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Chapter One
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Word for World is Forest, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Violence, War, and Colonization
Nature and Ecology
Communication and Translation
Gender and Masculinity
Summary
Analysis
As Selver Thele walks through the forest, he notices its many colors: rust, brown-red, green. The ground is wet, partly because of living organisms and partly because dead ones fertilize it. Nothing is stable out here; everything in the forest is in constant flux, and no one can notice all of its elements at once. Selver is slowly ambling on a path near a body of water when he sees an old man dreaming near a willow tree. The man, still dreaming, spots Selver inside of his dreams. Selver asks the man if he can come to his Lodge. Selver then squats down, exhausted—he’s been walking for five days.
This passage demonstrates how Selver’s people (known among themselves as Athsheans) view the forest, which contrasts with Davidson’s view. Selver acknowledges the forest as its own entity that can never be understood, whereas Davidson wants to dominate and kill it. Selver’s description of the ecosystem in this passage also demonstrates the harm humans are doing by cutting trees, as every element of the forest fertilizes others—deforestation will have a widespread impact. Finally, this passage introduces the importance of dreaming in Athshean culture: it’s something that allows them to live both in dreams and in waking reality.
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The man asks if Selver is from the “dream-time” or the “world-time,” and Selver tells him that he’s from the world-time. Leading Selver further into the grove of trees, the man admits that he at first mistook Selver for a god, since he’s seen Selver in a dream before. Selver replies that he comes from Sornol and is of the Ash people. The man says that this town is Cadast and that his name is Coro Mena. He asks Selver to confirm that he isn’t here looking for a wife, as travelers usually are, and Selver says that his wife is dead.
Apparently, Athshean dream-states are so closely intertwined with reality that Coro Mena can’t tell whether or not he’s dreaming when he meets Selver, especially because he has dreamed about Selver before (though it’s not yet clear why). This passage also demonstrates that the Athsheans’ lives are linked to nature, as Athsheans apparently identify by what trees (like the Ash) are native to their areas—again demonstrating how harmful the colonists’ deforestation is to the Athsheans’ cultures and identities. Because Athshean dreams aren’t the same as human dreams, Selver’s claim that his wife is dead doesn’t conflict with his earlier claim that his wife told him to attack Smith—it’s likely that she visited him in a dream.
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The two of them arrive at the Men’s Lodge, located inside a tunnel near the base of white oak trees. Upon arrival, Selver immediately collapses and falls asleep. That night, Coro Mena and a healer, Torber, sit near Selver and wonder what could possibly have made him so scarred and wounded, and what could have given him his bizarre arm injury. Selver also has a weird iron engine with him.
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Coro Mena feels deeply afraid and enters a dream state to figure out why. In the dream, giants walk through the woods among falling trees, with iron machines moving behind them and a bloodied man running away from them, toward the Cadast Lodge. Coro Mena exits his dream state and confirms Selver’s story, which he just saw in his dream. Selver must have come from Sornol, since the “giants” are there. Torber wonders if the giants will follow Selver here.
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Coro Mena slips in and out of dreams. Eventually, his sister Ebor Dendep, the Cadast Headwoman, calls him to the Men’s Lodge door and asks if Selver is awake yet—the Cadast people want to hear his story. She won’t insist on entrance to the Lodge, which would offend the Dreamers inside, but she’s worried for her people, since the giants might be following Selver. She asks Coro Mena to wake Selver, and Coro Mena agrees. Ebor Dendep wishes that Selver were a woman—then his story might make sense.
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When Coro Mena returns to the Lodge, Selver is awake and explaining to the group that his city, Eshreth, was destroyed by “yumens” (his people’s name for humans) who cut down the trees there. The yumens enslaved him, and one of them raped his wife, Thele, who died. In retaliation, Selver attacked that yumen, who almost killed Selver, but another yumen intervened before he could do so. Selver then came to the North Isle, but the yumens followed the same path and destroyed more cities along the way.
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Selver remained free and would sometimes visit the yumen camps, speaking to the people that the yumens kept in pens. Those people told him that the same yumen Selver had attacked was living in that camp. Selver was going to help his people escape, but the women were shut up in another, more secure area, and the men couldn’t leave them behind. Instead, the men came up with a plan to kill the yumens and burn their city.
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The yumen Selver had known initially got away, but then he returned to his camp after they’d burned it. Selver pinned him down and sang to him, but when the yumen wouldn’t sing back, Selver let him escape once again. Then, after this yumen left, a ship came to hunt Selver’s people and set the forest ablaze, but no one was hurt, since Selver’s people had already fled. Selver abandoned the group and continued on alone, since he’s recognizable to yumens and therefore would make the group less safe.
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Selver tells Torber that his wound is from the yumen’s weapon, which he took and has with him now. Coro Mena asks if Selver was once a Dreamer, and Selver says that he was, but he rarely dreams now, and when he does, he always does so while awake. He can’t always shape his dreams or walk the roads they lay out, which he should be able to do. Selver reassures Coro Mena that the yumens won’t follow him here, as he didn’t leave a trail. That’s not what everyone should be worried about, anyway. They should worry that the yumens will hunt and kill them all in retaliation for what Selver’s people did to the yumens.
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Torber insists that such horrible things happen only in fever dreams, but Coro Mena says that the world can always change and adapt. He asks Selver what the yumens are like and whether they’re men. Selver doesn’t know: they certainly aren’t like men he knows, as they kill their own kind and kill Selver’s people mercilessly. Coro Mena knows that everyone’s dreams will never be the same now that the yumens are here. But he says that Selver did what he had to do by killing men. Unfortunately, it was also the wrong thing to do, since it involved murder.
Coro Mena, who has seen the yumens once and concluded that they appear to be men, asks if yumens dream. Selver says that they dream like kids: only while sleeping and without training. Lyubov taught Selver the yumens’ ways, and Lyubov understood how to dream, but even he distinguished between dream-time and world-time as though one is more real than the other. Selver falls back asleep, and Coro Mena tells Torber that Selver is now a god unlike any other. They’ve all dreamed of him for years, foretelling his approach, but now Selver has left dream-time behind. He’s a god who knows what death is, one who “kills and is not himself reborn.”
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Ebor Dendep acts on Coro Mena’s prophecy and gets Cadast ready to evacuate just in case the humans attack. Then, she sends scouts out to monitor yumen activity and has Selver tell his story to everyone else once he regains his strength. Because she’s frightened, her people are, too. It’s the Dreamer’s job to make judgments, and her job to carry them out. Her people have messengers spread information about the attack and about Selver across the land.
Each land (of which there are 40) has a different dialect, and its people have different appearances and customs. But the forest barely changes, and the ocean never does. Selver’s people have regular trade-routes that enable them to marry between lands, and the Dreamers speak a pretty consistent language, one women and non-Dreaming men rarely learn. The Dreamers interpret written documents to the Old Women, and the Old Women choose whether or not to believe them.
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Still asleep, Selver dreams about being in a room at Eshsen (which is now the human city), which he can’t leave or something bad will enter. But he decides to go outside anyway, to see the trees that have been planted. Unfortunately, the trees are all uprooted, and when blood runs out of the end of one of them, he thinks about his wife, Thele. Selver returns to the house and notices that he’s near a street in Central, the yumen city.
Anticipating yumen attack, Selver notes that he has a gun he can use to shoot Davidson, who does eventually arrive. But when Selver fires the gun, nothing comes out, and he ends the dream in frustration. He’s been in Cadast for 15 days and has begun to dream in the correct rhythm, which should happen 10-14 times per day. His dreams are awful, but he welcomes them, since they prove that he can still dream at all.
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Selver enters back into his dream state and imagines himself pinning Davidson down again, this time hitting him with a rock and breaking his teeth. It’s a familiar wish-fulfillment dream, but he stops it before it can progress further, because he doesn’t want to feel relieved right now—he’d rather feel bitter. Instead, he dreams of his encounter with Davidson in Central, when Davidson beat him. Back in world-time, Ebor Dendep sits next to Selver in the birch grove, which is at the center of Cadast. There are houses at the roots of trees, and 800 people live there. Now, Cadast is hosting 60 strangers who came to see Selver.
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A young girl, Tolbar, comes to tell Ebor Dendep that there’s a messenger from the South at the Women’s Lodge. Tolbar watches Selver sleep, both fascinated and afraid of him. Two Old Women bring the messenger to Ebor Dendep, and once Selver wakes up, Ebor Dendep invites the messenger to speak. The messenger tells them that she comes from Trethat and has a message for Cadast and Selver specifically: there are “new giants” in Sornol, including females, and all the giants in Sornol know that Selver burned their city. The Great Dreamers elsewhere foresee that eventually there will be more giants than trees. Everyone is silent at this proclamation, and one of the Old Women says that this is a “bad world-time.”
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As they all sit there, Selver tells Ebor Dendep about Lyubov, who saved and freed him. Lyubov told Selver that half of his race is women, but the men were waiting to summon women to the Forty Lands until it was comfortable for them. Ebor Dendep scoffs at this—their men want to create “dry beaches” (her language doesn’t have a word for “desert”), and yet they call this comfort. They should’ve sent women first—maybe in their culture, women are the ones who dream. Ebor Dendep believes that the yumens are insane, since they “only dream in sleep,” but Selver insists that a whole people can’t be insane.
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Ebor Dendep doesn’t agree: these people are mad, unable to distinguish dream-time from world-time. They must think that if they kill a tree it’ll come back. But Selver shakes his head. The yumens understand death, he says. In fact, Selver is the one who didn’t understand a lot of what Lyubov told him, though this confusion wasn’t because of a language barrier—Lyubov and Selver learned each other’s languages. Lyubov told Selver that the men want wood and land, and that the yumens are men, just like Selver.
The yumens come from a place that has no forest, something that Selver can’t understand. But it doesn’t matter. The yumens want the forest, they have weapons, and their women will bear children, which means that their population will grow. They kill without mercy. They can’t sing “in contest,” they take poisons to make them dream, and those poisons make them drunk. The yumens may be insane, but it’s irrelevant—they have to leave the forest either way. If Selver’s people wait to get rid of them, they’re the ones who will die.
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Selver once saw the yumens kill a woman as she begged for mercy. Even if the yumens are also men, they’re unfit to be men. Selver wants to return to Sornol and gather exiled and enslaved people, all of whom are likely dreaming about burning cities.
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Selver leaves the grove, and the messenger asks who he is. Ebor Dendep says that he’s a god of forest-fire, “the one who is not reborn.” That night, Coro Mena walks with Selver to the place in the forest where they met. Sixty men will follow Selver, and they’ll gather more along the way, but he’s setting off alone first. Coro Mena tells Selver that this spot will be known as Selver’s Grove one day. Selver replies that Coro Mena believes in him more than Selver believes in himself.
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Coro Mena tells Selver that he sees things clearly: his people have been afraid for years, and Selver is gathering and harvesting that fear, since he’s experienced more than anyone. The world will change as a result of that harvest. Coro Mena dreamed about Selver before they ever met: in the dream, Selver walked a path, and trees grew up around him. Selver leaves Coro Mena and chooses a spot to rest against a tree, protected from falling rain by its leaves.
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