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Originally Posted by LMP
If that does not denote evil, I don't know what does. So I do not think it's a stretch to say that there are evil trees in Fangorn and the Old Forest. It's a different kind of evil, but "a rose by any other name" and all that....
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Unless 'black' is being used in the sense of darkness, an absence of 'light' implying a lack of moral 'light' or goodness, so that the trees are not actively evil, but merely not 'good'.
Treebeard is sentient to the extent that he is capable of both distinguishing good & evil, & of being able to choose one over the other. Maybe he simply means that those particular trees don't have that capacity & so are dangerous to the unwary, or to the tresspasser.
In short, I'm wary of attributing moral choices to trees, plants or animals. Do they have souls? Can they understand & make moral choices? (Actively)Evil trees seems to beg more questions than it resolves...