Entmoot

The Entmoot was the great council of the Ents, the tree-herds of Fangorn Forest, called during the War of the Ring to take counsel on what the Ents should do concerning the war and the depredations of the wizard Saruman. Held in a green hollow of Fangorn called Derndingle, it was a gathering of the slow and ancient shepherds of the trees, and from its deliberations came the march of the Ents on Isengard -- one of the great turning points of the war.

Background

The Ents had long kept apart from the affairs of the wider world, tending their forests and grieving the slow fading of their kind. But Saruman, who had once walked among the trees and spoken courteously with Treebeard the eldest of the Ents, had turned to evil and to the love of metal and wheels. His Orcs and Uruk-hai came into the eaves of Fangorn to fell its trees by the score for the furnaces of Isengard, wantonly destroying living things the Ents had shepherded for ages.

The hobbits Merry and Pippin, escaping from their orc-captors into Fangorn, encountered Treebeard, who carried them to his home and listened to their tale of the wide world's troubles. Stirred by what he heard, and by his own growing anger at Saruman, Treebeard summoned the Entmoot.

The Council

The Ents gathered in Derndingle and deliberated in their slow, rolling tongue, Old Entish, for three long days -- a brief span by the reckoning of Ents, who do nothing in haste and say nothing quickly. To the impatient hobbits the council seemed interminable, but the Ents were weighing a momentous and perilous choice: whether to break their long isolation and go to war.

At the last the Entmoot reached its decision. Roused to a cold and terrible wrath, the Ents resolved that they would march upon Isengard and Saruman, even though it might mean the end of the Ents themselves. As Treebeard said, it was likely that they were going to their doom -- the last march of the Ents -- but they would go.

Aftermath

The Ents, joined by the more savage Huorns, marched on Isengard and fell upon it with irresistible force. They tore down its walls, flooded its pits, and destroyed Saruman's war-machine, trapping the wizard himself in his tower of Orthanc. The destruction of Isengard removed Saruman as a power in the war at the very hour the free peoples most needed relief.

Significance

The Entmoot is the moment at which the oldest and most withdrawn of the free peoples chose at last to enter the War of the Ring. The deliberate, unhurried council and the devastating action that followed it together capture the nature of the Ents -- slow to rouse, but unstoppable once roused -- and their intervention proved decisive in the downfall of Saruman.