Entwives

A Few Art Renditions of Entwives and Commentary

The mates of the Ents, who had their gardens in the regions later known as the Brown Lands. When Sauron blasted that region, the Entwives escaped into the wilds of Middle-earth and were lost to the Ents (or so the Ents themselves believed).

  


When Fimbrethil , an entwife, was a young Entmaiden, she was lovely and lightfooted. As she grew older she became bent and brown with parched golden hair and red cheeks, but Treebeard still found her beautiful. Fimbrethil and the other Entwives left the Ents and the wild woods to grow gardens east of the Anduin. For a time they prospered, but when Treebeard went east to seek Fimbrethil in the time of the War of the Last Alliance, he found that the gardens had become the ruined Brown Lands and that Fimbrethil and the Entwives were gone. It is not known what happened to the Entwives. They may have perished, or they may have wandered farther east. When Treebeard began the march against Isengard on March 2, 3019, he said that he would have liked to see Fimbrethil one last time.Fimbrethil (meaning Slender Beech) had been missing since Sauron's forces destroyed the gardens of the Entwives during the Second Age. At the time of the War of the Ring, Treebeard had not seen his beloved Fimbrethil for over 3,000 years. Many other races wrote tragic songs about the loss of the Entwives.

"Especially poignant, Treebeard's account of the fate of the lost Entwives tragically mirrors the topography of modern day earth: "...the Entwives desired order, and plenty, and peace. So the Entwives made gardens to live in...the land of the Entwives blossomed richly, and their fields were full of corn...we crossed over Anduin and came to their land; but we found a desert: it was all burned and uprooted, for war had passed over it" (p. 93,Towers). Treebeard's frustration and trepidation regarding the actions of man on Middle Earth and the loss of the Entwives serves as a warning to readers, portraying what may happen if we continue to disregard the balance inherent in the natural world."  Talese Shertzer-