Middle-Earth Tours

Tour 1: The People of Middle-Earth

Ents

Treebeard, by Alan Lee

 They found that they were looking at a most extraordinary face. It belonged to a large Man-like, almost Troll-like, figure, at least fourteen feet high, very sturdy, with a tall head, and hardly any neck. Whether it was clad in stuff like green and grey bark, or whether that was its hide, was difficult to say....The large feet had seven toes each. The lower part of the long face was covered with a sweeping grey beard, bushy, almost twiggy at the roots, thin and mossy at the ends. But at the moment the hobbits noted little but the eyes. These deep eyes were now surveying them, slow and solemn, but very penetrating. They were brown, shot with a green light. Often afterwards Pippin tried to describe his first impression of them.
     'One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, 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, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don't know, but it felt as if something that grew in the ground -- asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between root-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky -- had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years.' --TTT, "Treebeard"

Treebeard, by Inger Edelfeldt
detail of Treebeard, by
John Howe


Detail from Treebeard at Wellinghall, by
Ted Nasmith
Treebeard, by Alessandra Cimatoribus

Tree Shepherds, by Nasmith		 They had been going on for a long while - Pippin had tried to keep count of the 'ent-strides' but had failed, getting lost at about three thousand - when Treebeard began to slacken his pace. Suddenly he stopped, put the hobbits down, and raised his curled hands to his mouth so that they made a hollow tube; then he blew or called through them. A great hoom, hom rang out like a deep-throated horn in the woods, and seemed to echo from the trees. Far off there came from several directions a similar hoom, hom, hoom that was not an echo but an answer. --TTT, "Treebeard"

Ent, by Dan Govar		 Much to my surprise, the movie's Treebeard turned out to look more like Dan Govar's vision than Alan Lee or John Howe's.
image from the TTT Visual Companion

image from the TTT Visual Companion

Entwife, by Dan Govar		 When the world was young, and the woods were wide and wild, the Ents and the Entwives - and there were Entmaidens then: ah! the loveliness of Fimbrethil, of Wandlimb the lightfooted, in the days of our youth! - they walked together and they housed together. But our hearts did not go on growing in the same way: the Ents gave their love to things that they met in the world, and the Entwives gave their thoughts to other things, for the Ents loved the great trees, and the wild woods, and the slopes of the high hills; and they drank of the mountain-streams, and ate only such fruit as the trees let fall in their path; and they learned of the Elves and spoke with the Trees. But the Entwives gave their minds to the lesser tres, and to the meads in the sunshine beneath the feet of the forests; and they saw the sloe in the thicket, and the wild apple and the cherry blossoming in spring, and the green herbs in the waterlands in summer, and the seeding grasses in the autumn fields. They did not desire to speak with these things; but they wished them to hear and obey what was said to them. --TTT, "Treebeard"

Wrath of the Ents,
by Ted Nasmith
The Ents at Isengard, by David Wyatt

image from theonering.net

 Round and round the rock of Orthanc the Ents went striding and storming like a howling gale, breaking pillars, hurling avalanches of boulders down the shafts, tossing up huge slabs of stone into the air like leaves. The tower was in the middle of a spinning whirlwind. I saw iron posts and blocks of masonry go rocketing up hundreds of feet, and smash against the windows of Orthanc. --TTT, "Flotsam and Jetsam"
Ents and Huorns were digging great pits and trenches, and making great pools and dams, gathering all the waters of the Isen and every other spring and stream they could find....It must have been about midnight when the Ents broke the dams and poured all the gathered waters through a gap in the northern wall, down into Isengard. --TTT, "Flotsam and Jetsam"
image from VFX Pro


For more on Treebeard, visit the Fangorn page
Full-size versions of these pictures are on display at Rolozo Tolkien.