Entish

Entish is not a name from inside the language it labels. It is a formation of the Common Speech, built on the name of the speakers, and it reaches the reader through the conventions of rendering that Appendix F sets out: the tongue of Rohan is represented by an older stage of English, and Ent is a word of that tongue, carried across unaltered rather than turned into a modern equivalent. Naming a language after its people is ordinary enough, but in this case there was little alternative. Nothing the Ents used of themselves could be lifted out and set down as a label, so the people's name had to serve for the speech as well.

Treebeard, speaking to the hobbits in the Common Speech, calls his own tongue Old Entish, and what he says about naming explains why no shorter designation survives. In that speech a real name recounts the story of the thing it belongs to; it is a recital, not a tag. His own name, he tells them, has been growing all his life and is long by now, and when he begins to give the Entish name of the place he has brought them to he breaks off after a few syllables, remarking that it is only a portion of it. A self-designation for the language itself would have obeyed the same rule, and would have been no briefer than the language deserved.

Outsiders named the speakers before they named the speech. The Elves knew the people as the Onodrim, which Legolas glosses for his companions with the word Men used, and it is that Mannish word which stands behind the form used here. For the tongue itself the record supplies no Elvish name at all. Appendix F observes that even the loremasters of the Eldar, who wrote down so much else, made no attempt to represent it in script, and a language that was never committed to writing acquired no scholarly title to go with it. Since it was spoken only among Ents, and no one outside that kindred could master it, no other community ever had reason to coin a name of its own; it remained simply the speech of the Ents.

Entish had a single community of speakers, and that community was coextensive with the people who made it. The Ents used it among themselves; they used nothing else with each other, and no one else used it at all. Appendix F is explicit that no member of another race could learn the tongue, and the obstacle was not instruction withheld but the thing itself — its pace, its accumulation of syllables, its reliance on shades of vowel and on distinctions of pitch and length that other ears did not register as meaningful. The demonstration comes at the gathering in Derndingle, where Merry and Pippin sat for three days within earshot of a deliberation conducted entirely in Entish and understood none of it, hearing rise and fall and the long booming of voices in concert but no content. What they learned of the debate they learned afterwards, from Treebeard, in the Common Speech.

It follows that the usual categories fit it poorly. Entish was not a learned register kept for ceremony, since the Ents had no other tongue of their own to serve ordinary purposes; the same speech carried both a greeting and a council of war. Neither was it a secret. Appendix F makes the point precisely: the Ents did not keep it hidden, and had no cause to, because concealment was already accomplished by the language's own nature. A tongue nobody outside can acquire needs no discipline of silence around it. What looks from outside like a closed mystery was, from inside, simply the way Ents talked when Ents were together.

Outward, the traffic ran the other way. The Ents were accomplished in the languages of others, learning them slowly and keeping them once learned, and of these they cared most for the tongues of the Elves, the High-elven above all. They credited the Elves not with giving them words but with waking in them the wish to speak, a distinction the Ents themselves drew. So Treebeard addresses the hobbits in the Common Speech, reaches for Elvish when he wants a name with weight in it, and reserves his own speech for his own kind.

The Ents were older than their speech. The account in The Silmarillion sets their beginning not in any event of Middle-earth but in a decision taken among the Valar: Yavanna, fearing for the growing things that could not flee or defend themselves, was answered by Manwë with the promise that spirits would come to walk among the trees as their shepherds, and that these would arise when the Children of Ilúvatar awoke. That places the origin of the people at the same threshold as the awakening of the Elves, and it says nothing at all about a language. When the Ents next appear in the First Age narrative, falling upon the Dwarves who were carrying the spoil of Menegroth eastward, they are described only as the Shepherds of the Trees; no word of theirs is recorded, and none is reported afterwards. The tongue, on the evidence, was not part of the original endowment but something that came later.

How it came is told by Treebeard, and he places it in the Elder Days, when the Elves went about the woods rousing the trees and teaching them speech while learning tree-talk in return. What the Ents took from that encounter was the practice of speaking rather than a vocabulary to speak with: instead of adopting an Eldarin tongue whole, they built one of their own, and its character shows how it was built. A speech that accumulates rather than abbreviates, in which a name is a recital of what the thing has been, is a speech that only ever grows longer with the age of its speakers. Nothing in the record suggests a period of standardisation or reduction. Since it was never set down — the Eldarin loremasters, who committed so much else to writing, left it alone — its history has to be read from what its speakers were doing at any given time rather than from documents.

The one visible development is layering. Appendix F notes that the strange names the hobbits carried away from Fangorn are not Entish at all but Elvish matter fitted into Entish habits of construction: fragments strung together in Ent-fashion, Quenya in the long rolling designation Treebeard uses for the dark valleys under the shadow of the forest, Sindarin in Fangorn, in Fimbrethil, in the byname Bregalad. Long acquaintance with the tongues of the Eldar, and a preference for them over all others, thus fed back into what the Ents said among themselves without altering the shape of the language. Treebeard's own habit of calling his speech the old Entish points the same way: a qualification of that kind implies that by the Third Age it was felt to have stages, though what a newer stage consisted of is nowhere stated.

Against this stands a long and unbroken contraction of the community that used it. Treebeard's account of the Entwives is the central fact: they went east over the Anduin to their own gardens, war came and the gardens were laid waste, and the searches that followed found nothing, so that the two halves of the people never came together again. From that separation there followed no Entings for a count of years he calls terrible, and no new speakers at all. Meanwhile the woods themselves shrank, the Ents grew drowsy and treeish, and trees on their side grew Entish, which meant fewer voices even among those still standing. A tongue no outsider could acquire had no way of replacing what it lost. By the end of the Third Age, Entish had a smaller body of speakers than at any earlier point in its existence, and no prospect of a larger one.

Its last recorded public use falls in the first days of March 3019, when the assembly in Derndingle reached its decision and the Ents went down on Isengard, matters settled in their own speech before anything was reported to anyone else. Everything the outside world learned of that deliberation reached it afterwards in the Common Speech, and every later dealing of the Ents with Men, Elves and hobbits — the guardianship of Orthanc, the release of Saruman, the parting near Isengard when Treebeard took leave of Celeborn and Galadriel and doubted they would meet again in the changed world — was conducted in borrowed tongues. Aragorn's word to him then was that the forests might yet spread again into lands where Ents had once walked; the Entwives were another question, and Treebeard did not expect an answer to it. The Third Age closed in 3021, and Entish passed out of the reckoning with it: never written, never taught, still spoken in Fangorn by however many were left to speak it, and beyond that the record simply stops.

What survives about the sound of Entish is a set of judgments rather than a description of a system, and the judgments are the whole of the evidence. Appendix F sets the tongue apart from every other speech of Middle-earth by its manner: unhurried, deep and resonant, given to heaping elements one upon another, and disposed to say a thing again and at greater length instead of compressing it. No paradigm, no vocabulary and no rule of formation stands behind those adjectives; nothing further was recorded, and nothing further can be reconstructed from what was. Treebeard's own estimate runs along the same line. He speaks well of his tongue while conceding that anything at all said in it takes a great while, and he attaches a reason to the concession: Ents do not open their mouths for matters that are not worth the time the saying and the hearing will cost. Slowness, on that account, is not an accident of temperament but a condition of use.

The one remark of a technical kind concerns what the speech distinguished. Appendix F reports a great multiplicity of vowel qualities, together with differences of pitch and of duration that carried meaning rather than merely colouring it. That is a considerable inventory of contrasts to hold apart, and it stands directly beside the statement that the loremasters of the Eldar, for all their industry with other tongues, never set about putting this one into script. The two facts belong together: a speech whose distinctions lie in shades of vowel and in the rise and length of a syllable offers a writing system little to fasten on. What an outsider registered instead was the acoustic surface. Treebeard's voice is likened to a very deep wind instrument, and his talk even in the Common Speech runs on long humming rumbles, which is as near as the record comes to letting a reader hear the tongue behind it.

One stretch of Entish is set down: the run of syllables Treebeard begins for the place he has brought the hobbits to, before he stops and observes that it amounts to no more than a part of what he calls that place. It is given without a gloss, and the absence is not an oversight, since a designation in this speech is not shorter than what it designates. The fragment itself is consistent with the general characterisation — a syllable-group repeated immediately, open syllables throughout, a preponderance of flowing consonants, and a marked long vowel near the close — though it is far too little to build anything on, and no meaning attaches to any part of it in the text. The same shape shows through in the long Elvish-built designations the hobbits carried away, where the components are piled into a single unbroken compound and then restated in a reordered arrangement. The material there is Eldarin, but the habit of construction is not.

Middle-earth had two families of letters, and Appendix E describes both as Elvish inventions that afterwards travelled far beyond the Eldar. The tengwar, the pen-written letters brought to their finished form by Fëanor, were fitted to one tongue after another, each language receiving a mode of its own in which the values of the signs were arranged to suit its sounds; Quenya, Sindarin and the Common Speech all had such modes, and the system was flexible enough that even the Black Speech was set down in it. The certar or cirth, cut rather than written and first devised in Doriath, spread eastward and were taken up by Dwarves and by Men, who altered and extended them for their own uses. Between them these two systems account for nearly every tongue that left a written record. Entish appears in neither account. No mode was made for it, no runic adaptation is mentioned, and Appendix F states plainly that the loremasters of the Eldar, who gave so much attention to the languages of others, did not undertake the work.

What the Ents kept, they kept by memory. Treebeard's long enumeration of the living creatures of Middle-earth is lore he learned when he was young and can still deliver in order, and when he decides that the hobbits deserve a place in it he simply composes a line and adds it, an amendment to something held in the head rather than a correction to a page. Nothing in the record shows an Ent writing, or reading, or keeping any document at all. It would be wrong to read the silence as a slight. The people who never had their speech written down were the same people who prized the Eldarin tongues above all others and had the High-elven best of all, and the Elvish loremasters who left the tongue alone were not in the habit of neglecting languages they thought little of. The single stretch of Entish that survives in writing survives because outsiders wrote it: it stands in a record kept by others, spelled by the conventions used for setting down the Common Speech, and it reached that record through the ear.

Everything of Entish that reaches the page comes from one speaker in one chapter. Treebeard, carrying the hobbits up the slopes toward his dwelling, offers them what he calls the place they are coming to: a-lalla-lalla-rumba-kamanda-lind-or-burúmë. He stops there of his own accord and says it is only a portion of the name, so that what stands in the text is not a word but the opening of one. Nothing else in the passage is presented in his own tongue; the name of the hall itself reaches the hobbits already in the Common Speech, and so does everything he tells them about the hill, the water and the light. The one Entish stretch is thus offered as a specimen and withdrawn in the same breath.

The only other item is a single word of loathing. Speaking of the Orcs, Treebeard drops out of the Common Speech for one term, burárum, and the narrative supplies no equivalent for it, describing instead the deep rumble of disgust with which it was uttered. Between these two the recorded corpus ends. The humming and booming syllables that break up his sentences elsewhere are given as the manner of his voice rather than as vocabulary, and the substantial things the Ents say aloud in the book are not in their own speech at all: the song of the lost Entwives, the marching chant taken up on the road to Isengard, and the lament Bregalad sings for his felled rowans, whose refrain names the trees in Quenya. Long designations of the kind Treebeard uses for Lothlórien look like further samples and are not, being Elvish material assembled in Ent-fashion.

Where the tongue is used at length it is reported rather than transcribed. The three days of deliberation among the Ents pass without a syllable being set down, and what the hobbits later tell Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli of that decision and of the assault that followed comes to them in the Common Speech, at second hand, with the Entish itself reduced to noise remembered. Appendix F accordingly describes the language instead of exhibiting it, and the two fragments in the narrative are all the illustration the reader is given.

Tolkien described the devising of languages as the foundation of his work and the stories as a world supplied for them to live in, a name commonly arriving first and a narrative growing afterwards to account for it. The Ents are the exception he himself acknowledged to that order of work. Writing to W. H. Auden, he said he had not consciously invented them at all, and traced their part in the book to a disappointment carried since schooldays with Shakespeare's handling of the march of Birnam wood upon Dunsinane, where the moving forest resolves into men carrying cut branches; he had wanted trees that went to war in earnest. On that account the people entered the story before any question arose of how they spoke, and their speech was worked out to fit them rather than the other way about. The name was material already in his professional keeping, since ent is an Old English word for a giant, and it survives in verse that assigns ruined ancient stonework to giants long departed.

The tongue itself is handled unlike any other in the book, and the difference is one of method rather than of degree. For the Eldarin languages there are words, recurring elements that behave like grammar, and scripts fitted to them arrangement by arrangement, as Appendix E sets out at length; for this one there is a page of impressions and a fragment nobody translates. The reticence does work that a lexicon could not. The whole presentation rests on a conceit of translation, by which the Common Speech stands as modern English and the kindred tongue of Rohan as an older stage of the same, so that every language in the story is reached through some equivalent the reader can be given; Entish is deliberately denied one, and its unlearnability and its absence from writing are stated inside the fiction as the reason. A philologist who built grammars for pleasure thus excused himself from building this one by making the excuse part of the story, and left a language characterised entirely from the outside, as an outsider would in fact have met it.