By the time Merry and Pippin escape from their orc captors, things have gotten quite momentous and arduous in The Lord of the Rings. But then, in his mercy, J.R.R. Tolkien gives us one of those periods of recovery, escape and consolation just when our Road through the story is looking so dark. We eucatastrophically encounter the Ents - one of the author's finest sub-creations.
We not only get taken to wondrous Wellinghall by Treebeard, but we get to roam Fangorn forest with him while he teaches us some of the ancient lore of living creatures and utters chants of surpassing melancholic beauty. Treebeard's hoom-homs suggest to me safety for hobbits, like the protective, haunting notes of distant fog horns keeping little ships afloat.
Sweet, melodious Quickbeam
While Treebeard is a figure of awesome grandeur, the hobbits are also put in the care of the merry, companionable Quickbeam who takes their hands and strides about the watchful woodland with them, laughing and singing. This has always made me yearn to hear the sounds of Ents, based on what we know about them having different voices, just as they each have a unique physical appearance. Have you ever tried to imagine to yourself what they might sound like?
We learn that Quickbeam's resonant voice is higher and clearer than Treebeard's, and it makes us recollect that it was the early elves who began waking up trees and speaking with them. Ents, of course, have their own language, but their long years in Middle-earth together with the elves make me feel that younger beings like Bregalad (Quickbeam) might sound something like elves when they sing. This passage from the chapter, 'Treebeard', which describes the customs of the rowan-like Bregalad, ranks highly among my favorites:
"All that day they walked about in the woods with him, singing, and laughing; for Quickbeam often laughed. He laughed if the sun came out from behind a cloud, he laughed if they came upon a stream or spring: then he stooped and splashed his feet and head with water; he laughed sometimes at some sound or whisper in the trees. Whenever he saw a rowan-tree he halted awhile with his arms stretched out and sang and swayed as he sang."
In painting this scene, I hoped to show the joyous dance of Quickbeam encountering a beloved rowan tree, with the little hobbits learning to sway with him as they receive new and broadening ideas about the inhabitants of the great forest. The smoke rising from Isengard is just glimpsed in the windy sky to the west, and below in Derndingle, Entmoot is underway around the three birch trees.
In this video short, I wanted to contrast the sweet, elf-like, sylvan voice of Quickbeam to the serious rumblings of the moot below, where the march of the Ents is being meditated to rescue the land from the mind of metal and wheels. It is a scene of bestirring energy, of contrast between the living, green world cared for by hobbits and ents, and the hard, lifeless world of power and machinery dominated by Saruman and his ilk:
Singing shepherds
Some months ago, I wrote an article about the Aulë/Yavanna cultural divide which is one of the main unifying strands within Tolkien's legendarium, from the War of the Jewels to the War of the Ring. The Ents come into being as a kind of consolation to Yavanna for her sorrow over the thought that Aulë's own dwarves will cut down her beautiful trees in quest of wealth and fame and craft. In 2023, much of England mourned like Yavanna and her Ents when the honored Sycamore Gap tree was felled without reason near Hadrian's Wall. I suspect that Tolkien readers everywhere felt the pain of this loss even if we'd never previously known of this tree. Our minds may instantly have flown to the lament of Bregalad for the fallen rowans of his home. Perhaps our hearts even rumbled burárum in fellow feeling with Treebeard.
But hope lies in that deeply hurt reaction to the felling of a single irreplaceable tree. While our species contains those unfortunate ones who confusedly meet the world with saws and axes, many more of us are capable of noticing that we, too, have long legs and useful hands and sweet voices.
We can stride amidst the forests, lifting our songs and planting the singing groves of the future. The rewilding of Britain is underway, and in my own part of the world, rivers are being released from insidious dams by Indigenous folk so that freed water can bring life to the land once again.
Perhaps, like Merry and Pippin, we can learn at the feet of Tolkien's Ents. With a little imagination, we can re-envision ourselves as the singing shepherds who walk and steward the lands we love as we earn a better place in the lore of Living Creatures!