One of my absolute favorite part of the wild, semi-hallucinogenic nature of the Lord of the Rings books and why I like them so much better than even the perfectly serviceable epic fantasy of the movies, was the trees.

You may already know this, but in the books, it's not quite so simple as some trees can walk around, and some are normal trees. It's like... all trees exist on a spectrum. Almost all of them are sleeping and stationary almost all of the time. But that's not their only mode. When they are roused, which takes quite a lot both in terms of events and in terms of time, they become different. Not just some special trees, but all of them, although some are more lively and rousable than others. Only the special ones have eyes and branch-arms and stuff and can get up and be mobile, but all of them are rousable.

When Saruman starts woodchippering his way through the forest, killing trees on an industrial scale, they don't really get roused up enough to be cognizant of it for quite a while. They're just wood, after all, just normal trees, almost all of them. But after it goes on for a while, and the ones of them that can walk around and talk start to discuss the problem and how it's for serious something that they can't take lightly, the level of activity they can display -- all of them, not just the special ones who can walk around -- slowly gets to be greater, as they start to get roused to action about it.

There's an orcish army, during the big fighting that starts to develop among the mobile types of creatures, and they have to go through a forest to get where they're going. And it's not really clear what happens, but this ungodly screaming and clashing sound starts to come from the direction of the forest, and then dwindles, and then goes away. And nothing of the army is ever seen again. They're just gone. The whole fuckin army just like it never was.

It doesn't end there. The war continues, and there's a sort of foggy period in the weather, and when the sun starts to burn away the fog, the forest is just in a different place, overlapping with Saruman's big factory and fortress. The trees are growing in among all his stuff, busting through the paving-stones and cracking through the foundations of his buildings and their solid stone walls, with thick roots stronger than anyone could cut through with any metal tool. The whole fuckin place is ruined, like a tree buckling through the sidewalk, or the foundation of a house, or a water-pipe, effortlessly.

But they're just trees. They weren't there before the fog rolled through, but now they are, and his fortress is smashed to bits with their roots growing through it now.

LotR is some fuckin great, great stuff