• Welcome to the Fantasy Writing Forums. Register Now to join us!

Ents

ksmith

Dreamer
It is just about pointless to google Ents, but anyways. When the reader is watching an ent do something should it be Ent or ent? The character will not be interacting with it.
 
Can you give us a bit more context for this question? Do you mean Tolkien ents? Or do you mean tree people in general? Further is this a fan-fic work or is this an original piece.

(As an aside welcome to Mythic Scribes, I'm the guy that posts videos and is snarky.)
 

Heliotrope

Staff
Article Team
It would be ent, just like how human would be human... I would think?

And I'm Helio. I write really long posts but usually have no clue what I'm talking about :)
 

ksmith

Dreamer
Sorry for delayed reply, got a new laptop! The art is going to be original (trying to be at least) and ent it would be just like Helio described. The ents are going to be like Lord of The Rings look.
 
So I think Tolkien capitalized Ents?

The problem with the word, for my part, is that it looks very odd in lowercase: ents. Almost like ants.

There is something of a standard for races, that Helio hits upon, by which the names of fantasy races are treated like human, which isn't capitalized. Dwarves, elves, faerie, and so forth look fine to me in lowercase. To not capitalize them treats them as one would treat human, and the implication is that all of them denote something common. If they appear in equal numbers, equally frequently, and are not thought of as something unusual by the residents of the land, then the lowercase versions are good I think.

But if you mean to designate something out of the ordinary, perhaps the capitalized version would work. Plus, we do capitalize the names of groups of people when we speak of nationality: the French, the English, the Japanese. Similarly, ethnicities are often capitalized, particularly when they are derived from places: Mexican-American, Native American, Asian. Names derived from tribes are capitalized: Apache, Ute. Perhaps along these lines, "Ent" would work just fine.
 

Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
I think it comes to this, FV kind of said: If it's a species designation, elf works, if Elves are a people/culture then Elf.

But long run for me: author's choice, until a publisher who's paying the bills weighs in, then it's their choice, heh heh.
 
It's a species, not a race, which means it's spelled with a lower case e. If you have a species called tree people, you may have Ents, Dryads, Oakbeards and whatever you can come up with in that group of similar beings. I guess a good example is the humans, and then within that species you have Africans, Europeans, Americans and so forth (races capitalized).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is what I ended up with my little research.
 
Top