J.R.R. Tolkien spends so much time talking about trees, telling us details of their species and their growth, that it’s curious there’s one omission. What kind of tree is Treebeard?

A few seemed more or less related to Treebeard, and reminded them of beech-trees or oaks. But there were other kinds. Some recalled the chestnut: brown-skinned Ents with large splayfingered hands, and short thick legs. Some recalled the ash: tall straight grey Ents with many-fingered hands and long legs; some the fir (the tallest Ents), and others the birch, the rowan, and the linden. [LR 3.04.142]

We get a hint here that Treebeard sort-of looks like an oak (400 species) or a beech (13 species), but it’s never explicitly stated and that doesn’t narrow it down much. Can we use external information to figure out what Tolkien might have been thinking? Of course we can!

Since Treebeard can get most of the Ents of Fangorn to a moot with one morning’s work, he must be a central figure in the Ent community. If we had a graph of relationships between trees, then we could look for centrally-positioned tree species. Treebeard is probably one of those.

The European Commission has funded research into forest types and the species that make them up, all available on line.¹ With a lot of transcription² and a little bit of matrix algebra, we can turn their tree species matrix into a species adjacency matrix, and thence into a graph.³ All matrix algebra and graph metrics were computed with the R statistical software, version 4.2.2.

I have omitted the species that only live by themselves, most conspicuously the junipers. (See the Canary Island pine, all off by its lonesome? Some species are even more isolated than that.) The introduced species are also removed,⁴ because Treebeard is nothing if not native to his forest. There are 112 species in the graph, after we remove the singletons. There are 92 types/subtypes of forest.

The European Forest Matrix converted to a graph. Hardwoods are in orange and softwoods in blue. Click to embiggen.

Even blown up to full size, that graph is too tightly connected to analyze with just eyeballs, so we need mathematical measures of centrality. I used four:

• Degree just counts how many species can live next to the tree of interest, because they exist in the same kinds of forest. The Ent with the most friends has the highest degree.
• Page Rank is how the Google search engine works. If your species is around other species that are themselves around lots of species, your centrality is higher. If organizing an Entmoot involves recruiting highly-connected Ents to help you out, the tree with the highest page rank would be a good one to do it.
• Closeness is a measure of how many steps through the graph (friend-of-a-friend) a species needs to get to every other species. This would be useful for organizing an Entmoot by yourself.
• Betweenness (that’s really the word) looks at the shortest paths through the graph connecting each pair of species. The species that’s on the most of those paths is the most between — this is the tree that would know all the news in the forest.

We don’t know how Treebeard did it; it might have been any of them, so I looked at these measures to find species that are near the top on all of them. Here are the candidates.

Ash: The European ash tree has the highest degree centrality. 65 other species connected to it. That’s because the range map on Wikipedia says it grows basically anywhere with water. Definite possibility! Except the text says that other Ents look like ashes, and they’re not Treebeard. Also, Gandalf’s staff was made of ash, so I doubt an ash-ent would think he’s such a good friend. So the ash is out.

Black elder: Besides elderberries being tasty, the Black elder has the highest page rank. Unfortunately, it looks more like a bush than a tree. I’m sad that this one didn’t work out because Celeborn addressing an elder as “Eldest” would have been a great joke.

Field maple: This tree isn’t number one on any metric, but it’s #3 or #4 on all of them so it’s a contender. It loses out because it doesn’t have any textual support. It doesn’t look anything like an oak or a beech. (No beech ranks above #8 on any metric.)

Pedunculate oak: This is the good old English oak. It’s a very long-lived tree, and very tall. The Wikipedia article says there are more ancient oaks in England than any other country in Europe. It also cites old myths saying oaks were the “thunderstorm trees”, with which Saruman might agree.  Merry said “The Forest had felt as tense as if a thunderstorm was brewing inside it”. [LR 3.09.059] Though it’s not higher than #3 on any metric, this is almost certainly the species Tolkien was thinking of.  But… the graph suggests a dark-horse candidate.

Turkey oaks in New York’s Central Park

Turkey oak: It’s got a funny name (OK, maybe not as funny as “pedunculate”), but it’s #1 on the betweenness metric. Turkey oaks have an interesting history. Wikipedia says, “The species’ range extended to northern Europe and the British Isles before the previous ice age, about 120,000 years ago.” I can’t help remembering Elrond saying the Old Forest once stretched all the way from the Shire to Dunland, but had shrunk since.  Almost like Treebeard could have walked among Turkey oaks from Wellinghall to England, but now there’s just empty lands between them.

So I liked Turkey oaks, but on top of that, searching for Turkey oaks on line took me to the website for Central Park. They have Turkey oaks there, and look at them! The one on the left is absolutely an Ent, caught in mid-pandiculation.

Credit where credit is due

About a quarter of the way through this exercise, I realized I was tracing the steps of Kieran Healy of Duke University, whose essay on how British intelligence might have caught Paul Revere if only they’d known some math is one of the funniest things ever written about graph analysis.  Note for his most-obscure joke: “eigenvector centrality” is the same as what I called “page rank” here.

Lee Smith is full of good ideas these days. Her latest is a graph of the characters in LotR who call each other by the familiar pronoun.

Her graph has caused me to reconsider an earlier opinion.  I once wrote a post in which I complimented Faramir on a slick linguistic move to seduce Éowyn.  The graph, though, shows that Faramir never switched from the formal to the familiar in anything he said to her.  Worse, he went even more formal: “I will wed with the White Lady of Rohan, if it be her will.”

I hadn’t realized this until I looked in the French translation.  During all their conversations in the Houses of Healing, franco-Faramir addresses Éowyn as “Madame”. (N.B. He’s 36 years old; she’s 24.) Then, as he makes his move, he ratchets it upwards. The highest level of formality, when talking to a feudal ruler, was to address them in the third person.  We have only echoes of that in American English; we get the feeling when someone says to the Queen, “as Her Majesty commands”.

So I’ve changed my opinion. Faramir is just role-playing his feudal-prince fantasies again. (We discussed this over at Olga’s joint, a while back.)  Not that I can blame him; Lee’s graph shows that Denethor never called his son “thou”, either.  Poor guy had no idea how to use pronouns.

Lines of familiar address by chapter

If you believe Peter Jackson, the Ring doesn’t do much of anything. It’s just a MacGuffin. With the Ring, someone who’s a hundred feet tall can knock down dozens of soldiers with one sweep of a thirty-foot mace, but I’m pretty sure I could do that without a Ring. (It’s all in the wrists.) The Ring blurs your vision and fills your ears with voices, which seems counterproductive when you’re trying to rule an evil empire. It enables you to see Ringwraiths, but who would want to?

The cost of Ringlessness

So what does the Ring actually do? We can try to figure that out by looking for things that only happened because Sauron didn’t have it. Here are a few:

The Nazgûl aren’t very effective, without their Lord

When the Black Riders split up they can scare people, but they can’t accomplish much useful. Granted, there is power working against them in the Shire, but it would have to be stronger than the military of Gondor to neutralize the Nazgûl to that extent, and I don’t think it is. Besides, the Riders seem kind of disorganized. The One Ring may be the only channel of control that works on all nine of their rings.

Saruman attacked Rohan too soon

Time to take another swipe at Peter Jackson. Saruman in his movie is a willing slave of Sauron, which makes his attack on Rohan ridiculous. If he’d held off a week,  until about March 8, the Rohirrim would have still been pinned down in Helm’s Deep as the gates of Minas Tirith were shattered. War over.

In the book, this makes perfect sense. Saruman thinks he’s an independent agent, pursuing his own ends. I can’t find any evidence that he knows Sauron’s timetable for the attack on Gondor. Sauron can’t give him a direct order without revealing his dominance, which would provoke some kind of resistance. Considering the distance and Saruman’s considerable power, resistance could have done quite a bit of damage to Sauron’s plans. All this is because Sauron doesn’t have his Ring. With the Ring, Saruman’s own ring would have bound him to Sauron’s will, with no need to keep up a pretense, and the synchronized attacks on Gondor and Rohan would have been devastating.

The fight among the orcs in the Tower of Cirith Ungol

Sam called it “lucky” that Shagrat’s and Gorbag’s forces wiped each other out, so we should keep an eye out for the hand of Providence. And everything worked out so neatly that it must have been there, but in this case it’s hardly needed. The natural centrifugal instincts of Orcs aren’t held in check by the Ring (even though it’s just a few feet away). A bit of “binding” would have kept the lines of command clear, and made sure that either Shagrat or Gorbag would have known to shut up and obey.

The chaotic orders Shagrat gets from Lugbúrz

Look at this mess:

“Any trespasser found by the guard is to be held at the tower. Prisoner is to be stripped. Full description of every article, garment, weapon, letter, ring, or trinket is to be sent to Lugbúrz at once, and to Lugbúrz only. And the prisoner is to be kept safe and intact, under pain of death for every member of the guard, until He sends or comes Himself.”

VI, i.

Shagrat’s reporting path upwards goes through the bureaucracy of Barad-dûr, but the path back down does not. This is a recipe for disaster: the middle-managers aren’t kept apprised of the actions at the top, so who knows what they’ll screw up, even if they’re following orders to the letter.

Let’s put these together into an Orc Chart. This graphic shows a disaster waiting to happen. Shagrat has three directions from which orders can arrive; that’s the obvious point of failure of this organization.  (JRRT’s military experience shows up again.) The Nazgûl don’t have any lines between their boxes. If I were Lord of the Nazgûl, I’d have designated two deputies, with three wraiths reporting to each one. Put one team at each Bree-gate, and LotR ends in Chapter 11. The green boxes are characters called “lieutenant”. Not very similar roles. The Ring can be thought of as a set of command and control channels among the characters that clear up that disorderly network.

Organization of Morgul & Cirith Ungol Divisions

Looking for the Ring in our world

From the 1950s through the 1970s, people who were looking for real-world analogues of the Ring usually thought of the atomic bomb. I was never comfortable with that because of one salient feature of the Ring: when it’s destroyed, Sauron will fall. This was a very puzzling thing to a teen-aged first-time reader. What kind of tool or weapon reduces its user to nothingness when it’s taken away? Stephen Winter wrote an essay recently about Sauron’s project, which gets at that important point.

Stephen reminds us that Sauron can not create. He calls Sauron a “false maker” (which seems to be a deliberate counterpoint to the word “sub-creator”). Previously in the history of Middle-Earth, Sauron had worked via the psychology of individuals. He was effective at sowing discord, but it didn’t help him build an empire of evil because it generally led to the destruction of the place he was working in. He needed something more tangible for his attempt to conquer and hold the world. But what tangible thing is available to a false maker? Sauron found the loophole: organizing is not creating. Matter can be rearranged almost indefinitely without overstepping any bounds. In particular, people and things can be arranged into a hierarchy.

A hierarchy is a tremendous tool for multiplying the force of a leader. In the mid-twentieth century, it reached a peak of implementation in Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Mao’s China. In fact, the word “totalitarian” could be defined as a state that allows no interactions among its citizens outside the hierarchy. There’s a pattern here. I am reminded of the comment by a (probably apocryphal) German officer in World War 2: “The reason the Americans do so well in war is that war is chaos, and Americans practice chaos every day.” The forces of the West in Middle Earth are the same way. If there’s any clear path of authority across the races, it’s hard to see. This came up in the comments at Middle-Earth Reflections, a while back. Leadership among Elves and post-Numenoreans is a matter of personal relationships between a commander and the troops. (Éowyn: “They go only because they would not be parted from thee — because they love thee.” V, ii) It’s not a hierarchy, or any kind of structure you can draw on a PowerPoint chart.

To make a hierarchy work, though, the boss has to pay a price. He has to delegate both authority or responsibility. Or, in Ring-terms, “let a great part of his former power pass into it.” (I, ii). The hierarchy can be turned against the boss, or if it’s destroyed the boss finds himself sitting at a desk, with a dead telephone, commanding nothing. Powerless.

Conclusion

Organization was missing in the First Age, so it’s what Sauron added when he set up on his own. Hierarchy is the key, a thing Morgoth never had. Théoden King of Rohan had more levels of structure in a 6,000-man (ok, 5998-man) detachment than you can find mentioned in the entire Silmarillion. For us in the Information Age, the closest thing to the Ring is not a weapon, it’s a hierarchical org chart.