Treebeard said, that trolls were created in mockery of ents. Like even Morgoth couldn’t create a goober named Bert out of a tree stump. It makes sense, that ents were a distinct species.
The ents don't have beds to sleep in. Treebeard stands up to sleep, he is surprised at first that Merry and Pippin want to lay down to sleep. He lays down on the bed to stay awake while they talk.
He also got elves wrong, and consequently everyone else gets them wrong. To this day, you’ll hear how elves are supposed to be stoic, nearly emotionless. That is the exact opposite of what Tolkien said. Legolas, for example, is more emotionless than the rest of the fellowship combined. Upon meeting his first elf, Sam said of them that they were not what he expected. They were both so sad and so joyful, so old and so young.
When you’re thousands of years old and have seen almost everything, you probably don’t get worked up easily. It would be easy to be frustrated watching men repeat the same mistakes century after century.
@@adeyinkabenjamin9537You can see how Tolkien borrowed the much more folklorish depiction of elves being more like magical spirits than humans with pointy ears.
The image of ents as living trees that move and talk is not the invention of the Peter Jackson films, but had already been solidified in popular culture far longer, being how they are portrayed in Dungeons & Dragons or Blood Bowl, for instance. The popular image of ents is also from Tolkien since it matches his description of the huorns, but at some point ents and huorns simply got conflated.
They are Ainur (maiar) corrupted by Melkor. From lotr fandom wiki: "Tolkien refers to the Balrogs having hearts of fire, tongues like red stabbing blades, yellow eyes that glowed like furnaces, and long arms tipped with steel claws. They had hair described as streaming manes, which could be kindled to cause a blaze behind it." I would say Jackson did a decent job. Tolkien obviously viewed the Ainur as angel-like and the Balrogs as "fallen angels" i.e. demons.
Just got the Ents wrong? He got a lot wrong , you could create a series of video's about what he got wrong . He also missed out quite a lot from the book . But on the positive side, he created 3 amazing movies that captured the feel of the books. As movies, they are outstanding .
@@Davy.J.Y watch the extended editions of the films. Peter Jackson has been as faithful , to the books as a director could actually get ( with out making it a tv show) He did amazing work and it is why , the Lord Of the Rings films are now considered a masterpiece
I can't blame the LOTR movies too much since many pieces of fantasy media already ran with the concept of "Treants" (obviously inspired by the Ents from the books) and "Treants" were commonly depicted as sentient tree monsters. Just look at the Magic: The Gathering TCG, which started years before the LOTR movies were filmed. Hell I have a 'Top Trumps' collectable card game from the 80's that has a 'Tree Monster' card which is essentially a living tree creature. So while the LOTR movies may have popularised the idea of "Treant-like Ents" they were hardly the first to depict such creatures in popular culture.
ALL trees are alive. What the Ents are is anthropomorphized. All plants are alive - they just can't walk and talk and think like people. Otherwise an interesting observation.
They can “talk” to, much like ants, and they can feel in danger as well from what I heard. They can *scream* too in ranges outside the human ears, though it’s not the same scream as humans.
@@basimali619They also have a symbiotic relationship with networks of sap-eating fungi, which in turn use the network to share chemical messages and nutrients with other trees (maybe other plants? Not sure tbh)
@@Randomdudefromtheinternet yep, and they also technically have a “blood system”, even if with a different composition and components, the similarities are hard to miss.
I got a view of a very Tree-like creature from the books, before the movies came out. There is a lot in the books that allows the reader to infer a thin line between tree and Ent. It's very easy to infer that the Ent-wives and Ents themselves have been morphing into regular trees as magic in middle earth begins to retire.
Same. The ents were one of the few things Jackson did fairly well. They were a bit tall, but their overall appearance was close to my minds eye when I first read the books nearly 40 years ago.
But Tolkien also said that the hobbits didn't even notice Treebeard at first, taking him to be an odd looking stump with two arm like branches. I think the illustration first provided is too man like.
Tree stumps may have lost all of their bark, becoming smooth like skin (sometimes even smoother). A grey beard may look like hanging lichen. And the hobbits didn't expect to see ents.
Great observations - I hadn't really thought of this before, but I can definitely see the sense behind it. A point that occurred to me while watching this is the slight change in description of the Ents from guardians (when they first appeared in Middle-earth) to shepherds (as they were in the Third Age), which could indicate a change in behaviour of the trees themselves, and perhaps an increase in populations of Huorns.
Tolkien developed the name "ent" from the Old English "eoten", meaning giant. The intended mamal-like ents fit the more general idea of giants that way. You could even think of the stone giants we briefly see in the Hobbit in a similar way. Maybe it is pushing speculation a bit far, but in a similar way to the ents adopting tree-ish features, perhaps the stone giants were originally similar spirits who adopted the stone-ish features of the mountains. Not sure how that could fit into the larger Legendarium, but I've always enjoyed the mysterious presence of the stone giants that way.
I don't know I think you are reaching a bit. The truth of the matter is that Tolkien does not give specific and detailed physical descriptions of a lot of creatures or really anything in the book. You pointed out the passage describing Treebeard. All we get told is that the skin looks like grey gnarled bark. So much so that the hobbits cannot tell whether or not it's his body or if he is wearing some kind of bark/wooden clothing. And then, as the arms travel further out from the body that tough gnarled bark gives way to smoother skin. Then we basically get told that he has mossy/twiggy beard and very striking eyes and that's about it. The hobbits didn't say he looked like a man that was wearing bark and wood and leaves. The hobbits didn't say it looked like a tree whose branches formed into limbs and move either. The book does constantly compare how similar ents and trees are, though. Ents can "fall asleep" and become like trees. Trees can "wake up" and be like ents. This gives the impression that if a tree "woke up" and started moving and talking it would be very much like an ent... and it makes it seem like if an ent just stopped moving it would be very much like a tree. The truth us the description isn't specific enough for us to really know. It's up to the reader to imagine. I think the Jackson interpretation is a perfectly understandable way to envision the the Ents given the sparse description we have in the books. Save for the specific detail that at least Treebeard's hands and lower arms would have smoother more skin like covering than bark. The other ents are not really described at all, but it's just said they resemble specific species of trees. It's left up to the reader toimagine what that really means.
Beyond the movies, from dnd to homm, many fictions had humanoid trees (trents beings the usual name) that were clearly based on the ents and predate the movies. The many descriptions of tree like traits as opposed to the single description of treebeard's smooth skin would point someone to have an image of a tree looking creature in mind. From looking like a tree to being portrayed like a tree there is but one step that everyone seams to have done. Leshy of slavic mythos do have the same treatment.
There is no film evidence that Peter Jackson made Ents into talking trees, if people think that, they are clearly not fantasy fans yet. I think you missed the mark here, In the world of art direction, treebeard had already been drawn and painted by many artist for decades before these movies were made. Peter Jackson makes it clear that his art direction recognizes artists like Alan Lee and Ralph Bakshi. The imagery of Ents had already evolved through games likes dungeons and dragons back in the 70s and 80s. Film is a visual medium, and if its aware of the media around it, its message delivers better. The book does what the book does best, add nuanced information, and the trilogy does what movies do best, immerse you in the core plot.
But the books also repeatedly talks about how Ents, when growing to old and weary, take root and become as no different from the other trees. So this is weird if a sleepy Ent can so thoroughly resemble a tree they are indistinguishable when they then also have to be magical fairy people. ‘Some of my kin look just like trees now, and need something great to rouse them; and they speak only in whispers. But some of my trees are limb-lithe, and many can talk to me." Trees have sexes and you can try all you want but without a female and male tree you won't get any fruit from some species. No Entings if you wish. The tree and the Ent being the same but different is like how the Chimpanzee and the Human are both hominids. Peter Jackson didn't get them wrong. He took an artistic choice to visually portray them as tree people. As the opposite spectrum of Smooth skinned tree sheperd vs treefied ent.
Fascinating indeed. Having re-read the books a few times, I am still able to paint my own picture of what certain characters and creatures look like, including the ents, despite their ever-so-popular depiction of them in the films. My guess is that the filmmakers simply tried to simplify some things to make it easier for newcomers. Also, it's just a matter of interpretation, and what we see in the films was theirs. Another case of simplification would be Shelob, who is a monstrous spider in the film, but is described differently in the books. I would have liked a more book-like depiction of her, but again, I understand that the filmmakers didn't want to make things too complicated. "Let's make her a big monster-spider, something everyone can grasp and be afraid of easily." Which is totally fair.
I don't really see what the fuss is. To be honest, Peter Jackson needed to communicate a lot of things very quickly in order to tell something approaching the story of lord of the rings within the run time of a film, a runtime, which is notably longer than most blockbuster Films. Personally, I have spent a lot of time subjecting Jackson's work to scrutiny and nearly every time I find that it comes out splendidly well when viewed through the lens of a screenplay. What I'm trying to say is every character needed to have a distinct visual language and a musical language to accompany that, perhaps the greatest thing about the trilogy is the harmony between Howard shore and Jackson's edit. I think that the standard edit (Non-Extended version) is realistically about as good as you could ever achieve in a film, still to this day. Totally outstanding and unbelievable. I'm aware that bias can always creep in and I really have subjected these films to a lot of scrutiny and for that I thank you but I think the choice to make the ents how they were in the film is of course a creative decision and within the context of the films themselves, I view it as a very respectful, creative decision, as many of Jackson's decisions were.
Aren't they described to look like a tree stump rather than a tree? if you look at the pictures in the video where they are shown "how Tolkin intended", you could see why they would be mistaken for a tree stump but not for a tree.
Jackson bought the art work that Bakshi used to guide his own film's production. For example, when the hobbits first encounter the Black Rider, Jackson literally used Bakshi's both art work and actual film footage as a storyboard instead of referring to the book. With regards to Ents; Merry and Pippin did unknowingly look at Treebeard whilst climbing the hill in Fangorn and only saw him as a leafless tree so Ents must look tree-like but my guess is that Jackson approved of the Ent design devised by Weta that was most like the Bakshi interpretation. Sometimes I think that had Jackson not had 5 years preparation we would have seen something as bad as The Hobbit. It was only because he slowly realized Tolkien was a good story-teller (better than himself) that we got a damn good set of films; not dark or tragic enough to be fully true to Tolkien but still very entertaining.
They don’t need to be mammals to require entwives. Trees often require males and females to reproduce. They also sometimes require another tree of a similar but still distinct variety to bear fruit.
Sorry, but as a Tolkien nerd who read every I could find by Tolkien decades before these films, I found most of Jackson’s vision of Middle Earth spot on. I can isolate a few changes (Elves instead of Rangers in Rohan, my biggest pet peeve) but the overall vision of how the place & peoples looked? Nope - excellent!!!
I forgive everything including the elves at Helms Deep but the Dead Army sweeping the Pelennor Fields at the final battle was a horrible decision and takes away from all the sacrifice and tension of the battle.
Exactly my thoughts. @InkandFantasy appreciates the "nuances" and understands the benefits of pondering them and getting them right and distinguishing exactly what's not right. Well done! It's what's so amazing about Tolkien.
And here I was thinking you were going to take issue with the ridiculous idea that Pippin had to trick Treebeard into attacking Isengard! That, for me, was the bigger error Jackson committed. :)
Thank you, thank you for showing that illustration by Darrell Sweet. I think he of all people came closest to depicting the Ents as Tolkien described them. Ever since I saw that illustration by Sweet in a Tolkien calendar so many years ago, it became my favourite and for me nothing else comes close.
@@melkhiordarkfell4354 Not true. He stands up to sleep and ask Merry and Pipin where they want to stand for sleep and they tell him they lay down for sleep.
I disagree. The Huorns are both trees that became entish and ents that became threeish. This means their nature is similar, and they can go from one state to the other. Is like how the trolls are animated rocks, the ents are animated trees. It is correct that the ents look diferent than a tree, but those are the ents that are active. In the shire they talk of a walking tree and is pretty obivous it is a ent, but its not described as having sking or having any characteristic that would make it not a tree. The comment about sheeperds and sheep becoming alike, is about their manners, personality, but a human would never turn into a sheep, yet a ent can become a tree.
I disagree, and two reasons come to mind. The first is that when Merry and Pippin first meet Treebeard, they can't distinguish him from a mundane tree until he speaks. The second is how ents become sleepy and tree-ish as they age. To me this seems exactly like anthropomorphized trees. Not literally trees, but the look in the films seems to me to be book-accurate. Also, where would the huorns fit into this? Where are they between ent and tree? Animated trees that can't speak? Ents who have forgotten language, or never learned it?
You have to realize that misunderstandings of Tolkien's ceratures were already widespread long before Jackson became involved, he isn't a Tolkien scholar and isn't really someone appropriate to blame
I don't know how much flora biology Tolkien was aware of, but I wonder if the Ents (and Trolls by extension) could be understood as being the cellulose-cell-wall equivalent for animals. Just as there are algae, fungus, and trees with soft, chitin, and cellulose cell walls, so in Middle Earth world there be animals, insects, and Ents. I believe they are described as being very tough, like trees. It seems possible that you could have gendered reproduction this way, though likely they would have external germination like fish.
This is simply not true, on both sides of the problem. Firstly because Tolkien's Ents do exhibit vegetal traits (mossy beard, etc.), and might become Huorns, tree-like to the point of being confused with them (you make it sound like that isn't a big deal, but it is actually quite significant), and more importantly because Peter Jackson's Ents are NOT just sentient moving trees either, they clearly have, as you even admit yourself, a humanoid shape, even if it's slightly obscured by a few branches popping here and there, and that is important, because trees do not. Of course, a written text gives you a whole range of plausible interpretations, and on that spectrum, PJ's Ents are on the more tree-like side, but apart from the smooth skin mention, there is strictly nothing in that interpretation that contradicts Tolkien's texts, and the movies' version is honestly quite close to some of the other artistic depictions you show in the video. Hence, he did not get the Ents wrong, but simply proposed one interpretation amongst others. Sure, it is not a complete, one hundred percent recreation of the smallest book details, but few are the illustrations that are, be it before or after the movies. There is no fundamental difference here.
Lol, I'm a long time fan of the series.... I think you may be nit-picking a smidge. People may have gotten the idea of them just being moving talking trees like something out of OZ but I think the movies give them the nuance of more than just trees. and as often as you support your argument on the physicality between your view and the more Jackson centric view you also provide some nice counters. I don't think he did a bad job overall, can't think of any other adaptation that comes close to the love shown in his adaptations. Yeah, some things were adjusted but I think the decision to make them more tree like and less ogre like was to make them more sympathetic, at least from a stage perspective. If they had gotten deeper into the lore they could have presented a better argument but the movies were already long, and decisions needed to be made elsewhere. IT's kind of how they decided for brevity's sake they wanted to make the elves outwardly stoic and inwardly passionate to avoid any outside "hippy" elves tropes that have existed that generally ruin the majesty of the fantastical creatures partially due to other media. As described the Ent's had become more treelike over time and the imagining that maybe they had been around for so long living without the tree wives they were becoming more and more like the trees themselves.... something rural loving Tolkien probably would have appreciated in relation to the shepherd line. In the end it's not about what he got "wrong" its about the story he presented being very faithful to the original but also creating something new by his, and I say in capital letters, ADAPTATION. He created a ton of new fans who then read the books and some of which who had never read the books until the movies came out, argue over details.
Creatures taking treelike characteristics and behaviors over many thousands of years but which are not actually trees. This is different from ents in the lotr trilogy how? Ents in the trilogy are not just portrayed as pieces of wood come to life. They have eyes, they have human like proportions often. Something that is just a tree made sentient wouldn't look like movie treebeard. A few of the ents actually do just look like animated trees intentionally because the idea is they've been sleeping for so long they've started to go treeish. But the more awake and active ones are more like men. I don't know how you could create a better ent than Peter Jackson did.
I wonder if Jackson's creation of Ents was largely affected by the illustration of Tree Beard. It's too bad that Jackson could not have found a way for the encounter between Quick Beam and the hobbits or that he could not film the moment when Treebeard takes the hobbits to his home.
Your argument that the Ents are separate from the trees is invalidated by the fact that they eventually get tree-ish and turn into a tree. The wood elves also live long lives in forests, yet do not become tree-like. If the first dwarves were, as the elves say, made out of stone and clay, then the first ents were similarly born out of trees. Having a smooth skin does not invalidate it anymore than the skin of dwarves would invalidate the elven belief that they were made out of stone.
And Yavanna very much, when discussing the Ents with Manwe, refers to what would become ents as trees that sang praise to Iluvatar, and that she wishes for trees to be able to speak for all with roots and punish those that would wrong them.
I wonder what is meant with spirits? The same that happened to dwarves when Eru gave them souls? Did Eru fully create the Ents to be like the other creations? Ents and Dwarves certainly are mammals as birthing living young. Probably even Orcs, he certainly said Orcs are born from Orcs and that female ones are just not seen as soldiers. Ents are clearly humanoids which just appear like trees but they seem to come in different tree varieties as you can see in their description and also how the young (almost hasty) Ent, maybe Quickbeam but in German Flinkbaum, has clear preferences to a certain type of tree called Eberesche here. There is also the variety in fingers/toes. One would assume they are either born or grow up attached to a certain tree type. I also have it in my head canon, that they find the Entwives and the younger Ents can reproduce again. The very beginning of the trilogy says that the other species still exist, albeit hidden and not as plentiful anymore. I personally think there should have been a shorter altenative 4th Age of peace before humans take over almost everything in the 5th Age. I'd love to have more contact between the races in that 4th Age and some more Elven blood being mixed with those of noble minded humans whose offspring will mostly live as humans but can carry forward all the Elven knowledge and disseminate them among Men. Knowledge and trade will flourish between all of Middle Earth although there will necessarily also be conflict with those peoples long tyrannised by the rule of Sauron's human servants but that Eastern world will also lead to some peoples not having been ruled by them or at least Sauron not having been able to corrupt their cultures thanks to the efforts of the Blue Wizards. It would not be a long Age, maybe even less than a millennium before things slowly go worse. Also what happened to the "older than Sauron" (maybe Gandalf meant older than the Maiar joining Melkor) monsters so terrible, Gandalf refused to even talk about them? That dark place was connected to Moria and with Sauron and the Balrog (let's not forget Saruman, whom I imagine will whisper manipulative words to people in their dream out of pure malice he became driven by after Gandalf taking away his power and asking him give up being evil twice (still, getting killed by a mere human was a bit disappointing)) having become just disembodied spirits, who will need a lot of time until they have even the slightest power to interact at all. I wonder if the evil disembodied spirits can communicate with each other. Imagine Sauron and Saruman arguing for millennia about why things failed lol. Uhm back to the unnamed ones, they can now leave their tunnels. Can the Dwarves try to go back to Moria? There is still nonhuman evil left. So many questions. So much useless writing on my part
Not useless at all, thank you very much for taking the time to watch and comment!! These are very interesting questions and especially of the horror element of the Nameless Things and their origins, which I’ve never really ever covered on my channel. I’ll make sure to think of some video ideas regarding the subject!!
Erm, birthing live young does not make a creature a mammal. Certain reptiles and fish birth live young. Having mammary glands makes a creature a mammal. See duck billed platypus.
It was implied that the blue wizards were going to be involved in the sequel the Shadow. Because it was told that only gandulf was the only astarti that was successful in his mission.
@@raigrant680 I know, I just didn't want to talk about Entwives's tits. If you take modern biology research seriously, all the common typological categories like reptiles, fish (we are more closely related to a carp than the carp is to many sharks) etc. become meaningless in the face of phylogeny. You cannot evolve out of a clade hence we are fish and birds are fish and dinosaurs.
From my very limited knowledge of this topic, I imageine that the ents and the entwives were supposed to be separated at some point. Thus, we only experience the old, male ents through the hobbits. The children, especially, would probably look much different from a 10000 year old ent. So, my guess is that in a while before that, before the dwarves faded from the world by digging further and further down, so would the ents eventually fade, as the need for ents diminished. There would also be fewer and fewer orcs, so the dangers to the trees would diminish as well. This would, of course, all be foreseen by the higher power of Tolkien's world, which is indeed ours, in Tolkien's imagination. A world where the magic and creatures of old become myths and fairy tails for children.
There is no way someone can put Tolkien books in movies accurately. Ever. But we need movies too and Peter Jackson did a great job. Your video is about Ents being created or evolved from trees. And we all know in Tolkien mythology there is almost no evolution at all, everything is creation.
"In the willow-meads of Tasarinan I walked in the Spring. Ah! the sight and the smell of the Spring in Nan-tasarion!" Treebeard loves trees. As he should, he was created by Yavanna to protect forests from dwarves.
A great video. Yes, I also noticed how so many people just took the movies as cannon. They started depicting the ents as trees, and Sauron as a disembodied eye all because of these movies. I think a lot of these people who misrepresent the lore are not real Tolkien fans, but people who were brought in because of the movies. A lot of them haven't read the books, and many of those who have only did so after watching the movies, so they are stuck with the movie imagery on their brains.
@@MasterOfTheElements It exposed normies to it, some of which went out and read LOTR but typically didn't go beyond that. Being a movie fan =/= a Tolkien fan. There was already a huge body of Tolkien fans before the movies, and I was one of them. Before the movie came out there were so many illustrations of scenes from Tolkien's work. My favorite professional artists were John Howe and Ted Nasmith. After the movies came out, many of the illustrations just started following that particular vision.
@@Procopius464 John Howe and Allan Lee both worked on Lord of the rings and the hobbit, their art was used as inspiration for the looks of the characters and places.
@@MasterOfTheElements Yea I know. But they took some liberties with those movies. The way they depicted Sauron and the Ents are wrong. Still it's better than anything being done now.
@@Procopius464 You'll be pressed to explain to us how Ents should look. As for Sauron, it's kind of hard to portray a creature that can barely stand as a threat and using the Flaming Eye is a creative liberty they took and that was a good decision. While Sauron is a great threat, he poured all his power into the one ring and the Nazgul.
The harsh reality that every Tolkien purist has to accept is that without Jacksons movies the LotR franchise would have gradually been forgotten by now.
Who would have forgotten it though? Even by then it was still a very popular fiction book. Besides its popularity is not the point. It's story stands tall without any kind of adaption and while the PJ movies are great, they changed a lot, for no reason. Harsh reality... I don't read Tolkien because of the movies.
I'm glad you subject PJ's trilogy to a critical review. Because anyway I turn it seems that EVERYONE is worshipping it as the one true God and saviour and the absolute tippity top of cinemmatic genius never to be rivalled. While I think it's a fun epic movie adventure, it also has it's flaws. And those deserve to be addressed.
Agree; he got it all wrong and turned an unique way of storytelling in stupid movies suited for imbeciles. He totally missed the philosophical and theological foundations of Tolkien's storytelling.
@@MasterOfTheElements Quite the opposite in fact. My main gripes with Jackson's trilogy include the absence of Saruman of Many Colours or his occupation of The Shire; I didn't even watch the Rings of Bezos. And your ad personam attack only validates my point.
basically the question is, were they meant to be mostly men who have a few tree traits, or are they mostly trees with a few man traits. i will pretend their hair has stiffened into wood-like textrure and branches, but they still have much more mammal biology under the facade
While I disagree with a lot of your points, namely that the ents as depicted in the movies can't possibly be "mammal-like", i do really like the idea that the ents SHOULD look more like trolls. Kind of like how orcs and elves resemble each other (so not all that much, but enough that you can Believe that one was made from the other, or made based on the template of the other)
Thanks for this video, after seeing the Balrog done so well in the LotR trilogy, I was very disappointed with the portrayal of the Ents. They came off as slow-witted and goofy, whereas the book has them as literally a force of Nature. Pippen best described them when he said, "An angry Ent is terrfying." I was expecting to see an almost hellacious scene of complete destruction of Isengard and the few orcs and men left back to defend it. Instead it was a silly scene of what kids do to action figures when they have a tantrum.
The Balrog was also fairly different in the movies, being a hulking horned monster that resembles typical pop culture devils rather than a mysterious and indistinct entity of shadow and fire like in the book. The movie Balrog was epic though, no doubt about that.
Hellacious scene... you do realize how tame Ents are even in anger? He let Saruman leave in the books because it was not his job to guard him, yet Saruman was the one responsible for all the burned forests and decay.
@@dinmavric5504 The Ents become so enraged towards the end that their roaring alone was bringing down the walls, with a maelstrom of debris being thrown 100's of feet up in air and against the tower. Plus their punches could crumple iron like tin foil. Maybe we just have different ideas of 'hellacious' And Ents slowly fell under the Voice of Saurman, as he played up their dislike of anything being caged or trapped.
I can see why they decided to make them look more like trees. The illustrations of half-tree, half-man-type ents are, to be honest, creepy. It's just easier to make them look like trees.
idk, i feel like its as with humans, we look like monkeys and we come from them but we are not monkeys and so therefore, they were trees that started to move and be able to speak thanks to the elves singing makes much more sense, tho im sure that it is based on a compound of mythos that Tolkien read about and therefore can be traced.
It is a sad thing that so many have Tolkien's world pre-imagined for them by those ghastly films and that they never experience firstly reading the books unpolluted by Peter Jackson.
Having read and watched LOTR, although I think the books are better in almost every aspect, the Tree Ents are one of the few things I prefer in the movies
Normally trees and plants don't have a gender but the Ents do. The Ent wives are gone meaning they must have been married to the male Ents. Treebeard also says that there are too few of them nowadays indicating that they haven't mated with the wives for a very long time. Iluvatar probably wanted them to feel love as even the Valar had the concept of wives and husbands.
@@Keffinated Well if I were to put it crass trees don't fuck like two different genders do. All trees can become new trees by replanting a fruit (which Isildur did). The seed, soil and weather takes care of the rest.
You should review The Flight of Dragons 1982, and Japanese media that went straight to the literary source rather than DnD and MMORPG's for inspiration. Could also drop Legend of Zelda in the video title for clicks.
PJ's treatment of Treebeard is like nails on a chalkboard for me. This is one of those totally unnecessary diversions from the text that make the movies almost unwatchable. I absolutely HATE Pippin and Merry tricking Treebeard into going to war. It belittles the Ents and removes their moral agency.
Much like the origin of orcs or the great eagles, Tolkien never provided a definitive origin for the ents. That said, given Tolkein's insistence that only Eru can grant sentience (i.e., the flame imperishable) to living creatures, the idea that huorns could be self-awoken trees seems unlikely to be something Tolkein would have accepted as final canon. Given the nature of ents, huorns, and the flame imperishable, one possible idea that makes sense to me is that perhaps unlike the children of Iluvatar who possess distinct indivisible fëa, the ents do not possess distinct fëa, but rather that the flame imperishable used to create ents can be shared, so that Treebeard, for example, is a hröa that has been sentiented by a portion of the flame imperishable, but that like all ents, it is possible for a portion of that flame to spread to other ents, huorns, or trees. The problem with this theory is of course the entwives, since clearly Tolkien contemplated sexual reproduction rather than sharing fëa as the means by which new ents would be created. Clearly, entlings would be the only means by which additional fëa for ents could be brought into Arda according to Tolkien, and he certainly never stated that sharing of the flame imperishable was possible, and likely never contemplated the idea. But I find nothing in the canon that would preclude my idea and cannot say whether he would have liked my idea or flatly rejected it.
This theory is very interesting, thank you for commenting! I would like to add, in connection to my Great Eagle video last week which might interest you, Tolkien had really contemplated the idea of creatures, such as animals, being able to gain a higher ability and understanding and even the ability to talk, without possessing a rational soul. Same could hypothetically be the case with the Huorns, though opposite may still be valid!!
Uh.... the premise of this video is false. The films might not have explained the entire origin of Ents but it does distinguish between Ent and Huorn. I'm out.
The video is about the movies making mainstream the idea that Ents are made out of wood, when in reality they are not! It’s not about Huorns or their origins
are you seriously basing your whole argument that peter got it wrong cause he made the Trees in the movie have more bark like skin than smoother skin.. Really dude..hahah ok.
@@InkandFantasy perhaps you mean sentience? I'm an arborist in addition to being a musician and Tolkien nerd. Plants are biological entities that can be quite complex, many even communicate with each other in a sense. I'm guessing English isn't your first language so I didn't want to come down on you too harshly.
Not what I expected from the title. Something that has annoyed me since a friend of mine pointed it out: Jackson made the Ents hasty. They at length in the movies decide NOT to go to war... then reverse that decision in MINUTES. That is completely against their nature, and I don't see how it would have lost anything to have had them decide to go to war like in the books.
Well, their description as having skin is factual and objective, as is the fact that they’re made out of wood in the movies and don’t have skin! Everything else is of course my interpretation of the material, but that’s what the video is about!!
By the way guys, by trees being alive or not I mean them being sentient and conscious!!!
Maybe "animate" would have been the word. I think we got the gist.
Treebeard said, that trolls were created in mockery of ents. Like even Morgoth couldn’t create a goober named Bert out of a tree stump. It makes sense, that ents were a distinct species.
That’s hilarious ahaha
Watching this video I was starting to wonder if Trolls were meant to be that. Just like Orcs are a mockery of elves/men.
@@Janx14This exact comparison was directly made in the books by Treebeard.
The ents don't have beds to sleep in. Treebeard stands up to sleep, he is surprised at first that Merry and Pippin want to lay down to sleep. He lays down on the bed to stay awake while they talk.
This was one of my favorite scenes from reading the books and I randomly tell people they can lay in the bed while I stand in the rain because of it
He also got elves wrong, and consequently everyone else gets them wrong. To this day, you’ll hear how elves are supposed to be stoic, nearly emotionless. That is the exact opposite of what Tolkien said. Legolas, for example, is more emotionless than the rest of the fellowship combined. Upon meeting his first elf, Sam said of them that they were not what he expected. They were both so sad and so joyful, so old and so young.
The movies sorta flipped Gimli's and Legolas' personalities.
When you’re thousands of years old and have seen almost everything, you probably don’t get worked up easily. It would be easy to be frustrated watching men repeat the same mistakes century after century.
The elves in the books are described as being gay...they always appear preceded by song
Pretty sure that particular horse bolted with D&D
@@adeyinkabenjamin9537You can see how Tolkien borrowed the much more folklorish depiction of elves being more like magical spirits than humans with pointy ears.
The image of ents as living trees that move and talk is not the invention of the Peter Jackson films, but had already been solidified in popular culture far longer, being how they are portrayed in Dungeons & Dragons or Blood Bowl, for instance. The popular image of ents is also from Tolkien since it matches his description of the huorns, but at some point ents and huorns simply got conflated.
Good point
I feel similarly about the balrog. It is represented as this irrational beast, when in fact they are Ainur, full of knowledge and very cunning
They are Ainur (maiar) corrupted by Melkor.
From lotr fandom wiki:
"Tolkien refers to the Balrogs having hearts of fire, tongues like red stabbing blades, yellow eyes that glowed like furnaces, and long arms tipped with steel claws. They had hair described as streaming manes, which could be kindled to cause a blaze behind it."
I would say Jackson did a decent job. Tolkien obviously viewed the Ainur as angel-like and the Balrogs as "fallen angels" i.e. demons.
Just got the Ents wrong? He got a lot wrong , you could create a series of video's about what he got wrong . He also missed out quite a lot from the book . But on the positive side, he created 3 amazing movies that captured the feel of the books.
As movies, they are outstanding .
Disagree; he got it all wrong and turned an unique way of storytelling in stupid movies suited for imbeciles.
And yet they're still amazing movies with the changes.
@@Iron_Wyvern Yep, i agree, i am going to re watch them all next weekend .
Yeah, I don't consider that "wrong". Just different.
@@Davy.J.Y watch the extended editions of the films. Peter Jackson has been as faithful , to the books as a director could actually get ( with out making it a tv show) He did amazing work and it is why , the Lord Of the Rings films are now considered a masterpiece
I can't blame the LOTR movies too much since many pieces of fantasy media already ran with the concept of "Treants" (obviously inspired by the Ents from the books) and "Treants" were commonly depicted as sentient tree monsters.
Just look at the Magic: The Gathering TCG, which started years before the LOTR movies were filmed. Hell I have a 'Top Trumps' collectable card game from the 80's that has a 'Tree Monster' card which is essentially a living tree creature.
So while the LOTR movies may have popularised the idea of "Treant-like Ents" they were hardly the first to depict such creatures in popular culture.
ALL trees are alive. What the Ents are is anthropomorphized. All plants are alive - they just can't walk and talk and think like people. Otherwise an interesting observation.
They can “talk” to, much like ants, and they can feel in danger as well from what I heard. They can *scream* too in ranges outside the human ears, though it’s not the same scream as humans.
@@basimali619They also have a symbiotic relationship with networks of sap-eating fungi, which in turn use the network to share chemical messages and nutrients with other trees (maybe other plants? Not sure tbh)
@@Randomdudefromtheinternet yep, and they also technically have a “blood system”, even if with a different composition and components, the similarities are hard to miss.
If trees could think would we be able to tell as they don't move
I got a view of a very Tree-like creature from the books, before the movies came out. There is a lot in the books that allows the reader to infer a thin line between tree and Ent. It's very easy to infer that the Ent-wives and Ents themselves have been morphing into regular trees as magic in middle earth begins to retire.
Same. The ents were one of the few things Jackson did fairly well. They were a bit tall, but their overall appearance was close to my minds eye when I first read the books nearly 40 years ago.
But Tolkien also said that the hobbits didn't even notice Treebeard at first, taking him to be an odd looking stump with two arm like branches. I think the illustration first provided is too man like.
Tree stumps may have lost all of their bark, becoming smooth like skin (sometimes even smoother). A grey beard may look like hanging lichen. And the hobbits didn't expect to see ents.
Great observations - I hadn't really thought of this before, but I can definitely see the sense behind it. A point that occurred to me while watching this is the slight change in description of the Ents from guardians (when they first appeared in Middle-earth) to shepherds (as they were in the Third Age), which could indicate a change in behaviour of the trees themselves, and perhaps an increase in populations of Huorns.
Tolkien developed the name "ent" from the Old English "eoten", meaning giant.
The intended mamal-like ents fit the more general idea of giants that way.
You could even think of the stone giants we briefly see in the Hobbit in a similar way. Maybe it is pushing speculation a bit far, but in a similar way to the ents adopting tree-ish features, perhaps the stone giants were originally similar spirits who adopted the stone-ish features of the mountains.
Not sure how that could fit into the larger Legendarium, but I've always enjoyed the mysterious presence of the stone giants that way.
Ooh, I like that idea.
Stone giants and tree giants
I don't know I think you are reaching a bit. The truth of the matter is that Tolkien does not give specific and detailed physical descriptions of a lot of creatures or really anything in the book. You pointed out the passage describing Treebeard. All we get told is that the skin looks like grey gnarled bark. So much so that the hobbits cannot tell whether or not it's his body or if he is wearing some kind of bark/wooden clothing. And then, as the arms travel further out from the body that tough gnarled bark gives way to smoother skin. Then we basically get told that he has mossy/twiggy beard and very striking eyes and that's about it.
The hobbits didn't say he looked like a man that was wearing bark and wood and leaves. The hobbits didn't say it looked like a tree whose branches formed into limbs and move either. The book does constantly compare how similar ents and trees are, though. Ents can "fall asleep" and become like trees. Trees can "wake up" and be like ents. This gives the impression that if a tree "woke up" and started moving and talking it would be very much like an ent... and it makes it seem like if an ent just stopped moving it would be very much like a tree.
The truth us the description isn't specific enough for us to really know. It's up to the reader to imagine. I think the Jackson interpretation is a perfectly understandable way to envision the the Ents given the sparse description we have in the books. Save for the specific detail that at least Treebeard's hands and lower arms would have smoother more skin like covering than bark. The other ents are not really described at all, but it's just said they resemble specific species of trees. It's left up to the reader toimagine what that really means.
Beyond the movies, from dnd to homm, many fictions had humanoid trees (trents beings the usual name) that were clearly based on the ents and predate the movies. The many descriptions of tree like traits as opposed to the single description of treebeard's smooth skin would point someone to have an image of a tree looking creature in mind. From looking like a tree to being portrayed like a tree there is but one step that everyone seams to have done.
Leshy of slavic mythos do have the same treatment.
There is no film evidence that Peter Jackson made Ents into talking trees, if people think that, they are clearly not fantasy fans yet. I think you missed the mark here, In the world of art direction, treebeard had already been drawn and painted by many artist for decades before these movies were made. Peter Jackson makes it clear that his art direction recognizes artists like Alan Lee and Ralph Bakshi. The imagery of Ents had already evolved through games likes dungeons and dragons back in the 70s and 80s. Film is a visual medium, and if its aware of the media around it, its message delivers better. The book does what the book does best, add nuanced information, and the trilogy does what movies do best, immerse you in the core plot.
But the books also repeatedly talks about how Ents, when growing to old and weary, take root and become as no different from the other trees. So this is weird if a sleepy Ent can so thoroughly resemble a tree they are indistinguishable when they then also have to be magical fairy people.
‘Some of my kin look just like trees now, and need something great to rouse them; and they speak only in whispers. But some of my trees are limb-lithe, and many can talk to me."
Trees have sexes and you can try all you want but without a female and male tree you won't get any fruit from some species. No Entings if you wish. The tree and the Ent being the same but different is like how the Chimpanzee and the Human are both hominids.
Peter Jackson didn't get them wrong. He took an artistic choice to visually portray them as tree people. As the opposite spectrum of Smooth skinned tree sheperd vs treefied ent.
Fascinating indeed. Having re-read the books a few times, I am still able to paint my own picture of what certain characters and creatures look like, including the ents, despite their ever-so-popular depiction of them in the films.
My guess is that the filmmakers simply tried to simplify some things to make it easier for newcomers. Also, it's just a matter of interpretation, and what we see in the films was theirs.
Another case of simplification would be Shelob, who is a monstrous spider in the film, but is described differently in the books. I would have liked a more book-like depiction of her, but again, I understand that the filmmakers didn't want to make things too complicated. "Let's make her a big monster-spider, something everyone can grasp and be afraid of easily." Which is totally fair.
I don't really see what the fuss is. To be honest, Peter Jackson needed to communicate a lot of things very quickly in order to tell something approaching the story of lord of the rings within the run time of a film, a runtime, which is notably longer than most blockbuster Films. Personally, I have spent a lot of time subjecting Jackson's work to scrutiny and nearly every time I find that it comes out splendidly well when viewed through the lens of a screenplay.
What I'm trying to say is every character needed to have a distinct visual language and a musical language to accompany that, perhaps the greatest thing about the trilogy is the harmony between Howard shore and Jackson's edit. I think that the standard edit (Non-Extended version) is realistically about as good as you could ever achieve in a film, still to this day. Totally outstanding and unbelievable.
I'm aware that bias can always creep in and I really have subjected these films to a lot of scrutiny and for that I thank you but I think the choice to make the ents how they were in the film is of course a creative decision and within the context of the films themselves, I view it as a very respectful, creative decision, as many of Jackson's decisions were.
I always imagined them looking like the Koroks from the Legend of Zelda series, but giant, and with beards.
Aren't they described to look like a tree stump rather than a tree?
if you look at the pictures in the video where they are shown "how Tolkin intended", you could see why they would be mistaken for a tree stump but not for a tree.
Ralph Bakshi started that with his animated adaption. I think that PJ simply went with that.
Jackson bought the art work that Bakshi used to guide his own film's production. For example, when the hobbits first encounter the Black Rider, Jackson literally used Bakshi's both art work and actual film footage as a storyboard instead of referring to the book. With regards to Ents; Merry and Pippin did unknowingly look at Treebeard whilst climbing the hill in Fangorn and only saw him as a leafless tree so Ents must look tree-like but my guess is that Jackson approved of the Ent design devised by Weta that was most like the Bakshi interpretation. Sometimes I think that had Jackson not had 5 years preparation we would have seen something as bad as The Hobbit. It was only because he slowly realized Tolkien was a good story-teller (better than himself) that we got a damn good set of films; not dark or tragic enough to be fully true to Tolkien but still very entertaining.
***THIS.Nailed it man, just one of the many Bakshi influences in the films.
They don’t need to be mammals to require entwives. Trees often require males and females to reproduce.
They also sometimes require another tree of a similar but still distinct variety to bear fruit.
Sorry, but as a Tolkien nerd who read every I could find by Tolkien decades before these films, I found most of Jackson’s vision of Middle Earth spot on. I can isolate a few changes (Elves instead of Rangers in Rohan, my biggest pet peeve) but the overall vision of how the place & peoples looked? Nope - excellent!!!
I forgive everything including the elves at Helms Deep but the Dead Army sweeping the Pelennor Fields at the final battle was a horrible decision and takes away from all the sacrifice and tension of the battle.
Peter Jackson's case can be compared to the case of Biblically Accurate Angels
A very well thought out and explained video. I love the old drawings and paintings used to exemplify your points. You've earned a new subscriber.
Thank you, it means a lot! I wish you all the best!!!
Exactly my thoughts. @InkandFantasy appreciates the "nuances" and understands the benefits of pondering them and getting them right and distinguishing exactly what's not right. Well done! It's what's so amazing about Tolkien.
Sometimes being wrong is for the better. The history of thought is one hilarious mistake after another 🎉
And here I was thinking you were going to take issue with the ridiculous idea that Pippin had to trick Treebeard into attacking Isengard! That, for me, was the bigger error Jackson committed. :)
Thank you, thank you for showing that illustration by Darrell Sweet. I think he of all people came closest to depicting the Ents as Tolkien described them. Ever since I saw that illustration by Sweet in a Tolkien calendar so many years ago, it became my favourite and for me nothing else comes close.
I mean ... "living trees" is a silly description
MOVING trees I'd understand
I meant conscious!
Ents do not use beds for sleep. They stand.
Treebeard had a bed in his house and he lay down to sleep. He stands to stop and think and can get lost in thought for years but it's not sleep.
@@melkhiordarkfell4354 Not true. He stands up to sleep and ask Merry and Pipin where they want to stand for sleep and they tell him they lay down for sleep.
@@melkhiordarkfell4354 he lays on the bed but doesn’t sleep on it
”ents just being living trees" …as opposed to all the other trees which are all dead. 👍
I meant sentient!
I disagree. The Huorns are both trees that became entish and ents that became threeish. This means their nature is similar, and they can go from one state to the other.
Is like how the trolls are animated rocks, the ents are animated trees. It is correct that the ents look diferent than a tree, but those are the ents that are active. In the shire they talk of a walking tree and is pretty obivous it is a ent, but its not described as having sking or having any characteristic that would make it not a tree.
The comment about sheeperds and sheep becoming alike, is about their manners, personality, but a human would never turn into a sheep, yet a ent can become a tree.
read the silmarillion, fool.
All trees are alive and move and even talk to Ents, to each other, to Tom.
There is nothing in the Peter Jackson movies that contradicts the book Ents. I think your thoughts on trees contradict both Tolkien and the Ents.
Some trees were rather entish and some ents were rather treeish.
Makes me think of the pak protectors from Niven ringworld
An apt comparison, actually. =^[.]^=
Peter Jacksons film may have solidified it but Ents/Treants in D&D were depicted the same way in the 70's.
I disagree, and two reasons come to mind. The first is that when Merry and Pippin first meet Treebeard, they can't distinguish him from a mundane tree until he speaks. The second is how ents become sleepy and tree-ish as they age. To me this seems exactly like anthropomorphized trees. Not literally trees, but the look in the films seems to me to be book-accurate. Also, where would the huorns fit into this? Where are they between ent and tree? Animated trees that can't speak? Ents who have forgotten language, or never learned it?
I like tree appearance better
Treebeard in the movie literally says that he isn't a tree though and explains the difference between a tree and an Ent.
The video is about how the movies have changed the perception of the ents on a physical level!
You have to realize that misunderstandings of Tolkien's ceratures were already widespread long before Jackson became involved, he isn't a Tolkien scholar and isn't really someone appropriate to blame
I don't know how much flora biology Tolkien was aware of, but I wonder if the Ents (and Trolls by extension) could be understood as being the cellulose-cell-wall equivalent for animals. Just as there are algae, fungus, and trees with soft, chitin, and cellulose cell walls, so in Middle Earth world there be animals, insects, and Ents. I believe they are described as being very tough, like trees. It seems possible that you could have gendered reproduction this way, though likely they would have external germination like fish.
This is simply not true, on both sides of the problem. Firstly because Tolkien's Ents do exhibit vegetal traits (mossy beard, etc.), and might become Huorns, tree-like to the point of being confused with them (you make it sound like that isn't a big deal, but it is actually quite significant), and more importantly because Peter Jackson's Ents are NOT just sentient moving trees either, they clearly have, as you even admit yourself, a humanoid shape, even if it's slightly obscured by a few branches popping here and there, and that is important, because trees do not.
Of course, a written text gives you a whole range of plausible interpretations, and on that spectrum, PJ's Ents are on the more tree-like side, but apart from the smooth skin mention, there is strictly nothing in that interpretation that contradicts Tolkien's texts, and the movies' version is honestly quite close to some of the other artistic depictions you show in the video. Hence, he did not get the Ents wrong, but simply proposed one interpretation amongst others. Sure, it is not a complete, one hundred percent recreation of the smallest book details, but few are the illustrations that are, be it before or after the movies. There is no fundamental difference here.
Great video 👍 very informative. Peace ✌🏻
Thank you!!
3:13 Perhaps you want to say "conscious trees."
Lol, I'm a long time fan of the series.... I think you may be nit-picking a smidge. People may have gotten the idea of them just being moving talking trees like something out of OZ but I think the movies give them the nuance of more than just trees. and as often as you support your argument on the physicality between your view and the more Jackson centric view you also provide some nice counters. I don't think he did a bad job overall, can't think of any other adaptation that comes close to the love shown in his adaptations. Yeah, some things were adjusted but I think the decision to make them more tree like and less ogre like was to make them more sympathetic, at least from a stage perspective. If they had gotten deeper into the lore they could have presented a better argument but the movies were already long, and decisions needed to be made elsewhere. IT's kind of how they decided for brevity's sake they wanted to make the elves outwardly stoic and inwardly passionate to avoid any outside "hippy" elves tropes that have existed that generally ruin the majesty of the fantastical creatures partially due to other media. As described the Ent's had become more treelike over time and the imagining that maybe they had been around for so long living without the tree wives they were becoming more and more like the trees themselves.... something rural loving Tolkien probably would have appreciated in relation to the shepherd line.
In the end it's not about what he got "wrong" its about the story he presented being very faithful to the original but also creating something new by his, and I say in capital letters, ADAPTATION. He created a ton of new fans who then read the books and some of which who had never read the books until the movies came out, argue over details.
Treebeard does say "Tree? I am no tree." in the movies...
I know! This video is mostly about the misconception that they’re made out of wood!!
And? Many humans will say "ape? I am no ape"
And yet we are
Gee some people will even deny humans are animals
Creatures taking treelike characteristics and behaviors over many thousands of years but which are not actually trees. This is different from ents in the lotr trilogy how?
Ents in the trilogy are not just portrayed as pieces of wood come to life. They have eyes, they have human like proportions often. Something that is just a tree made sentient wouldn't look like movie treebeard.
A few of the ents actually do just look like animated trees intentionally because the idea is they've been sleeping for so long they've started to go treeish. But the more awake and active ones are more like men.
I don't know how you could create a better ent than Peter Jackson did.
Jackson didn't get the Ents "wrong" per se, he applied artistic license to make it work for his cinematic adaptation.
I wonder if Jackson's creation of Ents was largely affected by the illustration of Tree Beard. It's too bad that Jackson could not have found a way for the encounter between Quick Beam and the hobbits or that he could not film the moment when Treebeard takes the hobbits to his home.
Orcs look like twisted and corrupted elves, so I always pictured ents as looking like uncorrupted trolls.
Your argument that the Ents are separate from the trees is invalidated by the fact that they eventually get tree-ish and turn into a tree. The wood elves also live long lives in forests, yet do not become tree-like. If the first dwarves were, as the elves say, made out of stone and clay, then the first ents were similarly born out of trees. Having a smooth skin does not invalidate it anymore than the skin of dwarves would invalidate the elven belief that they were made out of stone.
And Yavanna very much, when discussing the Ents with Manwe, refers to what would become ents as trees that sang praise to Iluvatar, and that she wishes for trees to be able to speak for all with roots and punish those that would wrong them.
I wonder what is meant with spirits? The same that happened to dwarves when Eru gave them souls? Did Eru fully create the Ents to be like the other creations? Ents and Dwarves certainly are mammals as birthing living young. Probably even Orcs, he certainly said Orcs are born from Orcs and that female ones are just not seen as soldiers.
Ents are clearly humanoids which just appear like trees but they seem to come in different tree varieties as you can see in their description and also how the young (almost hasty) Ent, maybe Quickbeam but in German Flinkbaum, has clear preferences to a certain type of tree called Eberesche here. There is also the variety in fingers/toes. One would assume they are either born or grow up attached to a certain tree type. I also have it in my head canon, that they find the Entwives and the younger Ents can reproduce again. The very beginning of the trilogy says that the other species still exist, albeit hidden and not as plentiful anymore.
I personally think there should have been a shorter altenative 4th Age of peace before humans take over almost everything in the 5th Age. I'd love to have more contact between the races in that 4th Age and some more Elven blood being mixed with those of noble minded humans whose offspring will mostly live as humans but can carry forward all the Elven knowledge and disseminate them among Men. Knowledge and trade will flourish between all of Middle Earth although there will necessarily also be conflict with those peoples long tyrannised by the rule of Sauron's human servants but that Eastern world will also lead to some peoples not having been ruled by them or at least Sauron not having been able to corrupt their cultures thanks to the efforts of the Blue Wizards. It would not be a long Age, maybe even less than a millennium before things slowly go worse.
Also what happened to the "older than Sauron" (maybe Gandalf meant older than the Maiar joining Melkor) monsters so terrible, Gandalf refused to even talk about them? That dark place was connected to Moria and with Sauron and the Balrog (let's not forget Saruman, whom I imagine will whisper manipulative words to people in their dream out of pure malice he became driven by after Gandalf taking away his power and asking him give up being evil twice (still, getting killed by a mere human was a bit disappointing)) having become just disembodied spirits, who will need a lot of time until they have even the slightest power to interact at all. I wonder if the evil disembodied spirits can communicate with each other. Imagine Sauron and Saruman arguing for millennia about why things failed lol. Uhm back to the unnamed ones, they can now leave their tunnels. Can the Dwarves try to go back to Moria? There is still nonhuman evil left. So many questions. So much useless writing on my part
Not useless at all, thank you very much for taking the time to watch and comment!! These are very interesting questions and especially of the horror element of the Nameless Things and their origins, which I’ve never really ever covered on my channel. I’ll make sure to think of some video ideas regarding the subject!!
Not all maiar came into arda at the same time. I think the nameless things are just evil spirits that entered into arda early. Same with Ungolianth.
Erm, birthing live young does not make a creature a mammal. Certain reptiles and fish birth live young. Having mammary glands makes a creature a mammal. See duck billed platypus.
It was implied that the blue wizards were going to be involved in the sequel the Shadow. Because it was told that only gandulf was the only astarti that was successful in his mission.
@@raigrant680 I know, I just didn't want to talk about Entwives's tits. If you take modern biology research seriously, all the common typological categories like reptiles, fish (we are more closely related to a carp than the carp is to many sharks) etc. become meaningless in the face of phylogeny. You cannot evolve out of a clade hence we are fish and birds are fish and dinosaurs.
"Got wrong" is just a stupid thing to say. But I guess you gotta get that click.
From my very limited knowledge of this topic, I imageine that the ents and the entwives were supposed to be separated at some point. Thus, we only experience the old, male ents through the hobbits. The children, especially, would probably look much different from a 10000 year old ent. So, my guess is that in a while before that, before the dwarves faded from the world by digging further and further down, so would the ents eventually fade, as the need for ents diminished. There would also be fewer and fewer orcs, so the dangers to the trees would diminish as well. This would, of course, all be foreseen by the higher power of Tolkien's world, which is indeed ours, in Tolkien's imagination. A world where the magic and creatures of old become myths and fairy tails for children.
I really like the illustrations of the Ents as tall men with flesh and very skinny.
The comment at 0:38 about the Ents being solidified in popular memory as living trees is pretty funny. I mean, regular non-Ent trees, are also alive.
By living I meant sentient like you and I!!
Jackson made the Ents into slow-witted muppets.
There is no way someone can put Tolkien books in movies accurately. Ever. But we need movies too and Peter Jackson did a great job.
Your video is about Ents being created or evolved from trees. And we all know in Tolkien mythology there is almost no evolution at all, everything is creation.
Shepherds don’t love sheep. They just really don’t like going hungry.
"In the willow-meads of Tasarinan I walked in the Spring.
Ah! the sight and the smell of the Spring in Nan-tasarion!"
Treebeard loves trees. As he should, he was created by Yavanna to protect forests from dwarves.
A great video. Yes, I also noticed how so many people just took the movies as cannon. They started depicting the ents as trees, and Sauron as a disembodied eye all because of these movies. I think a lot of these people who misrepresent the lore are not real Tolkien fans, but people who were brought in because of the movies. A lot of them haven't read the books, and many of those who have only did so after watching the movies, so they are stuck with the movie imagery on their brains.
You do realise that those movies are what catapulted lord of the rings into the stratosphere fame wise.
@@MasterOfTheElements It exposed normies to it, some of which went out and read LOTR but typically didn't go beyond that. Being a movie fan =/= a Tolkien fan. There was already a huge body of Tolkien fans before the movies, and I was one of them. Before the movie came out there were so many illustrations of scenes from Tolkien's work. My favorite professional artists were John Howe and Ted Nasmith. After the movies came out, many of the illustrations just started following that particular vision.
@@Procopius464 John Howe and Allan Lee both worked on Lord of the rings and the hobbit, their art was used as inspiration for the looks of the characters and places.
@@MasterOfTheElements Yea I know. But they took some liberties with those movies. The way they depicted Sauron and the Ents are wrong. Still it's better than anything being done now.
@@Procopius464 You'll be pressed to explain to us how Ents should look. As for Sauron, it's kind of hard to portray a creature that can barely stand as a threat and using the Flaming Eye is a creative liberty they took and that was a good decision. While Sauron is a great threat, he poured all his power into the one ring and the Nazgul.
I have always wondered why ents were portrayed the way they were in the films. Was it a matter of practicality?
The harsh reality that every Tolkien purist has to accept is that without Jacksons movies the LotR franchise would have gradually been forgotten by now.
Who would have forgotten it though? Even by then it was still a very popular fiction book. Besides its popularity is not the point. It's story stands tall without any kind of adaption and while the PJ movies are great, they changed a lot, for no reason.
Harsh reality... I don't read Tolkien because of the movies.
Thoughts on the 1978 cartoon's depiction of the Ents?
I'm glad you subject PJ's trilogy to a critical review. Because anyway I turn it seems that EVERYONE is worshipping it as the one true God and saviour and the absolute tippity top of cinemmatic genius never to be rivalled. While I think it's a fun epic movie adventure, it also has it's flaws. And those deserve to be addressed.
Agree; he got it all wrong and turned an unique way of storytelling in stupid movies suited for imbeciles. He totally missed the philosophical and theological foundations of Tolkien's storytelling.
@@stob23whine some more
Let me guess you love Rings Of power and you need to tear down the greatest trilogy ever made to justify watching that atrocious show.
@@MasterOfTheElements Quite the opposite in fact. My main gripes with Jackson's trilogy include the absence of Saruman of Many Colours or his occupation of The Shire; I didn't even watch the Rings of Bezos. And your ad personam attack only validates my point.
@@MasterOfTheElements I don't know how you pulled that out from the OP, it's very obvious they're book purists.
basically the question is, were they meant to be mostly men who have a few tree traits, or are they mostly trees with a few man traits. i will pretend their hair has stiffened into wood-like textrure and branches, but they still have much more mammal biology under the facade
tree like people, yup, i'm with that
Jackson's LOTR isn't Tolkien's LOTR, it's a Hollywood action comic book movie.
While I disagree with a lot of your points, namely that the ents as depicted in the movies can't possibly be "mammal-like", i do really like the idea that the ents SHOULD look more like trolls. Kind of like how orcs and elves resemble each other (so not all that much, but enough that you can Believe that one was made from the other, or made based on the template of the other)
Thanks for this video, after seeing the Balrog done so well in the LotR trilogy, I was very disappointed with the portrayal of the Ents. They came off as slow-witted and goofy, whereas the book has them as literally a force of Nature. Pippen best described them when he said, "An angry Ent is terrfying." I was expecting to see an almost hellacious scene of complete destruction of Isengard and the few orcs and men left back to defend it. Instead it was a silly scene of what kids do to action figures when they have a tantrum.
The Balrog was also fairly different in the movies, being a hulking horned monster that resembles typical pop culture devils rather than a mysterious and indistinct entity of shadow and fire like in the book.
The movie Balrog was epic though, no doubt about that.
Hellacious scene... you do realize how tame Ents are even in anger? He let Saruman leave in the books because it was not his job to guard him, yet Saruman was the one responsible for all the burned forests and decay.
@@dinmavric5504 The Ents become so enraged towards the end that their roaring alone was bringing down the walls, with a maelstrom of debris being thrown 100's of feet up in air and against the tower. Plus their punches could crumple iron like tin foil. Maybe we just have different ideas of 'hellacious'
And Ents slowly fell under the Voice of Saurman, as he played up their dislike of anything being caged or trapped.
Could you do a video on what Tolkien thought of Wagner?
I’ll do some research and see what I can do!
What about Wagner? This overrated thief (Schumann, Berlioz, Mayerbehr etc) that deformed German and Norse mythology.
I can see why they decided to make them look more like trees. The illustrations of half-tree, half-man-type ents are, to be honest, creepy. It's just easier to make them look like trees.
Even knowing this...I actually like the change Jackson made to the ents
To determine what ents are, we just need to know how they get their energy.
Photosynthesis? They are trees.
Eat other organisms? Not trees?
Trees that are alive....
idk, i feel like its as with humans, we look like monkeys and we come from them but we are not monkeys and so therefore, they were trees that started to move and be able to speak thanks to the elves singing makes much more sense, tho im sure that it is based on a compound of mythos that Tolkien read about and therefore can be traced.
We don't come from monkeys. And everything in Middle Earth is creation, not evolution.
Awesome 😎
It is a sad thing that so many have Tolkien's world pre-imagined for them by those ghastly films and that they never experience firstly reading the books unpolluted by Peter Jackson.
Having read and watched LOTR, although I think the books are better in almost every aspect, the Tree Ents are one of the few things I prefer in the movies
Jackson just copied the Ralph Bakshi 1978 design
...and they don't have knees.
Normally trees and plants don't have a gender but the Ents do. The Ent wives are gone meaning they must have been married to the male Ents. Treebeard also says that there are too few of them nowadays indicating that they haven't mated with the wives for a very long time. Iluvatar probably wanted them to feel love as even the Valar had the concept of wives and husbands.
Trees do in fact have gender, just not like the gender of animals.
@@Keffinated Well if I were to put it crass trees don't fuck like two different genders do. All trees can become new trees by replanting a fruit (which Isildur did). The seed, soil and weather takes care of the rest.
Many plants do have gender and sometimes it even matters greatly. Case and point, kiwi or cannabis plants.
Please capitalize the captions, not to mention commas and colons…
I will start doing that from next video, thank you!! Will also make them a bit larger and easier to read!
@@InkandFantasy Thank you!
🎉
You should review The Flight of Dragons 1982, and Japanese media that went straight to the literary source rather than DnD and MMORPG's for inspiration.
Could also drop Legend of Zelda in the video title for clicks.
I’ll do some research!
Jackson is an overrated hack who butchered the books!
Thank you, I thought it was just me who thought this.
Oh man glad someone finally said it.
PJ's treatment of Treebeard is like nails on a chalkboard for me. This is one of those totally unnecessary diversions from the text that make the movies almost unwatchable. I absolutely HATE Pippin and Merry tricking Treebeard into going to war. It belittles the Ents and removes their moral agency.
Not meaning to be rude, but trees ARE alive. They're just a different kind of life than animals and humans.
By alive I meant conscious and sentient!
I talk to my trees everyday.
@@dinmavric5504 And if you're Clint Eastwood, they don't listen to you.
Much like the origin of orcs or the great eagles, Tolkien never provided a definitive origin for the ents. That said, given Tolkein's insistence that only Eru can grant sentience (i.e., the flame imperishable) to living creatures, the idea that huorns could be self-awoken trees seems unlikely to be something Tolkein would have accepted as final canon.
Given the nature of ents, huorns, and the flame imperishable, one possible idea that makes sense to me is that perhaps unlike the children of Iluvatar who possess distinct indivisible fëa, the ents do not possess distinct fëa, but rather that the flame imperishable used to create ents can be shared, so that Treebeard, for example, is a hröa that has been sentiented by a portion of the flame imperishable, but that like all ents, it is possible for a portion of that flame to spread to other ents, huorns, or trees. The problem with this theory is of course the entwives, since clearly Tolkien contemplated sexual reproduction rather than sharing fëa as the means by which new ents would be created. Clearly, entlings would be the only means by which additional fëa for ents could be brought into Arda according to Tolkien, and he certainly never stated that sharing of the flame imperishable was possible, and likely never contemplated the idea. But I find nothing in the canon that would preclude my idea and cannot say whether he would have liked my idea or flatly rejected it.
This theory is very interesting, thank you for commenting! I would like to add, in connection to my Great Eagle video last week which might interest you, Tolkien had really contemplated the idea of creatures, such as animals, being able to gain a higher ability and understanding and even the ability to talk, without possessing a rational soul. Same could hypothetically be the case with the Huorns, though opposite may still be valid!!
Uh.... the premise of this video is false. The films might not have explained the entire origin of Ents but it does distinguish between Ent and Huorn. I'm out.
The video is about the movies making mainstream the idea that Ents are made out of wood, when in reality they are not! It’s not about Huorns or their origins
@InkandFantasy yeah I think I take my comment back. My bad dude. Keep on keeping on. I'm having a very bad year.
are you seriously basing your whole argument that peter got it wrong cause he made the Trees in the movie have more bark like skin than smoother skin.. Really dude..hahah ok.
Do you think that trees aren't alive? Having the phrase "Just living trees" in your intro might not be the best way to start your video.
I mean alive like you and I, like “tree people” in a sense!
@@InkandFantasy perhaps you mean sentience? I'm an arborist in addition to being a musician and Tolkien nerd. Plants are biological entities that can be quite complex, many even communicate with each other in a sense. I'm guessing English isn't your first language so I didn't want to come down on you too harshly.
Yes sentience is what I meant, thank you!!!
Not what I expected from the title. Something that has annoyed me since a friend of mine pointed it out: Jackson made the Ents hasty. They at length in the movies decide NOT to go to war... then reverse that decision in MINUTES. That is completely against their nature, and I don't see how it would have lost anything to have had them decide to go to war like in the books.
P.J got virtually the whole the whole of the books wrong , the only thing that was correct and true to the three books was their titles.
Jackson got everything wrong.
So ents are bigfoot
Big feet!
He got so many things wrong. What about page 56?
Pretty much exactly how I imagined them. Who cares? The film trilogy was more interesting than Tolkien's source material, and I grew up reading them.
So this is like just your opinion man
Well, their description as having skin is factual and objective, as is the fact that they’re made out of wood in the movies and don’t have skin! Everything else is of course my interpretation of the material, but that’s what the video is about!!