There’s a heck of a lot of material packed into this chapter. I’d been unconsciously making the assumption, in thinking ahead to this post, that there were two chapters. One where Merry and Pippin meet Treebeard, and he told them all about the Ents, and then another covering the Ent-moot. If I’d stopped to give it any thought I’d have realized it was all in this one chapter, but I hadn’t, and was startled when the chapter kept going right up to the marching of the Ents.
When Tolkien began working on LotR, Ents weren’t yet a thing in the greater legendarium. Treebeard, originally, was a giant that kidnapped Bingo-who-would-become-Frodo Baggins. And the Ents, as described by Tolkien, aren’t nearly as tree-like as the Jacksonian depictions (which, to be fair, predate the movies by a long time). They’re more very large and tree-ish rather than being literal animate trees:
They found that they were looking at a most extraordinary face. It belonged to a large Man-like, almost Troll-like, figure, at least fourteen foot high, very sturdy, with a tall head, and hardly any neck. Whether it was clad in stuff like green and grey bark, or whether that was its hide, was difficult to say. At any rate the arms, at a short distance from the trunk, were not wrinkled, but covered with a brown smooth skin. The large feet had seven toes each. The lower part of the long face was covered with a sweeping grey beard, bushy, almost twiggy at the roots, thin and mossy at the ends.
This chapter is the source of a great deal of speculation and discussion on the origin of Orcs and Trolls. Here, Treebeard says that trolls “Trolls are only counterfeits, made by the Enemy in the Great Darkness, in mockery of Ents, as Orcs were of Elves.” This isn’t quite accurate, and is a super complicated question for the simple reason that Tolkien himself never decided exactly how Orcs and Trolls and Dragons and the rest came about. In his early conceptions they were ideed “made in mockery” as Treebeard described. Later, Tolkien decided that only Eru Ilúvatar could actually create life, so he began playing with the “twisted Elves” theory that made its way into The Silmarillion (which isn’t actually strictly canonical). But that also introduced a whole bunch of problems too great for Tolkien to ignore, so he rejected that too. Twisted Men instead of Elves solves a bunch of these problems, but throws the timeline of the Elder Days all to hell. So we never really got an answer. Treebeard’s comments in LotR, the most canonically hard of Tolkien’s works, can be explained by the simple fact that Treebeard doesn’t really know what he’s talking about: “Treebeard is a character in my story, not me; and though he has a great memory and some earthy wisdom, he is not one of the Wise, and there is quite a lot he does not know or understand.”
The story of the Ent-wives is, of course, heartbreaking. People keep poking through LotR trying to find hints of where they are or any kind of suggestion of a happy ending. The most common thing they land on is the giant Sam’s cousin Hal saw on the North Moors (remember that?). That, with Treebeard’s comments on how the Ent-wives would like the Shire, gives people hope. But sorry, it’s not anything. As Tolkien himself said in one of his Letters:
I think that in fact the Entwives had disappeared for good, being destroyed with their gardens in the War of the Last Alliance (Second Age 3429-3441) when Sauron pursued a scorched earth policy and burned their land against the advance of the Allies down the Anduin. They survived only in the 'agriculture' transmitted to Men (and Hobbits). Some, of course, may have fled east, or even have become enslaved: tyrants even in such tales must have an economic and agricultural background to their soldiers and metal-workers. If any survived so, they would indeed be far estranged from the Ents, and any rapprochement would be difficult - unless experience of industrialised and militarised agriculture had made them a little more anarchic. I hope so. I don't know.
Thematically, there’s a lot that can be said about the symbolism of the Ents. Of course Tolkien famously “cheerfully detested” allegory, so they shouldn’t be taken as any kind of a direct representation of nature rising up against our modern world or anything like that. But there’s no question that Tolkien highly valued nature and an idyllic rural life over industrialized modernity. World War I influencing things again, I’d guess. Hard to be keen on modernity when you’ve watched it grind thousands upon thousands of your comrades into hamburger.
Monday, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli are reunited with an old friend in The White Rider. I’m referring, of course, to Hasufel and Arod, who ran away at the end of chapter 2.