Inspiration—that fickle thing without which no novel can get started. No. Scrub that: without which any novel, story, discussion, blog, argument, network or scientific experiment can get started. Where does it come from? Can you buy it in IKEA? And, more to the point, what exactly is it? My suggestion, which is only provisional, is that inspiration lives at that constantly fluctuating interface between one’s immediate experience, and the particular mix in that stew of thoughts that happens to be at the top of one’s brain at the time. Think of it like marbling paper, but with brain waves. Without conscious effort a part of one’s brain looks at the marbled pattern at any moment and says ‘Ah! Great-Aunt Etheldreda’s Ears!’, and a masterpiece is born.

What I’d like to emphasize here is that Inspiration is not a simple matter of thoughts triggering events, or vice-versa. To be sure, it might be possible to trace the inspiration for this or that to one single, tiny happening, as Proust did in Remembrance of Things Past, but I’d say that this was more a literary device than anything else. No, inspiration is nonlinear, multiply connected and highly recursive.

I shall take for my example, Tolkien. Well I would, wouldn’t I? And as it’s my birthday next week, I wouldn’t say no to a copy of The Children of Hurin, but I digress …

To be specific, what inspired the creation of the Ents? At first glance, the venerable Shepherds of the Trees that figure so memorably in The Lord of the Rings must count among Tolkien’s more original creations. But how original is ‘original’? Can we trace the things that influenced Tolkien’s seemingly unique fusion of people and trees?

The word ‘ent’ itself is clear enough—it is simply the Old English for giant, as in elda enta geweorc (‘the works of the giants of old’). It is clear from early drafts of The Lord of the Rings (in The History of Middle-earth) that Tolkien wanted to write about a giant called Treebeard, but it is only when Tolkien actually sat down to write the episode in which Treebeard first appears that it wasn’t just his beard that was so peculiarly arborescent.

Another overt influence was Shakespeare: Tolkien is known to have found Macbeth unsatisfactory, in that when the witches prophesy that Macbeth will not fall until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane, the words are actually borne out by ordinary blokes with branches on their heads. Shakespeare’s point is that even impossible prophecies have a habit of tunneling their way into reality—Macbeth would have interpreted ‘when Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane’ as something like ‘when Hell freezes over’ and thus felt himself to be invulnerable. Really, that—the concept of what Shakespeare called ‘security’, which we would now mean as a certain recklessness born of arrogance—is a major theme of Macbeth.

Tolkien, on the other hand, thought it was just cheap: it would have been so much more fun had the trees in Birnam wood really moved, of their own accord. The end of the Battle of Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers is very much Tolkien’s alternative to the Scottish Play.

In The Science of Middle-earth I suggested that Tolkien might have got some of his inspiration for ents from the amazingly entish ‘Plant Men’ in Star Maker by the unjustly neglected English author J. Olaf Stapledon. Tolkien was certainly familiar with Stapledon’s work (Stapledon’s Last and First Men is mentioned in The Notion Club Papers, Tolkien’s unfinished satire on the Inklings) and Star Maker was published around the time that Tolkien was drafting The Lord Of The Rings.

Stapledon makes sense as an inspiration for the ents—but that would be too simple, and since I wrote The Science of Middle-earth I have realized that I missed two other, and more obvious, possible sources.

One is the Middle-English poem Gawain and the Green Knight. An account of the legend of the Green Knight can be found here, from which it seems inescapable that the gigantic and … er… green character of Gawain’s adversary could easily have been elided into enthood—especially as the recognized authority on this poem was none other than … you guessed it … Tolkien.

Another is a single line from the Bible, to be specific, Mark 8:24, when Jesus restores sight to a blind man who says ‘I see men as trees, walking’. It should never escape one’s notice that Tolkien was a profoundly devout Christian—nor that such enigmatic lines from devotional literature were just the kinds of things from which Tolkien would—and could—spin whole stories. We know for a fact that Tolkien was turned on by Eala Earendel, engla beorhtast (‘Hail Earendel, brightest of angels’), a line in a poem by Cynewulf called Crist. Tolkien’s meeting with the enigmatic word ‘Earendel’ was almost certainly a major stimulus for the creation of his entire private legendarium, published in a somewhat abstract form as The Silmarillion.

But is that the end of it? Did Tolkien mix the Bible, Macbeth, Old English and Gawain’s Green Knight all together, add a dash of Stapledon and a pinch of his well-known fondness for trees, and come up with the Ents?

Assuredly not, for we were not, and could never have been, in Tolkien’s mind when he first thought of ents, and our reconstructions of the possible sources of ents must perforce be post-hoc guesswork which, in addition, is subject to our own inspiration—a point which Borges made with characteristic wry humour in his marvellous essay Kafka And His Precursors (to be found in his collection Labyrinths, which should be required reading for anyone aspiring to literary deconstruction). For all we know, Tolkien could have been pootering along on his bike, minding his own business, when a niggle about a line in Beowulf met a stray memory of the smell of unwashed socks, which then interacted with worries about the price of fish—and bingo! Ents were born.

This is all good and fine, you might say, especially as Tolkien is no longer around for us to ask him directly. But that’s just it—even when Tolkien was around, he was perpetually bemused by the themes that people insisted in having found in his work, much to his own surprise.

The fact is that the mechanics of inspiration are so complex that it is very difficult, even for an author, to summarize precisely where an idea comes from.

This concerns me closely as I am currently writing a novel, which is beginning to take shape, with all sorts of new and exciting avenues opening before my literary feet.

My agent tells me that my most recent novel, The Sigil, will be going out to various publishers next week. I suspect that each one will find in it something different from that found by anyone else—not because it is an especially rich or riveting work of literature (all right, it is, it’s fantastic, go read it) but because that’s how literature and inspiration work.

The Sigil was born from an unholy union of two quite different stories I wrote for Nature’s Futures SF section (which I ran. I call it editorial prerogative. What you call it, you can keep to yourself). One story was a hard-SF planetary apocalypse called Et in articulo mortis from which the astute will discern the overt influence of Waugh (Brideshead Revisited), Poe (The Facts In The Case Of M. Valdemar), Borges (Kafka again) and perhaps some interesting facts about ecology.

The other story appeared five years later and was called Are We Not Men?, inspired directly by the discovery of Homo floresiensis (though the title comes from H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau) and the possibility that unknown, quite large creatures might still exist.

But it was also inspired by this sketch on an old TV show called Not The Nine O’Clock News (a show that featured a young Rowan Atkinson, now sadly declined to the status of Mr Bean).

To be sure, the novel was inspired by many more things than that—itches I had to scratch about politics and religion and many other things, as well as homages to favourite moments in SF and horror. But I fully expect someone to come up to me, one day, and ask what I meant by a particular image or theme in the book of which I had been completely unaware. I am not (yet) in the peculiar position of an author who finds his or her works the subjects of other peoples’ dissertations. Though the views of books I’ve written that I come across on the web do make entertaining reading… sometimes I wonder if people read the same book that I wrote.

My current book is an X-files-esque horror-mystery called By The Sea. Now, I have planned it in some detail, so I think I know what’s going to happen, to whom, and why.

But as Tolkien said in another context, the Road Goes Ever On, and who knows where that path from your door will lead?