Master of Middle Earth (15 page)

This new
admiration for Galadriel opens Gimli to a new understanding and liking for
Legolas. Thereafter elf and dwarf become inseparable, to the wonder of all who
see together these members of two inveterately hostile races. The friendship
affords Tolkien countless opportunities for comparing elf and dwarf nature.
Although both are sad when leaving Lórien, Gimli is the sadder because he is
leaving Galadriel, whose memory will always be torturingly sweet to him. In his
own memorable words: "Torment in the dark was the danger I feared, and it
did not hold me back. But I would not have come, had I known the danger of
light and joy." Legolas tries to comfort him with the thought that his
memories will remain always clear, and never fade or grow stale. This is
precisely the trouble, Gimli answers. Elves may enjoy memory as a reliving of
past experience, but dwarves need the reality of the experience itself.
"Memory is not what the heart desires. That is only a mirror . . . Elves
may see things otherwise. Indeed I have heard that for them memory is more like
to the waking world than to a dream. Not so for Dwarves." Inherent in the
fabric of the two races is a difference in the operation and effect of memory.

Although Legolas
and Gimli are standing together on the plains of Rohan when Éomer belittles
Galadriel as a perilous enchantress, it is the dwarf, not the elf, who almost
precipitates a hopeless battle by bluntly rebuking him, regardless of
consequences. Gimli's renewal of the challenge to single combat in her defense
on several later occasions takes on a comic aspect and is humorously avoided by
Éomer, but Gimli never thinks it funny. In truth, the dwarf temper is not much
given to humor. I can think of only one occasion when Gimli jokes about
anything, and that comes when Pippin and Merry are reunited with their comrades
outside Isengard and Gimli joshes them over and over as "truants" who
had to be rescued from the ores—not a notably hilarious subject. Legolas, by
contrast, is high-spirited by nature, except when he longs for the sea. The two
make a striking contrast as they walk into Minas Tirith for the first time,
Legolas fair of face and singing, "but Gimli stalked beside him, stroking
his beard and staring about him" at the city's masonry: "There is
some good stone-work here . . . but also some that is less good, and the
streets could be better contrived." In their ensuing argument about the
durability of the works of men against change Gimli takes the pessimistic view
against Legolas' more hopeful one. From the plurals they use they seem to be
speaking as representatives of their respective races, as well as individuals.

At the start of
The Lord of the Rings
Durin's offspring, by nature, by circumstance, and by
the machinations of Sauron, are largely outcasts and self-outcasts (the one
follows hard upon the other) from the society of Western peoples. By the end of
the tale the breach has been healed as well as it can be among races so
disparate. Dwarves under Dáin have done their share in battle against the
northern wing of Sauron's armies. Their leaders permit Gimli to take dwarf
masons and other artisans to help rebuild and strengthen Minas Tirith, capital
city of the new ruling race of men. As a trusted companion of Aragorn he will
be a major link between the human race and his own. As the friend of Legolas,
who visits Gimli's new dwarf colony in the caves of Aglarond, he is a link with
the Silvan elves of Mirkwood, to whose kingship Legolas is heir. As a visitor
to Fangorn Forest with Legolas he will become better known to the ents. And to
every hobbit who reads Frodo's manuscript tale in the Red Book he will be as
familiar as their own heroes of the Shire.

3. Ents

Tolkien's imperial
success in his invention of the ent folk, the great tree herders of Fangorn
Forest, owes not a little to a deep personal love for trees, which began early
in life. Even as a very young boy his greatest enthusiasm was for stories about
Indians "and above all, forests in such stories."
¹⁶
When
he wrote of fantasy's power to tell tales of men conversing with birds and
beasts, he always added "and trees," which he conceived of as
speaking a language peculiar to themselves.
¹⁷
By his own account the
primary inspiration for his autobiographical story, "Leaf by Niggle,"
was a poplar tree outside his bedroom window, which "was suddenly lopped
off and mutilated by its owner, I do not know why. It is cut down now, a less
barbarous punishment for any crimes it may have been accused of, such as being
large and alive. I do not think it had any friends, or any mourners, except
myself and a pair of owls."
¹⁸
Tolkien's sense of the aliveness
of this poplar, and consequently of the cruelty done to it, is so strong as to
arouse in him the indignation one might feel at the murder of a man.

Ents are the
oldest of all living races, older even than the elf-sires of the First Age, but
"asleep" at first in silent awareness of themselves alone. Then elves
came along and "waked" them. This is the same metaphor of awakening
from sleep which was used earlier to describe Durin's creation and birth. For
the ents Treebeard recalls it in this way: "Elves began it, of course,
waking trees up and teaching them to speak and learning their tree-talk. They
always wished to talk to everything, the old Elves did." Appendix F, in
analyzing the ent language, says that it is "unlike all others: slow,
sonorous, agglomerated, repetitive ..." and that to the elves the ents
"ascribed not their own language but the desire for speech." In other
words, before elves stirred them up ents had an undeveloped potentiality for
speech. From the elves they got the elf tongues, which they used in talking to
others, and the stimulus to articulate their own language, which they used only
among themselves. "They had no need to keep it secret, for no others could
learn it." Yet, purposely or not, ents now resembled dwarves in having a
secret language and, possibly as a consequence, the same suspicious reluctance
to divulge their "true" names, for fear of putting themselves in the
power of their enemies. Treebeard will not reveal his to Merry and Pippin or
anybody else, and reproaches them as rashly "hasty" in trusting him
with theirs without knowing more about him. After all, there are plenty of
wicked ents in the depths of Fangorn Forest who contracted evil from Morgoth
during the Great Darkness in the north.

With these kinsmen
Treebeard has no traffic, and keeps strangers out of their way; for the ents
are subject to the same moral principles as are other fully conscious peoples.
Aragorn's universal maxim, "Good and ill have not changed since
yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among
Men," applies to the ents equally. Treebeard is practicing it when he
assures Merry and Pippin that he has no intention of restricting their liberty:
"I am not going to do anything
with
you: not if you mean by that
'do something to you', without your leave. We might do some things
together." Like Elrond, Aragorn, Gandalf, and other principals he has a
most tender regard for freedom of choice. Though the oldest and most respected
leader of his tribe, he orders none of its members to attack Isengard but puts
the question up for open discussion by the Entmoot. Noteworthy also is his care
in ascribing "bad hearts" to trees only
after
they have turned
into ents, when they have achieved full consciousness. "Some are quite
wide awake, and a few are, well, ah, well getting
Entish
. . . When that
happens to a tree, you find that some have
bad
hearts. Before then they
may be somewhat contaminated ("That sort of thing seems to spread")
but they are still essentially "asleep" and therefore not altogether
responsible.

This slow
awakening of some trees to ent status is going on all the time and forms one
part of a remarkable cycle fundamental to the life of ents. Ents are like elves
in that they never die unless killed by injuries inflicted by others from the
outside. Nevertheless a number have died in this fashion down through the
years. In the beginnings of their race these were replaced by the normal method
of sexual reproduction through the entwives. At the time when Merry and Pippin
enter Fangorn, however, these females have entirely disappeared from the ken of
the males. They have not died out. Long ago, even in the First Age, the ents
and entwives slowly developed such incompatibilities of interest that they grew
apart entirely, and the entwives left the forests in which they were born. The
ents remained there because they loved the trees in their wild state, "and
ate only of such fruit as the trees let fall in their path; and they learned of
the Elves and spoke with the Trees." But the entwives became interested in
the shrubs, fruit trees, herbs, and grains growing in the meadows outside the
woods. They were not content merely to speak to these plants and leave them as
they were but they "wished them to hear and obey what was said to
them" and made them grow as they were ordered, ". . . for the
Entwives desired order, and plenty, and peace (by which they meant that things
should remain where they had set them). So the Entwives made gardens to live
in." By this route they became the inventors of the arts of agriculture,
which men learned from them.

At first the male
ents used to leave their forests periodically to visit the females, begging
them to return, but in looking for better agricultural lands the latter moved
so far away that the males lost sight of them entirely. When last seen they
were being so changed in appearance by their work—"bent and browned by
their labours, their hair bleached and cheeks reddened by the sun—that
Treebeard is not sure he knows what they look like now. For a long while the
ents searched Middle-earth for them in vain, but "the wild wood called and
we returned to it" and now the memory of the entwives is only a perpetual
sorrow, still strong enough to keep Treebeard wistfully asking everybody he
meets whether they have been sighted anywhere. Like other races ents have a
vision of a hereafter of happiness. For them it takes the form of a reunion
with the entwives in "a land where we can live together and both be
content." According to the beautiful ballad dialogue which Treebeard hums
for the hobbits, this land lies in "the West" but can be reached only
after a bitter winter during which the two separated sexes lose all they have.

This separation is
the abiding tragedy of the ents. It has come about because the male propensity
to wildness and free wandering and the female desire for a settled, orderly home
have not been reconciled by a strong enough sexual instinct for reproduction,
as in other races. Consequently, in order to insure the continuance of the
species, nature has had to substitute a different method. Treebeard cannot
explain it altogether to the hobbits because "I do not understand all that
goes on myself." He knows enough, however, to observe that a cycle has
been inaugurated by which some (not all) trees grow into enthood while some
(not all) ents decline into treehood. His contemporary, Leaflock, for example,
"has grown sleepy, almost tree-ish . . . he has taken to standing by
himself half-asleep all through the summer with the deep grass of the meadows
around his knees." Of late even in winter he has been too drowsy to walk
far. Leaflock and others like him make up the class of huorns, half-tree,
half-ent, who tear down the walls of Isengard and smother to death the ore army
besieging Helm's Deep. Their ferocity terrifies the hobbits. Relapsing back
toward raw nature the passions of the huorns are no longer bridled by
rationality.

Ents share with
dwarves an abnormality of sexual life and with elves an endless longevity. But
they react to these problems in quite contrasting ways. Unlike dwarves they
have not let the loss of their mates drive them into either a surly
possessiveness in some cases or a love or art in others. Ents have no art. They
are friendly enough creatures, and they maintain a strong sense of
responsibility for their work as guardians of the forest. Unlike elves they
seem to have solved satisfactorily the puzzle of how to live undying in a world
where everything else dies. The heart of their solution lies in their handling
of memory. In Gimli's view elves' memory of the past can be as vivid as life in
the present—a very mixed blessing for them, perhaps even a curse—whereas
dwarves remember the past as irrecoverable past. Ents, on the other hand, have
eyes in which Pippin sees "an enormous well . . . 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 . . ."
For them life is a history in which the past grows into the present, all in due
order, and they remember every part of it sequentially and calmly. In fact their
language is such as to incorporate into the names of persons and places all the
events which have made them what they are, adding new events as they occur.
Treebeard's true name "is growing all the time," and the name of
Lórien is changing to match its fortunes.

In any comparison
of ents with the other races of Middle-earth Treebeard's analysis of their
similarities and dissimilarities with men and elves must be preeminent. The
feeling of ents for trees is much closer than that of shepherds for sheep, he says,
because ents are good at "getting inside other things." In this they
resemble elves more than men, who are more interested in themselves than in
other beings. On the other hand, ents are closer to men and farther from elves
in taking on the color of any new environment they enter. Elves always remain
the same. Finally, ents excel both elves and men in being able to "keep
their minds on things longer" and more steadily. Treebeard's central
interest here is the relative sensitivity of the three races to other
"things," meaning living beings. Men seem to come off rather the
worst of the three, as perhaps we should. Still, the analysis may not be
altogether objective, since Treebeard confesses later, "I take more kindly
to Elves than to the others: it was the Elves that cured us of dumbness long
ago ... though our ways have parted since."