Tolkien was based near Cannock Chase during WWI where he served as a signals officer. It is believed a number of features in the area influenced characters and places in his novel, including the gnarled tree pictured above, along with influences for the orcs and The Ring.
It is thought that this ancient tree – an oak planted during the reign of Henry Vlll – inspired the legendary character Treebeard in JRR Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings. Tolkien lived nearby and would walk these woods sparking his imagination to write his stories.
Treebeard was a giant tree that could walk and talk in Tolkien’s novel. Such a tree was considered an Ent, and there were other Ents in Lord Of The Rings too.
The tree is natural and has not been adapted which makes it even more amazing ~ Ian Haycox
“Like Sherlock Holmes, in the absence of any other evidence, it is certainly very strong. The tree has been there for quite a while.
“Most of the oaks were planted by Henry Vlll to build up the British Navy. It certainly has an interesting shape. They were planted across Cannock Chase during the Tudor times, it is more than 400 years old.”
Tolkien was stationed at Rugeley and Brocton Military Camps on Cannock Chase from November 1915 to June 1916, living nearby in the village of Great Haywood where a blue plaque is dedicated to him. When Tolkien was based there, he wrote The Fall Of Gondolin on the back of a sheet of military marching music.
The book is a deep history of Middle Earth and is set before the time of the Lord Of The Rings. His draft for The Fall Of Gondolin is considered the first traceable story, written down, of his Middle Earth series. The book was only published as a standalone piece in 2018, curated and edited by his son Christopher.
There are other theories about how the area, and his experiences while living there, influenced Tolkien’s writing. One is derived from a band of New Zealand soldiers who were based on Cannock Chase from the Auckland Regiment. It is thought the pronunciation of the regiment influenced the name of the ‘orcs’ in the Lord Of The Rings.
In a letter from Tolkien to close friend, Auden, he writes: “Their part (i.e. Ents) in the story is due, I think, to my bitter disappointment and disgust from schooldays with the shabby use made in Shakespeare of the coming of ‘Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill.
I longed to devise a setting in which the trees might really march to war.”
Tolkien’s reaction to Shakespeare was definitely a strong influence in Ent creation – or “sub creation” ~ Dan Cruver
Here is his description of looking into the eyes of an Ent:
One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long slow steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present…I don’t know, but it felt as if something that grew in the ground—asleep, you might say…between deep earth and sky, had suddenly waked up and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years.
He once described the magical world he had imagined as “my own internal Tree.” He must have been describing his own feelings when he wrote about Frodo touching a mallorn tree in Lothlórien: “He felt a delight in wood and the touch of it, neither as forester nor as carpenter: it was the delight of the living tree itself.”
Trees in Middle-earth
Both for Tolkien personally, and in his Middle-earth writings, caring about trees really mattered. Indeed, the Tolkien scholar Matthew Dickerson wrote “It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of trees in the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien.”
Tolkien stated that primaeval human understanding was communion with other living things, including trees.
Commentators have written that trees gave Tolkien a way of expressing his eco-criticism, opposed to damaging industrialisation.
In a 1955 letter to his publisher, Tolkien wrote “I am (obviously) much in love with plants and above all trees, and always have been; and I find human mistreatment of them as hard to bear as some find ill-treatment of animals”
Tolkien’s poem “Sing all ye joyful!” at the end of The Hobbit has in its last verse a mention of six kinds of tree ~
Lullaby! Lullaby! Alder and Willow!
Sigh no more Pine, till the wind of the morn!
Fall Moon! Dark be the land!
Hush! Hush! Oak, Ash, and Thorn!
— The Hobbit, “The Last Stage”
https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/black-country/cannock-chase-tree-inspire-jrr-
https://anitasanchez.com/2020/03/21/j-r-r-tolkien-the-living-tree/
Tree Weaver 