Ent

• 1. Introduction

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  Treebeard, the oldest living creature that walks in Middle-earth, stands roughly 14 feet tall. He has seven toes, a beard described as "almost twiggy", and eyes that penetrate with unusual depth. He is clad in something that might have been tree-bark. His name in Tolkien's invented Elvish language of Sindarin is Onod, and the race he leads is called the Onodrim. To English speakers, they are Ents, a word drawn directly from Old English enta, meaning giant.

  The Ents appear in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings as ancient shepherds of the forest, among the oldest beings in Middle-earth. But by the time the story unfolds during the War of the Ring, their numbers are dwindling. The Entwives, the female counterpart to the Ents, vanished long ago, and no young Ents have been born since. Treebeard himself fears that the few remaining Ents will stay in Fangorn forest and slowly become "treeish".

  How did creatures so ancient and so powerful come to exist? Why did Tolkien feel compelled to invent them? And what does their slow fading say about the world they were made to protect?

• 2. Shepherds of Creation

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  Yavanna, described in the texts as "the lover of all things that grow in the earth", made a case to the Vala Manwe before the Ents ever walked. She warned her husband Aulë that the Dwarves, whom he had made, would delve the earth and give no thought to living things. "Many a tree shall feel the bite of their iron without pity," she said. What followed was the recognition that Ents, too, had been part of the Song of Creation all along.

  Yavanna delivered a warning to Aulë: "Now let thy children beware! For there shall walk a power in the forests whose wrath they will arouse at their peril." The Ents were thus not invented by any single divine will; they were discovered, already woven into the fabric of the world.

  In the ancient days of Eriador, vast forests stretched unbroken. Elrond described a time when a squirrel could travel from what is now the Shire to Dunland west of Isengard without ever touching the ground, moving from tree to tree the entire way. The Ents moved through this older world as its silent custodians.

  Ents did not always have language. The Elves taught them to speak, a gift Treebeard remembered precisely: he said the Elves "cured us of dumbness", calling it a gift that could never be forgotten. Their debt to the Elves runs deep, which is part of why the Ents aligned themselves with the free peoples when Sauron and Saruman began burning and cutting the forests they had guarded since before history was recorded.

• 3. The Lost Entwives

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  The Entwives did not vanish by force, at least not at first. They simply preferred a different relationship with the land. While the Ents loved wild forests and preferred to let nature run its course, the Entwives wanted to plant, cultivate, and shape. They moved east across the Great River Anduin to a region that would become the Brown Lands, drawn to open fields and ordered gardens.

  For a time, the male Ents still visited them there. The Entwives taught Men the art of agriculture, a gift to human civilization that passed largely without recognition. Then Sauron destroyed the Entwives' gardens, and the Entwives disappeared entirely. No record of their fate survived.

  Tolkien wrestled with this absence. In letter number 144, he wrote: "I think that in fact the Entwives have disappeared for good, being destroyed with their gardens in the War of the Last Alliance... some may have fled east, or even have become enslaved." That ellipsis holds a world of unresolved grief.

  The Elvish tradition held that one day the Ents and the Entwives would find each other again. Treebeard asked Merry and Pippin directly to send word if they ever had news of the Entwives. Aragorn, after being crowned king, promised Treebeard that the Ents could expand to new lands now that the threat of Mordor had lifted. Treebeard's answer was bleak: forests might spread, but the Ents themselves would not. Without the Entwives, there were no Entings, and without young Ents, the race had no future.

• 4. The Last March

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  The Entmoot, the gathering where Ents decide their course of action, was considered hasty after just three days of deliberation. That measure of patience gives some sense of how extraordinary it was when the Ents resolved to march on Saruman's fortress at Isengard.

  Saruman had been cutting the trees of Fangorn to feed the furnaces of his industry. Roughly 50 Ents, led by Treebeard and accompanied by the hobbits Meriadoc Brandybuck and Peregrin Took, moved against the fortress. With them came an army of Huorns, creatures Treebeard described as either trees that had become animated or Ents that had grown more tree-like over time.

  Ents are strong enough to tear stone apart when roused. Tolkien wrote of them tossing great slabs of rock and pulling down the walls of Isengard "like bread-crust". The destruction was so total that the text compared it to the Great Sea rising in wrath and falling on hills with storm. Saruman was left trapped in the tower of Orthanc, unable to escape.

  Before the assault, Treebeard had already sent Huorns ahead to assist at the Battle of Helm's Deep. A forest of Huorns appeared there and destroyed Saruman's army of Orcs, ensuring that victory. Treebeard had also boasted to Merry and Pippin that the Trolls, whom Morgoth made in the First Age in mockery of Ents, just as Orcs were made in mockery of Elves, were far weaker than the creatures they parodied.

• 5. Why Tolkien Built Them

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  Tolkien described his childhood reaction to Macbeth in plain terms: "bitter disappointment and disgust". Shakespeare's use of the prophecy that Great Birnam Wood would come to High Dunsinane hill was, in Tolkien's view, a missed opportunity. Men carried branches, not trees. He wrote that from his school days onward he longed to devise a setting in which the trees might really march to war.

  Commentators have linked this impulse to something broader than Shakespeare. In the 20th century, Tolkien watched the English countryside being steadily damaged by industrial development. Matthew T. Dickerson and Jonathan Evans, in their book Ents, Elves, and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien, argue that Treebeard voices a vital part of Tolkien's environmental ethic: the need to preserve and look after every kind of wild place, especially forests.

  Nick Groom has also traced other possible ancestors for the Ents. The Gospel of Mark contains the speech of a man cured of blindness who says, "I see men as trees, walking." Algernon Blackwood's 1912 story "The Man Whom the Trees Loved" speculates that trees were once moving animal organisms that stood so long in one place they lost the power to move, which Groom notes sounds strikingly like Treebeard's account of Ents going sleepy and "tree-ish". Arthur Rackham's drawings of twisted anthropomorphic trees and a 1932 Disney Silly Symphony episode featuring walking trees round out a set of images Tolkien may have absorbed.

  Edward Pettit, writing in the journal Mallorn, noted that scholar Verlyn Flieger linked Treebeard to the Green Knight from the medieval romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Both figures have been described as versions of the Green Man, the leafy figure found carved in stone in churches across medieval Europe.

• 6. Song, Myth, and Warning

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  C. S. Lewis called Tolkien's tale of the Ents a myth in the fullest sense: "a story which has a value in itself." Ruth Noel compared the Ents to Germanic legends of huge, wild, hairy woodsprites. Corey Olsen took a more specific reading of the song the Ents and Entwives sing, supposedly composed by Elves.

  The song runs through the four seasons of the year, with each season yielding a stanza from the Ent and then one from the Entwife. Olsen observed that the Ent in summer is passive, even "languid and somnolent", with dreaming as the only active process. The Entwife's summer stanza is, by contrast, "simply bursting with activity". Olsen does not read these as opposites in competition; he suggests that both contemplation and action are valuable ways of engaging with natural beauty.

  But the song also carries a warning. Olsen points to Skinbark, who refuses to come out of his hills, and Leaflock, who stands in the long grass all summer doing nothing, lost in a kind of somnolent oblivion. These figures, Olsen argues, show the moral danger facing the Ents: their life in nature can lapse into mere lassitude. Without the Entwives to provide balance, the Ents risk drifting into apathetic isolation. Olsen calls it "a cautionary tale" and "tragic".

  Treebeard's own song "In the willow-meads of Tasarinan" also moves through the four seasons but functions differently: it is a lament. Anne Petty has noted that the song follows traditional gender lines, with the Ents drawn to wild nature and the Entwives to the more domestic realm of tended gardens. Olsen adds that Treebeard's reading of the song is not impartial; the Ent is, perhaps, not as humble as he presents himself to be.

• 7. Ents in the Wider World

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  Peter Jackson's film The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, released in 2002, rendered Treebeard as a combination of a large animatronic model and a CGI construct. John Rhys-Davies, who also portrayed the Dwarf Gimli in the same trilogy, voiced the character. Treebeard returned in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in 2003.

  The television series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, set in the Second Age, brought Ents to a new screen context. In the second season episode "Eldest", two named Ents appear: Snaggleroot, voiced by Jim Broadbent, and Winterbloom, voiced by Olivia Williams.

  A statue of Treebeard was placed near J. R. R. Tolkien's former home in Moseley, Birmingham, with permission granted by Tim Tolkien. The rock band The Fall of Troy included a song called "The Last March of the Ents" on their self-titled debut album, released in 2003.

  The reach of the Ents into gaming culture produced its own legal chapter. Ents appeared in the earliest edition of Dungeons and Dragons in the 1974 white box set, described as tree-like creatures able to command trees and lawful in nature. In 1975, Elan Merchandising, which held the licence to the Tolkien estate, issued a cease-and-desist order over the word "ent", and the Dungeons and Dragons creatures were renamed treants. That renamed figure persists in fantasy gaming today, appearing in games such as Heroes of Might and Magic V, where the creatures were even redesigned between the beta phase and the retail version due to copyright concerns.