Fangorn
the forest of Treebeard; the long vale of the Ents
Name and Place
Fangorn is the great forest that lay along the lower slopes of the Misty Mountains in the Third Age — the oldest surviving wood of the northwest, and the realm of the Ents, whose keeper and eldest is Treebeard, known among his own kind simply as Fangorn (the forest that bears his name). Treebeard is “the oldest living thing that still walks beneath the sun upon this earth”.
The Shepherd of the Trees
Of the Ents’ origin the Quenta tells (in Of Aulë and Yavanna) that Yavanna asked of the One that the trees have “shepherds”, and the Ents were set to the care of the woods. Fangorn remembers that elder world, and speaks of the “Ents walking in the world”… The forest is his body and his memory.
- The Ents’ wrath: When Saruman’s axes laid the trees of Fangorn at the border, Treebeard roused the Ents in the great “last march of the Ents” against Isengard — the forest’s answering against the breaking of its trees — and the flood of the Entwash undid the work of the Enemy.
Significance
Fangorn epitomises the deep memory of the natural world in Tolkien’s legend: the forest that remembers the First Age, keeper of the Ents’ fading, and the last witness of what Yavanna’s shepherds were made to guard.