Symbolism in Writing – The Tree

 

I’ve been away from my blog posting desk for a little while; the weather was holding good and the garden was crying out for attention. I’m writing course materials for the Open College of the Arts as well, so there wasn’t much time left to do anything else.

But now I’m back, I can’t get my garden entirely out of my mind, and so I’m going to look at trees as symbols in fiction. 

Trees are used to represent life and growth in mythologies, legends, poems and novels. Trees are considered representative of life, wisdom, power and prosperity. In literature trees are used as the metaphor of stability, solidity, strength and being grounded, and sometimes patience; that slow growth from a vulnerable sapling to a sturdy tree.

Trees can’t help but be spiritual, representing all the good in our lives; peace and prosperity, love and loyalty. as exemplified by the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge which can represent our personal development, uniqueness and individual beauty. Just as the branches of a tree strengthen and grow upwards to the sky, we too grow stronger, striving for greater knowledge.

The ancient Celts in Ireland so loved their native trees, that they based their alphabet on them – the Ogham – bestowed by the god of language, the Ogma. Each letters is affiliated – oak, of course, but also birch alder, willow, hazel, holly, rowan…twenty-five indigenous trees, each with it’s own symbolism. For instance Yew, which constantly regenerates itself and grows to a great age, is known as the tree of death and reincarnation. 

 Yggdrasil 

In Norse mythology the cosmology of the nine worlds, centres around a tree named Yggdrasil which reaches high above the clouds with roots that delve deep into divine realms. The god Odin hung from this sacred tree to gain enlightenment. 

Two of our most-loved and inventive writers, in their time, have featured trees in their work. J.R.R. Tolkien's Ents, the talking tree-like characters in the Lord of the Rings are the caretakers of forests, headed by Treebeard (believed to be the oldest creature in Middle-earth), and over millenia they have become more and more like the trees that they herd. Nimloth, the White Tree of Gondor, is central to the mythology of the books. It grew in the Court of the Fountain in Minas Tirith and was also the motif of Gondor's flag. It represented the pride of Gondor, and a symbol of friendship between humans and the Elves.

The Whomping Willow

J.K. Rowling also loved featuring trees. My favourite is the whomping willow, a violent tree in the grounds of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. which destroys anyone who disturbs its branches. In  The Chamber of Secrets, Ron and Harry narrowly avoid getting crushed. Later, in The Prisoner of Azkaban, they discover that the Willow hides the entrance to a secret passageway.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a beautiful book I’ve written about here, as it’s an old favourite of mine. A ‘tree of heaven’ serves as a symbol of rising above adversity, as it sprouts in the tenement buildings. This tree is native to China and Taiwan and now considered an invasive species in New York City, but in the story its determination to grow and its resistance to being destroyed parallels the ambitions of the main character,  Francie…                                                                    

There’s a tree that grows in Brooklyn. Some people call it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky. It grows in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps. It grows up out of cellar gratings. It is the only tree that grows out of cement. It grows lushly . . . survives without sun, water, and seemingly without earth. It would be considered beautiful except that there are too many of it.

Individual tree species can create mood alongside metaphor, because of their individual characters. The Beginning of Spring  by Penelope Fitzgerald, is set in Russia. Towards the end of the story, the family stay at their dacha next to a forest of white birch, which Fitzgerald might be using to represent both change and constancy. One night Lisa and Dolly walk into the forest:

‘There were paths through the birch forest, made for the autumn shooting. In fact there was a path, which might have been called a ride, almost opposite the dacha. Lisa walked steadily along it, taking the middle of the track, which was raised above the rain-worn hollows of either side.  You couldn’t say it was pitch-dark. The moon on the cloudy night sky moved among he moving ranches…

…The leaf scent pressed in on her. There was nothing else to breathe. Then Dolly began to see on each side of her, among the thronging stems of the birch trees, what looks like human hands, moving to touch each other across the whiteness and blackness.…

…They were in a clearing into which the moon shone. Dolly saw that by every birch, close against the trunk, stood a man or woman. They stood separately, pressing themselves each to their own tree. Then they turned their faces towards Lisa, patches of white agains the whitish bark.’

As a writer, I'm hugely drawn to trees and their symbology. They feature heavily in all my books. In my first Shaman Mystery, In the Moors, a black poplar grows against an abandoned cottage with a dark history. It allows one victim to escape and gives entrance to Sabbie Dare, when she's exploring. Black poplars are known as magical trees, which is why I chose it.

Later in the novel, willows feature, and their role is even more macabre than that of the whomping willow; a series of murder victims are buried in a marsh below an ancient willow tree.

The honoured carcass of the Glastonbury Thorn

The third novel Beneath the Tor, has several important trees that are Glastonbury icons. I couldn't help but want to write about the Glastonbury Thorn, the tree supposedly planted by Joseph of Arimathea on Wearyall Hill, which flowered every Christmas, until it was destroyed by locals angry about boundary disputes. Since then it has become even more of a quest for pilgrims, and its carcass is covered by ribbons flowers and other votive offerings.

I also gave a part to Gog and Magog,  a famous pair of stately, wise and ancient Glastonbury oaks, which Sabbie encounters immediately after leaving the scene of someone's sudden death:

        As we tramped along a country path, Wolfsbane mounted a fence that took him into a small enclosure where two old oaks stood proud. It took me a minute to catch him up. I found him leaning into the further of the two oaks, his arms hugging the trunk, which was so broad it would have taken several of us to surround it completely. I rested my hand on the gnarled and weathered bark of the other tree. The day was warm, bees already buzzing in the foxgloves. A woodpecker rapped with furious persistence in the distance.

'Oh, listen,' I whispered.

We stood in silence. I couldn’t imagine a better way for us to recharge our spiritual batteries. Eventually, Wolfsbane turned round. He hitched his thumbs into the waistband of his shorts and looked at the ground, as if the weight of what we’d seen only an hour ago was dragging at him. 'I think I might have to apologize to Brice.' 

I found myself gawping. Not a deliberate act, but I was startled by his words. Apologize seemed altogether the wrong sentiment. When someone you know has lost the love of their life, you condole. You sympathize and sorrow with them.

'Why ever would you need to apologize to Brice?' 

Wolfsbane leaned right into the trunk of the tree and closed his eyes. 'This is Magog, you know.'

'Oh,' I said, recognizing, but not quite placing the name. 

'The twin oaks. End of an avenue of ancient oaks.'

'Gog and Magog. I remember.' The oaks were almost leafless and white with age. 'They’re dying, Wolfs.'

'They’re dead.'

I put my hands over my mouth. 'That’s sad.'

'They’re the last, Sabbie. The rest were cut down – heck, a century ago. Even then they were millennia-old. It’s their time.'

Of course, there are so many poems that feature trees and use their symbolism, that they could not all be mentioned in a post of this size, but my favourites include Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “This Lime-tree Bower My Prison” and Robert Frost’s  “Birches”

Perhaps we should leave this subject by touching on what trees do, every day, for our planet. We're going to need all the trees we can get to help the next generation keep life on Earth for Humankind and many animals on an even and sustainable keel. I loved The Man Who Planted Trees, a short story published in 1953 by French author Jean Giono. It chronicles a shepherd’s three-decade-long effort to reforest a barren tract of land in Southeastern France. Spanning a time period shortly before World War I until shortly after World War II, the story is both an environmental and an antiwar allegory, but it has influenced the generations that have come after it, and now there are many guerrilla tree planters who fill their pockets with discarded acorns and carefully bring on the saplings they produce, before taking them back into barren places. 

To read more blogposts about symbolism in literature, click here