A poem by Joy Harjo came into my inbox the other day. I’m sure she’s not thinking of Ents, but the poem has this bit in it:

The deepest-rooted dream of a tree is to walk
Even just a little ways, from the place next to the doorway—
To the edge of the river of life, and drink—
I have heard trees talking, long after the sun has gone down:

“Speaking Tree”, lines 15-18

A tree by the doorway? That reminded me of the scene at the ruined gates of Isengard, and Legolas saying, “Yes, a tall grey Ent is there, but his arms are at his sides and he stands as still as a door-tree. (LotR, III, viii)

 

Harjo and Tolkien are clearly talking about different things, which reminded me that I’ve been meaning to look up that word since the 1970s. A “door-tree”, the OED informs us, is one of the vertical posts that frame a door. To give a sense of how up-to-date the word is, their most recent citation is to Piers Plowman: “as ded as a dore-tree”. I’m sure Legolas doesn’t want us to think Quickbeam is playing dead, but I’m otherwise mystified. I don’t know what connotations Tolkien might have wanted us readers to pick up.

However, now I do know the answer to Charles Dickens’s puzzlement:

Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

A Christmas Carol, stave I

It looks like “door-nail” has replaced “door-tree” in the quote from Langland, since everyone has forgotten what door-trees were. Even though I have no more clue about current attitudes toward Ents than when I started, it’s fun to see a stone skipping across seven centuries of literature like that.