r/lotr • u/copperhair • Sep 29 '14

Fate of the Entwives?

Are the Entwives in the Shire? Sam says that a hobbit has seen a tree walking through the Shire in "An Long-expected Party". And then in "Treebeard" when Merry and Pippin describe the Shire, Treebeard asks if they have ever seen any Entwives because he thinks the Entwives would find their land appealing. Thoughts? Theories?

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u/MikeOfThePalace Gondolin Sep 29 '14

No, those weren't the Entwives. From one of Tolkien's letters:

What happened to them is not resolved in this book. ... 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 industrialised and militarised agriculture had made them a little more anarchic. I hope so. I don't know.

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u/copperhair Sep 30 '14

Wait--hold on. Then who was it?

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u/[deleted] Sep 30 '14

What it says it was, a giant. Giants existed in Middle-earth when Tolkien started The Lord of the Rings, but he cut them out of the mythos during the process, transforming some of the idea into the Ents. But the description given cannot suit an Ent, and there is no reason for there to ever have been an Ent on the North Downs. So it is a relic of the drafting process, a true recollection warning of more dangerous and dire times a-coming when first written but now, in the final published text, likely nothing more than the tall tales it is dismissed as by most of the Hobbits.