Here’s What Happened To The Entwives, According To Tolkien Himself

thegamer.com:

Usually it’s crude to begin an article with the dictionary definition of what you’re talking about, hence why I’m waiting until the second paragraph. But I feel like the Entwives need explaining. They’re the subject of about three seconds of dialogue in The Lord of the Rings films by Peter Jackson and Philippa Boyens, and only get a fraction more attention in the books. To understand what an Entwife is, though, you first need to understand what an Ent is.

I believe the best description is from a pencil note that J.R.R. Tolkien scribbled on a letter to Colonel Worksett, a reader of The Lord of the Rings. “Ents were either souls sent to inhabit trees, or else that slowly took the likeness of trees owing to their inborn love of trees,” Tolkien writes in what has become known as Letter 247. They’re generally gentle beings, who shepherd trees and manage the forests of Middle-earth, but join the fight against evil when Merry and Pippin show them the environmental destruction caused by Saruman. Tolkien famously hated allegory, but this is a clear equivalent to the industrialisation of his home in Birmingham.

Related: FromSoftware Should Make A Lord Of The Rings Game

The Entwives are mentioned briefly by Treebeard, the chief Ent that Merry and Pippin encounter and communicate with. They were, predictably, the wives of the Ents, but many years ago they were “lost”. Not lost as in died, Treebeard recounts, lost as in they don’t know where they are or where they went. Like when you wandered away from your mam in the big Tesco as a toddler and had to get a nice lady to say your name on the tannoy system. Except there’s no Middle-earth tannoy system to locate the Entwives, and as such there haven’t been Entings (baby Ents) for