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I've got a bit of a weird question.

On page 981 of my copy of The Lord of the Rings, part way through Book 6 Chapter 6 (Many Partings) Treebeard and Galadriel meet. He says those famous lines ("The world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air") and then remarks that "I do not think we shall meet again."

Celeborn is unsure, but Galadriel says: "Not in Middle-earth, nor until the lands that lie under the wave are lifted up again. Then in the willow-meads of Tasarinan we may meet in the Spring. Farewell!"

This has gotten me thinking, and I have to ask -- do we have any idea, or any instance where Tolkien gave thought to, what the eventual fate of the Ents will be? I know they aren't Children of Illuvatar, per say -- created by Varda's request rather than intent or even Aule's little misstep with the dwarves -- but they are sentient, and they are well meaning. What do we think will become of them, in the end?
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This is that. Galadriel is expressing a hope about the distant future (post end-of-Time) in line with Elven philosophy, and she seems to be including the Ents in it. Tolkien does suggest, and it is generally understood by readers, so this is less information than confirmation, that Ents do have souls, so we should at least expect their spirits to be around at the end of the World and need resolving somehow. But technically speaking, even what happens to the Elves at that point is filtered by Tolkien through the lens of their own philosophy, not the author's stated objective truth.

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That is a fair point @Elenhir -- I suppose I was looking for more authoritative writing on the subject, but then again -- even the Silmarillion is filtered through the elven view. Thanks for the point.

Still, I wonder -- do the Ents have souls? Or rather, do they have mortal souls, or do they have souls in the sense that the Powers do? In Silmarillion Chapter 4, Of Aulë and Yavanna, Manwë remarks that "When the Children awake, then the thought of Yavanna will awake also, and it will summon spirits from afar, and they will go among the kelvar and the olvar, and some will dwell therein, and be held in reverence, and their just anger shall be feared."

I think this casts a little more light and a little more confusion -- since it is not the ents which awake when the Children do (which would liken them to the Children) but rather the thought of Yavanna which will awak -- and they seem to be inhabited by "spirits from afar," which sounds more like Maiar made flesh. Still, I think you're right that it's intentionally unclear.
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I always thought that the Ents were like old plaza loremasters; eventually, if they do not die, they become treeish. In our age of the world, it would take an elf to discern a tree from its shepherd. But as to whether Ents have souls? Well, let's start with Old Man Willow. Somewhere he is talked about as an ancient spirit inhabiting a tree. Can we read 'spirit' here as the same as 'soul' in your question?
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Tolkien specifically used the word soul when referring to ents in letter no. 247: while "[n]o one knew whence they (Ents) came or first appeared," some in-universe authorities held "that the Ents were either souls sent to inhabit trees, or else that slowly took the likeness of trees owing to their inborn love of trees." Of course, it's debatable whether we should read soul in this context as synonymous with fëa; I'm personally inclined not to. I agree with @Androthelm that the account in The Silmarillion sounds more like Maiar—or, possibly, spirits "of any other order [than the Valar and Maiar] that Ilúvatar has sent into Eä" (Valaquenta)—than Incarnates' souls. However, Ents could procreate, so even if the initial generation were Maiar, it's doubtful that later generations were. Given what we know about Maiarin procreation in other contexts (cf. Melian, possibly Boldogs and Eagles), I think the souls/spirits of Entings were most likely freshly provided by Ilúvatar rather than recruited from the pool of Ainur already milling about in Arda. In that scenario, and since Entings were clearly sentient, I'm happy to describe those souls as fëar.
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@Eldy Dunami, I'm also thinking of text VIII of 'Myths Transformed'. When it talks about speaking peoples and casually mentions Eru providing fear, it doesn't appear to be a spectacularly high hurdle in Tolkien's mind. The fandom likes to throw everything unknown into the bucket of 'Maiar', but I'd argue it's more in line with Tolkien's treatment to assume things that appear to have fear have fear. Maybe not by itself, if we have no idea, but before raising the idea of 'Maiar'.

And I would argue spirits of any other order that Iluvatar has sent into Ea includes Incarnate souls.

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@Chrysophylax Dives I think we probably can read "Spirit" and "Soul" similarly, at least so far as Elves and Powers go. After all, what happens on their unhousing / death (I.e. they are taken west, judged, and may be given physical form again) seems similar. The one place where I think things change is the question of permanent judgement -- Melkor is thrust into the void, unlike Feänor, who, while remaining in Mandos, has the potential to someday be released. But that may be more a matter of the scale of the crime, than anything.

Still, as far as the physics of the thing goes, soul and spirit seem, to my eye anyway, fairly interchangeable. I used "mortal soul" to specify, I suppose, fear bound at the beginning of life already to hroar as opposed to spirits which had a life before their physical incarnation.

As to @Eldy Dunami and @Elenhir's points on the maiar -- I think you're both right that the shepherds may be spirits "of any other order" (an often overlooked I element of the cosmology, and my personal favorite for an answer to the ent-eagle-spirit question) or fear sent from Illuvatar. Still, I think that sort of requires us to ask the question @Chrysophylax Dives is pulling towards -- are the fear of the Children still spirits in the sense of the Maiar, Valar, and "any other order" (albeit smaller)? Or are mortal souls a distinct category?
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Androthelm wrote: Tue Dec 01, 2020 6:03 pm Or are mortal souls a distinct category?
They are a distinct category in the sense that they are fear, not ealar. When Tolkien draws a distinction between the two, the distinction is that the fear is by nature designed to be wedded to a physical form. Fear appear to get all or most of the uses of the word 'soul', though 'spirit' is used with both fear and ealar, and is used more extensively for talking about fear than is the word 'soul', which Tolkien didn't use very often. So a general invocation of the word 'spirit' does not preclude talking about fear by any means. Fear are distinct from 'spirit in the sense of Maia and Vala', which is a constrained sense of the word, but not from the unspecified general term 'spirit'. Which is what we have in the 'any other order' quote: an unspecified use of the term.

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@Elenhir, Text VIII was in the back of my mind concerning the possibility of a mixed first generation Maiar / subsequent generation fëar nature, since (in my reading) Tolkien proposes that as a possible explanation for the Eagles, noting that Sorontar may have been a Maiar but that some of the later Eagles are mentioned to be his descendants. (On the other hand, one could read Text VIII as indicating these are competing, not reconcilable explanations.) The main thing that sways me towards favoring a Maiar or unspecified Ainur origin for the earliest Ents is the line in The Silmarillion that "the thought of Yavanna will ... summon spirits from afar," which is not how I would describe the process of Eru directly providing fëar to new Incarnates. But, of course, my inclinations for how to describe things does not evidence make, and it's not my intention to present this interpretation as the only plausible reading.
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I have little to add to the learned discussion that has already ensued ... though that will, of course, not prevent me from writing a lot :wink: :grin:

I will start out by adding a couple of relevant quotations from Morgoth's Ring that, especially when taken together, attempt to define the concepts of the fëa and the ëala.

In his commentary on chapter 3, ‘Of the Coming of the Elves' in the Later Quenta Silmarillion, Christopher Tolkien notes:
‘Morgoth's Ring’, p.165 wrote:There is a footnote to the word ëalar in this passage:
‘spirit’ (not incarnate, which was fëa, Sindarin] fae). ëala ‘being’.
Later, in ‘The Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth’, there is a full definition of the word fëa:
‘Morgoth's Ring’, p.349 wrote:fëa ‘spirit’: the particular ‘spirit’ belonging to and ‘housed’ in any one hröa of the Incarnates. It corresponds, more or less, to ‘soul’; and to ‘mind’, when any attempt is made to distinguish between mentality, and the mental processes of Incarnates, conditioned and limited by the co-operation of the physical organs of the hröa. It was thus in its being (apart from its experience) the impulse and power to think: enquire and reflect, as distinct from the means of acquiring data. It was conscious and self-aware: ‘self’ however in Incarnates included the hröa. The fëa was said by the Eldar to retain the impress or memory of the hröa and of all the combined experiences of itself and its body. (Quenya fëa (dissyllabic) is from older *phaya. Sindarin faer, of the same meaning, corresponds to Quenya fairë ‘spirit (in general)’, as opposed to matter (erma) or ‘flesh’ (hrávë).)
As @Elenhir has already said, the distinction here is not between mortal and immortal, but rather between incarnate or discarnate. As mentioned by @Eldy Dunami, the English word ‘soul’ is not exactly synonymous with Quenya fëa, and in some ways ‘spirit’, with its connotations of ‘mind’, is probably the closer translation for exactly the same reasons it is a fitting translation of Quenya ëala.
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With respect to the Ents, then, the first question is whether the spirits that animated them were ëalar or fëar – i.e. whether they were inherently incarnate or discarnate. As has already been pointed out above (by @Androthelm and later by @Eldy Dunami), the phrase “spirits from afar”, suggests that these spirits, summoned by the thought of Yavanna, were naturally discarnate, i.e. ëalar. The concept of Entings, however, would imply fëar, as the Entings would, obviously, be inherently incarnate.

All of this summarising suggests to me that Tolkien never really thought this through. His concepts of ëalar and fëar, and, for the latter, of mortal or immortal, were thoroughly thought through when it came to the Ainur, the Elves and Men, but he never really went on to extend these concepts systematically to many of the other creatures we meet — the great Eagles, the Ents, dragons, trolls, and even the Dwarves seem oddly tacked on to the idea of Elves and Men.

The consequence of this, I hope, is that it frees me to propose that we are, ultimately, facing another enigma — an unsolvable conundrum that Tolkien never did get round to address in a fashion that would resolve the inherent inconsistencies of the situation.
“The love of Faery is the love of love” J.R.R. Tolkien

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Yes @Troelsfo I think you're right -- in the end, to use Tolkien himself and put it poetically, we are in the very corner of a corner of a distant tree in Niggle's Leaf, hardly sketched or even properly imagined, only implied by other things.
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Yes, a very apt metaphor – thank you, @Androthelm.

Maybe a tree in those mountains far away that Niggle moves on to after having finished with “Niggle's Parish” :smile:
“The love of Faery is the love of love” J.R.R. Tolkien

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A tree, or a tree-herd? Impossible to say at this distance :wink:
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