The Lord of the Rings: Treebeard [Part One]

 

The Tale

Merry and Pippin follow the stream of the Entwash deeper into Fangorn Forest and higher up toward the mountains. Going is slow because of the density of the trees and a sort of close breathlessness in the ancient air. Finally, they pause for a drink from the stream and to discuss their situation.

They drink their fill then bathe their feet. Pippin remarks that if they keep by the stream they can always find their way out again. The forest reminds him of the room, back in the Smials in Tuckborough, where his great-great-grandfather the Old Took lived out his long life, which was never changed since his death, but just got older and shabbier over the years. He remarks at the ancient leaves and beards of lichen on the trees; he can’t imagine spring ever coming to the place.

But Merry says it doesn’t feel dark and black like Bilbo’s descriptions of Mirkwood; just ‘dim, and frightfully tree-ish.’ He can’t imagine any animals living here. Or hobbits, Pippin agrees. Probably no food for a hundred miles. They check their supplies; maybe enough lembas for five scanty days. No blankets for the cold nights either.

While they’re talking they become aware of shafts of sunlight piercing through the trees some distance away. They decide to go and investigate.

The way is farther than they thought, rising over increasingly stony ground. But the light grows brighter as they get closer to it. Finally they come to a rock wall before them: a rocky hill like an out-thrust root of the distant mountain, bare except for some scanty grasses and ‘one old stump of a tree with only two bent branches left: it looked almost like the figure of some gnarled old man, standing there, blinking in the morning-light.’ They decide to climb up the stony shelf, which rises almost to the level of the treetops, for a look around and a breath of air.

In the sunlight the woods are less grey, gleaming with rich browns and smooth black-greys of bark, and green boles like a fleeting vision of spring. The hobbits climb up the hill by some rough steps in the rocks. They are already healing from their ordeal and trauma surprisingly quickly, although in their eagerness to ascend they give that no thought. They come to the top and stand under the old stump to look out. They have only come about four miles into the woods; they can still see the curling smoke from the Orcs’ funeral pyre. Merry remarks that it’s cool up here, and Pippin says he almost liked the old forest as revealed in the passing gleam of the sunlight.

‘Almost felt you liked the Forest! That’s good! That’s uncommonly kind of you,’ said a strange voice. ‘Turn around and let me have a look at your faces. I almost feel that I dislike you both, but do not let us be hasty.’ A large knob-knuckled hand is placed on both hobbits’ shoulders, and they are turned and lifted up to face a most extraordinary creature. What they had assumed was a tree on top of the hill is really a person.

It is at least fourteen feet tall, almost troll-like, with a tall head, almost no neck, and a sweeping mossy beard. It looks to be clad in green and grey bark, but perhaps that is its skin. It has seven toes on each foot, and seven fingers on each hand; its arms are unwrinkled and covered with smooth brown skin. But the hobbits are mainly captivated by its eyes.

The eyes are large, brown, and shot with a green light. Their look is slow and solemn, filled with a deep well of memory, penetrating, and different in age and spirit than any they have ever seen.

‘Hrum, Hoom,’ the figure murmurs, with a voice like a very deep woodwind instrument. ‘Do not be hasty, that is my motto.’ If he had seen Merry and Pippin before he had heard their nice little voices, he might have trodden on them as little Orcs. If he had been hasty. But now that he sees them, he finds them very odd indeed.  

Pippin, though amazed, is not frightened. Please, he asks, who are you? And what are you? The old eyes look wary, but he answers that he is called an Ent, indeed you might say The Ent, in your manner of speaking. But some call him Fangorn, and others Treebeard. Treebeard will do, for now. Merry still wants to know what an Ent is, and what does Treebeard call himself, his right name.

Treebeard seems amused with the question. ‘Now that would be telling!’ But they are in his country, and he is asking the questions here. What are they? They don’t seem to appear in any of the old lists of the creatures of the world. He hums a few stanzas, then leaves off. It was a long list, he concludes, but they don’t seem to be on it.

Overlooked again, says Merry. None of the old legends or tales mention them, though they’ve been around a long time. They are Hobbits. Pippin even improvises a line to fit into the long list, emphasizing their height and that they live in holes.

Sounds very right and proper, says Treebeard, but who calls you hobbits? That does not sound like an Elvish word to him, and it was Elves that made all the old words first. It alarms the old Ent when Pippin says that no one calls them that; that is their own word. When Treebeard cautions them about giving out their right names, they give him their own full names as well as their nicknames: Meriadoc Brandybuck and Peregrine Took.

Treebeard is flattered by their confidence but urges them to greater caution in the future. ‘There are Ents and Ents, you know; or there are Ents and things that look like Ents but ain’t, as you might say.’ He will call them Merry and Pippin. He cannot tell them his full name because it is always growing. His name describes what he has done and what happened to him, and as he has lived a very long time, it would take a very long time to say it. But that is true of the Entish language itself.

But what are the Hobbits doing in the middle of all this? What is Gandalf doing? What about all these burarum – these Orcs – and young Saruman down at Isengard?  Merry says that would take a long time to tell, and perhaps his lesson in caution has had an effect. Does Treebeard know Gandalf?

Yes, he does; ‘the only wizard that really cares about trees.’ Pippin reveals that he was their great friend and guide, and then to further questioning that Gandalf has fallen. The old Ent looks at them searchingly for a moment, then says he doesn’t know what to say. Merry tells him they will tell him the whole story. Wouldn’t he like to put them down and they can sit together? He must be getting tired of holding them.

But Treebeard says he does not get easily tired, and as for sitting, he is not very, hm, bendable. But the Sun is going behind the clouds; perhaps they should leave this hill (‘a hasty word for a thing that has stood here every since this part of the world was shaped’) and go to one of his homes. Merry asks if it’s very far; they’ve lost all their belongings and have just a little food.

Treebeard says not to worry about that. He can give them a drink ‘that will keep you green and growing for a long while.’ And if they decide to part he can take them anywhere on the borders of his country ‘Let us go!’

 

Bits and Bobs

Treebeard’s way of humming and hooming is famously based on Tolkien’s friend C. S. Lewis, the great fantasist and apologist, whose Narnia Chronicles include his own take on Living Trees, based on the old Greek dryads. He also uses the word ‘Ettin’ for one of the evil races in the White Witch's army, a word related to Ent.

The word Ent itself is a descendant or cognate of the Old Norse Jotun, through the Anglo-Saxon word Eoten, all being words meaning ‘giant’ (in origin a Greek word), especially in the sense of a large evil creature like a troll. The ‘Eotenas’ were said in Anglo-Saxon poetry to be the builders of all large stone structures beyond the skill of ‘men of today’. Tolkien himself uses the name Ettenmoors to describe an area infested with trolls.

Treebeard began life in the first drafts as the name of the evil ‘Giant Treebeard’, and was going to be one of the hazards on ‘Bingo Baggins’ (Frodo’s) adventure. This concept was abandoned, of course, and Tolkien ‘discovered’ the real nature of the Ents in his love for trees, which seem to have been conceived, like Hobbits, all at once, and fleshed out as he went along. After The Lord of the Rings, of course, he had to go back and find places to retrofit them into The Silmarillion, ‘backdated to the beginning of time’.

Treebeard and the Ents also are scholarly philologists, interested in the names and origins and uses of language, believing in the power of words and that ’real names tell you the story of the things they belong to’.  Sauron shares in this belief, apparently, and never allows his ‘right name’ to be written or spoken. ‘Treebeard’ is a translation of the word ‘Fangorn’; Treebeard is ‘The Ent’, a courtesy title as the oldest surviving member of his folk.

Ents have proved to be one of the most difficult concepts to illustrate adequately; even in the narrative Merry and Pippin have a hard time describing them to those who have not seen them. Many artists want to especially ‘festoon’ the head with branches and leaves, details not mentioned in the books; the Bakshi film gives Treebeard a bizarrely sawn-off nose. One of the best Treebeards I ever saw was by Judy King Rieniets; I wish I had a scanner so I could share it with you.

My own tree-ish wood-ape (inspired by a dream) in my book A Grave on Deacon’s Peak obviously has deep roots (yuk yuk) in the image of Treebeard and the Ents.