by Stefan Ekman
Time in Lothlórien is markedly different from time in the world outside. It is quite clearly “an anachronism consciously opposed to [the] wrong time”62 of Middle-earth outside. The gap between outside and polder time recalls the vast history that underlies Middle-earth, and the fact that the power of Galadriel’s Ring is required to maintain that gap heralds the end of the elves. To Frodo, crossing the Silverlode is like walking across time into the Elder Days and “a world that was no more.” This world is different even from Rivendell, where “there was memory of ancient things; in Lórien the ancient things still lived on in the waking world” (FR, II, vi, 340). A time abyss, “a gap between the present of the tale and some point deep in the past,”63 opens up in Rivendell when Frodo learns that Elrond not only knows of the Elder Days more than six millennia ago, but can remember them (FR, II, ii, 236–37; cf. Appx B). In Lothlórien, he suddenly finds himself at the bottom of that abyss, in “a corner of the Elder Days,” together with elves far older than Elrond. Sam tries to express his impression of the land: “I feel as if I was inside a song, if you take my meaning” (FR, II, vi, 342). There is no doubt that he does not mean Pippin’s bath song or his own Troll song but rather songs such as Aragorn’s about Beren and Lúthien, or Bilbo’s about Eärendil, or The Fall of Gil-galad, which Sam has learned from Bilbo—songs about events that took place thousands of years earlier. Haldir explains that it is the power of Galadriel that he feels, something that she confirms. Lothlórien’s boundary is maintained by the power of her Ring, and as such, it will fail if the One Ring is destroyed. “[T]hen our power is diminished,” Galadriel explains to Frodo, “and Lothlórien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away. We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten” (FR, II, vii, 356). The time of the outside world will rush into the polder if Frodo succeeds in his quest, and not only the beauty of Lothlórien will be ruined. Galadriel’s words forebode the loss inherent in triumph: by the defeat of Sauron and destruction of the One Ring, the power of the elves is also forced out of the world. The “sudden joyous ‘turn’” that Tolkien calls eucatastrophe or “good catastrophe” might bring joy, but it is joy mingled with grief, deliverance mingled with loss.64
Time in the polder has not stopped, but it passes differently from time in the world outside.65 “Elves and Men will live in the world at different speeds, as it were, and their intersecting paths must involve a shift, on some level, from time to timelessness,” Flieger observes.66 Paul H. Kocher draws attention to the relation between passage of time and elven psychology: how, for the deathless elves, time passes both swiftly and slowly.67 Although the temporal aspect is only called attention to when the Company has left the elves and Sam is puzzled by the new moon (FR, II, ix, 379), a vagueness about the passage of time pervades the entire Lothlórien episode. Flieger discusses in detail how time flows in Lothlórien as compared to the outside world.68 Having examined Tolkien’s musings on time in Lothlórien from The Treason of Isengard,69 she concludes that after an “interior argument,” Tolkien appears to have decided that it is “[b]etter to have no time difference” between Lothlórien and the outside world. Nevertheless, time in Lothlórien remains vague and imprecise because “Tolkien’s theme, if not his plot, needed two kinds of time.”70
The clearest example of how time in the elven forest flows according to its own rules is provided during the Company’s final day there. To summarize their itinerary: they rise and walk with Haldir to the boats, a distance of about ten miles. When “noon [is] at hand,” they reach the tongue of land where the Silverlode passes into the river Anduin. They pack the boats and go for a test-drive up the river, run into Celeborn and Galadriel, and have a parting feast. After the feast, Celeborn informs them of the lay of the land along the river and Galadriel imparts her gifts. Then the Company leaves, as a “yellow noon [lies] on the green land” (FR, II, viii, 360–67). Unless the Company and the elves are remarkably efficient with their packing, partying, and presents, something must have happened to time here. It seems almost to have ceased inside Lothlórien, allowing for a greater number of actions than usual to be performed in a briefer (outside) time. The simplest explanation would be to ascribe this temporal anomaly to textual mistakes. According to “The Tale of Years,” Frodo and Sam are taken to Galadriel’s Mirror on February 14 and the Company departs from Lothlórien on February 16 (RK, Appx B, 1067). Because the hobbits look into the Mirror on what is obviously the Company’s last evening in Caras Galadhon (FR, II, viii, 358–60), the critics Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull suggest that a mistake has been made and that the correct date for the Mirror of Galadriel in “The Tale of Years” should be February 15.71
The question is, would “a writer known for scrupulous attention to the calendar”72 make not one but two mistakes for two consecutive dates? An alternative interpretation is possible. February 16, the day of departure, is the day with two noons. Does one noon, in fact, belong to the fifteenth and one to the sixteenth? Does the parting feast take them through the night and out on the other side without anyone noticing? Do Lothlórien days and nights, up to the very last, pass faster than on the outside? This would not only explain what seem like inconsistencies, it would also fit Sam’s bewildered attempt to recall more than a handful of days of an entire month. The two noons thus suggest both a moment stretched into hours and hours folded into a moment, ultimately indicating how time in Lothlórien, as in Stardust’s Faerie, does not simply pass faster or more slowly than in the mortal world but follows completely different rules.
The process of gaining entrance to Lothlórien not only emphasizes the diligence with which this polder is defended, it also displays the gradual nature of the boundary. Gradual, but not that of a crosshatch: despite the stages that the Company passes, it is not until they have crossed the Silverlode that they find themselves in a different reality. The parts of the elven realm that reach beyond the river are clearly part of the land but follow the rules of the outside world. Lothlórien is a Faerie realm that strives to maintain ancient times when the surrounding world moves on, providing a sanctuary for its elven population. That its existence is connected to the One Ring must surely count as the second great tragedy encountered by the reader in the story; but unlike Gandalf’s fall into the chasm in Moria, Lothlórien’s doom is never negated. Yet this park imparts an eerie vision of time as well as nature: both are constant in the elven realm, ultimately providing sterile beauty and time without change. Tolkien called his elves embalmers, and this polder provides an example of their embalming art.
The Forest of Twisting Paths: Holdstock’s Mythago Wood73
Ryhope Wood is a patch of wildwood, some six miles in circumference, in rural Herefordshire. Even though a large proportion of Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood cycle is set in the surrounding countryside, the forest provides a gravitational center for the stories. Within the impenetrable boundaries of this small forest unfold seemingly limitless woodlands where inherited memories from our collective unconscious come to life as so-called mythagos. The novels of the cycle—Mythago Wood, Lavondyss, The Hollowing, Gate of Ivory, and Avilion—all tell the stories of their protagonists’ journeys into, and in, the woods, journeys during which the forest acts upon the characters while allowing them to act in the forest.
Whereas the Lothlórien polder provides stability and constancy, Ryhope Wood, similarly an actively defended anachronism, is a locus of change. Each of the five novels in the series describes a place where space and time are fluid and mutable; and the polder also evolves over the novels into increasingly complex settings for the characters’ journeys.
The force that maintains the polder is a nebulous presence in the forest rather than a clearly identifiable entity. The direct action it takes to keep the woodland’s secrets bears witness to its power, though. Unable to penetrate the woodland defenses, Mythago Wood’s first-person narrator, Steven, seeks to fly over the woodlands to get an overview of
their interior. He and the pilot, Harry Keeton, set out to take pictures of the mysterious forest from above, but fail; the plane is tossed by heavy winds, a golden light enshrouds it, and a loud, ghostly wail is heard, forcing them to turn back (Mythago Wood 100–101). This powerful display is the only instance when the force that protects the polder takes direct physical action, but it leaves little doubt that there is a force that actively maintains the boundaries. George Huxley, Steven’s father, believes that the small stand of primordial wildwood
had survived by defending itself against the destructive behavior […] of the human population that was settling around it. Over the millennia, the concentration of time and spirit in the wood had made it into something more than just trees […]. It had become an entity, not conscious, not watching, but somehow sentient and to an astonishing degree timeless. (Hollowing 64)
The process suggests a virtuous circle, where successful defense leads to an increased concentration of time and spirit—Huxley uses the word aura (e.g., Mythago Wood 49)—which in turn results in greater sentience and thus better defenses. This brief description makes clear how central time is in connection with the polder. The process has taken millennia; the concentration of time and spirit has given rise to the sentience; and, somewhat contradictorily, the forest is astonishingly timeless. Over the course of the books, it becomes clear that the contradiction derives from the straightforward progression of time outside the forest polder and the temporal flux inside it.
The sentient woodland force, and the mythagos to which it gives rise, acts on the countryside around it. Its action on the surrounding world is one of the reasons why Mendlesohn considers Mythago Wood to be an intrusive fantasy. “[T]he wood’s field reaches out into the world,” she points out, and the field “allows the wood’s inhabitants/manifestations to burst through into modern life.”74 In fact, the forest reaches out—mainly through mythagos, but occasionally through other means—in all five novels. In Mythago Wood, a band of oak saplings stretches from the forest to the Oak Lodge, growing far faster than normal, culminating in the sudden appearance of an enormous oak in the study (Mythago Wood 88, 141–42). Tallis in Lavondyss is insidiously introduced to the forest and taught how to open portals into its depths, so-called hollowings. In The Hollowing, Alex’s spirit is partially sucked into the wood through one of Tallis’s masks, and the boy is subsequently abducted physically by a mythago version of the Green Knight (Hollowing 27–29, 296–99). Steven’s brother, Christian, is brought into the forest by the schemes of the mythago Kylhuk in Gate of Ivory. In Avilion, the ancient Amurngoth, or fairies, steal human children and replace them with their own. The books in the Mythago Wood cycle are, to use Marek Oziewicz’s expression, novels of visitations, “the kind of visitations the protagonist does not expect, which he dreads and yet becomes increasingly fascinated with while being drawn into wanting them to recur.”75 This power of dread–fascination–attraction is most obvious in the mythago character Guiwenneth, whom Clute refers to as “the seducer seduced.”76 “[T]he notion of the intrusion as seducer,” Mendlesohn observes, “is made manifest as the wood in the form of Guiwenneth, who pulls first George Huxley and then his two sons within its embrace.”77
People are pulled into the forest, through its manifestations or inhabitants, because it needs something from their minds, and they are brought past the boundary defenses. The human subconscious is a source of creative energy used by the mythogenic process to “seed” the forest with mythago inhabitants. In The Hollowing, Alex’s father, Richard, experiences how “a world [is] forming from his mind in the vampire wood around him” (Hollowing 96). Tallis loses energy to the forest, which is “sucking out her soul, her spirit. It was sucking out her dreams. It was draining her” (Lavondyss 247). Having been trapped in the forest for years, Huxley’s colleague Wynne-Jones is left empty, a native inhabitant of the forest (Lavondyss 203), and Steven suggests that he has become a part of the forest in Avilion (114). Unlike in the first four novels, it is suggested in Avilion that the mythogenic process is not purely passive; the main characters have some slight control. Steven and Guiwenneth’s son, Jack, intentionally calls up a mythago of his grandfather (e.g., 161–62); Jack’s sister, Yssobel, dreams up parts of Avilion (another name for Lavondyss, the Otherworld at the forest’s heart) (e.g., 200–201); and Steven exerts some measure of control in his search for a suitable place to live in the forest (94).
The forest’s need for people is why the boundary appears to both pull and push: while the forest does its best to keep outsiders in general away from the heartwood, some are pulled in and helped past the defenses. No character strays into this forest by mistake; all are led by a guide, brought against their will, or consciously force their way in. Steven and Keeton, for instance, very clearly fight their way through the forest defenses; and through their entry, the full extent of those defenses becomes plain:
First, there was disorientation. We found ourselves walking back the way we had come. At times it was almost possible to experience the switch in perception. We felt dizzy; the underwood became preternaturally dark; the sound of the river changed from our left to our right. […] Somehow we passed that first defensive zone. The wood began to haunt us. Trees seemed to move. Branches fell upon us … in our mind’s eyes only, but not before we had reacted with exhausting shock. The ground seemed to writhe at times, and split open. We smelled fumes, fire, a stench like decay. (Mythago Wood 207)
Disorientation is the defense that is most persistently mentioned. Unwelcome visitors are turned away, led out, and never manage to pass the woodland’s periphery. On his own and unwanted by the forest, Steven cannot breach this defense and is unable to enter more than two hundred yards into the woods (Mythago Wood 92–93). Huxley’s diary similarly mentions the difficulty of penetrating into the heartwood. Once humans are drawn in by the forest, however, disorientation also keeps them in, frustrating their attempts to leave. Richard, for instance, is unable to walk even the short distance from the Horse Shrine camp back to Oak Lodge (Hollowing 71–72, 74–75). The disorientation can be overcome, however. By keeping to the river, Steven and Keeton manage to maintain their orientation, but they are instead haunted by illusions. On the ground, the forest does not defend itself in such a physically violent manner as when the two attempt to fly over it. Instead, its defenses are related to the first stages of mythogenesis (the creation of mythagos), which are characterized by half-glimpsed images in the corner of the eye, rather than by fully formed (and physical) mythagos.
Humans are kept in the forest, providing material for mythogenesis until they have been emptied of dreams and myths and have been made parts of myths themselves. Because the forest needs people to seed itself with mythagos and also must prevent possible external threats from arising, it maintains its pull, drawing or (physically) dragging back any who manage to escape. Christian leaves at the end of Gate of Ivory but cannot give up his search for Guiwenneth, a search that eventually leads to his death in Mythago Wood and again in Avilion. Steven, Keeton, and Tallis all stay, unable to find their way out. Even in The Hollowing, in which the protagonists appear to have a chance of returning, the reader never actually sees them do so, or even start on their way out. Keeton and Tallis’s father manages to get out, but he remains spiritually shackled to the forest through Tallis’s Moondream mask. Only in Avilion does the wood eventually allow Steven and his son to leave, but like his brother before him, Steven keeps returning into the forest, unable to abandon his search for Guiwenneth.
Because of the manifestations of myths, the polder’s structure is not only spatial; it is a structure of places connected to the myths: mythago landscapes, buildings, and seasons. W. A. Senior calls this landscape a representation of “the unlimited potential of the mind and creative impulse,”78 and Tallis is told that the world in the forest “is not nature, it consists of mind” (Lavondyss 287). Likewise, the secret behind the polder’s impossibly large interior is that it consists not of natural landscap
e but of the landscapes of myths. This landscape is made up of mythotopes,79 the habitats of myths, places suited to the myths they harbor. Mythotopes are created through mythogenesis along with their heroes (see Lavondyss 160), and they are the reason why the woodlands open up endlessly as the characters travel inward.
Looking at the characters’ journeys in the novels reveals how the mythotopic structure evolves from novel to novel—the polder is not identical in all five stories. The basic structure is the labyrinth, found in its simplest form in Mythago Wood. In his review of Gate of Ivory, Clute describes that novel as “an arduous tale which leads its protagonists, arduously, through many labyrinthine meanders, into the arduous heart of fantasy.”80 On one level or another, all the novels can be discussed in terms of labyrinthine structures, although I will focus on the relation between mythotopical structures and character journeys. The path Steven follows through the forest in Mythago Wood twists and turns but never really leaves him with any choices.81 It is a path that conforms to what Umberto Eco calls a linear labyrinth82 and Penelope Reed Doob describes as a unicursal labyrinth, where “a single unbranched […] circuitous route leads inevitably, if at great length, to the center.”83 The river along which Steven and Keeton travel suggests such a circuitous path, curving and curling through the woodlands (Mythago Wood 244, 280); and the only fork that is implied occurs where they leave Christian’s trail, guided by a mythago. The inevitability of the unicursal path is echoed in the inevitability of Steven’s quest; the further he pursues his brother, and the deeper into the forest he travels, the more he becomes the Kinsman of myth, doomed to eventually kill the equally mythic Outsider that Christian has become, regardless of his own intentions.