting down and writing something like that. There’s a magic to it, and it’s not some Siegfried and Roy magic, you know? It’s a different kind of penetrating magic. … I did it once upon a time.”
Bob Dylan is clearly not trying to make himself seem mysterious but shows his own sincere inability to understand how it happened, what lay behind the treasure of songs, while admitting that the door was open once, but it is no longer. When he says, “try sitting down and writing something like that,” he means, in our view, that you cannot “invent” or “think” your way to lines like these; either they come to you, or they don’t. It’s not up to him, his conscious ego, but up to an inner source whose potential flow he does not control.
To take a third example close to us, David Lynch occasionally returns to the analogy of “the puzzle in the other room.” (This corresponds to what we previously referred to as the “weave” Tolkien discovers.) In an interview with Paul Holdengräber,[12] this creative and original filmmaker says that “an idea comes, and you see it, and you hear it, and you know it.” Holdengräber asks, “How does it come?” Lynch responds, “It comes like on a TV in your mind.” (The audience laughs, but without further comparisons, this is exactly how the idea we worked on for years came to us.) Then the interviewer cites another favorite of ours, Leonard Cohen, who said, “if I knew where the good songs came from, I would go there more often.” Lynch says, “Absolutely,” and explains that the idea initially is just a fragment (compare “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”), which attracts other fragments (the Ring, Gandalf, the Black Riders, and so on, in our view), until you finally have a script. Then Lynch repeats his analogy, that the puzzle is already laid out in “the other room,” but the pieces/fragments become available in your own room one at a time. One could say that the unconscious idea, or story, which already exists in the darkness, needs to be recreated in the light of consciousness piece by piece. The creator is dependent on what is already created; in fact, they are a tool, not an originator. (To identify with the source would be like putting on the Ring in Middle-earth, an identification with unconscious content.)
So when Tolkien, in his letters, says that he does not “invent” but rather dictates or discovers, he is describing his egoin relation to the unconscious idea that seeks to be realized in the conscious world through the ego. Another way to express this dynamic is through Jung’s concept of the daimon, the inner unconscious driving force that uses the ego as a means to express itself in time and space. If circumstances allow, a person can sail on this force, like Bob Dylan (“Take me for a trip upon your magic swirling ship”), but under less favorable conditions, it can also act destructively for the “bearer.” Franz Kafka writes in his diaries, driven as he was by his daimon to write strange stories, a necessity that often tormented him:
“My happiness, my abilities, and every possibility of being of some use have long lain in the literary. But I cannot fully devote myself to literary creation as it should be done, for various reasons. Apart from my family circumstances, I could not live off literature, not least because of the slow creation of my work and their peculiar character.”[13]
For Kafka, writing was not a choice, a promising prospect, or a reasonable pursuit for a livelihood, but a necessity, the “secret raven” that tormented him. He was driven by his daimon to express the unconscious’s ideas, regardless of whether his actual circumstances could support it.
Jung writes in his autobiography:
“A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon.”[14]
The premise that Tolkien did not invent, play with analogies, or accidentally reveal his own personal psychology, but rather let the daimon’s unconscious stream of ideas flow through him, we have tried to substantiate with his own private confessions and comparisons with other highly creative individuals’ experiences and their descriptions of the strange but very tangible, and rather unusual, process they do not control. These examples could be multiplied;[15] we have only taken a few from Tolkien’s 20th century that are close to us personally. Even the ancient Greeks, like Homer and Socrates, referred to the muses (the unconscious/inspiration/daimon) as the true source of art, work, or philosophy. Only the egocentric culture of our time believes that true art is the invention of the individual ego. But aside from wooden detective stories, it would, in fact, have nothing to express if there were not an inner mediator. It is this mediator’s symbols we discuss in our commentaries on the saga, regardless of who held the pen; for while the complex is highly personal, the archetype is impersonal and alien, always puzzling because it is primarily unconscious.
“Much of my own book puzzles me...”[16]
Footnotes
[1] Jung, Visions, p. 659.
[2] See, for example, Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, p. 171.
[3] Tolkien, Letters, p. 211-212.
[4] Ibid., p. 231.
[5] Jung, Psychological Types, par. 834/772.
[6] Tolkien, Letters, p. 145.
[7] Ibid., p. 189.
[8] Ibid., p. 215.
[9] Ibid., p. 258.
[10] Deirdre Bair, Jung: A Biography (New York: Back Bay Books, 2004), p. 242.
[11] “Bob Dylan – Interview with Ed Bradley,” 60 Minutes, CBS News, aired December 5, 2004.
[12] “Where Do Ideas Come From? Watch David Lynch in Conversation at BAM,” Brooklyn Magazine, published May 9, 2014, https://www.bkmag.com/2014/05/09/where-do-ideas-come-from-watch-david-lynch-in-conversation-at-bam/.
[13] Franz Kafka, Diaries: 1910–1923, ed. Max Brod, trans. Joseph Kresh and Martin Greenberg (New York: Schocken Books, 1988), p. 252. Cf. Daryl Sharp, The Secret Raven: Conflict and Transformation in the Life of Franz Kafka (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1980).
[14] Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 390.
[15] See for example Anthony Stevens, Privata myter: Om drömmar och drömmande, trans. Philippa Wiking (Stockholm: Gedins Förlag, 1997), p. 297. [Private Myths.]
[16] Tolkien, Letters, p. 278.