Re-reading the Lord of the Rings, Chapter 26

The Ents are a strong and independent people, who can spend their time on the things they like best. I think*, they always count their strides as well, so encompassing and undirected is their perception of the world. Like a tree they synthesize all the ingredients that they can find in the world, but in their minds as well as in their bodies.

But indepedent as they are each follows its own desire and unlike is it for them to compromise.

‘There were rowan-trees in my home,’ said Bregalad, softly and sadly, ‘rowan-trees that took root when I was an Enting, many many years ago in the quiet of the world. The oldest were planted by the Ents to try and please the Entwives; but they looked at them and smiled and said that they knew where whiter blossom and richer fruit were growing. Yet there are no trees of all that race, the people of the Rose, that are so beautiful to me.

Alas, my wife complains about the taste of rowan-berries as well. But apple-trees and rowan can be planted side by side. But I guess the Ents didn't want to walk around those runts, majestic they are surely not, wild and old they look untidy and in winter even ghostly.

But so does everything in winter, except for pines, spruce-trees and firs of course, but never mind that here, for this is of course the point I'm trying to get to that such independent people only look towards each other when the conditions for their occupations have been taken away from them.** And even when their tastes agree they only come together when those conditions are about to be taken away from them, as happens in this chapter.

Actually, there is a link with the Elf-disease, that people identify too much with their specialness, i.e. their taste, for this naturally leads to the kind of seperation that the Ents must endure. Perhaps it's worthwhile to ask, why the Elves themselves don't suffer from it. My guess would be too much of a sense of wonder at their mutual creations, group-indulgence, so to say, but maybe Hipsters are working on that already while I ponder.

In the greater context of the Big War that is coming up the Ents represent the principle that the more ambitious the attack is, the greater the natural resistance to it is and that under such conditions even unexpected allies will join the fight.

Finally, let me point out again that walking trees have been seen in the Shire, see chapter 2, but that the Ents didn't know of Hobbits. So... how could Merry and Pippin have been so cruel and not say a word, when Treebeard asked?

‘You never see any, hm, any Ents round there, do you?’ he asked. ‘Well, not Ents, Entwives I should really say.’

If only Sam would have been there! He must have never told his fellows. But perhaps Treebeard will go out on a hunch one fine day and visit the Shire.

* And so does Pippin, it appears.

Pippin had tried to keep count of the ‘ent-strides’ but had failed, getting lost at about three thousand.

** In this regard it might be considered noteworthy that both Bilbo and Frodo were conceived at the winter solstice.