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Description
Giants are cool. The idea of beings like ourselves but huge and powerful, ancient and mysterious to us, is inherently appealing, and has found expression in legends all over the world. Not surprising then that so common a feature of our storytelling heritage should find representation in Middle-Earth and, as Tolkien did with his elves and dwarves and dragons and goblins, his treatment of giants - his explanation of their origin and purpose, their temperament and pace, their great age and great strength - seems a synthesis of many of the core characteristics of those creatures, known to us through our long line of received stories from ancient sagas to victorian nursery rhymes, as if, in the giants that walked under the eaves of Dorthonion and Ossiriand of old, we are being told the truth behind those stories. I'm referring of course of the Ents.

Despite an unfamiliar name (though, in one of the many linguistic easter eggs scattered throughout Tolkien's writing, the word 'ent' is actually a curtailed version of 'etten,' the anglo-saxon word for 'giant') the tree shepherds of Fangorn Forest seem familiar to us quickly; we can place without much difficulty what 'type' of legendary creature they are, and it must be said that in Middle-Earth, as in the world of germanic myths and legends which were its primary influence, the giants are connected with trolls. Treebeard's face is remarked to be "almost troll-like" and, as the old Ent informs us, the trolls of Middle-Earth are in fact connected to his kind, though as a perversion or imitation. I think Tolkien saw an opportunity to present us the good side of the troll/giant archetype. They are not, in european folklore, purely villainous creatures, often functioning, like elves, as place spirits, protectors of woods or rivers, bringers of dreams, representatives of the unknown, the world of faerie. In ents - ancient guardians of the forest, companions of the elves long before the emergence of man - we see the true, original and "good" giants, whose character is remembered to us in figures like Roald Dalh's BFG, while the trolls of Angband and Mordor have done more to inform the likes of Grendel, or Jack's man-eating antagonist.

Are ents human-shaped trees? Are they made of wood? Do they grow branches? It's one of those much-argued debates over Tolkien's aesthetic intentions, up there with Balrog wings. The answer, as I imagine it, is a bit complicated. The image of ents as simply animate trees popularized by the Jackson movies, while appealing, doesn't quite read right for me. In their own traditions they count themselves as among the four 'people' along with dwarves, elves and humanity, and that I think is the best way to look at them. Like the dwarves they are a deity's children, designed - in form and function - in rough imitation of the children of God, altered according to their creator's nature, powers and limitations. Among the free people (as the ent-lists do not seem to include orcs, trolls or other sapient but 'unnatural' creatures) ents certainly seem the odd men out; over twice the height of elves or men, stiff and tremendously strong, not immortal but exceedingly longeval, appearing vastly more distinct from one another than members of the other races, with a wide variety of height and size, skin texture and even number of fingers and toes, with water seeming to be their only nutritional requirement. They are, in effect, very much the way the Earth-Mother, desiring intelligent protectors and tenders for her realm - and the plant kingdom in particular - might design a humanoid. They are certainly tree-like and, as Treebeard observes, they become more so over the course of their long lives until in old age they might even be mistaken for trees, eventually losing the ability to move or speak, in perhaps a kind of petrifying slow death not dissimilar to what trees themselves undergo, but I tend to imagine, in their youth (and in Yavanna's original conception of them) they are in fact quite like the other three speaking people, their physical bodies falling far over on the 'animal end' of her creative experiments. It is possible I think - both in the kind of mythic thinking that does not require scientific consistency, and in a more realistic, sci-fi-oriented mindset - to conceive of them as being at once animal and plant-like. Like us they are creatures of muscle and skin and bones and organs, not sap and cellulose, but these systems in them might be surprisingly like their counterparts in the plant kingdom, all biological life being composed of the same base chemical ingredients (Also, with all biological life - including, likely enough, the physical forms designed for and inhabited by the children of Illuvatar - being Yavanna's area, we may assume in crafting sentient beings she can stray between phylums and away from God's original blueprint with greater confidence and originality than Aule trying his hand at intelligent life)

Apparently Tolkien came up with the ents, much as he did with hobbits, on the spur of the moment; inventing Treebeard and his whole race and retro-fitting them into his already vast and intricately detailed fictional world-history as he wrote the fourth chapter of TTT. It's difficult now to imagine Middle-earth without it's wonderful 'hoom-toom'ing forest giants. It would be a poorer world for the loss.

Description
Giants are cool. The idea of beings like ourselves but huge and powerful, ancient and mysterious to us, is inherently appealing, and has found expression in legends all over the world. Not surprising then that so common a feature of our storytelling heritage should find representation in Middle-Earth and, as Tolkien did with his elves and dwarves and dragons and goblins, his treatment of giants - his explanation of their origin and purpose, their temperament and pace, their great age and great strength - seems a synthesis of many of the core characteristics of those creatures, known to us through our long line of received stories from ancient sagas to victorian nursery rhymes, as if, in the giants that walked under the eaves of Dorthonion and Ossiriand of old, we are being told the truth behind those stories. I'm referring of course of the Ents.

Despite an unfamiliar name (though, in one of the many linguistic easter eggs scattered throughout Tolkien's writing, the word 'ent' is actually a curtailed version of 'etten,' the anglo-saxon word for 'giant') the tree shepherds of Fangorn Forest seem familiar to us quickly; we can place without much difficulty what 'type' of legendary creature they are, and it must be said that in Middle-Earth, as in the world of germanic myths and legends which were its primary influence, the giants are connected with trolls. Treebeard's face is remarked to be "almost troll-like" and, as the old Ent informs us, the trolls of Middle-Earth are in fact connected to his kind, though as a perversion or imitation. I think Tolkien saw an opportunity to present us the good side of the troll/giant archetype. They are not, in european folklore, purely villainous creatures, often functioning, like elves, as place spirits, protectors of woods or rivers, bringers of dreams, representatives of the unknown, the world of faerie. In ents - ancient guardians of the forest, companions of the elves long before the emergence of man - we see the true, original and "good" giants, whose character is remembered to us in figures like Roald Dalh's BFG, while the trolls of Angband and Mordor have done more to inform the likes of Grendel, or Jack's man-eating antagonist.

Are ents human-shaped trees? Are they made of wood? Do they grow branches? It's one of those much-argued debates over Tolkien's aesthetic intentions, up there with Balrog wings. The answer, as I imagine it, is a bit complicated. The image of ents as simply animate trees popularized by the Jackson movies, while appealing, doesn't quite read right for me. In their own traditions they count themselves as among the four 'people' along with dwarves, elves and humanity, and that I think is the best way to look at them. Like the dwarves they are a deity's children, designed - in form and function - in rough imitation of the children of God, altered according to their creator's nature, powers and limitations. Among the free people (as the ent-lists do not seem to include orcs, trolls or other sapient but 'unnatural' creatures) ents certainly seem the odd men out; over twice the height of elves or men, stiff and tremendously strong, not immortal but exceedingly longeval, appearing vastly more distinct from one another than members of the other races, with a wide variety of height and size, skin texture and even number of fingers and toes, with water seeming to be their only nutritional requirement. They are, in effect, very much the way the Earth-Mother, desiring intelligent protectors and tenders for her realm - and the plant kingdom in particular - might design a humanoid. They are certainly tree-like and, as Treebeard observes, they become more so over the course of their long lives until in old age they might even be mistaken for trees, eventually losing the ability to move or speak, in perhaps a kind of petrifying slow death not dissimilar to what trees themselves undergo, but I tend to imagine, in their youth (and in Yavanna's original conception of them) they are in fact quite like the other three speaking people, their physical bodies falling far over on the 'animal end' of her creative experiments. It is possible I think - both in the kind of mythic thinking that does not require scientific consistency, and in a more realistic, sci-fi-oriented mindset - to conceive of them as being at once animal and plant-like. Like us they are creatures of muscle and skin and bones and organs, not sap and cellulose, but these systems in them might be surprisingly like their counterparts in the plant kingdom, all biological life being composed of the same base chemical ingredients (Also, with all biological life - including, likely enough, the physical forms designed for and inhabited by the children of Illuvatar - being Yavanna's area, we may assume in crafting sentient beings she can stray between phylums and away from God's original blueprint with greater confidence and originality than Aule trying his hand at intelligent life)

Apparently Tolkien came up with the ents, much as he did with hobbits, on the spur of the moment; inventing Treebeard and his whole race and retro-fitting them into his already vast and intricately detailed fictional world-history as he wrote the fourth chapter of TTT. It's difficult now to imagine Middle-earth without it's wonderful 'hoom-toom'ing forest giants. It would be a poorer world for the loss.