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Rich H wrote:Or maybe, ass. I dunno.

"...‘ent’ simply means ‘giant’ in Old English... The Book of Lost Tales had referred to giants as one of the Úvanimor, or monster-folk (BLT I.75), a thoroughly traditional touch on Tolkien’s part; giants have a long, long tradition in folklore of being extremely dangerous if not downright wicked... Ents are one of the five Free Peoples; giants one of those races which may be called the Children of Morgoth... The stone-giants of The Hobbit do not seem to be aware of the presence of the travellers, but then again there’s no indication that they would have behaved any differently had they known; in short, they are portrayed as a perilous but almost impersonal force, rather like the thunder-storm itself... By contrast, a much more traditional view surfaces in the next chapter – when Bilbo is trying to think of the answer to Gollum’s last riddle (‘This thing all things devours’), his mind is filled with ‘all the horrible names of all the giants and ogres he had ever heard told of in tales’ (p. 158). Here we can plainly see the echoes of such traditional tales as ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ and ‘Jack the Giant Killer’, with their murderous, man-eating giants...Yet not all giants can be such monsters, for a chapter later Bladorthin casually suggests finding ‘a more or less decent giant’ to block up the goblins’ front gate in the mountain pass. It seems, then, that giants occupy a neutral ground, neither good nor evil as a race but varying from individual to individual. Dangerous, certainly – but as Gandalf points out in speaking of Treebeard, powerful and perilous is not the same thing as evil..."

-- John Rateliff, History of the Hobbit

timb wrote:

"...for a chapter later Bladorthin casually suggests finding ‘a more or less decent giant’ to block up the goblins’ front gate in the mountain pass.