Mae govannen, Eä!

(That’s “hello universe” for folks who don’t read Sindarin!)

Welcome to this fun new project of mine! I’ve been interested in Tolkien’s plants for a long while, and in plants in general for even longer. The idea for writing about them here in particular came after a long thread I ended up writing on Twitter for Tolkien Trewsday, a project that an pal of mine, Tim, runs. The theme for week 25 was botany, and I ended up writing lots, despite restraining myself, and realised I had too many ideas not to expand a bit. So here I am.

While there’s plenty about the plants of Middle-earth in various books, blogs, and articles, my interest as an ethnobotanist goes a little further. Ethnobotany is the study of human relationships with plants, how we use and appreciate them, the meanings they have and take on for us, and how that shapes our interactions with the wider world. This goes for both the small scale, like the origins of your morning caffeine boost, and the large scale, like the historic injustices baked into some of the world’s biggest botanical institutions.

Tolkien’s plants don’t just hang around being decorative in Middle-earth. Even when he’s just using them to describe a place, like he does in Ithilien (LR IV-4), the heather, tamarisk, terebinth, olive, bay, juniper, myrtle, thyme, sages, marjoram, parsley, saxifrages and stonecrops, primeroles, asphodels, roses, irises, water lilies, cedars, ilex, and all the other plants have uses, purpose, importance, and the interaction of people with them is crucial. Hobbits love to grow things, which has become an integral part of their culture, cultivating plants for eating (potatoes), smoking (pipeweed), beauty (gardens), and even creating social spaces (the Party Tree). The horse-lords of Rohan are inextricably linked to their wide, sweeping grasslands, as are the Drúedain to their forest, while the near-magical properties of athelas and its folklore are instrumental in the cultural defining of Aragorn as King. The Peoples of Middle-earth are connected to their lands and to their plants in so many explicit ways, both in terms of where they are and who they are. Tolkien doesn’t just show that plants matter to him, he shows that they matter to everyone, both in Middle-earth and in our Primary World.

One of the things Tolkien loves to do is highlight the value of knowledge that people don’t find “important” - Boromir is told not to scoff at “Old Wives’ Tales” (LR II-8), while Théoden has to be reminded of the tales he was told as a child that referred to ents and the forest of Fangorn (LR III-8). Ioreth’s folk knowledge is dismissed by the herb-master, but affirmed and emphasised by Gandalf over and above the herb-master’s pontifications about “noble” and “rustic” names, and, of course, proven right (LR V-8). The study of ethnobotany has at its heart the ways we name, understand, and value plants, the information and knowledge systems that underpin our comprehension of the natural world. When you put real-world issues like that into fantasy worlds, you can crank up the volume and say exactly what you want to say against the backdrop you have chosen. From there, the botanical magic of our favourite Secondary Worlds can bleed back through and brighten our own understandings of the plants we see every day.