Spoilers ahead
For several years I read The Lord of the Rings every year starting on Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday. However, besides J.R.R. Tolkien’s works involving Middle Earth and his brilliant essay On Fairy Stories (we will cover this at a later time), I had never read any of his other writings until this month with Leaf by Niggle.
The story (rather autobiographical in nature) follows a painter, Niggle, in his quest to complete his grand masterpiece; however, he cannot quite find the time due to little bothers, in particular that of his neighbor, Mr. Parish. His life revolves around his art, caring for the lamed Mr. Parish (and his wife), seeing after others who lived even farther away, and packing for his Journey Ahead. This is Niggle’s great worry, his upcoming long Journey that continually makes its dreaded approach. As little trifles distract him, his painting is ignored, and his Journey continues its constant advance. Rather quickly Niggle must go on his Journey and leave his painting behind. As the reader begins to notice, this Journey represents the ending of Niggle’s time here on this Earth. He must move on, as we are here “but for a moment” as James teaches (James 4:14).
Niggle’s masterpiece began as a single leaf, but he longed to create a proper painting full of an entire tree. As he works it continues to grow and take on more and more. “The picture would have to stop just growing and get finished.” Tolkien, the perfectionist, began his great legendarium, not with the great stories and characters that we are so familiar with, but with his beloved single leaf of language. It was the languages of Middle Earth that would bring forth such tales and histories to Tolkien’s mind. It took a great deal to get The Hobbit in print, but the battle for The Lord of the Rings would take even longer. If you are interested in the role that C.S. Lewis played in getting these stories to print, you can find that here.
He had a number of pictures on hand; most of them were too large and ambitious for his skill. He was the sort of painter who can paint leaves better than trees. He used to spend a long time on a single leaf, trying to catch its shape, and its sheen, and the glistening of dewdrops of its edges. Yet he wanted to paint a whole tree, with all of its leaves in the same style, and all of them different.
Niggle’s Journey takes him first to a purgatory-like-state for the first one hundred years are spent in worry and work, but eventually he learns humility. Here, the story transitions to its final phase, Judgement. Niggle finds himself in a darkened room with two Voices (one severe and the other gentle while harboring a sadness with hope). A debate ensues as Niggle is evaluated concerning his life and character. Niggle has been focused more upon himself throughout his life and yet he did take proper time to serve others, with his last great sacrifice being of one to help his neighbor Mr. Parish. In the courtroom, unprompted by any idea of selfish gain, Niggle defends his neighbor as a good man and for the Voices to go easy on Mr. Parish for he had had a difficult time. Niggle’s time here has made him well. He is offered gentle treatment by the second Voice. “Niggle thought that he had never heard anything so generous as that Voice. It made Gentle Treatment sound like a load of rich gifts, and the summons to a King’s feast. Then suddenly Niggle felt ashamed. To hear that he was considered a case for Gentle Treatment overwhelmed him, and made him blush in the dark.”
Niggle goes on. Further into this eternal landscape, back to his house and place that he once knew here on this side of heaven. But now he finds his Tree. The work of art over which he had so greatly labored is finished and alive. At last he recognizes it was not exclusively about or by him, for some leaves are created through collaboration with others, including Mr. Parish. Like the parable of Mary and Martha, Niggle and Parish meet again this time both are able to appreciate what they were unable to in this life, for Niggle puts himself hard into labor while Mr. Parish was able to stop and behold the beauty all around him. As both men recognize they are here in this place due to the Second Voice, it is the feast that neither deserved.
The story ends with another evaluation, an estate evaluation after the death of Niggle back on our side. Niggle’s house and art are judged. We find two men (one severe and the other gentle). The severe Man finds no worth in Niggle’s work, all impractical with no economic value, “Worthless, in fact; no use to Society at all.” As the two talk of painting and jobs, alongside worth and value, it comes to our attention that the old canvases used by Niggle have been put to the use of patching old houses from a storm. The conversation that involves Niggle’s name comes at the comment upon his art, “Never knew he painted.” A small piece of his leaf does find its way to the town’s little museum but is lost to a fire. But his real art, his gift, remains in delightful use, as the two Voices in the realm beyond of our own often send others there to Niggle’s Parish where it serves as the gateway to the Mountains, the great enjoyment of God.
Tolkien’s famous idea of sub-creation can be found in his essay, “On Fairy Stories.” In it he argues that we have a duty to creation by our very Creator. However, we can use that for good or for evil. As Gandalf later replies to Frodo on his lament to be in such evil days, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
‘Dear Sir,’ I said — “Although now long estranged, Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed. Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned, and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned: Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light through whom is splintered from a single White to many hues, and endlessly combined in living shapes that move from mind to mind. Though all the crannies of the world we filled with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build Gods and their houses out of dark and light, and sowed the seed of dragons — ‘twas our right (used or misused). That right has not decayed: we make still by the law in which we’re made.”
In our creation we have work and art, and where that divide may be is hard to say for it seems that many would place the mark differently. But as the Preacher declares, “There is a time for everything.”
Pope John Paul II writes that, “All artists experience the unbridgeable gap which lies between the work of their hands, however successful it may be, and the dazzling perfection of the beauty glimpsed in the ardor of the creative moment: what they manage to express in their painting, their sculpting, their creating is no more than a glimmer of the splendor which flared for a moment before the eyes of their spirit.
Believers find nothing strange in this: they know that they have had a momentary glimpse of the abyss of light which has its original wellspring in God.”
May the Lord receive glory in both our work and our art.
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