The Entmoot and the Destruction of Isengard

The Entmoot and the Destruction of Isengard marks the moment when the oldest living things in Middle-earth abandon their legendary unhastiness and take up arms. For centuries the Ents, shepherds of the trees, had watched Saruman’s axes fell their friends and his fires blacken the forest, but they did not act. The arrival of Merry and Pippin, escaped prisoners carrying news of Gandalf’s fall and Saruman’s treachery, finally spilled the long-brewing wrath. Treebeard, the eldest Ent, summoned a gathering—an Entmoot—in the deep dingle of Derndingle, a great bowl ringed with evergreen trees. There, for three days, the Ents debated in their slow, sonorous language, a speech so deliberate that a single greeting might take hours. The hobbits, waiting with the young Ent Quickbeam, grew weary of the endless chant, but they sensed the forest itself tensing like a thunderstorm about to break. On the third day, the Ents’ voices rose to a great clamour and then fell silent. When they spoke again, it was with a single decision: they would march to war.

The March and the Assault

Treebeard lifted Merry and Pippin onto his shoulders, and at the head of some fifty Ents—and behind them, a rustling host of Huorns, trees that had grown almost Entish and could move with terrible speed—they strode south through the night. They sang as they went, a deep booming chant: "To Isengard! Though Isengard be ringed and barred with doors of stone, we go, we go, we go to war, to hew the stone and break the door." The Ents reached the Wizard’s Vale after midnight and found Saruman’s army already marched away to destroy Rohan. The gates of Isengard were shut, but arrows and stones from the walls only angered the Ents. Treebeard hammered on the doors, calling for Saruman, and when no answer came, the Ents began their work. They pushed, pulled, tore, shook, and hammered; in five minutes the great gates lay in ruin. Then they attacked the walls themselves, tearing up stone like bread-crust, their fingers freezing onto rock and ripping it apart. Saruman, panicking, fled to Orthanc, but Quickbeam nearly caught him before he slipped through the tower door. From the tower, Saruman unleashed his machinery: vents and shafts all over the plain spouted liquid fire, scorching and blistering several Ents. One, Beechbone, was caught in a spray and burned like a torch. That sent the Ents into a fury beyond anything the hobbits had seen. They roared and trumpeted until stones cracked at the mere noise, hurling slabs of masonry hundreds of feet into the air and smashing against Orthanc’s windows. But Orthanc itself, built of Númenórean stone, could not be cracked. Treebeard called his folk back and set them to a different task.

The Drowning and the Aftermath

Treebeard had a plan long prepared in his old head. The Ents dug great pits and trenches, gathering all the waters of the Isen and every other spring and stream they could find. At midnight they broke the dams and poured the gathered waters through a gap in the northern wall, down into Isengard. The flood filled the plain, hissing and steaming as it found its way into shafts and spoutholes, causing explosions and gusts of fire. By morning, Isengard was a vast, steaming lake, with Orthanc standing like a dark island in its midst. Saruman was trapped in his tower, his armies destroyed, his works drowned. The Ents had done what no army of Men could have done: they had broken the power of Isengard without a pitched battle, using only the strength of their ancient limbs and the patient cunning of the earth itself. When Gandalf, Théoden, and Aragorn arrived later, they found the hobbits sitting on the rubble, smoking pipe-weed, and guarding the ruined gates. Treebeard had taken over the management of Isengard, and Saruman remained locked in Orthanc, his voice still dangerous but his power broken. The Ents would watch him for years, until at last he was released and met his end in the Shire.