He wasn’t walking around and talking in “Common”. Old Man Willow had a very vivid and angry personality.īut he was still a tree. They could alter paths and talk to each other. There, trees were “alive” and had a presence. Tree’s as actual living things is a step beyond what we’ve seen so far, by which I mean the Old Forest. Fangorn lands us right back there with the Ents. We have been sort of absent the fantasy stuff for a while now, since Lothlorien I suppose.

It doesn’t take long for the titular character to show up, after only a brief bit of exploration from the two hobbits, and he is a dozy. It’s part of Pippin’s growth as a character over the last chapter, as we learn that he has not just got big potential, but a big future (if he lives to see it). It’s a bit odd that this has never really come up before, but there it is. He’s in the Took leadership bloodline, so he’s actually someone quite important in the Shire, essentially the heir to the place’s most powerful family. Pippin compares it with a sitting room in his home in Tookland, an interesting comparison, one that not only reinforces this image of an almost antique forest, but offers us a little bit more about Pippin. We might all have experienced that sort of stuffy, warm wooded area, but Fangorn seems to take that idea to an extreme. It’s a forest that has grown and then remained as it was, getting older and older without much change or outside intervention. “ A queer stifling feeling came over them, as if the air were too thin or too scanty for breathing…the trees that stood silently about them, rank upon rank, until they faded away into grey twilight in every direction.” Tolkien gives it an interesting description, that of an ancient, almost undisturbed area, somewhere that has been free from the influence of not just living things, but stuff like weather and the like: We’re heading back into the heavy fantasy stuff, starting now.įangorn is a stuffy and old place.

The ents are going to war