The Babbling Trees
If any of the various facets of the Babbling Trees had existed apart from one another, there would have been hardly any interest paid toward them, but all of the aspects combined add up to a mystery that has captivated imaginations all over the land for decades.
Written on each tree, between five and ten feet off the ground, are various phrases impressed into the bark in Draconic script. It has been hotly debated whether the words were carved and since scarred over in a manner not really seen in other instances, whether they were altered somehow magically, or were even grown to display the words. In any case, the phrases are not whole messages in and of themselves--at least not in a way that has made sense to most people reading them--and the theories around their origin and meaning are extremely wide-ranging.
Some common theories include:
The entire message had once made sense, but other trees with missing portions of the text are now long gone.
The message is somehow coded, like Thieves Cant, or only meant to be understood by a certain audience.
The message was accidentally and magically recorded, impressed on the surrouding trees as a sort of echo to something else that had occurred.
Historical Details
Background
Though there are plenty of ancient trees in Greymantle Marsh, they tend to either be behemoths found in expansive forests on dry land, or more gnarled and rootbound groves in the wetter areas. There is only one place where isolated giants can be found stretching up out of the swamp with seemingly hardly any dry ground to cling onto. Looking at the stand of trees, it has the look of only a few members of some primordial forest having somehow survived intact while the rest of it sank into the swamp. The Babbling Trees are massive, they stand with a strange amount of distance between them, deep swamp surrounds almost every one of them on all sides, and there are no other trees that resemble them even slightly for miles around. Even without the cryptic messages found on them, whole papers could be (and have been) written speculating about their origins.
History
No one knows how long the messages on the trees have been there, but the first known mention of it is from a travel journal written over two hundred years ago, and the entry only made mention of about half of what is now known to be written on the trees. It isn't known if the other messages simply hadn't been noticed, or if they had been added later.