Ents and Huorns — Treebeard, the Entwives and the Shepherds of the Trees

Quick Answer: Ents are the Shepherds of the Trees, ancient guardians of the forests of Middle-earth, made at the wish of the Vala Yavanna and taught to speak by the Elves. Huorns are trees that have grown half-awake and mobile, or Ents grown tree-like; they follow the Ents' lead and form the moving wood at Helm's Deep. Treebeard, called Fangorn in Sindarin, is the oldest Ent still walking in the Third Age. In Sindarin an Ent is an Onod, and huorn itself is an Elvish word, glossed as "spirit tree".

Of all the peoples in The Lord of the Rings, the Ents are the slowest to act and the most frightening once they do. A single night of Entish anger ends Saruman's power: the walls of Isengard crack, the river is turned into the Ring of Isengard, and the White Wizard is trapped in his own tower. Yet for most of the story the Ents do almost nothing at all, and that slowness is the point of them.

This guide covers everything Tolkien tells us about the Ents and the Huorns: where the Ents come from, why there are no young Ents, what became of the Entwives, what a Huorn really is, how Treebeard took Isengard, and how the films changed it. It also covers the Elvish words behind the trees — because Ents learned speech from the Elves, and their names come down to us in Sindarin.

This post is part of our series on the peoples of Tolkien's world. Start with the hub, Races of Middle-earth: The Complete Guide, for the full picture.

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Who Are the Ents?

Ents are tree-herds. They look like great trees given a shape somewhere between a man and a troll: in The Two Towers, Merry and Pippin meet one who stands at least fourteen feet tall, with a bark-like skin, a long grey beard like twigs and moss, and deep brown eyes that seem to hold a well of memory. Each Ent resembles the kind of tree he guards — one looks like a rowan, another like a beech or an oak — and their manner is the manner of trees: patient, deep-rooted and very hard to hurry.

The Ents live in Fangorn Forest, in the eastern foothills at the southern end of the Misty Mountains, above the river Entwash and the plains of Rohan. In older days, Treebeard says, the great woods ran unbroken across much of Eriador, and an Ent could walk from Fangorn far to the north-west without leaving the trees. By the end of the Third Age the forest has shrunk, and the Ents have shrunk with it.

They are not trees, and they are not Elves or Men. They are their own kind of being — one of the oldest in Middle-earth — and they are fierce when roused. Treebeard warns the hobbits that Ents are much stronger than trolls, and that they can crack stone the way roots slowly crack rock, only very much faster.

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Where Ents Come From: Yavanna's Wish

Tolkien tells the origin of the Ents in The Silmarillion, in the chapter "Of Aulë and Yavanna". Aulë, the smith among the Valar, had made the Dwarves in secret, and his spouse Yavanna, the Giver of Fruits who loves all growing things, feared what those Dwarves — and every other speaking people — would do to her forests. Nothing that grows can flee or defend itself.

Yavanna went to Manwë, chief of the Valar, and asked that something should protect the trees. Manwë took her thought before Eru Ilúvatar, and the answer came that, when the Children of Ilúvatar awoke, Yavanna's thought would awake too: spirits would come from far off and dwell among the growing things, and the Shepherds of the Trees would walk in the forests. In the same answer the Eagles of Manwë are named as guardians of the mountains.

So the Ents are older than most things that now walk in Middle-earth, and they owe their existence to a Vala's love for trees. That is also why Treebeard can describe himself as nearly as old as anything still walking beneath the Sun — Gandalf says as much of him in The Two Towers.

For the wider family of beings that Eru and the Valar set in the world, see our guide to the Wizards of Middle-earth, who are Maiar, spirits of the same order that serve the Valar.

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Ents and Elves: How the Ents Learned to Speak

The Ents were not born talking. In Treebeard's own account, it was the Elves who first woke the Ents from their dumbness and taught them to speak, because the Elves wanted to talk to every living thing. Treebeard has a deep affection for the Elves because of this, and he still sings old Elvish-sounding lists of the lands he loved — Tasarinan, Ossiriand, Dorthonion — as he remembers them.

This matters for language. The Ents developed a tongue of their own, Old Entish, which is long, slow and full of repetition, because for an Ent a name is the whole story of the thing named. Treebeard tells the hobbits that his real name has been growing all his life, and that saying it would take a very long while. No one but an Ent has ever learned Entish, and Tolkien gives only tiny scraps of it.

But Ents also speak Elvish when they talk to others, and they use the Common Speech with hobbits. Their names in the wider world — Fangorn, Onod, the forest names — are Sindarin. If you want the full story of how Treebeard talks, read Entish Explained: Treebeard's Language, which covers Old Entish, Treebeard's Quenya-flavoured phrases and what Tolkien said about them.

If you want to learn the Elvish the Ents learned from, there is no better start than Learn Elvish free on Tengwar — ten lessons before you ever see a paywall.

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Treebeard (Fangorn): The Eldest Ent

Treebeard is the translation of his Sindarin name, Fangorn, and the forest takes its name from him. He is described in The Two Towers as the oldest of the Ents, and one of three who remained from the earliest days: the other two are Leaflock and Skinbark. By the War of the Ring, Leaflock has become sleepy and tree-like, standing knee-deep in grass through the summer, and Skinbark was wounded by Saruman's Orcs and has gone up into the hills, among the birches, and will not come down.

Treebeard's character is one of Tolkien's most loved. He speaks slowly, with a rumbling "hoom, hom", and he dislikes being hasty above all things. He is wise and gentle, but he is also immensely powerful and capable of terrible anger when he understands the wrong done to his trees.

The hobbits Merry and Pippin, fleeing the Uruk-hai who had captured them, run into Fangorn Forest and meet him on a hill. He carries them to his home, Wellinghall, gives them Ent-draught — a drink from his stone jars that refreshes them and, by the end of the book, has made them the tallest hobbits on record — and listens to their whole story. Their account of Saruman's treachery is what finally sets the Ents moving.

For the hobbits' side of this story, see Hobbits of Middle-earth; for the Orcs who carried them west, see The Uruk-hai Explained.

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The Entwives: The Great Loss of the Ents

The saddest part of the Ents' story is the Entwives. Treebeard tells it to the hobbits as a lament.

In the early days the Ents and Entwives walked together. But their loves diverged. The Ents loved the wild trees — the great forests, the mountain slopes, things that grow as they will. The Entwives loved the lesser trees and the meads in the sunshine: fruit trees, flowering bushes, herbs and grasses, the corn in autumn. They wanted order, plenty and peace, and they wanted the growing things to listen to them and do as they were told.

So the Entwives crossed the great river Anduin and made gardens in the lands beyond. Men learned the arts of tilling from them, and the Entwives were held in great honour there. The Ents visited them from time to time, but less and less often. Then darkness and war came. The gardens were destroyed, and the land became what in the Third Age is called the Brown Lands, a barren region east of the Anduin. When the Ents went looking, the Entwives had vanished. No one knew where they had gone.

Because of this there are no Entings — no young Ents — and there have been none for ages. The Ents are slowly passing away. Treebeard recalls an old song in which Ents and Entwives promise to meet again in a land in the West, when both have lost everything, and he wonders aloud whether that time will ever come.

Tolkien never resolves the mystery in the published Lord of the Rings. There is a single tantalising hint: early in The Fellowship of the Ring, in the inn at Bywater, Sam Gamgee mentions that his cousin Hal saw something like a walking tree, as big as an elm, up in the Northfarthing. Readers have long wondered whether that was an Entwife. Tolkien himself, in his Letters, was not hopeful: he did not think the Ents would ever find their wives again in the mortal world.

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What Are Huorns?

Huorns are the most mysterious beings in the Ent chapters. Even the characters in the book are unsure exactly what they are.

When Merry explains them to his friends after the battle, he describes them as trees that have Ents among them, or have grown somewhat Entish: they can move, slowly and quietly, wrapped in shadow, and they can be very dangerous. They have voices of a sort and can speak with the Ents, but they are wild and dark, and Merry is glad not to have met them without Ents nearby to keep them in check.

Treebeard gives the other half of the picture. Some Ents, he says, are growing sleepy and tree-ish, and some trees are growing Entish: waking up, becoming watchful and slowly moving. The line between Ent and Huorn is therefore blurred. Huorns may be trees that are nearly Ents, and some may be Ents that are nearly trees.

Tolkien uses the word huorn as if it were Elvish, and modern research on his languages agrees: Eldamo lists huorn as a Sindarin noun with the tentative gloss "spirit tree". The question mark in that gloss is honest — Tolkien never laid out its etymology in a finished text, so the translation is careful about how sure it is.

The Huorns at Helm's Deep

The Huorns' great moment comes at the end of the battle of Helm's Deep in The Two Towers. When dawn breaks after the night of the siege, the defenders see that a forest has appeared overnight across the valley mouth, where there had been bare grass. The Orcs, routed by the charge of Théoden and the arrival of Gandalf and Erkenbrand, flee straight into the trees — and none come out.

Afterwards the Riders find a great mound of dead Orcs, the Death Down, and the forest withdraws as mysteriously as it came. It was the Huorns, sent by the Ents with Gandalf's knowledge, to close the trap. For the Orcs' side of that battle, see Orcs and Goblins of Middle-earth; for the Rohirrim who held the Hornburg, see Men of Middle-earth and Rohirric: The Language of Rohan.

Old Man Willow

Readers often ask whether Old Man Willow, who traps Merry and Pippin in the Old Forest in The Fellowship of the Ring, is a Huorn. The book never says so outright. He is a huge, ancient willow with a black heart, the strongest of the hostile trees of the Old Forest, and Tom Bombadil sings him back to sleep. He shares with the Huorns the image of a tree woken into malice, and Treebeard himself speaks of dark places in his own forest where the trees have grown bad-hearted. The comparison is natural, but it remains a reader's inference.

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The Entmoot and the March on Isengard

Once Merry and Pippin have told their story, Treebeard calls an Entmoot — a gathering of the Ents in a hollow called Derndingle. It lasts three days. To the impatient hobbits it seems endless, but to the Ents it is a fast decision: they talk through what must be said in Old Entish, and in the end they decide to march on Isengard.

The reason is plain. Saruman has been cutting down the trees of Fangorn on the borders of the forest, letting his Orcs fell them, sometimes just to burn them, and the Ents have found the stumps. Treebeard had once counted Saruman a neighbour, a wizard who came to talk and learn. Now he understands that Saruman has a mind of metal and wheels and does not care for growing things except as they serve him.

The march to Isengard is one of the great set pieces of The Two Towers. The Ents stride out singing, the Huorns follow them in shadow, and by nightfall they stand at the gates. They break the walls, tear down the works, and finally turn the river Isen into the Ring of Isengard, flooding the pits and the furnaces until only the tower of Orthanc stands above the water. Saruman is shut inside it, and Treebeard keeps watch.

Saruman's story from the inside — his name, his tower and his languages — is told in Saruman and Isengard: The Language Behind the White Hand. And Gandalf's role in sending the Huorns, and in his return to Fangorn as the White Rider, is part of Gandalf's Elvish Name, Mithrandir.

Treebeard lets Saruman go

One detail is often forgotten. Later in The Return of the King, when Gandalf comes back to Isengard after the war, he learns that Treebeard has let Saruman go. Saruman had talked to him with his persuasive voice, and Treebeard, hating to see anything caged, released him on the promise that he would go away. Gandalf is not pleased, and Saruman goes on to do harm in the Shire. It is a perfectly Entish mistake: Treebeard is wise, but he does not understand lying.

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Ents in the Films

Peter Jackson's The Two Towers (2002) gives the Ents a striking look and a memorable Treebeard, voiced by John Rhys-Davies, who also played Gimli. But it changes the plot in one important way.

Film only: in the film, the Entmoot decides not to go to war. Treebeard is ready to send the hobbits home. Pippin then asks him to carry them south, past Isengard, and when Treebeard sees the ruined edge of his forest — the stumps of the trees Saruman has felled — he is enraged and calls the Ents to march. In the book, the Ents decide to attack at the Entmoot itself, after their own long deliberation; there is no trick by Pippin.

The films also leave out most of the Huorn story. In the theatrical cut the Huorns do not appear at Helm's Deep at all — the battle ends with the charge of the Rohirrim and Gandalf's arrival with Erkenbrand's men. The Extended Edition adds a brief scene of the Huorns' forest after the battle, but their role is reduced to a glimpse. The Entwives are mentioned only in passing, and Leaflock, Skinbark, Wellinghall and the Ent-draught's growth spurt are largely gone.

These are reasonable cuts for a film, but the book's Ents are slower, stranger and more independent than the screen version, and Huorns are far more important to the outcome of the war.

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Why Tolkien Invented the Ents

Tolkien explained in his Letters (No. 163) that the Ents came partly from his long disappointment with Macbeth. In Shakespeare's play, Birnam Wood "comes to Dunsinane" only because soldiers carry branches as camouflage. As a schoolboy Tolkien had hoped the trees would really march, and he finally made them march himself.

He also said that the Ents were a surprise to him: he did not plan Treebeard in advance, and the chapter more or less wrote itself. The word Ent came from the Old English word for "giant", which Tolkien, a professor of Old English, borrowed for the language of Rohan; in the fiction it is the Rohirric name for these beings, translated into the old English of the Riddermark.

Finally, the Ents carry one of Tolkien's deepest themes: the loss of wild places to industry. Saruman's Isengard, all fire and iron, against Fangorn, all patience and roots, is about as clear a statement of his love for trees as anything in his work. He was famously fond of trees and once wrote that he took the part of trees against all their enemies.

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Ents and Huorns in Elvish

The Ents learned to speak from the Elves, so it is fitting that the names we have for them are Elvish. Here are the attested words, with their glosses from our Eldamo-sourced Elvish dictionary.

A few notes on these:

• Onod is the Sindarin word for Ent. Appendix F of The Lord of the Rings also gives the plural Onodrim (the collective "Ent-folk") and Enyd. Tolkien gives no separate Quenya word for Ent in the finished books.
• Fangorn combines the element fang, "beard" (Quenya has the same root in fanga), with orn, "tall tree". It is the name of the Ent and of his forest — "Fangorn" is literally "Treebeard".
• huorn carries a question mark in its gloss because its meaning is inferred: "spirit tree" fits the beings well, but Tolkien never spelled out its parts in a finished work.
• galadh is the general Sindarin word for "tree", the same one in Galadhrim, the Tree-people of Lothlórien. Note that Galadriel does not come from it; her name comes from galad, "radiance".
• taur is "forest" or "wilderness", as in Taur-nu-Fuin, the Forest under Nightshade.

Want to hear yourself say them properly? The Sindarin pronunciation guide explains the trilled R, the TH in galadh and the vowels. For more words like these, see Elvish Words for Nature and our Elvish Dictionary of Common Words.

You can also type any English phrase — "guardian of the forest", "the old trees" — into the Elvish translator to see it in Quenya and Sindarin, or write your own name in the Elvish script with the Tengwar name tool. If you would like to try writing Fangorn by hand, the Tengwar Scribe will check your letters, and the Tengwar alphabet guide explains every character.

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People Also Ask

Are Ents trees? No. Ents look like trees and are deeply bound to them, but they are a separate people, made at Yavanna's wish and awake in their own right. Huorns are the beings that sit closer to the line between Ent and tree.

How old is Treebeard? Tolkien gives no number. Gandalf calls him the oldest living thing that still walks beneath the Sun in Middle-earth, and Treebeard remembers the great forests of the First Age, which makes him many thousands of years old.

Why are there no young Ents? Because the Entwives were lost. Without them there have been no Entings for ages, and the Ents are slowly fading from the world.

Did the Ents fight at Helm's Deep? Not the Ents themselves. They were at Isengard. It was the Huorns, sent from Fangorn, who closed around the fleeing Orcs at the end of the battle.

What language do the Ents speak? Old Entish among themselves, a slow, very long tongue no one else has mastered; Elvish and the Common Speech with others. See What Language Do the Elves Speak? for the Elvish side, and Quenya vs Sindarin for how the two Elvish tongues differ.

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Learn the Language the Ents Learned

The Ents waited ages for the Elves to teach them speech. You do not have to wait at all. Tengwar teaches Quenya and Sindarin from the first word, with real Tolkien vocabulary, spaced-repetition review and the Elvish script. Learn Elvish free — 10 lessons, no card required — at learningelvish.com/learn-elvish. Start with greetings, and before long you will be reading words like Onod, orn and Fangorn as easily as Treebeard does.

For the full map of Tolkien's tongues, our Complete Guide to Tolkien's Elvish Languages is the next stop.

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Related Reading

• Races of Middle-earth: The Complete Guide
• Entish Explained: Treebeard's Language
• Elves of Middle-earth
• Hobbits of Middle-earth
• The Uruk-hai Explained
• Wizards of Middle-earth: The Istari
• Saruman and Isengard: The Language Behind the White Hand
• Black Speech Words: Orkish Vocabulary
• Lord of the Rings Elvish Phrases