Treebeard

Treebeard is the name the Common Speech gives him, a plain compound answering to his look: a bark-skinned figure whose grey-green beard is more twig than hair. In Sindarin the same sense is carried by Fangorn, which is also the name of the wood he keeps, so that warden and forest cannot easily be prised apart in speech. He introduces himself to Merry and Pippin under both names, and calls himself Eldest without further boast. His true name, in the language of his own people, he declines to give: Entish names grow along with the things they name, gathering the whole story of a life into themselves, so that speaking his in full would take a very long time. He adds that Ents are not free with their real names in any case, since a name says what a thing is, and that is not a thing to hand over lightly.

His kind are the Ents, called Onodrim by the Elves, with Onod for one of them and Enyd for many. They are shepherds of trees, keeping watch over the woods against the beasts and the axes that trouble them, and they measure time on the scale of growing things rather than of Men. Treebeard himself stands some fourteen feet tall, upright as a young tree, with a broad stump of a body, seven toes to each foot, and eyes that Pippin found slow and deep, brown shot through with green, as though a long memory lay behind them. Speech, Treebeard says, the Ents owe to the Elves, who woke them from their old dumbness and taught them the pleasure of words; Ents were quick pupils and have never stopped talking since. In the old lore-lists he learned as a young Ent, his people are counted among the free folk of the world, ranked with Elves, Dwarves and Men, and he notes with mild interest that hobbits appear nowhere in them.

The origin of the Ents lies far earlier, in the disputes of the Valar over the fate of the growing world. Yavanna, grieving that the trees and lesser green things she loved would stand defenceless before the works of Aulë's Dwarves and the needs of the Children of Ilúvatar, asked that something be set to guard them. Manwë answered that in the Music such guardians had already been foreseen, and that when the Children awoke, spirits would come to dwell among the trees and walk in their defence. From this the tree-shepherds arose, and it is to that first waking that Treebeard's great age is traced.

Treebeard's own account of his past reaches back beyond any record kept by Men. He recalls walking in the willow-meadows of Nan-tasarion, among the elm-woods of Ossiriand, under the beeches of Neldoreth and in the pinewoods of Dorthonion, lands of the Elder Days that lie now beneath the sea, and he speaks of them as a countryman speaks of fields he once worked. In those days, he says, the woods ran nearly unbroken across the north-west of the world, so that an Ent could walk and sing for a day together and pass out of no forest at all. What he keeps in Fangorn is a survival of that older wood, hemmed in by grass and stone, and he counts its shrinking not as a legend but as something he watched happen. No year can be set to his waking; the register gives only that his age is measured in the growth of trees.

The central grief of that long history is the loss of the Entwives. In the early days Ents and Entwives dwelt together, but their loves diverged: the Ents kept to the wild woods, while the Entwives turned to open country and to the ordering of growing things, and they crossed the Great River eastward to make gardens there. For a time the Ents still visited them; then war passed over those lands, and when the Ents came again they found the gardens burned and rooted up, and the country a brown waste. They searched, and asked the Elves for news, and found nothing. The Elves made songs of the parting that are still sung, and Treebeard admits that Entish memory of the Entwives has grown thin, so that his people no longer agree even on where to look. Because of that severance there have been no Entings for an age of the world, and the number of Ents has only diminished, some of them growing slow and tree-ish and falling silent.

The nearer part of his history is bound to Isengard. Saruman took up his dwelling in the ring of Angrenost in 2759 of the Third Age, by leave of the Steward of Gondor, and in 2953 claimed it for his own and fortified it. In those earlier years, Treebeard recalls, the wizard was a frequent and courteous visitor to Fangorn, walking in the wood and asking questions, and Treebeard talked freely with him and told him much. Then the visits grew rarer and the courtesy thinner, until Saruman ceased to look at anything he did not intend to use. His orcs began felling trees along the eaves of the forest, burning what they did not carry away to feed the furnaces beneath the tower, and leaving the maimed trunks unburied. Treebeard reproaches himself for having been slow, and for having been talked to for a long while by someone who told him nothing in return.

On 29 February 3019 the orc-company carrying Merry and Pippin was destroyed by the Rohirrim at the forest's edge, and the two hobbits escaped into Fangorn, where Treebeard found them on a hillside and carried them to his house at Wellinghall. He questioned them, gave them draughts of his own brewing, and learned from them how far Saruman's designs had gone. What he heard settled a matter he had been turning over slowly for years. On 2 March he called the Ents to a moot in the wooded hollow of Derndingle, and there the Ents debated for the better part of three days in their own unhurried tongue, the hobbits meanwhile in the keeping of Bregalad, called Quickbeam, whose rowans Saruman's servants had cut down and who had made up his mind before the moot began. Late on 3 March the moot ended in agreement: the Ents would march, knowing it might be their last march, and would go openly.

They came down on Isengard that same night, with the Huorns moving behind them, and Treebeard sent a great part of that darker company south to the fords and to Helm's Deep, where they closed on the orc-host after the battle. At Isengard the Ents broke the gates, tore up the pillars and stopped the tunnels, and Saruman fled into Orthanc, whose stone they could not break. On the following day Treebeard turned the waters of the Isen into the ring, drowning the pits and quenching the fires beneath. When Gandalf, Théoden and Aragorn rode to Isengard on 5 March they found the hobbits at the ruined gate and Treebeard master of the place, and at Gandalf's asking he undertook to keep Saruman shut in his tower, setting a guard of trees at the mouth of the valley.

In the ordering of Middle-earth Treebeard holds no office and commands no realm. A tree-shepherd's work, as he describes it, is watching and walking: going up and down his wood, keeping the trees from harm, driving off what would gnaw or fell them, and occasionally waking a tree that has grown drowsy so that it recovers speech and movement. Trees that go the other way, growing wild-hearted and dangerous while keeping the outward form of trees, are the Huorns, and it is a mark of his standing that these still answer to Entish voices when few other things could hold them. His authority within his own kind is that of the oldest and most listened-to, not of a lord: when the question of war was put, it was decided by the assembly of Ents in their own time, and he could argue for a course but not impose one. He is also careful to disclaim the wider quarrel, telling the hobbits that he stands wholly on nobody's side because nobody stands wholly on his; what moves him is the fate of trees, and his intervention, when it comes, is aimed at one valley and not at the war entire.

His strength is of a plain physical kind, and he states its measure without flourish: Ents are made of the substance of the earth and can break stone as tree-roots do, only far faster, and they are stronger than trolls, which he holds to be crude imitations of his own people fashioned by the Enemy in the ancient dark, as orcs were imitations of Elves. That strength showed at Isengard in torn gates and pulled-down masonry rather than in anything resembling sorcery, and it was matched by an ability to redirect a river. Beyond force he keeps a long lore: names of countries drowned before the counting of years, verse-lists of the living kinds, and a memory that serves as a record where no written record survives. The draughts he brews from the water of his own springs are restorative rather than magical in any showy sense, though they sustained Merry and Pippin without other food and were afterwards credited with the unusual height both hobbits carried home.

The limits are equally plain. Arrows did little against Entish hide, but fire did: Saruman's burning liquid killed the Ent called Beechbone outright, and the sight of it drove the rest to a fury that still could not touch the black stone of Orthanc, which stood unbroken above the ruin they made of everything else. Nothing in Treebeard's power could open that tower or compel the wizard inside it; he could only besiege and wait, and Saruman's release afterwards turned on a misjudgement of persuasion rather than on any failure of strength. Slowness is the standing constraint on all of it — deliberation measured against the growth of trees, which nearly let the danger arrive before the decision did — and Treebeard concedes as much when he reckons the march a thing that might finish his people. His victory was local and late, and he neither claimed nor was granted a part in what followed.

The attachment that shapes Treebeard's part in the war is also the least likely one in his life: two hobbits he had no category for. Nothing in the lore he had learned as a young Ent accounted for them, and his response was not to dismiss the gap but to repair it, composing a fresh line for the old verse-catalogue of living kinds so that the hobbits stood in it beside the rest — for an Ent, a considerable form of welcome. He questioned them at length about their own country and its manners, and was pleased rather than offended by how quickly they spoke. Their value to him was not counsel; it was information, brought from outside a wood he rarely left, and it confirmed a suspicion he had been carrying without proof.

Among his own kind he is more solitary than his standing suggests. The Entwife he remembers by name is Fimbrethil, slender and light of step when the world was younger, and he concedes without argument that she would be as altered now as he is, so that neither might know the other on meeting. Of the three oldest Ents left in Fangorn, one, Leaflock, has grown drowsy and stands summer-long half asleep in the grass, while another, Skinbark, keeps to the high slopes since orcs wounded him there and will not come down. The nearest thing he has to a companion of temper is Bregalad, whose readiness to answer before a question is finished the other Ents count a fault, and which Treebeard regards with amusement rather than reproof.

His judgement of others rests on a single test: whether they look at a growing thing or only at what it can be made into. Saruman failed it, and Treebeard's verdict is that his mind had become a thing of metal and wheels with no care left for anything that grows. Gandalf passes it, and is described as the one wizard who genuinely minds about trees — though Treebeard notes drily that he is always in a hurry, which in Entish reckoning is a real if forgivable defect. The Men of the Mark, his nearest neighbours, he treats with neither grievance nor warmth; they avoided his wood and kept his people alive only as an old tale, and he did not trouble to correct them until their king stood at Isengard and had to be told what he was looking at.

The name is older in Tolkien's working papers than the being it now belongs to. While the opening chapters of the sequel to The Hobbit were still being revised and re-revised, outlines for the story to come mention a Giant Treebeard among the hazards ahead, and the tone of those jottings is not welcoming: one note has Frodo taken and held by him, in a wood that at that stage still carried the Beleriandic name Neldoreth. Nothing there implies a shepherd of trees, a people called Ents, or the grave courtesy of the finished chapter; the name promises a large and probably hostile creature of the woods and no more. Christopher Tolkien remarks on the distance between these notes and what eventually emerged, and the giant's projected role was in the end distributed elsewhere, the function of captor passing to figures with no connection to forests at all.

The account of how such guardians came to exist belongs to a much later stratum of composition than the narrative that made them famous. Tolkien set it down as a separate text attached to the late revision of the Quenta Silmarillion, treating the Ents and the great Eagles together as answers to the same problem: what protection the growing world might have against those licensed to use it. Christopher Tolkien printed that text in its own right and, in editing the published Silmarillion, folded it into the chapter concerning Aulë and Yavanna, where it now reads as an established part of the mythology. Its origin is worth recording, since the conception it preserves is not a survival from the earliest legendarium but a retrospective fitting of the Ents into cosmology, written after they had already walked into the war-narrative of their own accord.

Treebeard's screen and broadcast history begins with the two adaptations of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Ralph Bakshi's animated film gives him only a brief appearance: the hobbits' flight into Fangorn brings them to him, but because the film breaks off after the battle at Helm's Deep and no second part was ever made, the Entmoot, the march and the breaking of Isengard fall outside its span altogether, and the Ents have no bearing on how it ends. The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation, spread across twenty-six half-hour parts, had room for the opposite approach; Treebeard is voiced there by Stephen Thorne, whose delivery sets the character's unhurried pace against the tighter scenes around it, and the sequence of encounter, moot and assault is kept in its proper order and proportion. Of the older versions it is the radio one that reproduces the Entish material most fully.

In Peter Jackson's trilogy Treebeard is a computer-generated figure voiced by John Rhys-Davies, who also plays Gimli. The films alter his decision in a way that is frequently noted: where the book's moot ends in agreement to march, the screen Entmoot concludes against war, and Treebeard turns towards Isengard only after Merry and Pippin steer him to the wood's southern edge, where the sight of felled trees provokes him. The initiative thus passes from the Ents' own deliberation to a hobbit stratagem, and the long-standing grievance against Saruman is replaced by a single immediate shock. Later scenes diverge again: in the extended version of the third film Saruman is killed at Orthanc rather than kept prisoner and afterwards released, so Treebeard's misjudged act of mercy — and the later meeting at which he gives up the keys of the tower — has no counterpart. The Huorns' arrival at Helm's Deep is retained, though presented without explanation of what the trees are.