'The World Tree', written by Professor Robert Macfarlane, will be performed for the first time today by the Helsinki Chamber Choir in Finland.
I am interested as much in the longue durée of human-forest relations
Robert Macfarlane
The Sycamore Gap tree was an iconic 120-year-old sycamore tree growing at Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland, England. It was illegally felled in 2023, sparking international outrage.
"It was in many ways an axis mundi, a 'world tree'," says Macfarlane, Professor of Literature and the Environmental Humanities at the Faculty of English and a Fellow of Emmanuel College.
"Although it was a single tree growing where there should really be a forest, it nevertheless became a focus for many of our complex, passionate, contradictory feelings about trees, forests and the living world more broadly."
"I decided that, instead of just writing a series of contemporary requiems … I wanted to widen the whole frame of the work and take a much longer view of tree-human relations in England and beyond."
"In the libretto I pull the temporal lens right back to the re-emergence of trees and forests in northern Europe towards the end of the Pleistocene," Macfarlane says. The World Tree's first movement is called 'Glacial Maximum'.
"I am interested as much in the longue durée of human-forest relations as in the acute event of the Sycamore Gap Tree's felling, and the outpouring of love, grief and anger which followed."
Macfarlane's libretto has been set to music by the Finnish-Canadian composer Matthew Whittall and the premiere will be conducted by Nils Schweckendiek.
The final movement, 'The Word for World Is Forest', imagines a future forest flourishing on the uplands where that one tree once stood. Between these two movements come eight others with titles such as 'Wildwood', 'Song of the Axe' and 'Pollen: a Polyphony'.
Responding to the conviction of two men, in May 2025, for felling the Sycamore Gap Tree, Macfarlane said: "The historical-psychological echoes and rhymes of this event are many. The intersection of ecocide and toxic masculinity is nothing new."
"I thought immediately of the first story of mindless tree-felling by two glory-seeking males: the account in the Epic of Gilgamesh (a text c. 4400 years old in its Sumerian form), of how Gilgamesh and Enkidu travelled to the Sacred Cedar Wood, slew its guardian spirit Humbaba, felled the tallest cedar in the forest and took its lumber - and Humbaba's head - back to Uruk as trophies."
Robert Macfarlane's award-winning books, including Is a River Alive? (2025), Underland (2019), Landmarks (2015), The Old Ways (2012) and The Wild Places (2007), have been widely adapted for music, film, television, radio and theatre. He has previously written operas, plays, and films including River (2022) and Mountain (2017), both narrated by Willem Dafoe. As a lyricist, he has written songs and albums with musicians including Cosmo Sheldrake, Karine Polwart and Johnny Flynn, with whom he has released two albums, Lost In The Cedar Wood (2021) and The Moon Also Rises (2023) and an EP, Six Signs (2022). In 2022, with the actor-director Simon McBurney he co-adapted Susan Cooper's classic fantasy novel The Dark Is Rising into a twelve-part BBC audio drama series.
The World Tree world premieres at Helsinki's Temppeliaukio Church on 18th November 2025, with additional performances that week in Kotka, Nurmijärvi and Vihti.
