The Great Tolkien Reread: Treebeard

"Treebeard" by Tomás Hijo

'Hoom, hm, I have not troubled about the Great Wars,' said Treebeard; 'they mostly concern Elves and Men. That is the business of Wizards: Wizards are always troubled about the future. I do not like worrying about the future. I am not altogether on anybody's side, because nobody is altogether on my side, if you understand me: nobody cares for the woods as I care for them, not even Elves nowadays.'

Having escaped their orcish captors and their would-be Rohirrim rescuers, Merry and Pippin make their way into Fangorn forest, a place they have been warned against. Right away there are echoes in this chapter of "The Old Forest". The atmosphere in the forest is close and oppressive. The sun barely peeks in, leading the hobbits to worry about the feasibility of foraging or hunting. Whole paragraphs are taken up with descriptions of a rocky outcropping that the hobbits climb to get a better view of their surroundings, reminding us of the granular, hyper-detailed nature writing of the earlier chapter.

It is on the rocky outcropping that Merry and Pippin meet Treebeard, and are introduced to ents. Again, we feel echoes of that sequence in Fellowship between Frodo and company's departure from the Shire, and their arrival in Bree. The very concept of ents—talking trees and tree-herders who seem to have been plucked out of legend, and who would probably be dismissed as a hallucination if we weren't meeting one ourselves—feels a bit like a throwback to the tweeness of those chapters. It sits a bit strangely amid the geopolitics of the preceding chapters—Aragorn's attempts to forge an alliance with the Riders of Rohan, the disputes between different orc bands, Saruman's growing influence and belligerence.

Treebeard himself is a little of a piece with Tom Bombadil. Like the merry old fellow, he is connected to nature, and, if not quite "oldest and fatherless", then certainly much older than most beings we've met, including some of the elves. He remembers when the great forests of Middle Earth—Mirkwood, Fangorn, and the Old Forest—were all one. When Pippin describes looking into his eyes, he is struck by their sense of timelessness, and the alienness that implies.

'One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present: like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don't know, but it felt as if something that grew in the ground—asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between root-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years.'

Like "In the House of Tom Bombadil", "Treebeard" is a chapter that plucks our heroes out of the adventurous, perilous context in which they had been immersed (and which was on the verge of killing them) and grants them an interlude that feels sideways of their story. It's a chapter that is full of history, both the unique history and culture of the ents, and the long stretch of Middle Earth history which they've observed. It is absolutely groaning with poetry, which ranges from nursery rhymes that teach young entlings to list the world's living creatures (from which hobbits have been regrettably omitted), to laments to lost forests and trees, and finally the ents' war anthem as they march on Isengard. It has bizarre interludes such as the entmoot taking hours to simply acknowledge the hobbits' existence and agree to amend their poetry to reflect it, and tragic ones, such as the mystery of the entwives' disappearance. It's a long chapter, and while reading it one can almost forget that so much else is still going on beyond the forest.

My anti-Bombadil stance back in Book One proved a bit divisive, but still I think that it is uncontroversial to say that, Bombadil-like as he is, Treebeard (and the chapter that bears his name) are much more embedded in the fannish consensus than the man with the blue jacket and yellow boots. I would go so far as to describe Treebeard as a second attempt at the same concept, and it's worth considering why this pass at the material works so much better than the first.

At the root of Treebeard's effectiveness, I'd say, is the fact that although he is fundamentally sideways of the story of The Lord of the Rings, he is not untouched by that story. If Tom can cut himself off from the world and continue to live in a bucolic idyll with his hot wife, Treebeard's detachment from the world means that he is left behind and overlooked. Sometimes this expresses itself in amusing ways, such as his slightly huffy objection that using the word "hill" to describe the rocky outcropping on which he and the hobbits meet is "a hasty word for a a thing that has stood here ever since this part of the world was shaped." It's an observation that turns the world on its head for a moment, but it doesn't change the fact that "hill" is the word that people will continue to use.

Other times, Treebeard is a tragic figure. Not unlike the elves—and very much unlike Tom Bombadil—he is someone who has spent his long existence in a constant state of loss. He has observed and experienced deforestation on an unimaginable scale, and to him this loss is personal as well as environmental: "Many of these trees were my friends, creatures I had known from nut and acorn; many had voices of their own that are lost forever now." The War of the Ring is, to him, a minor chapter in a long litany of destruction, and yet unlike the elves' equally long tale of loss, nobody except the ents tells the story of Middle Earth's deforestation as a tragedy.

The entwives are a particularly affecting example of the tragedy of the ents. On one level, they're a metaphor for the transition from untrammeled, untouched nature to agricultural management (though the fact that even in Middle Earth's domesticated regions, the entwives are unknown suggests that they, too, outlived their utility). On a more basic storytelling level, however, the entwives are a familiar tale of dissolution and loss, similar to ones we've heard from elves, dwarves, and men. But although The Lord of the Rings is a fantasy of restoration, one that ends with kings returning to their thrones and the white tree blooming again, I think we know, even as readers coming to "Treebeard" for the first time, that the entwives will not be found.

All of this makes the ents' choice to join the fight against Saruman, and more broadly the Enemy, a slightly poignant one. One of the chief preoccupations of Book Three is persuading various powers in Gondor and its surrounding regions to join in that fight, usually by pointing to their own self-interest, and offering hope that things can get better. As Treebeard and the entmoot conclude, Saruman has transgressed even by the standards of Middle Earth's ongoing deforestation, and his transgressions must be answered and stopped. But once the war is over, there will be no restoration for the ents. The allies they made common cause with will continue to log timber, burn firewood, and clear fields. The ents are doing the right thing even though they know the people whose side they've joined are not really on their side, and this makes their sideways nature more touching, more real, than anything Tom Bombadil could show us.

Next time: Who is that cloaked figure? On November 3rd, we reconvene to discuss "The White Rider"

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