{"id":6510,"date":"2018-12-28T18:26:58","date_gmt":"2018-12-28T18:26:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/potbanks.wordpress.com\/?p=6510"},"modified":"2018-12-28T18:26:58","modified_gmt":"2018-12-28T18:26:58","slug":"the-word-of-teregor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/2018\/12\/28\/the-word-of-teregor\/","title":{"rendered":"The Word of Teregor"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Word of Teregor<\/a><\/em> (1914) by Guy Ridley (1885-1947) is an early British fantasy novel of sentient trees. The trees converse in moots and are unfriendly to men. One of the trees is called Enteth.<\/p>\n

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“No one but a real lover of trees could write of them as Mr. Ridley has done.” — review in the Westminster Gazette<\/em>. “A suggestive and original voice among the babel of modern literature” — review in The Daily Telegraph<\/em>.<\/p>\n

An obvious inspiration for J.R.R. Tolkien’s Ents, circa 1938, you might think. Though I doubt that would be provable now — and anyway there are more obvious and earlier possibilities. Such as an aside in Shakespeare\u2019s Macbeth<\/em> (“Who can impress the forest, bid the tree | Unfix his earthbound root?” ‘impress’ = to strongarm a man into armed service in an Army<\/em>). This might perhaps be Shakespeare’s nod to Taliesin’s magnificent poem “The Battle of the Trees” (Cad Goddeu<\/em>), in which many types of trees are enchanted into a marching army of trees. Tolkien and his circle had surely found time to notice Taliesin by 1938 — though I imagine that Tolkien would have been professionally wary of seeming to endorse the authenticity of the late Welsh ‘bardic’ songs.<\/p>\n

There’s also a prime example from Tolkien’s childhood, the “Attack of the trees” from the famous The Wizard of Oz<\/em>, here depicted in 1900 by Denslow…<\/p>\n

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Anyway, the full novel is at the link above.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Word of Teregor (1914) by Guy Ridley (1885-1947) is an early British fantasy novel of sentient trees. The trees converse in moots and are unfriendly to men. One of the trees is called Enteth. “No one but a real lover of trees could write of them as Mr. Ridley has done.” — review in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6510\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}