All about ents

[avram]

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.

Now, I’m not talking here about a case of diverging from the original text, though this movie did do that more than the first one did. I’m not a Tolkien purist, and it’s been long enough since I read the books that I don’t notice most of the divergences anyway. Here’s something where the movie just plain contradicts itself.

We’ve seen that the ents are these big, slow-moving dudes, which is appropriate given how tree-like they are. We’ve been told outright that entish is a language where it takes a long time to say anything, so they never say anything that isn’t worth taking a long time to say; they’ve spent hours just agreeing that hobbits aren’t orcs.

But then the entmoot breaks up, and as far as we can tell the ents ought to be all heading off to their various usual hangouts. Treebeard is carrying Merry and Pippin off, and gets talked into turning south, and after walking for what ought to have been several hours at least comes upon the outskirts of Isengard and sees the destruction that Saruman has wrought. And he howls a single, drawn-out syllable and the rest of the ents step right out of the forest behind him as if they’d been following him. What the fuck? Are we supposed to ignore plausibility and established fact here?

It’s a small nitpick, but I really hate it when storytellers just fudge over the details like that and expect me not to notice.

Oh, and Gollum was brilliant, but I kept waiting for Frodo to give him a sock.

Comments

[avram]

That's just exactly the problem though. Stories set in the real world can rely upon the fact that the real world is full of bizarre things that we can't dispute because they are real. If you'd tried to write a serious novel (not a satire) ten years ago with something like the 2000 election crisis in it, people probably wouldn't have taken it seriously, unless you did a whole lot of work and research and got all the details right. If you're writing a novel nowadays you can just toss in a casual reference to the real event and people have to believe it because it really happened.

In a work of fantasy you've got to work harder because you need to create a believable world, you don't have the real world doing that work for you. Good fantasy authors (and Tolkien was one) sweat blood getting all the details just right because they know that if they don't either the audience's suspension of disbelief will come crashing down or the work will seem arbitrary and lack dramatic tension.