Which Tolkien story features the artist Niggle and his journey after death?

Leaf by Niggle is the Tolkien story featuring the artist Niggle and his journey after death.

Tolkien wrote “Leaf by Niggle” during the 1930s, and it was first published in the Dublin Review in 1945. The story follows Niggle, a painter whose attention is divided between an enormous tree he is trying to complete and the practical needs of people around him.

After illness and death, Niggle passes through a purgatorial sequence of correction and learning. He eventually discovers that the tree he imagined has a real place in a wider landscape, where his artistic work and acts of kindness become part of something larger than he understood.

Readers often interpret the story as partly autobiographical because Niggle’s unfinished tree can suggest Tolkien’s own long work on mythology and language. It is also frequently discussed as an allegory of creativity, duty, mortality, and grace, although Tolkien resisted treating his fiction as a simple one-to-one code. The story appears in several collections, including Tree and Leaf.