Tolkien read-aloud: Rohirrim, Ents, and collective action hopes

A and I have reached Rohan in our read-aloud of LotR, and I was thinking about the story's belief in the need for -- and possibility of -- collective action in the face of collective emergency. One might theorize that one of the things this book has meant to readers in the 20th and 21st centuries is a hopeful image of a world, not so unlike our own, where the adults are actually capable of putting away individual despair, joining together, and committing collective resources against an otherwise-unsurvivable crisis.

What wouldn't we give for the leaders of the world today to respond to COVID, or climate change, as Theoden, Eomer, Hama manage to do. How dearly we want to rouse the ents. How good it is to see the peoples of Middle-earth struggle to come together, and then succeed in doing so.