Ents the earthborn, old as mountains
When Merry and Pippin encounter Treebeard in their flight from the Orcs, the surprise is mutual. Treebeard has not seen anything quite like them before:
“What are you, I wonder? I cannot place you. You do not seem to come into the old lists that I learned when I was young. But that was a long, long time ago, and they may have made new lists.”1
He searches his memory, and the process reveals some of the most characteristically Anglo-Saxon poetry to be found in The Lord of the Rings:
Learn now the lore of Living Creatures!First name the four, the free peoples:Eldest of all, the elf-children;Dwarf the delver, dark are his houses;Ent the earthborn, old as mountains;Man the mortal, master of horses:Hm, hm, hm.Beaver the builder, buck the leaper,Bear bee-hunter, boar the fighter;Hound is hungry, hare is fearful . . .hm, hm.Eagle in eyrie, ox in pasture,Hart horn-crowned; hawk is swiftest,Swan the whitest, serpent coldest. . .
There are some peculiarities about this poem that set it apart from other poetry in The Lord of the Rings and also offer us a perspective through which to examine the Old English entas that inspired Tolkien’s Ents.
In terms of meter, Treebeard’s lines are something like a Platonic ideal of Old English versification. Although there is no caesura in the printed text, we can see that each line is constructed of two halves (an a-verse and a b-verse), each with two stresses:
LEARN now the LORE of the LIVing CREAtures
One or the other (or both) of the stressed syllables of the a-verse alliterates with the first stressed syllable of the b-verse (Learn … Lore … Living…). All vowels are considered to alliterate, so in
Ents the Earthborn, Old as Mountains
“old” alliterates with “ents” and “earthborn”.3
In form, Treebeard’s verses are as Anglo-Saxon as the poem sung by a ‘maker of Rohan’ in honor of the fallen after the Pelennor Fields,4 or as the lines sung by Gleowine, minstrel of Theoden, at the king’s funeral.5
But it is not merely due to Fangorn’s proximity to Rohan that Entish poetry should resemble that of their Mannish neighbors – for Treebeard is capable of crafting and singing in Elvish as well as the Westron he uses for the old lists. It is rather, I think, an echo of the ‘primitive’, one that might suggest to the reader something about the antiquity of the lines (and thus their declaimer) – for the ‘old lists’ resemble some of the oldest poetry in Old English.
Apart from the meter, the content of these lines is very close to a genre of Old English poetry called ‘gnomic’: that is, ‘wisdom poetry’. This kind of poetry is, to modern eyes, perhaps difficult to get excited about. There is no narrative element, and unlike other Old English poems (such as those which are often called ‘elegiac’) there is also not much description of physical details or emotional states. Gnomic poems like Maxims I and Maxims II mostly consist of short, simple, declarative statements which appear logically unassailable and therefore, from our point of view, unnecessary:
Draca sceal on hlæwe,frod, frætwum wlanc. Fisc sceal on wæterecynren cennan. Cyning sceal on heallebeagas dælan. Bera sceal on hæðe,eald and egesfull. -Maxims II, ll. 26-30
A dragon must be in the mound,wise, treasure-proud; in water the fishincreasing its kind; a king in the halldistributing rings; a bear on the heath,old and horrible.
Leaving aside the challenge of interpreting the use or purpose of gnomic verse to its Anglo-Saxon audience7, I want to suggest that the similarity of these ‘old lists’ to Maxims II not only points to a source of inspiration for Treebeard’s poem; it suggests, or reinforces, ideas Tolkien may have had about the Ents themselves.
Let’s look again at the line Treebeard offers for his own people:
Ents the earthborn, old as mountains.
Saying Ents are “earthborn” is decidedly strange. We know from Treebeard’s discussion of Entwives and Entings that Ents do not grow out of the ground like trees, nor do we hear that they emerged from the soil upon their first awakening. While Tolkien certainly played with tree imagery in his descriptions of Ents, they are presented as male and female, producing children.
“Earthborn” may make sense if we consider it alongside a piece of etymology from Isidore of Seville. In his Etymologiae (XI.iii.12-14), Isidore suggests that the word ‘gigans’ (giant) has its origins in a shortened form of ‘terragenita’: born of earth.
Gigantes are so-called according to the etymology of Greek speech, and they reckon them γηγένεις, that is ‘earth-born’, because according to fable the earth their mother gave birth to them with vast bulk and similar to herself. For γή means ‘earth’, γένος ‘breed’, although they are also commonly called ‘sons of earth’, and their race is uncertain. However those inexperienced in Holy Scripture falsely reckon that colluding angels slept with the daughters of men before the flood, and that from them were born Gigantes, that is excessively large and strong men, with whom the earth was filled.8
Isidore was a famous scholar whose life straddled the turn of the 7th century; his work was widely known, including in Anglo-Saxon England. But in Old English ent and gigant are often used to refer to the same things, or people. In the late 9th-century Boethius of Alfred the Great, Nimrod and his co-builders of Babel are referred to as gigantes; in the writings of Aelfric, a century later, these same people are called entas.
Ents in Middle-earth are not referred to as ‘giants’ (although they do have a connection with Trolls). But, whether it was a constant understanding throughout the Anglo-Saxon period or one that developed over time, the rough equivalence of ‘ent’ and ‘gigant’ is something Tolkien would have noticed. Perhaps he imagined his Ents as sharing the origin Isidore proposed for the gigantes.
The reference to Ents as ‘old’ is straightforward. Apart from the obvious fact of Treebeard’s longevity, in Old English, entas are consistently linked with the past. Eald enta geweorc (old ent-work) occurs in The Ruin; enta aergeweorc (former/ancient work of ents) in Beowulf and Andreas. In cases where a word meaning ‘old’ or ‘ancient’ is not associated with entas, the antiquity of entish things is often strongly implied. The lair of the dragon (and possibly its treasures) are described as enta geweorc, and the barrow itself as well as its contents must have been crafted and assembled centuries ago, since we are told that the dragon has inhabited the place for 300 years.
A more subtle link with age may also have motivated Tolkien’s decision to call Ents ‘old’ here. Jacob Grimm, in Teutonic Mythology, saw ent as being potentially related to the Old High German ant(r)isc, ent(r)isc ‘old’; more recently, Bernard Mees suggests “entisc(ne) could well have been modelled on Latin antiquus ‘ancient’ (or even represent a loan of OHG antisc, entisc)”9. Alternative explanations for the word’s origin are few, tentative, and unconvincing. Either the Latin or the German derivation would have been available to Tolkien, had he looked for it.
Finally, there may be another dimension to the statement that the Ents are “old as mountains”. While the phrase may be simply another way of saying “old as the hills”, Maxims II clearly puts entish work on the high ground:
Cyning sceal rice healdan. Ceastra beoð feorran gesyne,Orðanc enta geweorc, þa þe on þysse eorðan syndon,Wrætlic weallstana geweorc. -ll. 1-3
A ruler the realm holds. The ramparts far-seen,Ingenious ent-works, that are on this earth,Wondrous wallstone work.
Although no mountains are specifically mentioned here, the logical suggestion is of a built structure occupying some highly visible point, such as a hilltop.
There is a relationship between this image of entish work on a hilltop, visible from afar, and a 9th-century poem in Old Saxon. This poem is the Heliand, a retelling of the Gospel story intended for recently-converted Saxon Christians.
The author of the Heliand sought to make the Christian story accessible in a Germanic social and cultural context. Thus there are references that portray Christ almost as the leader of a warrior-band, or Jerusalem as a hill-fort.10
In its presentation of the Sermon on the Mount, the Heliand follows the Gospel of Matthew in several particulars. As in the Gospel version, the Heliand has Christ telling the gathered disciples that they will be the salt of the earth, a light to the world, like a city on a hill. But the details of that city are strikingly different from its appearance in the Biblical account. The Heliand’s Christ says to the disciples that their works can not remain hidden,
than mer the thiu burg ni mag, thiu an berge stað,hoh holmkliƀu biholen uuerðen,uurisilic giuuerc -ll. 1395-97
No more than a castle can remain ever concealedWhich standeth on a mountain or steep on a cliff,A giant-made work.
The ‘ceastre’ in Maxims II parallels the ‘burg’ on the ‘berge’ of the Heliand, which Christ calls ‘uurisilic giuuerc’ – a parallel expression to the Old English enta geweorc. The chief characteristic of the ‘ceastre’ in Maxims – that it is ‘feorran gesyne’, seen from afar – is also perfectly paralleled in the Heliand, where the point of Christ’s metaphor is to insist that the godliness of the disciples should be seen by all: they are the light of the world, the salt of the earth, the city on a hill, whose gifts cannot be hidden. That the disciples should be compared to the work of risi, giants, is unparalleled - although we will see a similar move being made in the Old English Andreas, whose hero uses an enta geweorc pillar to godly purpose.
I don’t believe Tolkien referenced the Heliand in any of his writings related to Middle-earth. But he would have known the poem, and he knew what ‘risi’ meant. As we explored in the post ‘From Entish Land to the Ettenmoors’, Tolkien briefly considered calling the Ettenmoors ‘Bergrisland’ – an Old Norse word meaning ‘land of the mountain-giants’. It would not be surprising, I think, if the faint idea of the ‘risi’ moved along with that of the Ents down south, into Fangorn, where they emerged as if an echo of the Heliand by way of Treebeard’s reference to mountains.
The Two Towers, “Treebeard”
Ibid.
For more about the metrical structure of Old English poetry, see Jun Terasawa, Old English Metre: An Introduction.
The Return of the King, “The Battle of the Pelennor Fields”
The Return of the King, “Many Partings”
Old English text of Maxims II is from Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records VI, The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems. Translations mine.
For more on wisdom literature in Old English, see Elaine Tuttle Hansen, The Solomon Complex.
Cited in Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript, p. 104
See Bernard Mees, “Of Ettins and Ents” (2015), p. 614.
For more discussion of the Heliand and the interface between Christianity and Germanic culture more broadly, see G. Ronald Murphy, S.J., The Saxon Savior: The Germanic Transformation of the Gospel in the Ninth-Century Heliand (1989) and Tree of Salvation: Yggdrasil and the Cross in the North (2013).
Old Saxon text of The Heliand is from James Cathey, Heliand: Text and Commentary (2002). English translation by Mariana Scott: The Heliand: Translated from the Old Saxon (1966).
This was great!