Today’s video is brought to you by Magic the Gathering’s new expansion: the Wilds of Eldraine.
This brand new set, available now, dives into the world of fairy stories. Go to the link in
the description to check out these fairytales with a twist and dive deeper into the world of Magic!
They are among the great tree folk of Yavanna. While they
would have a fruitful mentorship with the humans of Middle-earth,
their lands would meet tragedy and their fate would be shrouded in mystery.
Today, on Nerd of the Rings, we cover the Entwives of Middle-earth.
Like the male ents, the entwives date back to some of the earliest days of
Arda. After Iluvatar shows mercy upon her husband Aule’s creation - the dwarves,
she pleads to Eru through Manwe, to give life to some of her creation. For she feared for
the trees and plants that they might be so easily destroyed by Aule’s creation.
Thus, the ents are born. Tolkien says they were either souls sent to inhabit trees,
or they slowly took on the likeness of trees due to their inborn love of them. The Ents,
also known as the Shepherds of the Trees,
would protect the forests from the beings of Middle-earth like dwarves, orcs, and others.
The male Ents were devoted to Orome, the huntsman of the Valar, while the Entwives are devoted to
Yavanna herself. While an exact time isn’t given, it is implied that the ents are created around the
same time the elves awoke at Cuivienen. And it is indeed the elves who teach the trees to talk,
giving them desire to speak, and teaching them elvish. As Treebeard would say,
the elves “cured the ents of their dumbness” - a great gift that could not be forgotten.
In addition to learning evlish, the Ents would develop their own language - Entish,
which grew in complexity over the long years of their existence. In our video on Treebeard, we
covered the Ents time in Beleriand, and how they assisted Beren in defeating a group of dwarves.
However, it is in the lands of Eriador where the tale of the Entwives takes place. As remembered
by Elrond during his council in Rivendell, there was once a time when a squirrel could
carry a nut from tree to tree from Rivendell to the Great Sea - indicating the vast forests that
once covered the majority of Eriador. Not only would the forests dwindle over the centuries,
but those of ent-kind would also split on separate missions, as Treebeard says:
‘When the world was young, and the woods were wide and wild, the Ents and
the Entwives – and there were Entmaidens then: ah! the loveliness of Fimbrethil,
of Wandlimb the lightfooted, in the days of our youth! – they walked together and
they housed together. But our hearts did not go on growing in the same way:
Sometime during either the First or Second Age, the Entwives began to move farther away
from the male ents. While the males of their race shepherded the forests,
the Entwives loved to plant and tend to smaller things like flowers, grass, and
herbs. The Entwives pass over the Anduin River and settle in lands south of Mirkwood in Rhovanion.
We are told that after Morgoth is defeated at the end of the First Age in Beleriand,
the gardens of the entwives blossomed. It is also said that the Entwives taught agriculture
to the Men of that land, who in turn held the entwives in great honor. Unfortunately,
destruction would come for the gardens of the Entwives.
Late in the Second Age, as the Last Alliance of Elves and Men marches toward Mordor, the dark
lord would turn to terrible methods to slow their progress. He burns the gardens of the entwives,
and they are ever after known as the Brown Lands. Treebeard recounts
the day when the Ents left to find the Entwives, only to discover devastation:
‘I remember it was long ago – in the time of the war between Sauron and the Men of the
Sea – desire came over me to see Fimbrethil again. Very fair she was still in my eyes,
when I had last seen her, though little like the Entmaiden of old. For the Entwives were bent and
browned by their labour; their hair parched by the sun to the hue of ripe corn and their cheeks like
red apples. Yet their eyes were still the eyes of our own people. 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.
But the Entwives were not there. Long we called, and long we searched; and we asked all folk that
we met which way the Entwives had gone. Some said they had never seen them; and some said that they
had seen them walking away west, and some said east, and others south. 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 again and look for the Entwives, 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 Entwives are only a memory for us, and our beards are long and grey.
Here we turn to what is without question one of the most asked about mysteries
of Middle-earth - what happened to the Entwives? In the Letters of JRR Tolkien,
he twice responds to this very question. In April 1954, Tolkien responded to a number
of questions from Naomi Mitchison and after talking about Tom Bombadil - and mentioning
Bombadil didn’t have any connection to the Entwives, he goes on to say:
I think that in fact the Entwives had disappeared for good, being destroyed with their gardens in
the War of the Last Alliance (Second Age 3429–3441) 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 Ents,
and any rapprochement would be difficult – unless experience of industrialized
and militarized agriculture had made them a little more anarchic. I hope so. I don’t know.
One of the prevailing hopes of fans for the survival of the entwives comes in one of the early
chapters of The Lord of the Rings: The Shadow of the Past. In this chapter, we find Sam conversing
with Ted Sandyman and among the things they butt heads on is the alleged sightings of giant
tree-men beyond the North Moors of the Shire. Sam relays that it was as big as an elm tree and
walking seven yards to a stride. He also notes that there are no elm trees on the North Moors.
The issue of the entwives has not only brought about discussion among fans for decades,
but was one Tolkien was undecided on for many long years. 18 years after his previous letter
we referenced, Tolkien was still unsure as to what happened to the Entwives. In June 1972,
he wrote back to Fr. Douglas Carter who had asked if the Ents ever found the Entwives:
As for the Entwives: I do not know. I have written nothing beyond the
first few years of the Fourth Age… …But I think in Vol. II pp. 80–811
it is plain that there would be for Ents no re-union in ‘history’ – but Ents and their
wives being rational creatures would find some ‘earthly paradise’ until the end of this world:
beyond which the wisdom neither of Elves nor Ents could see. Though
maybe they shared the hope of Aragorn that they were ‘not bound for ever to
the circles of the world and beyond them is more than memory.’. . . .
Like the fates of the Blue Wizards, Radagast, Shelob,
or any number of mysteries of Middle-earth, the fate of the entwives has captured
the imagination of fans and lead to a multitude of theories. More recently,
in a since-deleted 2017 Quora post, a user named Pip Willis claimed that his father had
drawn a map of Middle-earth and was able to meet with Tolkien in person in 1971. Willis
further alleges that Tolkien wrote on the map west of the Sea of Rhun “here may be Entwives”.
This certainly makes for an interesting potential development in the Entwives discussion. However,
it’s worth noting that the area shown in the alleged map depicts a forest south of
where the River Running meets the River Carnen - where no forest is depicted in the published
map of The Lord of the Rings. Its authenticity debatable, it is yet another in a long line of
uncertainty surrounding the Entwives. And while fans will continue to debate and speculate for
years to come, we can take comfort in Tolkien’s final words in the 1972 letter that the Ents and
Entwives could be reunited after the ending of the world - beyond the wisdom of elves
or ents - and perhaps beyond the very circles of the world where there is more than memory.
Like Tolkien himself, I enjoy a good fairy tale. And with the new Wilds of Eldraine, every Magic
game I play features age-old tales with fun, new twists. With its fairy story roots, Wilds of
Eldraine makes a great addition to your existing Magic the Gathering deck. Whether you go for
things like dragons, dwarves, and fighting bears, or you want to get nuts and unleash a gingerbread
horseman, you can’t go wrong. No matter how you play, there’s a great time to be had while playing
Magic: the Gathering: The Wilds of Eldraine. Order now through the link in the description.
As always, I want to say a huge thank you to all my patreon and
youtube supporters who make this channel possible:
TomDaBombadil19, Lissomie the Sinda, Rabbi Rob Thomas, Charles Leasure, CCDCRedTeam,
Joe Tepper, The Mighty Mîm,Leo Vettori, Skycarcass, SlideBelts, Dane Ragnarsson,
BertoBerg, Graham Derricott, The Dark Haired One, Wyland, Michael Woo, and Debbie.
Thanks so much for watching and subscribing, and we’ll see you next time on Nerd of the Rings.