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Location
Weatherford, Oklahoma
Document Type
Paper
Event Website
https://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-54.htm
Start Date
25-7-2026 1:30 PM
End Date
25-7-2026 2:20 PM
Description
In The Two Towers, Fangorn Forest initially appears as an uncanny diversion when Merry and Pippin flee into its shadowy depths to escape Saruman’s Uruk-hai. Their encounter with Treebeard awakens the Ents, providing unexpected and devastating flow to the power of Saruman the White. Far from actually being scary or horrifying, though, the forest is actually the gateway to two very important qualities in The Lord of the Rings: a sense of deep psychology, of caring for the land so much that sentient being has become actually bound up with natural entities, and of contemplation, as Treebeard Who has lost the love of his life, Fimbrethil, and the treats that he has loved, has withdrawn into A melancholy introspection that is itself a kind of rival “tower” to the imposing physical structure of Orthanc. Treebeard, as Matthew Dickerson pointed out, is on the side of the good without being politically affiliated with it. Even though Tolkien abandoned his original idea of having the old Ent be a threat, there is something about him, which does not quite fit into the narrative flow of the rest of the narrative. Treebeard represents something which is, as Tolkien’s admirer WH Auden put it, “in the valley of its saying” which reroutes the narrative to the ecological contemplative without altering its general moral valence, but providing an important internal modification.
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Included in
Fangorn Forest as a Rerouting to the Ecological Contemplative in The Two Towers
Weatherford, Oklahoma
In The Two Towers, Fangorn Forest initially appears as an uncanny diversion when Merry and Pippin flee into its shadowy depths to escape Saruman’s Uruk-hai. Their encounter with Treebeard awakens the Ents, providing unexpected and devastating flow to the power of Saruman the White. Far from actually being scary or horrifying, though, the forest is actually the gateway to two very important qualities in The Lord of the Rings: a sense of deep psychology, of caring for the land so much that sentient being has become actually bound up with natural entities, and of contemplation, as Treebeard Who has lost the love of his life, Fimbrethil, and the treats that he has loved, has withdrawn into A melancholy introspection that is itself a kind of rival “tower” to the imposing physical structure of Orthanc. Treebeard, as Matthew Dickerson pointed out, is on the side of the good without being politically affiliated with it. Even though Tolkien abandoned his original idea of having the old Ent be a threat, there is something about him, which does not quite fit into the narrative flow of the rest of the narrative. Treebeard represents something which is, as Tolkien’s admirer WH Auden put it, “in the valley of its saying” which reroutes the narrative to the ecological contemplative without altering its general moral valence, but providing an important internal modification.
https://dc.swosu.edu/mythcon/mc54/schedule/14
