![]() “I can see and hear (and smell and feel) a great deal from this a-lalla-lalla-rumba-kamanda-lind-or-burume. Evil will always say, as Stalin said of the Pope, “How many divisions does he have?” Maybe it will be those who learn to see like Ents or Hobbits who will prove to be our most doughty champions. Evil always discounts that which does not seem to threaten it on its own terms. But as we shall see they have dangerously miscalculated. As far as they are concerned Ents are too slow, just like the trolls made by Morgoth in mockery of them, to be a real threat. It is not that they do not know of their existence but that they discount them as they weigh up who their most dangerous opponents might be. ![]() Thankfully Sauron and his lesser ally, Saruman, overlook the Ents. At the time of The Lord of the Rings he is revealed as he truly is. Perhaps he would know how to use words like freedom as a cloak for his true purposes but now with the possibility of real and everlasting power he needs cloaks no longer. We may remember that there were times when Sauron took on the appearance of a benevolent lord. He might look at our behaviour and conclude that in actual fact the orcs had won the War of the Ring and that a new Dark Lord had indeed arisen wielding something that was very much like the One Ring, if not worse. And if he were horrified by that he would be even more horrified by our daily destruction of the forests of the world and the endless steady transformation of our planet into a vast desert. He would be horrified to see us only plant trees that will mature at great speed and then be cut down to feed our need for timber. For there is no doubt that Treebeard would see us as very “hasty” folk indeed. We do not say anything in Old Entish, says Treebeard, “unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.” In other words we are being invited to look at reality through the eyes of a creature who never rushes and who takes a very long term view of everything and to imagine what life might be like if we were to see it as he does. Ents may not be trees but they think like trees and if trees could speak (and for all I know they do) they might speak as Ents do. In meeting Treebeard Merry and Pippin are introduced to a wholly different way of seeing the world and living in it.
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