An Elfin Book of Trees for the Elven Druid

AN ELFIN BOOK OF TREES FOR THE ELVEN DRUID can be used as an oracle and is in a sense a way of listening to the trees. It is not the same as being out in the trees and feeling their radiant and wondrous presence, nor ingesting some of the herbs and fruits that plants and trees use to enlighten and heal us. However, not all of us, in the modern world, can be among the trees regularly or as much as we would like and this tome is, in that sense, designed to express their voice in the form of an oracle for those of us who are unable at present to spend a great deal of time among them. Although, in our hearts and imaginations, we are ever surrounded by the forest. And in that way, this book is a forest, an elven woodland, an elvish glade, a living book of tree lore. The Silver Elves explain: "We have always loved, from the first moment we encountered them, the trees and therefore admired, from first we heard of it, the relationship of the Druids to the trees. Being Silver Elves - Elves of Starlight, Moonlight and the Radiance of the Trees - we naturally feel an affinity for nearly anyone else who also loves trees. And the Druids, being seers, bards and magic wielders, especially found a place in our hearts, minds and souls for their deep love and connection to the trees and to the spirit world." The Silver Elves express in the introduction to this book that they are genuinely fond of Liz and Colin Murray's The Celtic Tree Oracle and even though some people find Robert Graves's book The White Goddess and its interpretation of the Language or Alphabet of the Trees to be spurious, they found great insight in it, although they accepted from the beginning that it was a theoretical interpretation and not necessarily a factual representation of the Druids and their Ogham Script and their Alphabet (Ælfabet) of the Trees. After all, the Druids had an oral tradition. The Druids didn't write anything down as far as their teachings, beliefs, tales, myths and history until they became Christianized (those that survived the Romans), and almost everything we know about them comes, for the most part, from their contemporaries, the Romans, and from the archeologists of today who are doing a bit of educated theorizing about the Druids. There are only twenty-five letters in the Druid tree alphabet, associated with letters of the English language, but obviously connected previously with various Celtic dialects and languages. That has always seemed too few trees to the Silver Elves, who realized that the Druids, surely, were dealing with the major types of trees in their vicinity, the British Isles and mostly Southern Europe, where they lived and this is certainly understandable. We each tend to speak of and deal with the world that we know. The Silver Elves however, see the whole world as their ancestral lands, and quite frankly there are certain types of trees, which they love and adore, that just weren't represented in the Tree world of the Druids, but which are decidedly part of the Silver Elves own elfin understanding of the world of the trees. There are over 60,000 species of trees in the world, so dealing with every species seemed a bit more than the Silver Elves wished to take on. So, they decided instead to deal with the basic types and families of trees, which gives 111 possibilities overall. In some cases, they picked a whole tree family to be represented by a Wizard Myne (they call these runes as Wizard Many-s [spelled Mynes in Arvyndase] instead of Ogham Fews) and at other times they selected individual trees. And so, in this way, they have created, channeled, remembered The Elven Book of Trees for the Elven Druid and expanded their Wizard Script to go with it. Each tree or tree group has its own chapter (111 in all). This book is easy to use as an oracle and the specifics on just how to do so are covered in the introduction and throughout the book, along with a spell at the end of each chapter for your personal magic.