What happened to the entwives?

What happened to the entwives?

where did the ENT wives go it’s one of the most enduring mysteries of The Lord of the Rings tree Beard’s sadness and longing for them is heartbreaking so where are they hi everyone this is Robert welcome to inde deep geek on this channel we cover the Lord of the Rings in depth as well as other great fantasy worlds Like A Song of Ice and Fire And The Witcher welcome the ants are one of the most memorable and loved races we meet in The Lord of the Rings they are slow moving slow thinking and slow acting but filled with a sense of justice and right and wrong and underline the centrality of nature in tolk’s writings but at the heart of their story there is tragedy the ants are sad deeply sad because the ant wives went away many years ago and haven’t returned in order to understand what this means let’s recap on the history of the ants who they are and who the antt wives are the ants are an old race one of the oldest in Middle Earth they first came into being when AA one of the Valor The Godly Pantheon of tolkin legendarium told his wife yavanna about the new race he had created dwarves yavanna was concerned for all things that grow in the earth and she probably rightly thought that they will delve in the earth and the things that grow and live upon the Earth they will not heed many a tree shall feel the bite of their iron Without Pity though to be fair humans and elves probably F even more trees she went to manway the king of the Valar begging for the trees to have some protection the ants were added into the song of creation although there’s more than a hint that they may have been there already as part of aru’s ineffable plan anyway the ants were created and were known as the Shepherds of the trees they were there to protect them from all perils not just dwarves although the ancient enmity there may well explain gim’s initial innate dislike of fangor forest the ants were created pretty much as we saw them in The Lord of the Rings although over time they did become more treelike even slower and sleepier and bearing ever closer resemblances to the trees they each shepherded the elves taught them to speak a gift the ants were hugely appreciative of although they seemed less appreciative of the way the elves would then constantly talk to them sometimes they just wanted a bit of Peace So the trees and the forest were protected by the ants and it seems that that the entwives were with them for a long time joining together for the creation of Tings baby enss not that we see any of them in the main stories but feel free to imagine Baby Groot that’s what I do tree beard just describes them as being more bendable but of course with no anent wives now there are no more Tings and the ENT race is slowly dying or more accurately slowly becoming that which they once shepherded The Parting of the ways between the ants and the an wives seems to have been caused by different interests or purposes for existing the ants we know were all about the trees in the forest their shepherding of the trees was rather lay Fair it seems preferring nature wherever possible to go its own way for the forest to evolve and change as the centuries passed the end wives on the other hand had a slightly more proactive approach they liked to grow and tend and nurture so they moved out of the forest to what is now known as the brown lands which is sort of between Mordor and merkwood at the time though it was a rich and fertile land and there they taught humans and possibly even early Hobbits how to garden and farm and cultivate nature although this might seem like quite a big move the ant wives just leaving the ants for another part of the world entirely the split seems to have been largely amicable the ants traveled to see the an wives every now and then and new Tings entered the world all was still good but then this happened this is tree Beard’s own sad account it goes on for some time as you’d expect from an ENT so I’ve edited it down a bit but I’ve tried to keep the spirit of what happened in my own Hasty way I remember it was long ago he said in the time of the war between Sauron and the men of the sea we crossed over and doing and came to their land but we found a desert it was all burned and uprooted for war had passed over it but the entwives were not there long we called and long we searched but nowhere that we went could we find them our sorrow was very great yet the Wild Wood called and we returned to it for many years we used to go out every now and then and look for the antt wives walking far and wide and calling them by their beautiful names But as time passed we went more seldom and wandered less far and now the antt wives are only a memory for us and our beards are long and gray so what happened to them well the most likely answer is that they were simply killed by sauron’s retreating forces this was the end of the second age with the last Alliance of elves and men and Sauron seems to have basically adopted a scorched Earth policy when retreating back to Mordor he burned down The Gardens of the entwives and the entwives with them as I said this is the most likely solution to what happened the least satisfying perhaps but the most likely tree beard doesn’t believe this though when Pippen asked how the antt wives died tree be seems quite angry with the idea they didn’t die he said I never said they died we lost them I said we lost them and we cannot find them he sighed maybe this is tree beard just being optimistic or naive but perhaps some of them did survive and went off in search of new places to Garden we’re told that their Gardens were destroyed not them and we hear that the ants asked the people they met in the brown lands where the ant wives had gone and some said they saw them go south some West and some East the ants looked but perhaps not far enough perhaps the ant wives are still out there somewhere so if they did move on somewhere where might they have gone well we don’t know definitively but we do have a few Clues when Mary and Pippen talk to tree bid he makes them repeat over and again the description of the Shire a pleasant simple land of Agriculture and Gardens he asked them if they have ever seen any of the an wives there because he thought that they would like it there natural but well ordered with Gardens and gentle farming clearly the ants themselves had never been there to look treid didn’t know the land and had never heard of hobbits so it wasn’t one of the places he had searched and there’s this curious conversation between Sam and Ted sandyman The Miller’s son in the green dragon Inn near the beginning of the story it’s obviously a pub conversation and has a narrative purpose in setting up Ted sandyman as an unlikable rationalist compared to Sam the dreamer which will play out much later in the scouring of the Shire but despite those caveats when taken in combination with those other hints we’ve had about the antt wives it’s intriguing all right said Sam laughing with the rest but what about these tree men these Giants as you might call them they do say that one bigger than a tree was seen up away beyond the north Moors not long back who’s they my cousin hell for one he works for Mr bofin at Overhill and goes up to the north Farthing for the hunting he saw one says he did perhaps your hell’s always saying he’s seen things and maybe he sees things that ain’t there but this one was as big as elm tree and walking walking seven yards to a stride if it was an inch then I bet it wasn’t an inch what he saw was an elm tree as like as not but this one was walking I tell you and there ain’t no Elm Tree on the North Moors Ted sandyman might not believe Sam and his cousin Hal but we might so if and it’s a big if the antt wives survived sinon’s attack then the most likely place they ended up does seem to be in the Lush land somewhere north of the Shire why they never told their ENT husbands where they were is another matter but let’s put that to one side for the minute because at this point we would normally turn to tolken himself for an explanation of whether the antt wives were still alive he was generally very open about his writing ideas and the background to his world answering literally hundreds of letters from Friends colleagues and fans alike in often surprising detail but in this instance talkling himself self is actually not as much help as you might think in one letter responding to the question of whether the ants ever found the an wives he simply says As for the ant wives I do not know I have written nothing beyond the first few years of the fourth age but I think it is plain that there would be for ants no reunion in history so even if the antt wives were still alive the ants won’t find them why well this is what he says in another letter number 144 for those keeping count I think that in fact the entwives had disappeared for good being destroyed with their Gardens in the war of the last Alliance when Sauron pursued a scorched Earth policy and burned their land against the advance of the Allies down the anduin they survived only in the agriculture transmitted to men and Hobbits some of course may have fled East or even have become enslaved tyrants even in such Tales must have an economic and agricultural background to their soldiers and Metal Workers if any survived so they would indeed be far estranged from The Ant and any Ron would be difficult unless experience of industrialized and militarized agriculture had made them a little more anarchic I hope so I don’t know again that repetition of I don’t know what happened to them or where they are but a Clarity of thinking that the ants would not see them again I don’t think this is talken being deliberately evasive though in fact I think it was quite deliberate he didn’t want to provide an answer because the answer to where the entwives are actually distracts from the much more important point that he is trying to make the entwives are lost their absence has left an indelible mark on the ants and it makes them sad many things in Middle Earth thematically lost and found again Aragon as the Lost Heir to the Thrones of aror and Gondor is Chief among them the Shire is lost to the forces of industrialization and then replanted by Sam and so on things are lost and then found again and replanted or remade but for tolken not all lost things can be found or renewed or replaced some are just gone it is a part of our world and was a part of his he speaks movingly of his sense of loss of the rural idle of his youth he felt it lost forever to the forces of modernization and industrialization and even more tragically as a young man he took part in the First World War and the horrendous Battle of the P by the end of that war as he wrote simply but starkly in the for word to the Lord of the Rings all but one of my close friends were dead tolken knew loss keenly how could he create a world that reflected our own at a deep level without it also having loss at its heart the ending of The Lord of the Rings is Bittersweet we see Aragorn made King the enemy vanquished the lands freed from tyranny and all the rest of it but Frodo is never whole again gadriel talks about how she must diminish and pass into the west and the ants live on with their deep sense of loss of the ant wives we have no hope to give them for an Earthly reunion with the an wives tolken deliberately doesn’t ever give them that hope the entwives are gone and the ants have to carry on mourning their loss if that thought makes you sad or feeling a sense of loss then that is exactly what Tolen intended the ants lost the ant wives they call out their names but there will be no reunion for them not in this world anyway to wonder where they are is to miss the point the point is simply that they are lost as are some things in our lives but the ant lives go on as do our lives if you’d like to see more videos on the world of JRR talken and the Lord of the Rings please 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