O70 The Memory of Party Trees

[huinare.livejournal.com]

B2MeM Challenge: "A Long-Expected Party" (Alternate Viewpoints)
Format: Double drabble
Genre: General
Rating: G
Warnings: Tree-death
Characters: The Party Tree (seriously), Bilbo, Frodo, Saruman, Samwise
Summary: The Party Tree's perception of Bilbo's eleventy-first birthday, and what happened later.




Climbing hands bearing laughter, backs propped sitting, the tree adds these things to each annual ring.  It knows Bilbo Baggins who comes springtime and autumn to tell it poetry, and Frodo Baggins who reads beneath it or brings cousins to climb.

A hundred lanterns, frosted glass or exotically patterned paper, are hung on the tree as an autumn approaches.  The quiet field fills with light and bodies and song.  The tree has not known anything like this.

Bilbo Baggins, no older yet weary, stands under the tree, then departs.  That is the last season he is added to its rings.
____

Seventeen more rings have graced the tree when stifling smokes arrive.  Autumn again approaches, bringing now the wizard who regards the tree spitefully though it knows him not.

Metal bites through the rings of years.  The tree falls prone in the field.  As autumn’s colors flare and fall and the smoke deepens, the tree lies dying its slow death.

Winter nears, the smokes ebb, and a familiar gentle presence returns.  Into the earth Samwise Gamgee commends a seed.  The tree goes slowly into the soil, embracing the seed as it emerges to commit the coming years to its own rings.

Comments

[engarian.livejournal.com]

Such a nice contrast between the violence of the death and the gentleness of Samwise planting the seed.

- Erulisse (one L)

[huinare.livejournal.com]

Thanks, Erulisse!

[keiliss.livejournal.com]

Bittersweet. I love the concept of all these things being committed to the rings so they're a record of more than just time.

[huinare.livejournal.com]

Thank you, Keiliss =) The rings helped ease the problem of explaining precisely what a tree is "thinking"...maybe the rings are part of an actual consciousness, maybe just a sort of library of the things that took place around it...

[blslarner.livejournal.com]

Oh, but I LOVE this so! Yes, so the Party Tree would mark the events around it. And I am glad that it accepts and seeks to sustain and nourish the little mallorn as it does!

[huinare.livejournal.com]

Thank you! Writing this was a diverting excursion for me.

[aliana1.livejournal.com]

What an awesome use of "alternate viewpoints"! Treebeard and Tom Bombadil would approve. I love how you write about all the sensations the tree must have felt and recorded in its rings, and the tragedy of its death, and how it embraces the seed at the end. Trees are such an important part of Tolkien's world, and I'm glad you could do justice to this one.

[huinare.livejournal.com]

I love the Alternate Viewpoints card so very much, because from day one it made me think: "How can I do something really obscure with this?" Not that all of my responses have been this obscure, but the card got me thinking about things in different ways.

Thanks as always for your lovely comments, Aliana. I'm a big fan of trees myself (despite my favorite character being like tree-murderer extraordinaire) so I'm glad you think Treebeard himself would dig this. =D

[mews1945.livejournal.com]

This is incredibly moving. Wonderful viewpoint story.

[huinare.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much.

[dwimordene-2011.livejournal.com]

Yay, foliage fic! Trees can give such a different perspective: the slow, patient incorporation of memories, year after year, ring after ring, works beautifully, as does the trees prolonged, and equally patient, death (despite the violence). The last line is fantastic - after all the trouble with rings, here are some that should be celebrated, encompassing that circle of life as they do.

[huinare.livejournal.com]

Yay, foliage fic!
I kinda missed the whole tree party that was going on earlier in the month..ah well.

The last line is fantastic - after all the trouble with rings, here are some that should be celebrated, encompassing that circle of life as they do.
Thank you, Dwim! I was actually pretty pleased that that ended up being the last line I wrote for B2Me this year.

[dreamflower]

Oh, that's beautiful.

[huinare.livejournal.com]

Thanks, Dreamflower! How pleasant to get a comment on a B2MeM piece at this hour. I'll forever remember B2MeM2012 as the month I included hobbitses in my fic for the first time (and enjoyed it, no less). =]