How many Huorns ?

[Animalmother]

How many Huorns were there at the Deeping Coomb, and perhaps other places?

Tolkien tells us there were about forty-nine ents at the entmoot in Fangorn before the storming and drowning of Isengard. There are only a few clues about Huorn numbers, e.g., they filled the Deeping Coomb and devoured thousands of orcs. The exact geography of the Deeping Coomb and Helm's Deep is unclear. One map makes out the Deeping Coomb as at least twenty square miles area, but there are other maps which I have not seen.

It seems a handful of ents could shepherd large numbers of Huorns. As the ents were the Shepherds of the Trees, another clue would be the number of sheep a single shepherd can manage. If a shepherd can manage 200 sheep, that would give us a population of about 10,000 herdable Huorns. That is too few to fill the Deeping Coomb. If there were 300 Huorns per acre, about 180,000 Huorns would be required to cover one square mile.

I'm baffled.

[MatthewM]

Good question. Perhaps it's another Tolkien mystery? Personally, if I was to take a stab at this, I would say that maybe they didn't actually "fill" their area of attack, for instance the Deeping Coomb, to the brim. Remember how fast the Huorns are described to be. Pippin couldn't even make out their shapes because of their speed. It could have been the Huorns just moved so fast that it seemed as though they filled the place up to the brim. They were much faster than orcs, of course. 10,000 Huorns seems a lot to me as is. I can see no reason why they wouldn't be able to devour countless orcs in a matter of minutes, their speed acting as an illusion, looking like more Huorns than there actually were.

[Oddwen]

Wasn't there an unnatural gloom described underneath their boughs, as well?

Maybe they had shadows they could command. (Oh no, do Huorns have wings?)

[littlemanpoet]

Phew! I was afraid this thread belonged in Middle Earth Mirth and was the beginnings of a new running gag, "How many Huorns does it take to ....... change a palantir?" :p

To answer the question as best it can be in my humble opinion: "a forest full".