Trees, Battle of the

There are two versions of the story called "the Battle of the Trees", one fairly well known, one less well.

The better-known version tells how the Welsh wizard, warrior and prince Gwydion became involved in an obscure battle which was either called Câd Goddeu, "the Battle of Trees", or Câd Achren -- "Achren" being one of the many names for the underworld or alternate universe ruled by Prince Arawn, the lord of the dead. Scholars do not agree on the causes of the battle -- some say that it was a raid on the otherworld during which Gwydion intended to bring back for the use of mankind three valuable creatures (the dog, deer and lapwing bird) which he felt the Lord of the Otherworld was unfairly withholding from humanity.

The long and mysterious poem that tells about the battle itself was attributed to the wizard-bard Taliesin. The Câd Goddeu poem describes the great wizardry by which Gwydion brought the trees to life and sent them into battle to fight for humanity's sake against the forces of death.

If you ask a tree, though, you may get a different version of the story -- more like the one that Nita's friend the rowan tree Liused tells her when the subject comes up. The trees and other plants apparently had some awareness of the role they could play in making the Earth habitable for the animal lifeforms that were to come, up to and including human beings. By the green things' reckoning, the Battle began millions of years ago, and continued for thousands upon thousands of centuries as they turned carbon dioxide into oxygen and gradually added thousands and millions of tons of organic matter to the previously barren surface of the planet. This may not seem like a battle to humans, who might say that the plants had no choice in the matter and were only doing what they were designed to do. But intention can turn even otherwise inevitable behaviors into the kind of gesture of which a universe must take note. And the trees, also aware on the most basic level of the Lone Power's furious resistance to their efforts, were utterly determined not to let It win. Their response to the resistance was what it always is: to slowly and steadily grow enough roots to break through it.

It took them many thousands of millennia. The Lone One and the forces It commanded scoured the Earth's surface with glaciers, climate-changed newly fertile land for desert, flooded newly established plains and prairies, and lashed the forests and hills with lightning that started the firestorms which gave it Its epithet among the green things, "Kindler of Wildfires". But the grasses and the trees always grew back in the end, implacably breaking the barren stone and making a living world of a dead one. At last the Lone Power, infuriated, began to turn more of its attention to the new kinds of life for which the trees had been preparing the land and which were now starting to appear. By no means did the Lone One forget them, or forgive them their victory. It delights still in the irony that the creatures for whom the trees prepared the world now destroy them with such routine thoughtlessness.

The trees -- with a maturity born of millions of years' worth of existence in this world -- seem, by and large, to have forgiven us, if Liused's musings in SYWTBAW are anything to go by. We should count ourselves lucky...and search in ourselves for some similar maturity in our treatment of our fellow creatures, or (at the very least) our fellow humans. (SYWTBAW)

See also: Options of Choice: Sentience (relative).