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paradoxcase · 4 years

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So... I’ve just gotten to the end of the chapter about Merry and Pippin and Treebeard, and the next two chapters are about the Legolas/Gimli/Aragorn part of the story, and theoretically the next Merry/Pippin chapter could pull something and this will all be wrong, but I kind of doubt it based on what I remember of Tolkien’s story-telling style and it’s been a while since I made a post and I’m juggling a lot of “interesting things I’ve noticed in LOTR” post ideas right now, so I am just going to post this.

I could have sworn that when the movie had Pippin convince Treebeard to go to war against Saruman by leading him to a place where he saw all the trees Saruman had destroyed, which made him angry, that this was something that actually happened in the book and wasn’t invented for the sake of the movie, partially because a) it’s an example of Pippin being smart, and b) I’m sure I would have remembered feeling some surprise when I watched the movie the first time if it hadn’t been in the book. But it does appear that I’ve completely misremembered this and actually this does never happen in the book. The whole sequence with Merry and Pippin and Treebeard is actually completely different in tone in the book than it is in the movie. Like, I think the capture Treebeard well in the movie, in terms of what he’s like and what motivates him, but... In the movie the hobbits actually encourage Treebeard to go to war, and Treebeard calls the Entmoot, and the hobbits, especially Merry, are incredibly frustrated with how long the Entmoot takes to come to a decision and even try to explain to Treebeard that time is of the essence, etc., and then the Entmoot ultimately decides not to go to war and Treebeard is only convinced to change his mind by Pippin, who shows him something he presumably did not know before, which is that Saruman has murdered all of those trees.

In the book, Treebeard knows that Saruman and the orcs have been wantonly destroying the forest for some time now, this is revealed when the hobbits tell Treebeard about Saruman’s recent doings and about how they were captured by orcs who were definitely 100% working for Saruman. It’s at this point, just after Treebeard has met Merry and Pippin, that Treebeard gives his “some of those trees were my friends” line, talking about trees that he knows have been killed. Merry and Pippin do not have to, nor do they actually try to get Treebeard to go to war against Saruman - instead, Treebeard gets himself into a state by talking about the things that he already knows Saruman has done to the forest to where he starts saying “we have to do something about Saruman” and “what shall we do about Saruman?” Then he chastises himself for being “hasty” and instead decides to call the Entmoot. This was all Treebeard’s own decision-making - Merry and Pippin only influenced this by talking to Treebeard about Saruman. During the Entmoot itself, Merry and Pippin are totally understanding about the amount of time it takes (three days) and in fact Treebeard actually has another Ent called Quickbeam occupy them for those three days (Quickbeam has already decided to attack Saruman, and does not feel the need to actually sit through the Entmoot). In fact, after the Entmoot, Pippin even says to Treebeard, “the Ents made up their minds pretty quickly after all, didn’t they?” and Treebeard agrees that three days is pretty quick for Ents. So we do not have the hobbits pestering Treebeard to make the decision more quickly. And what’s more, what the Entmoot decides “quickly” in three days is that they are going to go to war against Saruman. Pippin doesn’t have to trick Treebeard into this because the Ents decided to do this all by themselves, in an orderly and official Ent fashion. All of that tension is just completely absent, and I think it also gives a fair bit of agency to the Ents that isn’t really present in the movie.

It’s interesting that here the movie has Pippin doing something smart that he didn’t do in the books, whereas all the other times I’ve brought up Pippin it’s to point out how the movie usually has him doing something dumb that he didn’t do in the books. But this could be balanced out a bit by the fact that in the books, Pippin does some pretty smart stuff that is probably singlehandedly responsible for allowing them to escape both the orcs and the Riders of Rohan. In addition to cutting his bonds early and freeing his hands, he actually convinces Grishnakh that he (Pippin) has the ring and that Grishnakh’s best bet to get it is actually to take the hobbits away from where the orcs are surrounded by the Riders. After taking them away, Grishnakh is killed by a rider and this causes the Riders to close in on the orcs, which puts them between the orcs and where the hobbits now are, and the hobbits cut their remaining bonds and simply leave. In the movie, I believe Grishnakh simply wanted to eat the hobbits and the hobbits had to escape from an active battlefield, and it was mostly luck that got them out. In the book, it was all Pippin. So maybe this scene where Pippin convinces Treebeard to fight is to make up for leaving this out in favor of a more action-packed sequence. I’m glad it’s there, because Pippin has a lot of dumb moments in the movie, and I think this part of the story where Pippin does some genuinely clever stuff is important character development for him, whereas before he saw himself as kind of a useless tourist who just came along on the mission because his friends were going, now he sees that he can actually be a useful person who can be helpful in some situations. In the book, Merry remarks that he is going to have to step up his game to match Pippin now; in the movie to my memory, he says something like “I think you actually did something smart” which is a bit less nice.

#lord of the rings #lotr #merry brandibuck #pippin took #treebeard

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