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starofdunedain
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Post The Two Towers (discussion?)
on: October 08, 2016 02:04
I know the forums aren't as active anymore but the book club is still on the Silmarillion and I'm on my annual reading of Lord of the Rings. I'm currently reading through The Two Towers and was wanting someone to discuss the book with.
Anyone have thoughts on Treebeard and the Entmoot? I think they should have kept the book version of the Ents in the movies, where they get together rather quickly and decide 'hastily' to tear down Isengard and Saruman. I love their chant of going to war. Someone should make a real song of it.
Gandolorin
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on: October 08, 2016 04:07
PJ's treatment of the Entmoot and what followed (before the attack on Isengard) is one of the major sources of my rage against him, where I consider that he understood exactly zilch, zero, nada of what JRRT intended. Merry and Pippin manage to "convince" a moron Treebeard to take them close to Isengard, the moron only then sees and realizes what Saruman had been doing. W R O N G! The Ents (some more, some less) were very informed about what Saruman was up to - they were quite simply, according to their nature, not hasty. They decided on their attack on Isengard after three (two?) days of deliberation, not, as PJ decided to portray it in a totally brain-dead manner, decided against the attack, and were then spontaneously enraged to the attack. If there is one thing PJ never understood (among a lot of others), it is the Ents being N O T H A S T Y!!!
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GreenhillFox
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on: October 08, 2016 04:31
I fully share Gandolorin’s unhappiness about the (di)version in the movie. I think that whenever PJ diverted from the books and tried to be a little Tolkien himself, it always ended wrong.
His version of “The Hobbit” e.g. is a terrible literature rape (from giant sand worms to an elf-and-dwarf love story) in my eyes. It is really sad, given the enormous effort and investment for making those (technically) top quality movies, that the books have not been very honored by the end result.
Back to Ents: what I liked much is the story on the loss of the Entwives, and the author’s subtle suggestions of sadness and melancholic feelings to days of union long gone by.
'There’s something mighty queer behind this.'
starofdunedain
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on: October 08, 2016 10:18
Goodness, I hadn't intended to turn this into a book vs movie discourse.

One of the things I've always noticed when I read this part is that I have trouble imagining what the ents look like. So many trees are mentioned such as holly, ash, oak, and rowan, but I have no idea what those look like since I live surrounded by towering evergreen pine trees! I ended up having to google pictures of them and I can see how Tolkien would imagine some of them coming to life and having faces.
I also read someones comment on another site about how this part was his response to the Macbeth playing and fixing the part where the trees really do come to life this time. I haven't read the play but I can see how that happened.
I'd like to go up into the mountains while reading this or some other place so I could get a feel for what kind of environments the characters are in. I think the description and scenery are one of my favorite things about the book.
Elthir
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on: October 09, 2016 01:01
The appearance of Ents appears to differ widely between readers.

For myself I picture them more "man-like" than many visual interpretations I have seen over the years. Darrel Sweet (one of many Tolkien calendar artists) pictured them very man-like too, or at least illustrated a group of them that way in my opinion, but to my mind, his group lacks the diversity of colour and texture described by JRRT.

Tolkien actually describes that Treebeard's face "belonged to a large Man-like, almost Troll-like figure"... and earlier, that the "tree" the Hobbits initially took for a tree, looked like some gnarled old-man "with only two branches left"....

... two branches left... to me, obviously Treebeard's arms when the Hobbits got closer and eventually actually pay attention to the figure. From this I feel at least supported by text to claim that Treebeard did not have all sorts of branches sticking out from him, which some artists seem to illustrate.

It's interesting too that JRRT uses 'stump" to describe the "tree" that Merry and Pippin note above. When I use the word stump I usually refer to something either cut or broken, something shorter than myself... but of course compared to the towering heights of many trees, even the giant Treebeard himself (at least fourteen feet tall, so probably not notably taller than fourteen feet in my opinion, as then the number fourteen itself would arguably become fairly useless) could be considered a 'stump'.
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