Column: Image to Image: Musings on Faith, Media, and Story
November entry: “Requiem for the Fall” (November 2024)
Column Description: Image to Image: Musings on Faith, Media, and Story is a monthly column that illuminates old and new ideas about media ecology from a Christian perspective. Dr. Mitchell will explore what it means to bear God’s image and Christian witness in a mediated world, with a particular focus on the relationships between theology, media, and orthopraxy across different Christian traditions.
By Chase Mitchell, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Media and Communication, East Tennessee State University
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Requiem for the Fall
“The world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air.”
-Treebeard, The Lord of the Rings
Here in east Tennessee, late October is dappled in bright yellows, deep reds, and burnt ochre. On my street, a large, black-barked maple puts on a smoke show, as it does every year, its fiery orange leaves aflame in the Fall light.
Tolkien had a special affinity for trees. The Ents in The Lord of the Rings—walking, talking timber—are the most famous manifestation of his love of the forest. Another of his lesser-known works, Leaf by Niggle, is further testament to that fondness, and a story that I read only recently.
In Leaf, Niggle is a painter whose artistic work goes largely unnoticed, and certainly unappreciated, by his neighbor Parish as well as the wider world. He most enjoys painting leaves, and spends as much time as he can working on a single painting: a life-size tree. Niggle obsesses over every detail and renders each leaf with unique beauty. He’s constantly frustrated by Parish, who’s not only apathetic to Niggle’s painting, but a nuisance who takes him away from his artistic work. Parish is lame and genuinely needs assistance, frequently asking for help in ways that Niggle finds tedious and tiresome, such as helping to repair his roof after a storm, and riding into town on his bicycle to call on the doctor for Parish’s sick wife. Though Niggle has a tender heart and does these things willingly, he begrudges his neighbors for it.
As Niggle painstakingly labors on his tree—often interrupted, too, by the Inspector of Houses’ admonitions to tend to his shabby garden—he is also aware that he must prepare for a long, mysterious trip. When the time comes to leave, he is unprepared, and is sent to a kind of institution, a bleak place where he is made to do menial work. After a while, he is released and sent to a place for “a little gentle treatment,” where he finds, to his surprise and wonderment, his painting come alive: the tree and surrounding forest in every detail. Niggle realizes that his painting was an incomplete, imperfect facsimile of the place; his painting, though true, was only a dim reflection of the reality before him.
He meets Parish there, who becomes an adept gardener, and together they beautify the tree and forest even more. Eventually, Niggle leaves for the mountains in the distance, which were barely visible in his painting. And later, after Parish makes the same journey, the place they tended becomes known as Niggle’s Parish, a stop on the way for others also bound for the mountains’ high peaks.
Unbeknownst to Niggle, after his departure the painting is destroyed and the canvas used to repair a roof. Only a small portion survives—a single, perfect leaf—and is preserved in a local museum, which names the artifact “Leaf by Niggle.”
The story is as close to an autobiographical account as Tolkien ever wrote. Though he famously disliked allegory in most of its forms, Tolkien admitted to using it in at least this respect: “I tried to show allegorically how [sub-creation] might come to be taken up into Creation in some plane in my ‘purgatorial’ story Leaf by Niggle.” Like Niggle’s tree, Tolkien’s lifelong work on The Lord of the Rings and its legendarium was a passion project, often “interrupted” by his professorial duties and familial responsibilities.
Leaf was published in 1945, after the release of The Hobbit but before the completion and acclaim of The Lord of the Rings. Given the timing, Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey has suggested that Niggle’s tree corresponds, allegorically, to Tolkien’s work on LotR and its expansive legendarium. Like his protagonist, Tolkien obsessed over details and revised his work as only a perfectionist does, and he worried that it would never be finished. Niggle’s leaf, preserved by the museum, represents The Hobbit: a small part of the greater whole that might be (in Tolkien’s mind at the time) the only part of the epic that would be read by a broader audience.
We’re not Tolkien, but I think we all know this feeling, to some degree. We imagine that our lives are spent in pursuit of some grand work; we worry that we won’t get it right, or get it finished; and we’re frustrated when other priorities “get in the way.” In the end, of course, those other things that occupy our time—those mundane tasks, hard responsibilities, and challenging relationships—are what sanctify us. They are, in truth, what make the “perfect leaf” possible.
Tolkien’s allegory is especially interesting because it came to him in a dream. In a letter to his friend Stanley Unwin, he wrote that the story, “that odd thing,” was distilled in his mind “virtually complete” upon waking one morning in 1939, shortly before the start of World War II. Tolkien must’ve understood that the inspiration for Leaf had a unique quality, points out Organ, because though dreams are largely irrational, this particular one was rational. Further, Tolkien himself observed, it is “exceptional” for fantasy to appear in dreams, as “fantasy is a rational, not an irrational, activity.”
To experience a vivid, rational, and fantastical dream—and one that reflected his own life in so many ways—obviously made an impression on Tolkien. He was typically a slow, deliberate, even plodding writer. But Michael Organ has noted that, in the case of Leaf, Tolkien’s composition was “frenzied,” resembling the “automatic writing” popularized by the Surrealists in the early 20th century. In this respect, we get the sense that Tolkien felt the touch of the Grand Author on his pen. He wanted to record the story before it fleeted from memory, as dreams often do.
Leaves are like dreams. They ripen through shifting seasons. Most come and go, unnoticed, and wither in the soil of time. But some enrapture us.
When you next see a tree alight in color, know that such beauty is wrought by a labored soul: He who from eternity past dreamed strange and glorious things—of the heart of God and the Burning Bush. Hear, too, the crunch of deadened leaves underfoot. They spoke into Creation, upon a time, and speak still. Each will have its requiem, by to His grace.