Old Man Willow

Tolkien made a drawing of Old Man Willow while writing the chapter about him; his son Christopher suggests it was based on a tree by the River Cherwell at Oxford.

As Tolkien explains in the narrative of The Lord of the Rings:[T 4][3] But none was more dangerous than the Great Willow: his heart was rotten, but his strength was green; and he was cunning, and a master of winds, and his song and thought ran through the woods on both sides of the river.

His grey thirsty spirit drew power out of the earth and spread like fine root-threads in the ground, and invisible twig fingers in the air, till it had under its dominion nearly all the trees of the Forest from the Hedge to the Downs.

The willow then traps Merry and Pippin in the cracks of its trunk and tips Frodo into the stream, but the latter is saved by Sam, who, suspicious of the tree, manages to remain awake.

[T 4] Once they are safely in his house, Bombadil explains to the hobbits that the "Great Willow" is wholly evil, and has gradually spread his domination across the Old Forest until almost all the trees from the Hedge to the Barrow-downs are under his control.

Jason Fisher, writing that "all stories begin with words", takes up Edmund Wilson's "denigrating dismissal" of The Lord of the Rings as "a philological curiosity", replying that to him this is "precisely one of its greatest strengths".

[4] Fisher comments, too, that Old Man Willow could be said to have gone to the bad, like the Ringwraiths or in the words of the Middle English poem Pearl that Tolkien translated, wyrþe so wrange away, "writhed so wrong away" or "strayed so far from right".

[4] The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger writes that Old Man Willow first appears as "a predatory tree" in the 1934 poem "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil", and that the character is developed in The Lord of the Rings, as documented in The Return of the Shadow.

[9] The scholar of literature James Obertino comments that "'Every obstacle that arises' in the hero's path 'wears the shadowy features of the Terrible Mother'", who in Aeneas's case is the goddess Juno, in Frodo's "the darkness that is Old Man Willow", along with that of the Barrow-wight and Moria.

[10] Obertino likens Frodo's encounters with these darknesses to catabasis, the descent into an underworld, complete with psychological interpretations of personal development, of a hero such as Virgil's Aeneas.

He adds that Frodo initially finds comfort in the darkness, "in danger of succumbing to the charm of uroboric incest", as he slumbers beside Old Man Willow, and again in the Barrow-wight's deathly dwelling-place.

[12] Morton Zimmerman's unproduced 1957 highly-compressed script, criticised by Tolkien for rushing rather than cutting, similarly included them: Bombadil takes the hobbits straight from Old Man Willow to the Barrow-downs, all the action in the episode seemingly occurring in one day.

Historic drawing of the character
Old Man Willow , drawn by Tolkien while he was writing the chapter on the Old Forest . A face can just be made out on the right-hand side of the tree above the arm-like branch. [ 1 ]
Sketch map of the Shire. The Old Forest is on the right; the River Withywindle runs through it.
Tom Bombadil frees the Hobbits from Old Man Willow. Scraperboard illustration by Alexander Korotich , 1981
A large willow tree where Tolkien used to walk
Tolkien may have based his drawing of Old Man Willow on a tree beside the River Cherwell in Oxford , [ 1 ] like this one in the University Parks there.
Sculpture of the Fall of Man
Tolkien, a Roman Catholic , believed that living things such as trees had been affected by the Fall of Man . [ 3 ] Medieval statuary of the Fall at Notre Dame de Paris
A scene from Virgil's Aeneid
Frodo 's encounter with Old Man Willow has been described as a catabasis , a journey into the Underworld , like that of Virgil 's hero Aeneas . [ 10 ]
A frame from the Russian television play Khraniteli
Old Man Willow with the four Hobbits, two of them trapped inside the tree, in the 1991 television play Khraniteli