The Plants of Middle-earth: Botany and Sub-creation (review)

Amy Amendt-Raduege

Tolkien Studies, Volume 4, 2007, pp. 290-293 (Review)

Published by West Virginia University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tks.2007.0000

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/215110

[ Access provided at 24 Oct 2020 20:41 GMT from UNSW Library ]

 Book Reviews

three things that to my mind really do flow together: Beowulf: The Monsters
and the Critics; the essay On Fairy-stories; and The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth.
The first deals with the contact of the ‘heroic’ with fairy-story; the second
primarily with fairy-story; and the last with ‘heroism and chivalry’ (Letters
350). Yet Kreeft’s examination of Tolkien’s worldview and philosophy
makes far more references to Plato than it does to Beowulf. This omission
seriously limits the utility of the analysis presented in this book.
Kreeft writes in the Introduction that “this book is not about The Lord
of the Rings but only its philosophy. It therefore leaves out far more than it
leaves in” (20). While Kreeft was referring to the omission of characters,
plot, and setting, his words serve as an apt criticism of this book. Far
more is left out than Kreeft includes, and consequently this work makes
for a somewhat interesting but ultimately unsatisfying analysis.

Matthew A. Fisher
Saint Vincent College
Latrobe, Pennsylvania

The Plants of Middle-earth: Botany and Sub-creation, by Dinah Hazell. Kent,

OH: Kent State University Press, 2006. x, 124 pp. $22.95 (hardcover)
ISBN 0873388836.

One of the many delights of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is
that it offers something for everyone. Historians can delve into its mythi-
cal past; economists can analyze the economies of Gondor or the Shire;
sociologists can plunder its geopolitical ramifications. And, of course,
anyone who loves gardening can delight in the plant life of Middle-earth,
from the homey daisy to the mystical mallorn. Such is the intended audi-
ence of Dinah Hazell’s The Plants of Middle-earth: Botany and Sub-creation.
Adorned with bits of medieval herblore, sprinklings of horticultural his-
tory, and the occasional venture into Tolkien criticism, the book takes a
wandering journey through Middle-earth, beginning and ending in the
Shire, with stops along the way to examine its indigenous plants.
The book opens by gathering a “bouquet” of flower-names found in
the Shire, mostly drawn from the genealogies that appear in Appendix
C of The Lord of the Rings. Since we know very little of the women who
bear these names, any link between the folkloric traits of the flowers and
the characters of the women named for them must necessarily be lim-
ited to speculation. When offered, those speculations are interesting, but
more often than not Hazell prefers to stay within the safer territory of
established lore.
The rest of the book departs from the pattern established in the first

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chapter in favor of a more wandering path. The second chapter travels

from the Shire to Mordor, but the journey is not linear: it quickly outlines
the entire progression, then returns to the Shire and strolls through the
same territory at a more leisurely pace. The chapter skims over the Old
Forest to reach Bree in a timely fashion, then digresses into Tolkien’s
famous description of Edith dancing in the grove before plunging into
the wilderness. Rivendell gets only a cursory glance, but the holly of
Eregion is studied at some length. And so the journey continues, stop-
ping to examine an interesting specimen here and there, traveling rapidly
through terrain that interests the author less, until Frodo and Sam reach
Mordor.
Chapter three backtracks again, devoting itself to the plants found
in Ithilien. Here, the author sticks closer to the hobbits’ path, though
not without further digressions into medieval verse and a bit more about
Tolkien’s well-known love of trees. The fourth chapter returns to the
topic of trees in more depth, spending some time examining the alle-
gorical significance of Niggle’s tree before turning its full attention to the
forests of Middle-earth. Mirkwood, the Old Forest, and Fangorn are all
explored at some length, but Lothlórien gets a bare two paragraphs be-
cause the author feels that the magic of Lórien cannot be captured or en-
riched through analysis (though Galadriel’s garden was visited for three
paragraphs in chapter two). Finally, we return to the devastated Shire,
which Hazell reads conventionally as an indictment of industrialization
and an assertion of the recuperative powers of nature. Chapter five is
simply a brief expansion of this theme, using the White Tree of Gondor
as a metaphor for the earth’s power to regenerate itself.
Although the title of the book suggests a methodical approach to
the ways in which Tolkien shaped the plants of Middle-earth by a series
of deliberate choices, the book is really about the folkloric properties of
real plants found in Tolkien’s imaginary world. As such, it is more about
herblore than botany, and more about Creation than Sub-creation. The
title further implies a preoccupation with the process by which Tolkien
derived imaginary plants using his knowledge of real ones, but such is not
the case. The mallorn, niphredil, and athelas get almost no attention what-
soever. Ironically, these plants are not discussed precisely because they are
imaginary: the author repeatedly states that she has no wish to infringe
on the readers’ imagined re-creations of these magnificent plants.
Throughout the book, Hazell’s style is casual and welcoming, almost
like sharing afternoon tea with a fellow garden enthusiast instead of
reading a scholarly work. But, like most conversations, the text is prone
to wander. So, for instance, chapter four’s section on Fangorn Forest in-
cludes paragraphs on the derivation of “ent,” parallels between The Wan-
derer and the “Lament of the Rohirrim,” the complexities of male/fe-

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male relationships in Tolkien’s works, and, finally, a bit of lore regarding

the rowan. All of this—and more—takes roughly two and a half pages.
In at least one case, the ambling nature of the text results in a confusion
of characters, too; for instance, the discussion of the Old Forest asserts
that Treebeard is a crack willow (74), though Tolkien’s description cat-
egorizes him as an oak or a beech. Old Man Willow might well be a crack
willow, but Treebeard is not. Also, there is a startling paucity of Tolkien
criticism, though several of the parallels she draws suggest the author has
read, at the very least, Tom Shippey’s Author of the Century. That is not to
say that two independent authors cannot arrive at the same conclusion;
quite clearly, they can and do. But it is always rewarding to find one’s
own ideas echoed in the minds of others. Besides Carpenter’s biogra-
phy, the only pieces of Tolkien-specific criticism cited are Ruth Noel’s
The Mythology of Middle-earth (1977), Robert Foster’s Guide to Middle-earth
(1971), and two collections of Tolkien’s artwork. Given all the attention
that Tolkien’s trees have recently garnered, this is a surprising omission.
She might have found Beth Russell’s “Botanical notes on the Mallorn”
helpful, or, more broadly, Michael J. Brisbois’s “Tolkien’s Imaginary Na-
ture.” Even if the author did not have access to these sources, Patrick
Curry’s Defending Middle-earth is widely available, and contains material
on Tolkien’s ecology. None of these works is as lengthy or difficult as the
books of medieval horticulture the author did consult, each pertains to
issues raised in Hazell’s work, and all have the added advantage of build-
ing on twenty years of intervening scholarship.
That said, the idea behind this book is essentially a good one; the
connections between Tolkien’s knowledge of medieval herblore and
the plants incorporated into his work have not, to my knowledge, been
previously explored. The illustrations are lovely, too. The problem with
this book is that it is not really one thing or another; it wavers between
medieval herblore and horticulture on the one hand, and commentary
on Tolkien’s text on the other. While the plants might provide a living
link between the two worlds, in effect they often fall into the background
as the text meanders. Though the book does offer its readers a journey
through Middle-earth, too often it loses sight of its own destination. Had
it been slightly more focused, the book might have been a genuine con-
tribution to Tolkien scholarship. As it is, the book resides well within well-
trodden ground, offering no new insights into the world of Middle-earth
besides a few interesting tidbits of medieval herblore. However, no one
who loves green and growing things, medieval literature, and The Lord of
the Rings can fault Hazell for wanting to play in the garden.
Amy Amendt-Raduege
Marquette University
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

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WORKS CITED

Curry, Patrick. Defending Middle-earth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

Brisbois, Michael J. “Tolkien’s Imaginary Nature: An Analysis of the
Structure of Middle-earth,” Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 197-216.
Russell, Beth. “Botanical Notes on the Mallorn,” Mallorn 43 (July 2005):
20-26.
Shippey, T. A. J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 2001.

The Power of the Ring: The Spiritual Vision Behind the Lord of the Rings by
Stratford Caldecott. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2005.
viii, 151 pp. $16.95 (trade paperback) ISBN 082452277X.

A revised and expanded version of the author’s Secret Fire: The Spiritual
Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien, published in England in 2003, this self-described
search for “Tolkien’s secret fire” finds it in the author’s devout Catholi-
cism.
The first 113 pages develop Caldecott’s interpretation of the famil-
iar fact that Tolkien was a religious man who subsumed his faith in his
fiction. He cites, as seemingly every writer on the topic does, Tolkien’s
famous December, 1953, letter to family friend Fr. Robert Murray, S.J.:
“The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious
and Catholic work; unconsciously at first but consciously in
the revision . . . the religious element is absorbed into the
story and the symbolism” (48).
Few thoughtful readers will disagree that Tolkien was a devoted Catholic;
the relative importance of his Catholicism in his creative scheme is, how-
ever, debatable. Many other elements are incorporated in the making of
Middle-earth; faith is but one.
Caldecott’s style mingles personality with scholarship: “I sometimes
think of the Inklings (not to mention the ‘Coalbiters’!) when I read the
description of Elrond’s ‘Hall of Fire’ in Rivendell, for it is there they
would have been most at home” (11). Such authorial intrusion may seem
more like casual conversation than cogent criticism to some readers. Af-
ter a while, Caldecott’s use of “I” to introduce his views seems both re-
dundant—who else could it be?—and distracting, rather like Tolkien’s
own authorial intrusions in The Hobbit, wisely excised from The Lord of
the Rings.

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