Ents

Origins

When Aulë made the Dwarves and Eru Ilúvatar granted them life, Yavanna grew afraid for the trees and growing things she loved, which would be helpless before the axes of Dwarves and of the coming Children. She went to Manwë, who sought the mind of Eru, and returned with the answer that when the Children awoke, Yavanna's own thought would awake too, and spirits would be sent to dwell among the trees and speak for them. These were the Ents, the Shepherds of the Trees, whom the Elves call Onodrim. Treebeard himself, the eldest of them, described how the Elves first found them and taught them speech, waking them from a wordless existence into thought and memory.

What the Ents are, exactly, is left carefully undefined. They are not Ainur, though spirits sent by Eru animate them; they are not trees, though they resemble them and can become them; and they are not Children of Ilúvatar. Treebeard's own view was that the Ents were closer to Elves than to Men, because they wished to talk to everything rather than to master it, but that they were steadier and slower than Elves and more like Men in changing with the world.

What sets them apart

An Ent is a huge figure, fourteen feet or more in height, with a shape somewhere between a man and a tree. Each Ent resembles the kind of tree he herds, so that there were beech-like Ents, oak-like Ents, and fir-like Ents, and old Ents grew more tree-like with the centuries. Their strength is immense: an Ent can rend stone as roots do, only far faster, and a company of them tore the walls of Isengard to pieces in a night. Their eyes are deep and slow, and Ents are hard to kill, though fire and axes are their terrors.

The defining trait of the Ents is slowness. They do nothing hastily, and their language, Old Entish, is so slow and full of repetition that a simple statement takes hours and a proper name may be a whole history. They are also long-sighted in memory, keeping the lore of the forests from the earliest ages. Their weakness is the opposite of that virtue: over long ages some Ents become sleepy and rooted, treeish, and cease to move or think, while some trees, conversely, become Entish and walk. These half-awake beings are the Huorns.

The Entwives

The Ents were once a people of two kinds. The Entwives loved gardens, ordered fields and the smaller growing things, while the Ents loved the wild woods and the great trees. Their tastes drew them apart. The Entwives crossed the Anduin and made gardens in the lands that later became the Brown Lands, and Men learned agriculture from them. In the war between the Last Alliance and Sauron at the end of the Second Age, the gardens were burned and the Entwives vanished. The Ents have searched for them ever since without success, and because there have been no Entwives there have been no Entings, no children, for three thousand years.

Fangorn and the Third Age

By the Third Age the Ents were confined mostly to Fangorn Forest at the feet of the Misty Mountains, a remnant of the vast primeval woods that had once run from there to the Old Forest far away in Eriador. Treebeard, whose Elvish name Fangorn was given to the forest, was their eldest, and Leaflock and Skinbark were the other survivors of the first three Ents; Leaflock had grown drowsy and stood still most of the year, while Skinbark had withdrawn to the high slopes after Orcs wounded him and felled his trees. The Rohirrim knew the forest as a place of dread and the Ents as figures of legend; even the Wise seem to have half-forgotten them.

The War of the Ring

The Ents were roused when Merry and Pippin, escaping from the Uruk-hai, met Treebeard in Fangorn in February T.A. 3019. From them Treebeard learned the extent of Saruman's assault on the forest, and he called an Entmoot at Derndingle. After three days the Ents decided to march. They broke into Isengard the night after the Battle of the Hornburg, tore down its walls, drowned its pits by diverting the river, and imprisoned Saruman in Orthanc. The Huorns they sent to Helm's Deep destroyed the Orc army that fled from the fortress. It was the last great deed of the Ents, and probably the last time they will act in the affairs of the wider world.

Relations with other peoples

The Ents loved the Elves, who had taught them to speak, and Treebeard especially remembered the Elves of Beleriand and knew Galadriel and Celeborn of old. They were suspicious of Men and hostile to Orcs, who cut and burned trees for pleasure, and they had a long grievance against the Dwarves, whom Yavanna had feared from the beginning. Hobbits had no place in their old lists of living things until Treebeard added them. Their relationship with Saruman, once a neighbour who walked in the woods and listened, turned to hatred when he began to fell Fangorn for fuel.

Fate

After the war Treebeard let Saruman go and the Ents were given the ruined ring of Isengard, which they planted with trees and renamed the Treegarth of Orthanc. King Aragorn granted them the valley and promised that the lands west of the mountains would be theirs again, and Legolas and Gimli visited them. But Treebeard told Galadriel and Celeborn at their parting that the Ents and the Elves would not meet again in this world, and that the Ents, without the Entwives, would slowly diminish, taking root and falling into sleep as the forests shrank in the age of Men.

Ents are between fourteen and twenty feet tall, with bodies of bark-like skin, arms and legs like limbs of trees, and feet with toes like roots. Each Ent resembles a kind of tree: Treebeard was beech-like, Skinbark like a rowan, Quickbeam like a rowan too, and others like oaks, firs and chestnuts. Their eyes are deep brown and shot with green, holding a sense of enormous age and slow consideration. Their voices are deep and resonant, like a great wind instrument. They do not eat but drink ent-draughts, waters of the forest that strengthen them, and they stand at rest with their feet in flowing water or rooted in the earth. Wounded Ents can be killed by fire and by axe blows, but they are otherwise nearly indestructible and immensely long-lived.

The Ents are governed by no king; the eldest and wisest are heeded, and decisions are taken at the Entmoot, a slow assembly in which every Ent speaks and consensus emerges over days. Their language, Old Entish, is unwritten and unlearnable by others, built from long accumulations of sound in which a name grows with everything that has happened to its bearer. They loved and learned Quenya and Sindarin from the Elves and could speak the Common Speech, though they thought it hasty. Their lore is a list of living things in verse, which they keep and add to. Ents drink from special draughts that maintain their strength, and they hold that nothing should be done rashly. They herd the trees, waking the sleepy ones and quieting the dangerous, and protect the forest against fire and axes.

The Ents came into the world as the answer to Yavanna's plea. When she learned that Aulë's Dwarves would use axes, she asked Manwë whether all the living things she had brought forth would be left defenceless. Manwë consulted Eru in thought and answered that when the Children awoke, spirits would come to dwell in the woods and protect them, and that the trees would have a voice. Treebeard's own memory begins with the Elves, who found the Ents as voiceless beings and taught them speech, thereby giving them their own inner life. He remembered the great forests of the Elder Days when he could walk from the Misty Mountains to what is now the Old Forest without leaving the trees.

The Ents survived the Third Age but not as a growing people. With the Entwives lost since the end of the Second Age and no new Entings, their numbers can only fall. After the War of the Ring they were given Isengard as a garden, and Aragorn promised them lands, but Treebeard expected that the Ents would gradually take root and sleep as the forests were cut back, and that they and the Elves would not meet again in Middle-earth.