ancient Northern European languages,

There Really Is a Tree
When J.R.R. Tolkien had been working on writing The Lord of the Rings for some time, he came to an
impasse.9 He had a vision of a tale of a sort that the world had never seen. As a leading scholar in Old
English and other ancient Northern European languages, he knew that most ancient British myths about the
inhabitants of “Faerie”—elves, dwarves, giants, and sorcerers—had been lost (unlike the myths of the
Greeks and Romans or even of the Scandinavians). He had always dreamed of re-creating and reimagining what an ancient English mythology would look like. The Lord of the Rings was rooted in this
lost world. The project required creating at least the rudiments of several imaginary languages and
cultures as well as thousands of years of various national histories—all in order to give the narrative the
necessary depth and realism that Tolkien believed was crucial for the tale to be compelling.
As he worked on the manuscript, he came to the place where the narrative had divided into a number
of subplots. Major characters were traveling to various parts of his imaginary world, facing different
perils, and experiencing several complicated chains of events. It was an enormous challenge to unfold all
these subnarratives clearly and then give each a satisfactory resolution. Not only that, but World War II
had begun, and though the fifty-year-old Tolkien was not called into the military, the shadow of war fell
heavily on him. He had experienced firsthand the horror of World War I and had never forgotten it. Britain
was now in a precarious position, with invasion imminent. Who knew if he’d survive the war even as a
civilian?
He began to despair of ever completing the work of his life. It was not just a labor of a few years at
that point. When he began The Lord of the Rings, he had already been working on the languages, histories,
and stories behind the story for decades. The thought of not finishing it was “a dreadful and numbing
thought.”10 There was in those days a tree in the road near Tolkien’s house, and one day he arose to find
that it had been lopped and mutilated by a neighbor. He began to think of his mythology as his “internal
Tree” that might suffer the same fate. He had run out of “mental energy and invention.”11 One morning he
woke up with a short story in his mind and wrote it down. When The Dublin Review called for a piece, he
sent it in with the title “Leaf by Niggle.” It was about a painter.
In the first lines of the story we are told two things about this painter. First, his name was Niggle. The
Oxford English Dictionary, to which Tolkien was a contributor, defines “niggle” as “to work . . . in a
fiddling or ineffective way . . . to spend time unnecessarily on petty details.”12 Niggle was of course
Tolkien himself, who knew very well this was one of his own flaws. He was a perfectionist, always
unhappy with what he had produced, often distracted from more important issues by fussing over less
important details, prone to worry and procrastination. Niggle was the same.
We are also told that Niggle “had a long journey to make. He did not want to go, indeed the whole
idea was distasteful to him; but he could not get out of it.” Niggle continually put the journey off, but he
knew it was inevitable. Tom Shippey, who also taught Old English literature at Oxford, explains that in
Anglo-Saxon literature the “necessary long journey” was death.13
Niggle had one picture in particular that he was trying to paint. He had gotten in his mind the picture
of a leaf, and then that of a whole tree. And then in his imagination, behind the tree “a country began to
open out; and there were glimpses of a forest marching over the land, and of mountains tipped with
snow.” Niggle lost interest in all his other pictures, and in order to accommodate his vision, he laid out acanvas so large he needed a ladder. Niggle knew he had to die, but he told himself, “At any rate, I shall
get this one picture done, my real picture, before I have to go on that wretched journey.”
So he worked on his canvas, “putting in a touch here, and rubbing out a patch there,” but he never got
much done. There were two reasons for this. First, it was because he was the “sort of painter who can
paint leaves better than trees. He used to spend a long time on a single leaf, . . .” trying to get the shading
and the sheen and the dewdrops on it just right. So no matter how hard he worked, very little actually
showed up on the canvas itself. The second reason was his “kind heart.” Niggle was constantly distracted
by doing things his neighbors asked him to do for them. In particular, his neighbor Parish, who did not
appreciate Niggle’s painting at all, asked him to do many things for him.