Chapter 4: Treebeard

Jacob's Thoughts (6/22/14)

So I don't know if this is a popular opinion or not, but I actually really like the Ents.  Yes, "Treebeard" was kind of an overlong and slow-moving chapter; but given the slow-moving nature of the Ents, that pace felt thematically appropriate to me.

Part of my affection for these creatures lies in residual remembrances of my Ecocriticism seminar that colored so many of my posts a year ago; the Ents seem an apt symbol for a Nature that pushes back against us polluting, exploitative, and destructive human beings that blithely and selfishly abuse the Earth's resources like Saruman.  And like the Ents, Mother Nature, which normally takes ages to change and move and adapt, has suddenly awoken in a rage and now swiftly attacks us with mega-droughts across California and Australia, melting ice caps, and super-storms that ravage the Gulf and East Coast (and that's likely just for starters).  

But these Ents aren't just metaphors--they are also characters, I've realized this time around.  I'd plum forgotten about the Entwives, and the forlorn melancholy of Treebeard as he sings a song of lost love that is apparently older than all recorded human history.  That is a long friggin' time to still be carrying the torch for a lost lover--and I'm one to talk!  Yet even sadder is that this story isn't unique to Treebeard--all the Ents have been without their lovers for ages!  In fact, their entire species seems endangered because of it.  What is the commentary going on here?  Is this a warning against taking women for granted?  (If so, that's some rich irony from a text that features so precious few female characters!)  Or, less-grandiosely, is this just another symbol for how losing a lover canfeel apocalyptic and like it lasts for centuries?  There is some rich and elusive symbolism with the Ents here.

I'll tell you what I most enjoy about the Ents, though: through them, Tolkien actually engages with the ramifications of immortality in a way that he doesn't with, say, the Elves.  Now, the Ents are not immortal, of course; but they have apparently existed for so staggeringly long, that from a human perspective they might as well be.  As such, Treebeard can say things like "Let's not be hasty" repeatedly, because the truth is, compared to these hobbits who exist only in a blink of an eye by Ent standards, that Treebeard really does have all the time in the world by which to make decisions.  Hence he and the Ents move so slowly, so carefully, so deliberately, and so often not at all--for if you have literally millennia to move, then why hurry?  It's why they can speak so long and slowly and digressionally, as well as carry the torch for lost wives for so long--it's not like their lives are too short for that sort of thing.

It is we human beings who must rush about, as we constantly feel the dread march of time breathing down our necks with ever increasing rapidity.  A physicist friend of mine, upon turning 30, decided to calculate how much time he had experienced--when you're 3, for example, a year feels like a third of your life, cause it is; and when you're 4 a fourth, then a fifth, and so forth.  By his calculations, by the time most of us reach 25, even if we still later live to be 90, we have nevertheless already experienced around 80% of our lives.  For by the time you are decades old, what's another year but another fraction of your life flying by?

But that arithmetic gets jacked up when we start talking about life-spans in the millenia, not mere decades.  When a year is a mere 10,000th of your life, then mourning a lost lover for centuries suddenly doesn't seem like such a big, long, waste of time; and conversations that take tedious hours to finish, by Ent perspective are really only seconds long; and Ents that slowly turn into trees for ages then back into Ents again, will really have only appeared to "sleep" indeed; and of course, one will have long learned to never be hasty.

These behavioral ticks of the Ents intrigue me in part because it indicates that Tolkien really has given some thought as to the implications of super-longevity--what that would look like, how that would effect behavior, etc.  Because Tolkien has apparently notgiven the same thought to the Elves' purported immortality.  We only know Tolkien's elves are immortal because he told us; nothing about their behaviors gives that longevity away, as we mostly just find more idealized forms of humans--they may be more nimble and skilled and beautiful and serene than us regular humans, but other than that, their immortality has not caused their civilization or society to behave all that differently than ours.

Yet the Elves have lived even longer than the Ents, and will outlast them, too.  So why is it that the Ents have evolved behaviors more commensurate to their massive lifespans, while the Elves still live day to day in human time?  Maybe that's a small quibble, but it is one that the Ents can't help but foreground for me.

Ben's Thoughts (5/11/15)

I have a decidedly love-hate relationship with this chapter. On the one hand, it's a beautiful piece of lyrical prose, with (what I consider to be) lovely poetical interludes, vivid descriptions, and just the right tinge of sorrow and loss floating throughout that Treebeard's character really resonates with me, and the Ents' choice to go to war makes perfect emotional and logical sense. On the other hand, this is a massive chapter -- equivalent in length to "Council of Elrond" in Book 2, which we all agreed was just too lengthy to be of ultimate service to the narrative -- which drags down the pace of this book to a snail's crawl. Not to mention the fact that Merry and Pippin are without a doubt the least engaging characters among the Fellowship and they just don't get any better here.

So I don't really know what to say about the chapter beyond the fact that it's inventive, well-written, admirable from a literary perspective, and an absolute bore, all at the same time.

Treebeard -- the Old Ent doesn't really come across as much of a threat to anyone when he is first encountered at the beginning of the chapter, which is a strange juxtaposition when considered in the light of the threatening, sinister Old Man Willow of Book 1. He kind of comes across as a goof until we get the story of the Entwives and the sorrow behind the character and the Ents as an entire race emerges. Treebeard really doesn't come to life until that moment when he speaks and sings of the Entwives. I'm glad the Ents were given some life and motivation beyond just "shepherds of the trees". Frankly, it makes their march on Isengard all the more believable. They searched and searched for their missing wives and, when they finally gave up on finding them, retreated back to their last shrinking stronghold. And even there these orcs and dirty wizards won't leave them alone; instead they seek to destroy the last thing left to the Ents. It can't be tolerated further.

Jacob is right that the Ents' longevity really affects their characterization in these chapters; Tolkien's a little on the nose with it, in my opinion, but he gets his point across and makes the Ents quite unique in that respect. The Ents experience time in the same way as humans and hobbits do, and as a result they feel quite alien in many respects to the young hobbits. Jacob also talks about the Elves not having this same feel. I would argue that Tolkien has actually quite carefully laid out that Elves experience time quite differently than mortals do. The hobbits mention quite explicitly that in Lórien, and to a lesser extent in Rivendell, they completely lose track of the days and weeks; the hobbits are even confused about how many moons have passed while they stayed in the Golden Wood. This seems like the Elves' time-diluted lives have some kind of an effect on the mortals that surround them. Sam experiences something of the same during the evening they hobbits spent with the Wood-Elves way back at the beginning of Book 1. Tolkien, I believe, places starkly-defined lines between his mortals and immortals; the Elves, although capable of interacting with humans to the degree that they almost might seem human themselves, are actually quite different, and when the reader is reminded of these differences its effect is almost startling. (Remember just two chapters ago? Legolas didn't even need to sleep, and he could put his mind in a trance-like state while running that was just as good as sleep to him.)

Merry and Pippin -- Oh, those darn hobbits. I just can't warm up to them. They're wholly useless. I know they're given narrative purpose here, in swinging the Ents into violent action, but really, they serve as a catalyst only. They tell Treebeard what is going on in the outside world, and a very guarded version of their quest, and then Treebeard decides that enough is enough and takes the Ents to war. I can almost see why Peter Jackson changed this section so much, even though it makes the Ents come across as utter idiots. It simply makes the hobbits, who are supposed to be real characters, into something more than plot muffins. But as it is, here, they're just set dressing who distract us away from the interesting business: the Ents' discussion of whether or not to fight. Additionally, Pippin's weird flash-forward description of Treebeard's eyes is very strange and completely out of character; if there is one person who has been depicted as wholly clueless and unobservant to this point in the narrative, it's Pippin. There's no way the character as we know him would be that eloquent or articulate in describing something later on.

The concepts, the ideas, of the chapter, are wonderful. I love the Hurons (Tolkien's Ents and Hurons spawned a whole legion of tree-like characters in D&D an countless video games from these brief appearances in Lord of the Rings), the fact that Merry and Pippin can live off of the magical Ent-water (seriously, what is in that stuff?), the descriptions of the varying kinds of Ents, and the callback to "The Old Forest" with explanations of how trees might come alive or become corrupted. I also love the new perspective on Saruman; Treebeard seems dumb to have divulged so much to Saruman without receiving anything in return, but it makes perfect sence once we actually meet the White Wizard in a few chapters and see just what his superpower really can do to people.

But while the concepts are excellent, the execution and pacing is woefully turgid. I'm eager to get back to Aragorn and Friends in the next chapter.

Eric's Thoughts (5/28/15)

Treebeard, ironically, is (at this point) one of the best developed characters in the story. Here, Tolkien manages to do in one chapter what he has failed to do so far in the entire series -- create an interesting and human character. This is ironic because Treebeard is, in fact, not human. Unsurprisingly, he is a tree.

Every other character besides Treebeard simply lacks the passion, humanity, and--most importantly--the force of Treebeard. Other than Treebeard, characters in this story are simply reacting to events rather than making choices that drive the plot. This is what's putting a drag on everything. Aragon is merely chasing after the Hobbits (reacting), and spouting off a kingly speech now and then (reacting), and (in the next chapter) fulfilling a promise to Eomer (reacting). Gandalf is just Gandalf -- enigmatic, powerful, funny, and trying to avoid a mountain storm (reacting), dodge the tentacles of a water beast (reacting), and survive the attack of a Balrog (reacting). Little needs to be said about Gimli (reacting), Legolas (reacting), Pippin (reacting), Merry (reacting), and Sam (reacting), who are all caricatures. Frodo, the only character to yet make a choice of any impact (I will take the ring!), has disappeared from the action (and regardless he mostly does what he is told anyway, i.e. reacting). What I am trying to say is that reacting characters are boring, and characters that make choices and decide to wreak havoc are interesting(À la, Treebeard.)

Also, all of these characters lack the passion and sorrow of Treebeard. Indeed, the saddest story so far--and the most relatable--is that of the lost Ent Wives. Certainly we would all be as devastated as Treebeard in a world without the company of women or hope of reproduction.

And when the Treebeard gets pissed off (pardon my French), and convinces the other Ents that they should be mad too, you can feel the weight of their footsteps as the Ents march to war. It doesn't take an English degree to know that the Ents are about to do some serious damage to Isengard. This gets me excited and makes me want to read on, as I assume it does for other readers. In contrast, listening the other characters talk about the end of the world, the conversation is so commonplace you'd think they were discussing having ham and eggs for breakfast.

So while this chapter is initially slow, yes, I also find it to be the most compelling and best written chapter in LOTR so far.

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