Ents

The Ents were a race of ancient tree-like beings, the Shepherds of the Trees, who dwelt in the forests of Middle-earth from the earliest days of the world. Tall as trees and seeming half-tree themselves, with bark-like skin, gnarled limbs, and deep eyes, they had been set in the world, the legends told, to guard the forests against the harms of other creatures. They were among the oldest living things in Middle-earth, older even than many of the Elves' own works.

The Ents were unhurried beyond the understanding of any other people. They spoke a slow, rolling, deliberate language, Old Entish, in which nothing was ever said quickly, for to an Ent a thing not worth taking a long time to say was not worth saying at all. They counted long ages as other folk count years, and were slow to anger -- but terrible when at last roused.

Origins

By the oldest tales the Ents awoke in the world together with the trees, in the days when the Elves first walked Middle-earth and taught the trees to speak. The Elves, it was said, loved the Ents and gave them much of their care for growing things. The greatest and eldest of the Ents in the Third Age was Treebeard, called Fangorn, who dwelt in the forest that bore his name, the last great remnant of the primeval woods.

A great sorrow lay upon the Ents: the loss of the Entwives. In ages past the Ent-wives, who loved ordered gardens and tended growing things, had wandered away to other lands and been lost in the wars and ruin of the world. Without them no young Entings were born, and the Ents slowly dwindled toward their end.

The Entmoot and the War of the Ring

During the War of the Ring, the wizard Saruman in his stronghold of Isengard loosed his orcs to fell and burn the trees of Fangorn for his furnaces. The hobbits Merry and Pippin, fleeing into the forest, roused Treebeard, who summoned the Entmoot -- a great and lengthy council of the Ents. After long deliberation the Ents resolved to march. Their fury, once unleashed, was unstoppable: they assailed Isengard, tore down its walls, and trapped Saruman within his tower of Orthanc.

Significance

The march of the Ents on Isengard is among the great turning points of the War of the Ring, for it destroyed Saruman's war-machine at the very hour the free peoples most needed it. Yet the Ents' tale is also one of melancholy: the last of an elder kind, fading without their Entwives, the slow guardians of a wild world passing forever into the Age of Men.