[Aiwendil]

Child of the 7th Age wrote:

Perhaps the problem with Ent and Entwife did not lay in the different pursuits they had chosen but rather in the lack of communication between them.

I don't know - to me it really does seem that the problem between the Ents and Entwives arose primarily from their differing pursuits. Remember Letter 163:

And into this has crept a mere piece of experience, the difference of the 'male' and 'female' attitude to wild things, the difference between unpossessive love and gardening.

These are the characteristics that directly led to the Ents and Entwives living separately; their pursuits differed to such a degree that they could not pursue them both together in the same place.

Does this make the Entwives like Saruman? Yes, I would say. Obviously, not much like Saruman - but I think that again we can apply the Artificial vs. Natural distinction that pervades so much of Tolkien's work. The Ents are just about supremely Natural; Saruman of course embodies Artifice. The Entwives are somewhere in between - or, one could say, they are members of a fairly select group - Tolkien's Good Artificers. Aule is the prime example. He wants to create, to make things with skill, but he wants to do so for essentially good reasons. The Entwives have lesser ambitions, but again their goal in cultivating and gardening is not evil.

Having rambled a bit about that, I feel obligated to say something about the chapter at hand. I think that one of the few changes made by Peter Jackson that was actually for the better was the direct depiction of the attack on Isengard. Now I do not think that it was a mistake for Tolkien to tell the story as he did - through Merry and Pippin as a kind of flashback. Rather, I think that this is a prime example of a real difference between the literary and the cinematic. The fundamental principle at work here is that a movie is capable of making a direct visual appeal to the audience, and that is simply something that a book cannot do. In this one matter at least, motion pictures have an innate advantage over books. It would be a mistake for a LotR movie not to depict the Ents attacking Isengard, because that scene is one with the potential for such a powerful visual impact. In fact, to refer to such a momentous event without actually showing it would probably feel like a cheat to the audience.

But it would be a mistake to take this kind of thinking into the literary realm. For in a book, there is no opportunity for direct visual appeal to be missed. What a book substitutes for a movie's visual impact is the beauty of its prose. A written account of the ruin of Isengard achieves an impact on the reader not through the literal events that it depicts but through the words used to convey those events - as can be shown by the fact that it is quite possible for two writers to write about the same event and achieve very different results.

What this means is that there is nothing to be gained by telling of the attack on Isengard directly, rather than through Merry and Pippin - for either way, we are reading an account, not seeing the events. But what is there to be gained from this technique? One thing that has already been mentioned is suspense. We know that the Ents are going to attack Isengard but for several chapters we are left to wonder about the outcome.

But I think there is another reason that this way of telling the story is desirable: it allows the story to come out of Merry's and Pippin's mouths. For, after all, how would our narrator describe the attack? Can a straightforward description, even through the eyes of the Hobbits, really convey the fury of the assault? Perhaps I'm underestimating Tolkien's narrative ability, but I simply don't see how an account of the battle in the narrator's objective voice could do it justice. Merry and Pippin, on the other hand, can report the events with splendid subjectivity and with all the wonder and amazement a pair of Hobbits can conjure up.