Summary — Treebeard
Could it be that the trees of Fangorn
were awake, and the forest was rising, marching over the hills to
war?
See Important Quotations Explained
Speeding through the forest, Merry and Pippin stop to
drink water from the Entwash River. Munching on some of their few
remaining lembas cakes, they worry about their
lack of food and supplies. To their surprise, Merry and Pippin are
suddenly addressed by what appears to be a fourteen-foot-tall walking
tree. The creature is an Ent, an ancient treelike creature, named
Fangorn or Treebeard. He is kind to the hobbits, and he explains
his history to them. Treebeard identifies himself as one of the
oldest creatures in Middle-earth. He is the shepherd of the other
trees in the forest, many of which are Ents like him. Fangorn offers
to carry Merry and Pippin to his home and to give them food and
drink. On the way, Fangorn provides information about the Ents and
their history. Many trees in the forest are simply Ents that have
fallen asleep, who must be roused to action by some stirring motivation.
The Ents have lost their wives, as the Ent-wives wandered off one
day long ago. As a consequence, there are no young Ents in the forest.
As Pippin and Merry are being carried to the Ent-house,
they ask Fangorn why they have heard stories warning them about
the Ent forest. Fangorn agrees that it is an odd land, and expresses
surprise that the hobbits ever made it into the forest in the first
place. During the hobbits’ meal at the Ent-house, Fangorn gives
them some Ent food, a nourishing liquid that they drink greedily.
Pippin and Merry learn about the Ents’ growing fury at the Orcs
and at Saruman, who has been mutating the Orcs into a new breed
of monsters unafraid of sunlight (most Orcs fear the sun, and therefore
come out only at night). Fangorn says that Saruman is evil and that
Saruman’s Isengard forces must be stopped through an alliance between
Rohan, the Ents, and Aragorn’s group.
After a night’s sleep, Fangorn takes the hobbits to an
Entmoot, or gathering of the Ents, in which the tree beings discuss
a possible alliance with Rohan. The hobbits discover a variety of
tree creatures of different shapes and sizes assembled. While the
Ents debate in a low murmur, Merry and Pippin wonder how the Ents
could possibly move on Isengard, which is a ring of rocky hills
with a pillar of rock in the middle—not a place that trees could
reach easily.
Merry and Pippin are invited to the home of an Ent named Bregalad
or Quickbeam, who explains that the Orcs have been cruel to the
Ents, cutting down trees for no reason. The hobbits suddenly hear
the mighty roar of the Ent assembly, which has been stirred to action.
Pippin at first cannot believe his eyes when he thinks he sees trees
in motion, but it is true—the forest itself begins to move. The tree
creatures all march toward Isengard to wage battle with Saruman
and his Orc forces. Bregalad marches next to Fangorn, who reflects
that the Ents may be marching to their doom. Fangorn points the
way on to Isengard.
Analysis
The introduction of the Ents effectively broadens the
scope of the battle brewing between the Fellowship’s forces and
the Enemy, as the natural world itself becomes involved. What is
taking shape is more than just warfare among the various races and
peoples of Middle-earth. As Saruman’s Orc armies have begun an assault
on nature itself, destroying the forest for no reason, nature itself
fights back. The dramatic scene of the Ents marching into battle
is a powerful moment, as well as a subtle nod to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in
which one of the prophecies relating to Macbeth’s demise is that
a forest will physically move toward a castle. The episode of the
Ents, in reminding us that evil in The Lord of the Rings is
a universal force, touching even the lives of trees, forests, and
entire landscapes, is an important component of the rich portrayal
of the natural world that Tolkien has created in the novel. Tolkien
wrote The Lord of the Rings in the 1940s,
before the blossoming of the modern environmental conservation movement,
but he foreshadows this era of ecological concerns in his critical
portrayal of the evil Orcs’ thoughtless destruction of trees for
no practical purpose. The tree creatures have been patient for centuries,
but now that they feel a significant threat to their environment,
the power of their anger is formidable.
The Ents offer an example of a benevolent element in the
natural world. Continuing the pattern we have seen in The
Fellowship of the Ring, nature is rarely just an indifferent
backdrop: it is either a force of evil (as in the previous volume’s
episodes with Old Man Willow and the pass of Caradhras) or good
(as we see here with the Ents)—almost never neutral. Fangorn is
willing to help Merry and Pippin from the first moment he meets
them, offering to convey them through the forest and treating them
nobly and hospitably thereafter. Both Fangorn and Bregalad offer
Ent food and shelter to Merry and Pippin out of sheer benevolence,
expecting nothing in return. As always in The Lord of the
Rings, good brings creatures together and evil drives them
apart. The display of hospitality, such as we see here with the
Ents, is an important idea in Tolkien’s work, and is one of the
ways in which the world of Middle-earth imitates the ancient Greece
depicted in epics such as Homer’s Odyssey. In Homer’s world,
the true measure of a person’s nobility is the generosity with which
he receives guests. While the Orcs are objectionable hosts to Merry
and Pippin, the Ents show an ancient and epic regard for giving
strangers food and shelter.
The full dimensions of the imminent standoff between Gandalf and
Saruman become clearer in this chapter, as the Ents provide crucial
insight into the scope of the war that is brewing. Fangorn issues the
first unequivocal call to arms in the novel, declaring Saruman to be
evil and announcing the necessity of a large-scale alliance among all
of Saruman’s enemies. The fact that this initial call to arms is issued
by a tree creature, rather than one of the Fellowship’s leaders like
Aragorn or Gandalf, is a measure of the urgency of the conflict at
hand. The Ents are very deliberate, patient creatures who have been
dormant for centuries, and they are not at all political beings. They
seem capable of shrugging off nearly any provocation. However, the
offenses to which Saruman’s Orcs have subjected the Ents cannot
be ignored. The enthusiasm of the Ents when roused to action shows
us that this battle is not just a skirmish among minor, transitory
figures, but an epochal clash of the primal forces of -Middle-earth.
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