Etude cinétique de la production du méthane

“Leaf by Niggle,” published in the Dublin Review in 1945, was conceived and written the previous year, a er the Tolkiens’ neighbor expressed nervousness about a large poplar looming over her house. e woman wanted to have the tree removed, but Tolkien considered this ridicu-lous and managed to prevent its being felled. But, “anxious about [his]

own internal Tree,” he began thinking. “One morning he woke up with a short story in his head, and scribbled it down,” his biographer tells us.¹⁰ As mentioned earlier, this story has been regarded as an autobio-graphical allegory.¹¹ However, at least one dimension of the story is so clearly suggestive of parallels with Tolkien’s own self-conception and with religious perspectives on mortality that the distinction between application and allegory may be an excessively fine one.

e title character Niggle is initially introduced simply as a painter, much in the same way that Giles is presented simply as a farmer. Just as, on one level, “Farmer Giles” is only a story about a man’s defense of his farm, on the surface, “Leaf by Niggle” is simply about a painter and his art. But the story is really about two things: the character flaws that prevent Niggle from being a more successful painter, and a deeply philosophical defense of art in relation to transcendent or eternal val-ues. Part of this defense is the fact that Niggle’s paintings, especially his leaves, are beautiful in and of themselves, at times even captivating.

“A Leaf by Niggle has a charm of its own,” says the mysterious Second Voice in the middle of the story. “He took a great deal of pains with leaves, just for their own sake” (TL, 85). But on a deeper level, the story’s message is not “art for art’s sake” but a defense of art for the sake of real-ity. e argument does not diminish the importance of art but elevates it to the status of transcendent value and, in addition, makes it part of a value system in which the beauty of nature is linked to things of eternal importance. Niggle’s paintings, and in particular his tree, are, for many, the “best introduction to the Mountains” (95).

To understand the ecological implications of this story, we must begin with a detailed account of Niggle’s great painting, described in one of the story’s first visual images:

It had begun with a leaf caught in the wind, and it became a tree; and the tree grew, sending out innumerable branches, and thrusting out the most fantastic roots. Strange birds came and settled on the twigs and had to be attended to. en all round the Tree, and behind it, through the gaps in the leaves and boughs, a country began to open out; and there were glimpses of a forest marching over the land, and of mountains tipped with snow. (76)

Simple as it may seem, this picture provides a wonderful illustration of the complex environmental perspective discussed in earlier chapters.

In the aesthetics of the tree itself, we have images associated with arbo-riculture as part of the more general horticultural devotion identified with the Elves of Valinor and Lothlórien. We learn later in the story that the tree actually comes to life in a landscape surrounded by hedges, where the two principal characters spend a great deal of time

garden-ing and cultivatgarden-ing flowers, includgarden-ing new floral species imagined into life collaboratively. Again, this brings to mind Lothlórien and the Shire a er its restoration. And the tree sustains other species of life: numer-ous strange and presumably wild birds. en, behind the tree, there is a forest—it has a tamer part nearby and an untamed one farther away—

while still more distant are the even wilder mountains. ese images evoke the wilderness domain associated with the Ents in a picture that contains elements of both cultivated and wild beauty: conservation shading into preservation, horticulture shading into feraculture. It is a design replete with ecotones. ese varied ecological components do not compete; rather, they complete one another, an e ect captured in miniature in the “shining spray [of leaves] that framed the distant vision of the mountain” (80). Initially, we see the image of the mountain from a distance; it is only a vision, but visions can be powerful, especially when—as in this story—they come to fruition in reality.

is imagery is further developed toward the end of the story, a er Niggle’s painting has been given the gi of primary existence. Again, all these aspects are present in the real tree and in the surrounding region that comes to be known as Niggle’s Parish:

e birds were building in the Tree. Astonishing birds: how they sang! ey were mating, hatching, growing wings, and flying away singing into the Forest, even while he looked at them. For now he saw that the Forest was there too, opening out on either side, and marching away into the distance. e Mountains were glimmering far away. (89)

ey are now part of a cultivated region of a real world, and the tree and the surrounding garden provide sustenance and life for wild birds—this time, real birds.

e passage quoted above provides just a glimpse of the story’s imag-ery. e plot of the story, though, is also significant to an understanding of Tolkien’s ecology, even in places where it seems primarily personal or idiosyncratic. In the beginning of the story, Niggle has become so wrapped up in his private painting that he neglects his other duties:

“nuisances” and “hindrances” he calls them. He neglects his neighbor, Parish. He neglects his garden, which is overrun with weeds. And he neglects to prepare for an inescapable, “wretched” and “troublesome”

journey. e conflict between Niggle’s painting and his other respon-sibilities is made explicit when his painting of the tree is moved to “a tall shed that had been built for it out in his garden (on a plot where once he had grown potatoes)” (75–77). e nature of the parentheti-cal comment emphasizes that Niggle’s focus on his painting has been at the expense of his garden—not a flower garden, but one in which a nutritive staple once grew. A section of his land once used for humble agrarian purposes now has a storage shed erected on it.

Shippey has made a persuasive case for understanding this part of the story as an expression of Tolkien’s anxiety over the pursuit of his imaginative writing (his “art”) to the neglect of his own “garden,”

the academic world (his “field” of study). No doubt this is right. At the same time, a tension between art and the world in the wider sense also seems to be written into the story, and there are implications for the view of nature that we find to be part of Tolkien’s environmentalism.

Additionally, Niggle’s neglect of his neighbor Parish is presented here as a lack of charity, a character defect that is healed when his art is trans-figured into a real world of intense natural beauty. As a character, Niggle himself is transformed by the end of the story, and his transformation is part of the translation of a mere painting into the gi of nature.

In the story, Niggle’s neighbor Parish is one of the many irritating interruptions preventing Niggle from making progress on his painting.

Niggle does not like Parish very much, “partly because he was so o en in trouble and in need of help.” But also:

He did not care about painting, but was very critical about gardening. When Parish looked at Niggle’s garden (which was o en) he saw mostly weeds; and when he looked at Niggle’s pic-tures (which was seldom) he saw only green and grey patches and black lines, which seemed to him nonsensical. He did not mind mentioning the weeds (a neighbourly duty), but he refrained from giving any opinion of the pictures. (78)

Neither man understands the other. When Parish begs him for some canvas to repair a leaky roof, Niggle evades the request, and Parish’s roof never gets fixed. In short order, Niggle is indicted by an Inspector of Houses for failing to attend to Parish’s needs; the inspector, a tall man dressed in black, announces that he is “the Driver” and whisks Niggle