Entwives

The Entwives were the female counterparts of the Ents, the tree-herds of Middle-earth. In the deeps of time they became estranged from the Ents and were lost, and the search for them was one of the abiding sorrows of Treebeard and his kind.

The Ents and the Entwives

The Ents were ancient tree-like beings, shepherds of the forests, who awoke in the early ages of the world. In their beginnings the Ents and the Entwives dwelt together. But the two came to differ in their loves: the Ents cared for the wild trees and forests, content to let things grow as they would, while the Entwives loved order, tilled gardens, orchards, and growing things they could tend and command. Because of this difference the Entwives crossed the Anduin and made their gardens in the lands to the east, while the Ents remained in their forests.

The Sundering

For an age the Ents would cross the river to visit the Entwives, but in time the lands where the Entwives dwelt were laid waste, in the wars of the Second Age, and became the Brown Lands. When the Ents came again, the gardens were gone and the Entwives could not be found. They had vanished, and no Ent ever discovered where they had gone.

Legacy

The loss of the Entwives meant that there were no longer any young Ents, the Entings, and the race of Ents slowly dwindled toward extinction. Treebeard, the eldest of the Ents, spoke wistfully of the Entwives to the hobbits Merry and Pippin during the War of the Ring, recalling an old song of the lovers and expressing the faint hope that, when both peoples had lost all else, they might one day find each other again. Whether any Entwives still lived was never known.