Fanciful Inclinations

“Kazul’s not my dragon.“ Cimorene said sharply. “I’m her princess. You’ll never have any luck dealing with dragons if you don’t get these things straight.”

@what-eats-owls

Little Thieves

- In the movie, Treebeard does not remember the Entwives, and coincidentally he doesn’t think he’s ever heard of the Hobbits before. Meanwhile, Merry and Pippin are shocked at the idea of a ‘talking’ tree, but the idea of trees that are in some manner ‘awake’ is not foreign to them; the Old Forest that resides near the Shire is inhabited by Huorns to the Hobbits’ common knowledge, and Merry’s ancestors themselves are responsible for having built the High Hay, a great hedge twenty miles long designed to protect the hobbits from the wild trees of the Old Forest, as said trees - without a shepherd - posed a serious threat to them.

- In the book, Treebeard described the Entwives as having “hair parched by the sun to the hue of ripe corn and their cheeks like red apples. Yet their eyes were still the eyes of our own people.” This second line suggests that their eyes are likely one of the only features they had in common with the Ents. Meanwhile, most of the Hobbits are portrayed as rosy-cheeked and fair-haired, but their eyes are one of the only features they have in common with the Ents.

- Trees are asexual, capable of producing both male and female flowers, and they reproduce through pollination. Some release pollen into the wind to let it scatter where it may, while others rely on insects, birds, or animals to cultivate the pollination for them. It makes sense to believe that Ents, being conscious life-forms that are separate from trees but similar to them, might have a counterpart that cultivates them, without whom they can’t reproduce. Meanwhile, Hobbits are famous for being gardeners - cultivators - and in fact place such a great importance on trees in particular that the jewel of the Shire is the Party Tree, and when it gets cut down in the book, the sight is so devastating that Sam bursts into tears, and later replaces the felled tree by planting a silver nut gifted to him by Galadriel, growing the only Mallorn to exist outside of Lothlorien. “For all Hobbits share a love for things that grow.”

- The estrangement and separation of the Ents from the Entwives came about because the Ents prefered wildlands and great forests, while the Entwives preferred lush gardens and flowers and fruit trees and vegetables. The initial location of the Entwives gardens was destroyed by Sauron during the second age, at which point the Entwives disappeared, becoming little more than legend in the songs of elves and men. (Many people in Middle Earth also have no idea what the fuck a Hobbit is until they meet one.) If they had escaped the destruction of what would come to be known as the Brown Lands and fled North to Mirkwood, they could have slowly migrated from there until they eventually reached the Shire and settled, following the same path that Bilbo took to reach Mirkwood in The Hobbit.

- Merry and Pippin’s presence was the catalyst that inspired the Ents to involve themselves in the war. The Ents and Entwives were originally created by Yavanna with the purpose of protecting nature; it was Merry and Pippin who showed the Ents that such a task sometimes includes fighting a war. Meanwhile we have Frodo and Sam: “We set out to save the Shire, and it has been saved.” The motivation of protecting and preserving the beauty of nature was prevalent in both the Ents and in Hobbits, and it took the two groups meeting face to face to inspire the uprising against Isengard and the destruction of the industrial factories burning through the woods therein.

- Merry and Pippin grew in height after drinking the Ent-Draughts, becoming the tallest Hobbits in the Shire.