All about ents

The ents were one of my favorite things in Lord of the Rings. The very idea of a race of tree-herders is an amazing bit of whimsy, and Tolkien’s ents seemed so fully realized that I could almost believe in them. Here, two interesting things about ents:

They were inspired by Macbeth. Young Tolkien had felt cheated by the fulfilment of the prophecy about Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane, and resolved to come up with a way for a wood to really go to war.

The word “entmoot” is a pun. The entmoot is the big meeting of ents, and I imagine the predecessor of the Parliament of Trees in Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing. In English, a moot is a meeting called to reach a decision. You know how such meetings would go in the old days among the Anglo-Saxons, held in a clearing with the speaker standing on a tree stump to make himself seen and heard. That’s where the word comes from — a moot was a stump or the root of a tree.

I’m thinking about this because my roommates and I saw Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers last night, and there were some bits about the ents that ticked me off a bit.

(  Some spoilage here  )