Tree by Tolkien

by Colin Wilson

An evaluation of Tolkien's creative writing.

20 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1973

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Colin Henry Wilson was born and raised in Leicester, England, U.K. He left school at 16, worked in factories and various occupations, and read in his spare time. When Wilson was 24, Gollancz published The Outsider (1956) which examines the role of the social 'outsider' in seminal works of various key literary and cultural figures. These include Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William James, T. E. Lawrence, Vaslav Nijinsky and Vincent Van Gogh and Wilson discusses his perception of Social alienation in their work. The book was a best seller and helped popularize existentialism in Britain. Critical praise though, was short-lived and Wilson was soon widely criticized.

Wilson's works after The Outsider focused on positive aspects of human psychology, such as peak experiences and the narrowness of consciousness. He admired the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow and corresponded with him. Wilson wrote The War Against Sleep: The Philosophy of Gurdjieff on the life, work and philosophy of G. I. Gurdjieff and an accessible introduction to the Greek-Armenian mystic in 1980. He argues throughout his work that the existentialist focus on defeat or nausea is only a partial representation of reality and that there is no particular reason for accepting it. Wilson views normal, everyday consciousness buffeted by the moment, as "blinkered" and argues that it should not be accepted as showing us the truth about reality. This blinkering has some evolutionary advantages in that it stops us from being completely immersed in wonder, or in the huge stream of events, and hence unable to act. However, to live properly we need to access more than this everyday consciousness. Wilson believes that our peak experiences of joy and meaningfulness are as real as our experiences of angst and, since we are more fully alive at these moments, they are more real. These experiences can be cultivated through concentration, paying attention, relaxation and certain types of work.

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 2 out of 5]

This short book is an essay about Tolkien and offers occasionally critical opinions by Wilson about his place in modern literature. I thought he was needlessly concerned about citing some pretty obscure works and writers as reference points, perhaps to try to establish his own academic credentials. He bombards the reader with a quite lengthy list of possible influences and contemporaries and forerunners. I don't claim to be especially well nor formally educated, but some of the sections seemed needlessly filled with posturing simply for the purpose of name dropping and trying to sound profoundly erudite. For example, he opens with an anecdote about a conversation with Norman Mailer on the way to having lunch with W.H. Auden at his apartment, and later states repeatedly that Tolkien's work is inferior to David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus. (Which I remember reading at least a portion of years ago and not being impressed.) I did agree with most of the conclusions that Wilson drew, but thought his points were in the main self-evident and didn't need to be explicated. I did not agree that Tolkien was in any way the father of the rebirth of occultism in the 1960s. I think Tolkien's initial popularity came about by average readers enjoying well-written fantasy, the huge rise in his popularity in subsequent decades was due to folks longing for a happier life and society (represented in retro-pop-culture by kids wanting to sit by the fire smoking magic weed and dreaming of magical adventures), and is now, perhaps unfortunately, kept alive by the Jackson films. I enjoyed a couple of Wilson's novels years ago (The Mind Parasites and The Space Vampires), but this non-fiction one left me a little cold. The book is illustrated by very pleasing little sketches at the top and bottom of each page by Caitlin Mackintosh, my favorite thing about it.

[Leaflet · Rating 3 out of 5]

The main charm of this little chapbook (which I found in a used bookstore) is the illustrations by Caitlin Mackintosh. A tree in red ink on the first page, a dragon perched on a paragraph in the second page, a hobbit smoking a pipe, tiny sketches of Shire scenery, mountains on the bottom, warriors (dwarves? Men?) on the top. The essay itself left me lukewarm and the author’s claim that Tolkien is the originator of the ‘occult revival’ seems ludicrous.

[Frances · Rating 2 out of 5]

The essay features numerous arbitrary logical leaps. Wilson demonstrates an inconsistent understanding of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings books; at some points I appreciate his analysis and at others I'm left wondering how he'd gotten there. Even his overarching opinion of The Lord of the Rings is inconsistent as at one point he'll call it a masterpiece and at another he'll admit to skipping over sections of it on rereads. Messy overall, though it's novel reading some criticism of Tolkien's work from over 50 years ago as it's approached quite differently now.