Treebeard (person)

Treebeard, who is also called Fangorn, is the guardian of Fangorn forest and the trees and ents who live there. Being tree-like, his life is nearly timeless, and his conversation with Merry and Pippen in The Two Towers reveals as much: "I used to spend a week just breathing." He is not the oldest among living things (the song about the living creatures reveals as much), nor even older than all the trees; he freely admits that "there are hollow dales in this land where ... the trees are older than I am." Nevertheless he is Fangorn the tree-herd.

A good description of an ent is much sought after. It is said that ents came first (after elves and dwarves), then trolls were made as a mockery of them, so that trolls ought to appear as similar to ents. But ents are very similar in appearance to the trees they tree-herd, so ents like Quickbeam tend to look like the rowan, while others would look like the birch, beech, fir, or other trees. Treebeard was described as having "seven-toed feet" and being roughly fourteen feet tall, covered in a smooth brown skin. It's the ents' eyes that fascinate me, however. If I were given a choice of characteristics I would like to gain from characters in The Lord of the Rings, I would choose to have eyes like those of Treebeard. As Pippen said, "One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking..." But I suppose I would need to live a while longer before anything like that starts happening...