Parish is lame and has a sick wife and genuinely needs help. However, there are many mundane chores and duties that prevent Niggle from giving his work the attention it deserves, so it remains incomplete and is not fully realised.Īt the back of his head, Niggle knows that he has a great trip looming, and he must pack and prepare his bags.Īlso, Niggle's next door neighbour, a gardener named Parish, frequently drops by asking for various forms of help. Niggle ends up discarding all his other artworks, or tacks them onto the main canvas, which becomes a single vast embodiment of his vision. He invests each and every leaf of his tree with obsessive attention to detail, making every leaf uniquely beautiful. Working only to please himself, he paints a canvas of a great Tree with a forest in the distance. In this story, an artist, named Niggle, lives in a society that does not value art. 'Leaf by Niggle' is often seen as an allegory of Tolkien's own creative process, and, to an extent, of his own life. This is notable because the book, consisting of a seminal essay called ' On Fairy-Stories' and 'Leaf by Niggle', offers the underlying philosophy (Creation and Sub-Creation, see below) of much of Tolkien's fantastical writings.

It can be found, most notably, in Tolkien's book titled Tree and Leaf, and in other places (including the collections The Tolkien Reader, Poems & Stories, A Tolkien Miscellany, and Tales from the Perilous Realm). Tolkien in 1938–39 and first published in the Dublin Review in January 1945. ' Leaf by Niggle' is a short story written by J. English edition of Leaf by Niggle, HarperCollins, 2016

Jrr tolkien tree and leaf