Standing in a picturesque dip in the landscape beside Hadrian’s Wall, the 150-year-old Sycamore Gap tree was among the most beloved in England. Considered an iconic national landmark and frequently photographed, it co-starred with Kevin Costner in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, appeared in a Bryan Adams music video promoting the film, and won Tree of the Year in 2016. Not a bad resumé for a tree. Tragically, however, it was illegally felled in September 2023, an act that sparked widespread outrage across the world.
The culprits were found guilty of criminal damage in May 2025; in July, a judge sentenced them each to more than four years in prison, noting that the two men were responsible for “a sense of loss and confusion across the world.” One of the defendants expressed disbelief at the public outcry. “It was just a tree,” he said. “[I]t was almost as if someone had been murdered.” Yet, the outcry wasn’t merely grief for a squandered natural wonder but a reflection of the deep-rooted symbolic power trees hold in our cultural memory.
For millennia, trees have stood as emblems of the profound interconnectedness of all living things, central to the universe’s structural integrity and humanity’s moral compass. A recurring archetype across world mythologies is the Tree of Life (alternately described as a world tree or cosmic tree), described by biologist J. Andrew McDonald as representing “the metaphysical principles of cosmogenesis, natural creation, eternal recurrence, and/or human hopes for everlasting life in the hereafter.” Such trees are spiritual barometers, their fate intertwined with the morality of the worlds to which they connect. In Norse mythology, the ash tree known as Yggdrasill binds together all nine worlds, from the underworld of Niflheim to the realm of the gods, Asgard. Its appearance and condition reflects the actions of the worlds’ inhabitants. As described in the Poetic Edda, a collection of Old Norse narrative poems, during times of peace and divine harmony, the tree is “ever green,” but in times of disorder, it “suffers anguish more than mortal has ever known.” Its roots are gnawed at endlessly by the dragon Níðhöggr, who is said in some interpretations of the poem Völuspá to burst free during Ragnarök, the end of the world, carrying the bodies of men on his wings.
Similarly, in Greek mythology, the tale of King Erysichthon asserts that the felling of a tree is an indicator of moral failure, which invites divine retribution. In Ovid’s version of the story, after cutting down a sacred oak, Erysichthon is cursed with insatiable hunger by the dryad nymph who inhabited it. Still unable to satiate his appetite after selling his daughter into slavery for food, he eats himself to death.
This deep connection between trees and morality is further evidenced in a trope of Western literature in which humans are transformed into trees, sometimes as an embodiment of sin. Philosopher and literary critic Tzachi Zamir observes these metamorphoses as denoting “morally relevant transformations in a person’s relation to inhabited space.” One such example can be found in the Latin mythological text Fabulae, in which the sisters of Phaethon are transformed into poplar trees as punishment for yoking his chariot without their father’s permission. In other versions, this transformation is framed as a result of their intense grief consuming their bodies. The motif of losing one’s human body and becoming a vegetative entity, Zamir argues, is a moral contribution; as one’s inner self “erupts onto the surface, controls one’s body, and is transformed into an ungovernable entity,” we’re prompted to empathetically connect with another’s experience, as it prompts us to “deepen and redefine what acknowledging others might mean.”
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Trees constituting the moral fabric of humanity recur in modern mythopoeia, particularly in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Drawing inspiration from Norse and other mythologies, the trees of Middle-earth in the Lord of the Rings series are sacred beings, whose treatment stands as a moral litmus test. Mistreat a tree, and you’ll find yourself among the bad guys of Tolkien’s universe. Mordor, the realm of the dark lord Sauron, is depicted as a barren wasteland devoid of vegetation, as is Isengard, where armies of orcs felled trees and transformed the land into a hellscape of industrial horrors. Meanwhile, the virtuous, near-immortal elves of Lothlórien are depicted living peacefully in a realm of lush flora and elaborate tree-houses.
Writer Claudia Riiff Finseth credits Tolkien’s Catholic upbringing and interest in Anglo-Saxon literature to his appreciation of the tree’s rich symbolism. Some Christian legends, Finseth observes, refer to the “Quaking Aspen,” a tree that trembled upon realizing that it would be carved into the cross upon which Christ was destined to be crucified. The cross, a symbol that wards off evil, is mirrored in Tolkien’s use of the mallorn, described as a cross-shaped tree, as a place of refuge and protection. Recalling the English folk motif of the tree as possessing healing powers, a clump of soil dug up from an orchard in Lothlórien is used to replenish the scoured Shire. The deep, booming voice of Treebeard, the tree-giant of Fangorn who leads a rebellion of trees to flood Isengard, was said to be inspired by that of C. S. Lewis, Tolkien’s friend and literary rival.
Lewis’s own fantasy epic, The Chronicles of Narnia, aligns with Tolkien’s tree-loving sentiments. In the final novel of the series, The Last Battle, the destruction of trees and dryads in Lantern Waste, a place tied to the creation of Narnia itself, is one of many portentous omens signalling the end of the world. By locating this cruel act at the site of Narnia’s origin, Lewis recalls the core principle of the cosmic tree, as tied to the birth and death of the world and contingent upon the moral actions of its inhabitants.
We can understand the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree through this complex lens of mythological, literary, and religious resonance. It was an act of vandalism not just toward the tree itself, but toward the cultural heritage and folkloric narratives it carried. As Robert Bringhurst writes, “stories are epiphytes: organisms that grow on other organisms, in much the same way staghorn ferns and tree-dwelling lichens…grow on trees.” To destroy a revered tree is to metaphorically sever a limb from the body of our cultural memory. As such, it has been the case throughout history that public outrage regarding the destruction of an important tree is underscored by a recapitulation of its folkloric and symbolic meaning.
In 1765, a tree planted in colonial Boston became a rallying point for the Sons of Liberty, who protested British rule by hanging effigies of officers from its branches and giving speeches. This recalls a pre-Christian tradition of trees used as points of assembly where, as historical geographer Della Hooke writes, diviners and enchanters gathered to “stave off terrors, appease their anxieties, pour out their desires of their hearts, to seek comfort and help in sadness.” Such was the importance placed on the tree for mobilizing resistance that in 1775, it was cut down by British soldiers to demoralize the revolutionaries. Founding father Thomas Paine would later write a poetic eulogy to the tree, adapted in revisions to fit “all popular revolts against autocratic government.”
This concept of resistance was adopted during the French Revolution, where trees of liberty, or arbres de la liberté, were planted to show solidarity with the movement. To embolden a revolution through its connection to growing, living trees suggested that liberty itself was a vital force, strengthened at its roots by the shared ideals of community. Like its Bostonian predecessor, however, the arbres de la liberté were soon considered a threat and subsequently felled. An 1850 engraving shows the dismantling of a liberty tree, just two years before the establishment of the Second French Empire under Napoleon III. This clearing away of the symbolic backbone of revolutionary virtues marked a return to authoritarian rule.
In other cases, tree-fellings have conjured up folkloric history to fuel conservationist movements. In 1853, a giant sequoia in California’s Sierra Nevada, dubbed the “Mother of the Forest,” was brought down, its bark torn and sent away to be exhibited. The resulting anger directed at lumber companies sparked the beginnings of the conservation movement, paving the way for the founding of Yellowstone, the first national park. Its name is key here: It evokes the typical empathetic personification of Mother Nature, but it also predates what would later become a core principle in the tree conservation movement, the idea of networked “mother trees,” popularized by the research of forestry scientist Suzanne Simard. Vital to the ecosystems of forests, mother trees nurture the development of seedlings via fungal networks.
When a mother tree is felled, the survival rate of many of its seedlings may be drastically reduced, a process not unlike the reciprocal feedback loop of Yggdrasill, whose deterioration in response to discord in the nine realms spells cosmic collapse. During the 1970s, rural villagers in India, particularly women, responded to the invasion of loggers by embracing trees under threat, in what became known as the Chipko movement. Some activists read from the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu text which describes the roots of the Ashvattha, a sacred tree, as bound to human actions and karma. In 1973, the Tree of Ténéré, a 300-year-old acacia in the Sahara Desert, was mourned following its destruction by a truck driver, alleged to have been drunk. Considered one of the most isolated trees on the planet, miraculously flourishing in a hostile landscape, it was described by Commander of the Allied Military Mission Michel Lesourd as possessing “a kind of superstition, a tribal order which is always respected.” For generations, the tree had become familiar to passing travellers and caravans, fostering a sense of shared perspective and community. Its uprooting marked not only the loss of a helpful landmark but the loss of an emotional touchstone in an otherwise uninhabitable landscape. So devastated were the locals that the tree’s remains lie in the Niger National Museum, and a commemorative metal sculpture stands in its place. Its legacy still endures today, notably through a sculptural exhibit at the 2017 Burning Man festival, described by its designers as honouring the tree’s “ceremonial function to bring people together for ritual and rest.”
These events reveal a recurring truth: trees are never “just trees.” They’re living monuments to morality, resilience, and connection, whose destruction marks a betrayal of those treasured virtues. The grief felt over the Sycamore Gap tree wasn’t disproportionate; it was a deeply human reaction rooted in thousands of years of cultural and folkloric significance. The sycamore species itself carries symbolic weight in world mythologies, linked to Hera, queen of the Greek gods; the World Tree in Celtic tradition; and Hathor, the Ancient Egyptian goddess of love and beauty. In Christian lore, the sycamore also symbolizes repentance, humility, and forgiveness of one’s sins, evoked by the story of the tax collector Zacchaeus, who climbed one to see Jesus. Fittingly, the remaining stump of the Sycamore Gap tree has begun to sprout seedlings, perhaps a quiet echo of the spirit of redemption. Yet, as the estate manager of the Woodland Trust, Mark Feather, states, it will take anywhere from 150 to 200 years for it to come “anywhere close to what we have lost.” With this, a question emerges: will our moral obligation to trees endure 200 years from now, or will we, like Níðhöggr, continue to gnaw at the roots until it’s too late?
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