Themes of interest in Red Tree, White Tree

I've started reading Wendy Berg's Red Tree, White Tree, a book Bruce mentioned a while back, understanding it that it would be primarily a reinterpretation of the Matter of Britain based on the assumption that Guinevere and many of the other characters are Faery rather than Human.

I'm only about a third of the way through it, but already I've found a lot that is unexpectedly relevant to what we generally refer to as This Thing.

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1. Tolkien as non-fiction

This is an approach not too many people take, but Wendy Berg is one of them:

The power of Tolkien's work lies in the fact that he has not invented a fantastic or unreal story but that he used his imagination as the means by which he could remember some of the ancient history of our world when the human and Elven/Faery races walked the land together.

Nor is it only in a general way that Tolkien's writings reveal the ancient past. Berg cites details of Tolkien as if they were at least as authoritative as Geoffrey of Monmouth or Wolfram von Eschenbach.

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2. Coat of skins

One of Bill's deleted blogs was called Coat of Skins, a phrase from the Eden story which he took to refer to the physical body. He also often explored the idea of Elves or other higher beings incarnating in a human "coat of skins," sometimes symbolized by an ape or pig.

Here is Wendy Berg's take on the phrase from Genesis:

The phrase "coats of skins" does not refer to clothes but to that moment in creation when the binding limitation of the physical body within its containing skin was first made real. It is this coat of skin which marks the essential difference between human and Faery. . . . the creation of the limiting skin marked the first moment of the physicality of Adam and Eve. Up until this moment they, and the earth, were as the Faeries

Interpreting the "coat of skins" as a physical body is not an unusual approach, but the idea of Elf-like beings putting on coats of skins to become human makes this a much specific match with Bill's thinking.

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3. Split incarnations

The idea that single soul can temporarily "split" and incarnate in two separate bodies simultaneously is something one of my correspondents has been exploring (to explain for example how I can "be" Pharazon while the actual Pharazon is still imprisoned in the Caves of the Forgotten). Wendy Berg also proposes that this is possible, but only for Faeries. Then again, Faeries can incarnate in human "coats of skins," so the distinction is a malleable one.

Leodegrance has two identical daughters both called Gwenevere, one of whom was accepted as 'real' in the sense that she was recognised to be of royal status, while the other was not. . . . The two Gweneveres are two manifestations of the same incarnatory impulse: they are indeed both Gwenevere. Humans have one single spark of spiritual identity which manifests in only one physical body at any one place and time, but this is not so for the Faery race. What in human terms might be thought of as a 'clone' is not so in Faery terms, and while the concept of the individual spark or spirit is common to both human and Faery, the latter race is much more flexible and varied in its manifestation. What would seem inconceivable to us, something we would interpret as loss of our essential, spiritual oneness, is not so to the Faeries. It is possible for one Faery spirit to manifest in one, or two, or many different places at the same time.

Berg seems to be making a sharp distinction between Human and Faery here, but later she suggests that "it was perhaps the case that the false Gwenevere" -- one of the abovementioned pair who were "indeed both Gwenevere" in a way possible only for Faeries -- "was human and not Faery." So apparently one spirit who is "really" a Faery can have two simultaneous incarnations as a Faery and a Human. Could she have incarnated as two Humans instead? The significance of these distinctions, at least in terms of a given spirit's real or ultimate identity, begins to be rather unclear. However, it parallels Bill and Leo's ideas about Elves and Dwarves incarnating as Men.

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4. The White Tree

One of the main "articulations" Daymon Smith found between the works of J. R. R. Tolkien and Joseph Smith was the image of a White Tree. The parallel seems at first to be rather superficial, however. In Tolkien, it is an actual tree -- Telperion, one of the Two Trees of Valinor, and its various descendants -- while in the Book of Mormon it is a visionary symbol, "a representation of the tree of life," which in turn "was a representation of the love of God" (1 Ne. 15:22; 11:25). By calling it "the tree of life," Nephi implicitly identifies it with one of the two trees of Eden, the other being the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Telperion is also one of a pair, but its partner, Laurelin the Golden, seems quite different in character from the tree whose forbidden fruit brought suffering and death into the world. It is interesting, though, that in both the Legendarium and the Book, it is the White Tree alone that maintains its relevance through the ages, while its partner appears only in legends about the distant past.

The Bible makes no mention of the Tree of Life being white or having white fruit. That imagery comes from the Book of Mormon. But Wendy Berg, with no apparent knowledge of the Book, draws on Arthurian legend and arrives independently at this same idea of the biblical Tree of Life being a White Tree.

The Red Tree of her title then becomes identified with "the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil which might perhaps more accurately be called the 'tree which makes you human'."

The first tree brings death, but the second tree brings immortality. The first tree symbolises the condition of humankind and the second tree symbolises the condition of Faery, There are two trees in the Garden of Eden: human, and Faery, and the symbolism is of vital importance. The problem that the Lord God was so anxious to avoid, and with good reason, was that Adam should have simultaneous access to two states of being, human and Faery. He could be one or the other, but not both at the same time.

From here, she goes on to make independently the same connection that Daymon made only with the help of the Book of Mormon: Tolkien's White Tree is the Tree of Life. She then takes the next logical step, which I believe Daymon does not: Its partner is the Tree of Knowledge.

One is the Elven or Faery tree, and the other is the human tree . . . . Telperion was the elder, just as the Elves are the elder race. . . . Laurelin was the younger, just as the race of Men is the younger. . . . Laurelin represents the Sun, the Solar Logos of the human race. Telperion represents the Moon and the stars, and was the White Tree, the Faery Tree of Immortality, the second tree of the Garden of Eden.

I haven't yet digested all of this, nor even finished reading through the book, but I thought the presence of so much This Thing-related content in one short book on the seemingly unrelated topic of Arthurian legend was remarkable.