The Forge of Tolkien Episode 14, THE ENT IN THE MOON, is now live on #UATV.
Tolkien insisted that he did not consciously invent many of the details in his stories, including most famously the Ents. These characters, he insisted, were compounded of “philology, literature, and life,” drawing on particular words from Old English, stories like Shakespeare, and the actual differences between “male” and “female” attitudes towards gardening. In this episode, Professor Rachel Fulton Brown explores the roots of the Ents in the Old English poem “The Ruin,” Tolkien’s work for the Oxford English Dictionary on words beginning with “w,” the Green Knight in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the song Frodo sang at the Prancing Pony—and its “Mannish” predecessor about the Man in the Moon. What do giants have to do with towers and the “stain” on the Moon? It is all part of the mystery of “asterisk reality” and the love of Logos.