Entwives

Who they were

The Entwives were the female Ents, of the same origin and nature as the Shepherds of the Trees but of a different temperament that in the end divided the two halves of the people. Treebeard's account in The Two Towers is almost all that is known of them, and it is coloured by his sorrow. In the beginning the Ents and the Entwives walked together, but even then their hearts went in different directions. The Ents loved the great trees, the wild woods, the high hills and the mountain streams, and they wanted to talk to things rather than to tend them. The Entwives loved the smaller growing things: the meadows, the flowering shrubs, the fruit trees, the grasses and the grain. They wished to order and cultivate, and where the Ents let the forest grow as it would, the Entwives made gardens.

Appearance

Treebeard remembered the Entwives as beautiful, though he admitted that they had grown bent and brown from their labour in the fields, with sun-scorched hair and cheeks the colour of ripe apples. Their eyes were still the eyes of their people. Fimbrethil, his own beloved, whom he called Wandlimb, is the only Entwife named, and her Elvish name suggests the slender form of a young birch.

The gardens

In the Elder Days the Entwives crossed the Great River Anduin and settled in the lands east of it, where they laid out gardens and fields. They taught the earliest Men who came into those lands how to grow crops, and Men honoured them, though they had only names and stories for the Entwives and did not truly understand them. The Ents crossed the river to visit them from time to time, but the Entwives would not come back to the woods, and the Ents would not stay in the fields. Bit by bit the visits grew rarer, and the two kinds became strangers.

The loss

At the end of the Second Age Sauron made war on the Last Alliance of Elves and Men, and the lands east of Anduin were fought over and burned. When the Ents next crossed the river to seek the Entwives they found only a desert of ash, which became known as the Brown Lands, and the Entwives were gone. The Ents searched far and wide, calling their names, and asked every traveller for news, but they found nothing. Treebeard said that the Ents and Entwives had a song among the Elves about their differences and their parting, and that the Ents believed there might come a time when they would find each other again, but he did not sound as if he believed it.

Hints and rumours

The published texts leave a few traces. Samwise Gamgee told a story in The Green Dragon of a tree-like giant walking on the North Moors of the Shire, seen by his cousin Hal, which some readers have taken as a possible glimpse of an Entwife, though Treebeard himself was doubtful. Treebeard told the hobbits that if the Entwives had survived at all he might expect to find them in the Shire, which they would have loved, and asked Merry and Pippin to send word if they ever heard of them. Nothing came of it in the histories. In the letters preserved with the published texts Tolkien suggested that the Entwives had most likely been destroyed, and that if any survived they had fled far east.

Consequence

The loss of the Entwives meant the end of the Ents as a people, because without them there could be no Entings, no young Ents, and the survivors in Fangorn were all of them old. This is why Treebeard, having won the War of the Ring's most spectacular victory at Isengard, spoke of his people's future as one of slow decline into sleep, and why the Ents stand in the legendarium as one of its clearest images of a beauty passing from the world.

Entwives shared the tree-like form of the Ents but, according to Treebeard, were slimmer and more graceful, until long work in the fields bent them and browned them. Their hair was bleached by the sun and their faces reddened by it. Fimbrethil's name evokes a slender birch. Like the Ents they would have been huge by the measure of Men, though the hobbits never saw one.

The Entwives were gardeners and farmers. They ordered the land, planted fruit trees in rows, sowed grain and encouraged the smaller growing things to obey them, whereas the Ents spoke to trees and let them be. They were teachers of Men, from whom the earliest agriculture in the east of Middle-earth was learned. They spoke Entish and doubtless the Elvish tongues the Ents had learned, but their song and lore are lost with them. Treebeard recalled that they were proud of their work and wanted things to grow as they wished them to, and that this was the root of the disagreement between the two kinds.

The Entwives came into being with the Ents when Eru granted Yavanna's plea for guardians of the growing things. From the first their love went to the cultivated rather than the wild, which suggests that they answered that part of Yavanna's thought which delights in fruit and harvest as the Ents answered the part that delights in forest.

The Entwives disappeared when their gardens east of Anduin were destroyed in the war between Sauron and the Last Alliance at the end of the Second Age. The Ents have sought them ever since without result. Tolkien's own view, given in published letters, was that they had probably perished, and the Ents themselves expected to dwindle away without them.