by Dwight Longenecker
What connection is there between two of England’s greatest literary figures — both men of Warwickshire’s Middle England, both brilliant wordsmiths and creators of powerful stories and unforgettable characters? Not much it would seem. The common opinion is that Tolkien disliked Shakespeare.
It is part of Tolkien lore that the Ents’ militant march on Isengard was inspired by the bloody child’s prophecy that MacBeth will not be defeated until Great Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane Hill. The scene may have inspired Tolkien, but it did so through disappointment.
In a letter to W.H.Auden, quoted in The Letters of J.R.R.Tolkien, Tolkien wrote about the Ents, “Their part in the story is due, I think, to my bitter disappointment and disgust from schoolboy days with the shabby use made in Shakespeare of the coming of ‘Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill: I longed to devise a setting in which the trees might really march to war.”
In a paper presented to Mythcon in 2002 Janet Brennan Croft writes, “Because of the evidence in his letters and biography, J.R.R. Tolkien is often thought of as being ‘unswervingly hostile’ to William Shakespeare and his works. As a schoolboy…he had already formed his opinion of the playwright, and did not enjoy studying Shakespeare, whom he ‘disliked cordially.’ “