O sweet Entmaiden,
Light of heart and grace of Faerie
Bourned in the heart of the greenwood
In the freshness of First Light,
My lovely Fimbrethil. . . ~From Song of Fimbrethil, attributed to Fangorn (also known as Treebeard in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings)
Treebeard (Fangorn in Sindarin) watched as his brother Ents, the tree-shepherds and forest protectors that he had known for eons, slowly came together in a circle around him to consider the Halflings request for assistance. Indeed, he had witnessed the birth of each of them.
They moved with a stately, measured pace for Ents were not so much slow and sluggish as unhurried. They thought in terms of aeons not years and certainly never minded days, hours or minutes.
A young Ent had once written some verses about Ent time as he came of age, and like young people everywhere grew frustrated with their elders. The verses had only taken a millennium or so to write, but they were still a fair declaration of the longings of Youth:
Out of time. . .out of mind. . .out of wonder
O great and glorious, most beloved Elders
Of the First Dawn, of the First Breath of the Green,
Whose Love of the sacred trees,
In the Song of Our Truth,
Mirrors even the Timeless One,
So long you forget the dance of youth
The embrace of trailing tendrils
In the misted Morning Lights.
O Elders,
Remember your days of Youth
And the sweetness
With which your boughs swelled,
Like the Silver Beech in flower;
O remember aged Great Ones,
Remember those days
Your entwining branches
Caressing your Beloved;
O remember and remember well
Those novel days of Emerald Youth.
In fact their long lives were actually reckoned in greater epochs than millennia or eons. In the Entish language such long periods of time were called wheeooehoboerthtimbeain , which translates as Toward the Infinity of Earth and Sky
A human or Hobbit, gazing at the throng of creatures assembling on Derndingle Dell, would probably assume that the green and brown creatures were all male. In fact since Ents were complex creatures, there had to be females somewhere in their world.
However, there were none at this assembly or the one of the previous Epoch. The female shepherds had tired of living in the wild wood and had departed for the plains east of the river, Anduin. There, they used their powerful connection with the earth to grow wonderful gardens of vegetables, fruits and flowers.
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