Leaf by Niggle
Short story by John Ronald Reuel TolkienWikipedia
10
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5
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5
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Search complete. 10 mentions across 5 episodes found for "Leaf by Niggle".
Sep 14, 2026
JohnHOST
Yeah.
GretaHOST
I love me some Leaf by Niggle.
JohnHOST
Mm-hmm.
GretaHOST
Mm-hmm.
JohnHOST
I really do.
JohnHOST
Like, I just adore the story Leaf by Niggle.
JohnHOST
It, I realized a few weeks a- a few weeks ago that it was, it, it, it can't, it can't really rival the Middle Earth.
JohnHOST
Like, it can't really rival Lord of the Rings.
Alan SistoHOST
Letter 253 goes to Rainer Unwin on December 23, 1963.
Alan SistoHOST
The editors of the volume set it up for us, explaining that a new paperback has been agreed, collecting the essay version of Tolkien's lecture on fairy stories and his short allegorical story, Leaf by Niggle.
Alan SistoHOST
The book was to be called Tree and Leaf.
Alan SistoHOST
Rainer asked whether Tolkien could suggest a suitable drawing of a tree for the cover, maybe something out of a medieval manuscript, he said.
Alan SistoHOST
He's been drawing the same imaginary tree over and over for years.
Alan SistoHOST
We learn also that this tree bears many flowers, small and large, that these flowers are symbols of poems and major legends.
Alan SistoHOST
Well, that's his legendarium, drawn as a tree with a flower for every story.
Alan SistoHOST
He's describing this in a letter about the cover of a book called Tree and Leaf, a book that includes his story about a man painting a tree that he cannot finish.
Paul VanderKlayHOST
Part of what's interesting about all of this, whether it's reconciliation, is that we have very little grasp on what exactly the arena of that reconciliation would be.
Paul VanderKlayHOST
Now, it's interesting if you read Tolkien's Leaf by Niggle, you get these little hints of some of Tolkien's idea of it.
Paul VanderKlayHOST
But The difficulty we have, again, the same difficulty that, let's say, an unborn child has with knowing the world outside the womb or after their birth.
Paul VanderKlayHOST
We just really have very, very little... to go on.
Andrew SnyderHOST
And so I'll also, in addition to philosophy texts, I'll assign Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich is one of my favorite ones because of what that has to do about the psychology of death and avoidance and relationships.
Andrew SnyderHOST
or also I'll assign Tolkien's Leaf by Niggle.
Andrew SnyderHOST
Sometimes I assign The Great Divorce, but I always end the course with Beowulf, which is a fun one in that context because most students, if they've read it at all, which fewer and fewer have at all, it was specifically in a literary context, but actually read it for philosophy to see what it means to enact the heroic ideal simply because it's the right thing to do.
Andrew SnyderHOST
That kind of thing is very eye-opening for students who are immersed in this postmodern propaganda, where they just have such ambiguous sense of identity and purpose.
Rob LeonardiPANELIST
Lewis came out with nine different like major works, including most of his space trilogy and the screw tape letters, which those are like some of the most popular things out there.
Rob LeonardiPANELIST
Yet Tolkien in that time came out with Leaf by Niggle, which is a great story.
Rob LeonardiPANELIST
And everyone should go listen to our podcast on that a few episodes ago.
Rob LeonardiPANELIST
Yeah.