Here's Blackwood, describing a character having heard the Wendigo's (or its victim's) terrible cry: A horror from the deep untouched woods, it's 'the Call of the Wild personified,' as one character describes it, which calls to travelers with a voice that 'resembles all the minor sounds of the Bush-wind, falling water, cries of the animals.'ĭrout points out that the Wendigo, 'with its dreadful aerial entity and wailing cries from above that cause panic in hearers' may have 'contributed to one of the most important sources of terror to be found in Lord of the Rings: the airborne Nazgûl.' Compare Blackwood's passage above with this from The Fellowship of the Ring:Ī dark river of brown water, bordered with ancient willows, blocked with fallen willows, and flecked with thousands of faded willow-leaves.īeyond homicidal trees, there's Blackwood's Wendigo. 'Blackwood's evocation of landscape, as with Tolkien's, is unusually convincing,' writes Michael D. There's the murderous Old Man Willow and his 'cunning mazes' in the Old Forest, Mount Caradhras, Mirkwood, Fangorn and the Ents. Tolkien would later cite Blackwood as the source for his iconic phrase 'the Crack of Doom.' More than that though, Blackwood's themes of a malevolent nature - 'the treachery of natural things in an animate world' as Jared Lobdell writes in The World of the Rings - are found throughout Tolkien's writings. Lovecraft, William Hope Hodgson, Henry Miller, and Clark Ashton Smith to name a few - including one fellow Englishman who was a 15-year-old student when 'The Willows' was published: J.R.R. This passage is from Algernon Blackwood's classic weird tale ' The Willows,' in which two travelers are beset upon (possibly) by a hostile nature - either of this world or from the nebulous Elsewhere.īlackwood's writings would inspire and influence countless authors - H.P. Untrodden by man, almost unknown to man, it lay there beneath the moon, remote from human influence, on the frontier of another world, an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows. The eeriness of this lonely island, set among a million willows, swept by a hurricane, and surrounded by hurrying deep waters, touched us both, I fancy.

The willows and the wendigo