Fangorn

The wood and its oldest inhabitant answer to the same word. When the two hobbits meet him beneath the eaves of the forest, the Ent gives Fangorn as the name others use for him, alongside the Common Speech rendering by which he is better known, and the narrative applies the same word to the country of trees he walks in. He is careful to say that this is not a real name in the Entish sense: in his own slow tongue a name is an account of the thing named, growing with everything that has happened to it, and no such account can be given in a short breath. The brief labels are therefore borrowed, and he attributes the habit of quick naming to the Elves, who in his telling were always eager to speak of things and to give them words.

Fangorn is Sindarin, and its two elements are ordinary ones in Tolkien's Elvish nomenclature: a first element meaning beard and a second meaning tree, the latter familiar from other names of trees and of persons named for them. The compound thus matches the Common Speech form exactly, which suggests that the Westron name is a translation rather than an independent coinage. In the same conversation the Ent offers older names for the wood itself — Ambarona, Tauremorna, Aldalome, Tauremornalome — which the text leaves untranslated; their shape points toward the darkness and twilight of trees rather than toward any person, and they are presented as names out of a deeper past than the one now in use.

Men of Rohan had their own word for the place and called it the Entwood, after the folk they believed dwelt there, and the same element recurs in the names of the river and ford that run out of its country. This is a translated name: the speech of the Rohirrim is rendered throughout by an archaic form of English, so their term for the wood reaches the reader in that guise rather than in its own sounds. The Elves used a different word for the tree-shepherds themselves, and among Men further south the forest was a rumour more than a neighbour. The plainer English forms used in narration — the forest of Fangorn, Fangorn Forest — are descriptive expansions of the Elvish name rather than additional names in their own right.

The wood lies where the Misty Mountains come to an end, filling the broken ground at the southern feet of the range and climbing westward into its valleys, so that its highest trees stand under Methedras, the last of the peaks. On its eastern side the forest breaks off in steep slopes and wooded downs that look out over the grasslands of northern Rohan and the Wold, and from the plain it shows as little more than a dark line beneath the mountains. The Entwash gathers in its upper glens and runs out southeast across the open country to the Great River, where it loses itself in a wide fenland of many mouths; northward the land falls away toward the Limlight, which divides Rohan's pastures from the fields beyond. Westward, past an outlying arm of the trees and a shoulder of the mountains, lies the walled vale in which Isengard stands, near enough that a host setting out from within the wood can come down upon the ring of stone in a night. The Rohirrim graze their herds up to its margins and cross the river that issues from it, but they do not willingly pass under its eaves.

Within, the ground rises almost at once, and the character of the place asserts itself: air that is close and unmoving, a dim light filtered brown and green, deep drifts of old leaves, and trunks shaggy with moss and hanging growths. It is not uniformly dark. There are shelves of bare rock and open glades where the sun reaches the floor, and springs of cold clear water; on one such shelf at the mountain's foot stands Wellinghall, a bay in the rock wall with a stream falling across its lip. Deeper in, under the roots of the mountains, the growth is oldest and least tended, and the narrative repeatedly gives the trees an attention of their own, so that travellers feel watched rather than merely surrounded. Somewhere in that inner country lies Derndingle, a shadowed bowl of ground ringed with evergreens, where the tree-shepherds hold their council.

Material published after Tolkien's death sets the forest in a wider frame. In an earlier age the trees ran on eastward toward the golden wood without any visible boundary between the two, so that Lórien and Fangorn were the surviving ends of one continuous woodland rather than separate countries with open land between them. On that reading the grass that later divided them is a thinning of the same forest, and Fangorn's borders are less an outline than a retreating edge.

No founding can be dated for the wood, because in the legends of the Elder Days its guardianship is older than any settlement of Men or Elves in the lands where it now stands. The Silmarillion traces the tree-shepherds to a plea made before the Children of Ilúvatar had awoken: Yavanna, seeing that growing things would have no defence when the coming peoples took axe and fire to them, asked that something should walk in the forests on their behalf, and the answer given was that when the Elves awoke such spirits would rise among the trees. In the wars of Beleriand the same shepherds appear once in action, when they fell upon the Dwarf-host returning from the sack of Doriath at the fords of Ascar and drove the survivors into the eastern mountains. That country was drowned at the end of the First Age, so the guardianship that survives at the feet of the Misty Mountains is a remnant carried east out of a ruined world rather than a thing begun there.

Treebeard's own account of the early history is a history of shrinkage. He tells the hobbits that there was a time when the woodland ran unbroken westward as far as the Blue Mountains, and that what is now called Fangorn was no more than its eastern end; his songs recall walking in forests that are named nowhere on any later map, in lands he says are gone under the sea. The wood at the Shire's edge is another such fragment of the same vanished whole, and both are described in the narrative as leavings rather than as woods in their own right. Gandalf, meeting the Ent later, calls him the oldest living thing still walking under the sun in Middle-earth, which sets the forest's continuity apart from that of any realm of Men or Elves: it has no line of rulers and no succession, only one memory that has not been broken.

The decisive loss came from within. The Entwives, caring for orchards and tilled ground rather than for wild wood, drew apart from the Ents and crossed the Great River, where they made gardens east of Anduin; in the wars of the Dark Years those lands were burned and left desolate, and when the Ents at last went over to seek them nothing was found. No Entings were born afterwards, and Treebeard reckons the Ents he can still name as the whole of his people. Over the same long stretch the wood and its keepers drifted toward each other: some Ents grew slow and tree-like, and some trees woke to a half-Entish wakefulness, so that the forest holds a population of watchful, mobile things — Huorns in the hobbits' record of the word — that answer to the Ents but are not of them. The result is a wood that persists without renewing itself, its population fixed and its borders receding.

Men came late to its margins. In 2510 the riders of the north brought relief to Gondor at the Field of Celebrant, close under the wood's northern skirts, and were granted the emptied province south of the Limlight; from then on the Rohirrim pastured their herds up to the trees without going in. Isengard passed into Saruman's keeping in 2759, and in 2953 he claimed it outright and began to fortify it, so that for the last two generations before the War of the Ring the wood's western neighbour was a power with a use for timber. Elsewhere the forest kept an evil name at second hand: in Lórien, Celeborn warned the Company against passing under its eaves, and among Men further south it survived chiefly as a rumour about a country of walking trees. The felling along the borders, carried out by Saruman's Orcs for his furnaces, was what turned a long grievance into a decision.

The events that gave the wood its place in the war fall within a week of 3019. On 29 February the two captive hobbits, having slipped away from the Orc company on the forest's eastern edge, climbed into the trees and met their eldest inhabitant; the same day the Rohirrim destroyed the Orcs on the plain outside. On the following day the tree-shepherds began a council in the wood's inner hollows, and on the same day, in another part of the forest, the three hunters from the broken Fellowship met Gandalf returned. The council ended on 2 March, and the Ents went down on Isengard that night, breaking its walls and drowning its works. On 3 March, while the Hornburg was assaulted, the moving trees that had marched south stood across the Deeping-coomb, and the orc-host that fled into their shadow was never seen again.

Afterwards the wood extended itself, for the first time in its recorded history, beyond its own borders: a guard of trees was left standing about the ruined ring of Isengard, called the Watchwood, and the Ents began planting the enclosure that Saruman had cleared. Their warden held the wizard prisoner in his tower for months and then, judging him harmless, let him walk out — an act Treebeard admitted to at the parting near Isengard without much defence of it. At that meeting he spoke of his people's prospects plainly: woods might spread again in the years of the new King, but the Ents themselves would not increase, and he expected no reunion in Middle-earth with those who were leaving it. The forest therefore ends the Third Age not destroyed and not restored, but confirmed in what it already was — a survival, kept by a fixed number of keepers, its future measured in the slow retreat of an edge rather than in any further history.

Only one people is ever named as dwelling in the wood, and it takes its name from the wood's own shepherd-folk. Treebeard's account of living things makes the point in passing: the old catalogues of creatures that the Elves composed have no line for the Ents, and he supplies one himself, placing his kind among the earthborn and setting them beside Elves, Men and Dwarves as a race the lists had simply overlooked. He credits the Elves with rousing the trees in the first place and with teaching them speech, so that the wakefulness of the wood is presented as something learned rather than native to it. Beside the Ents the forest holds a second population that the hobbits heard called Huorns, trees far gone toward the condition of Ents or Ents far gone toward the condition of trees; these keep voices of a kind, can still be spoken with by the shepherds, and move at their bidding, but they are not reckoned as a people in their own right.

There is no lordship. The eldest Ent holds no office and gives no orders; he speaks of the others as folk he can still name rather than as subjects, and the few he names keep to their own quarters of the wood without any division of authority between them. Leaflock has grown drowsy and stands out in the upland meadows through the summer with the grass to his knees, more tree than walker; Skinbark kept the mountain slopes west toward Isengard until Orcs killed many of his trees, after which he withdrew among the high birches and would not come down. Business affecting all of them is settled in council, and the council decides by agreement rather than by command, which is why it takes days: nothing is resolved until the assembled Ents come to one mind. Individuals may run ahead of it — Quickbeam, hasty by the standards of his kind and mourning felled rowans, had settled his own answer before the debate closed — but no one can rule the rest into a decision.

With its neighbours the wood kept a mutual distance that suited both sides. The lords of Rohan, whose herdsmen bordered it, treated the tree-shepherds as a figure out of old songs and were startled to find them acting in the world; Théoden admits as much when he rides past the moving trees to Isengard, saying that what he had known only as a tale of children now walks in his own country. In Lórien the caution ran the other way, and Celeborn warned the departing Company against straying under the eaves. Yet the two woods were not strangers: when the Lady of Lórien passed near Isengard on her way west, she and the eldest Ent greeted one another in Elvish as old acquaintances, and Treebeard's own songs place Ents and Elves in the same distant past. No Men settled within the trees, and the Orcs who entered came as intruders and were destroyed there.

The wood enters the narrative as a barrier rather than a place. The three hunters from the broken Company follow the orc-trail across the plain until it ends at the eaves, and the Rider who meets them there speaks of the forest as ground that his people do not enter and cannot account for; its first office in the plot is to close a road and to make a pursuit look failed. What follows inverts that office entirely. The trail vanishes into the trees because its object is already safe among them, and the obstacle turns into the agency that settles the western half of the war — a reversal the story underlines by having Saruman's own servants carry the two hobbits to the one threshold that would undo him.

Within the trees the smaller members of the Fellowship cease to be freight. Taken as prisoners of interest to other people's plans, they find under the eaves the first listener who asks them what they are and waits for the answer, and it is their report of what has been done in the west that gives the council its subject. The forest is also where the story returns what it had apparently taken away, since the wizard believed lost is met beneath the same trees within a day of the hobbits' escape. Three strands — the hunters, the captives, the returned counsellor — pass over the same ground almost together without meeting there, and are only knotted afterwards, when the hobbits retell their week among the ruins of Isengard as something already finished.

As a symbol the wood stands for a party to the war that neither side had counted. Théoden, riding past its moving trees, says plainly that he had thought such things belonged to the songs of children, and the narrative allows him no explanation beyond what he sees. Characters are measured by their response to it: the Dwarf goes in under protest and the Elf leaves it wanting to return, and their agreement to visit both the caves and the forest together is one of the few private promises in the book that is kept after the fighting ends. The wood also marks its guests physically, the drink given to the hobbits telling in their height long afterwards. Its final sense is that the world being fought over has interests older than the fight.

The earliest surviving notes give the name to a figure rather than to a country, and give that figure a character opposite to the one it finally kept. In the plot outlines written while the journey was still being felt out, Christopher Tolkien records a hostile giant called Treebeard, imagined as a danger to be met on the road rather than as a keeper of anything; at one stage his capture of the wizard was to serve as the explanation of Gandalf's failure to appear when he was expected. Nothing in these sketches anticipates a race of tree-shepherds, a council, or a woodland with a grievance of its own, and the forest itself has no settled place or extent in them. The name is thus older in Tolkien's papers than the conception it now carries.

The reversal came with the writing of the third book, where the drafts show the hostile giant replaced by the ancient guardian and the wood turned from an obstacle into the force that settles the war in the west. The editorial commentary presents this as arriving with very little preparation: the outlines standing immediately before the chapter do not foresee the Ents, yet the first drafting of the meeting under the eaves runs close to the published text over long stretches, with the wood's names and its shepherd already in place. The march on the wizard's ring of stone, by contrast, was worked out more slowly, and the geography joining the forest to Isengard and to the river running out of it was adjusted as the narrative advanced.

The forest reaches the screen for the first time in Ralph Bakshi's animated film, and only just: the two hobbits break away from the Orcs and pass under the trees near the end of the running time, where the eldest Ent appears in a single short sequence. Because the film stops after the fighting at Helm's Deep, everything the wood does in the second half of the book is absent — there is no council among the trees, no march on Isengard, and no shadow of moving trees on the battlefield — so the forest functions purely as a refuge and never as a combatant. The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation, being far longer, keeps the whole sequence: Stephen Thorne plays the wood's oldest inhabitant, the council and its decision are dramatised at length, and the assault on the wizard's ring of stone is carried in narration and sound rather than dropped. Of the older versions it is the one in which the forest retains the structural role the novel gives it.

Peter Jackson's trilogy gives the wood extended screen time and rewrites its central decision. John Rhys-Davies, who also plays the Dwarf of the Company, voices the Ent; the council is staged as in the book but reaches the opposite conclusion, declining to go to war, after which the hobbits persuade their host to carry them south so that he comes upon the felled trees himself and is roused by the sight. Responsibility for the wood's entry into the war thus shifts from the Ents' own deliberation to a hobbit's intervention. The trees that overwhelm the fleeing Orcs at Helm's Deep are retained, but the drink given to the hobbits and its effect on their growth appears only in the extended cut, and the meeting outside the ruined ring of stone is likewise absent from the theatrical release. The films also remove the wardenship that follows: rather than being held in his tower by the Ents and later released, the wizard is killed at Orthanc in the extended version of the third film, so the forest's long custody of its defeated neighbour has no counterpart on screen.