XPost: rec.arts.books.tolkien   
   From: no.spam@no.spam   
      
   "Hm! Here we are!" said Treebeard, breaking his long silence.   
   "I have brought you about seventy thousand ent-strides, but what   
   that comes to in the measurement of your land I do not know."   
      
   I suppose ent-strides been estimated already on this forum but   
   here are my calculations anyway:   
      
   Treebeard is "at least fourteen foot high." I'm five feet ten   
   and my stride is about a yard. Assuming a linear ratio, I calculated   
   Treebeard's stride to be 7.2 feet. (One small step for an Ent;   
   one giant stride for Entkind).   
      
   Therefore 70,000 Ent-strides x 7.2 / 5280 = 95.45 miles   
      
   Then I double checked this figure from the following:   
      
   "Anyhow we are near the roots of the Last Mountain. Part of the name   
   of this place might be Wellinghall..."   
      
   Looking on a map of Middle Earth, I measured the distance from where   
   the Entwash leaves Fanghorn Forest (the scene of Eomer's battle)   
   to the nearest eastern slopes of the Misty Mountains to be about   
   100 miles, so the figure is roughly correct.   
      
   How long did this take? I was just a toddler when Roger Bannister ran   
   a mile in under 4 minutes at the British Empire Games in Vancouver.   
   That's better than 15 mph. Assuming Treebeard can stride at the same   
   pace, he can do ~36 mph. It must have been terrifying for Saruman's   
   orcs and Dunlanders to see these giants coming at them so fast.   
   However, even at the more leisurely pace of, say 25 mph it would   
   have taken Treebeard something like 4 hours worth of striding   
   to reach Wellinghall, which sounds reasonable.   
      
   SQ   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)