Where did the Entwives go?

where did the nth wipes go it's one of the most enduring mysteries of the Lord of the Rings three bids sadness and longing for them is heartbreaking so where are they hi everyone this is Robert welcome to in deep geek this video is brought to you by my wonderful patreon community from now on I'll bring you regular jr. our Tolkien and Lord of the Rings content on this channel as well as the best of other great fantasy and science fiction like a Song of Ice and Fire and West world if you're interested in seeing more of that please click the subscribe button in the bottom right of your screen and the Bell icon the ents are one of the most memorable and loved races we meet in 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 Tolkien's writings but at the heart of their story there is tragedy the ents are sad deeply sad because the nth 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 ents who they are and who the nth wives are the ents are an old race one of the oldest in middle-earth they first came into being when all a one of the Valar the angelic powers of Tolkien's legendarium told his wife Yavana about the new race he had created dwarves Yavana was concerned for she was known as the lover of 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 she went to man way the king of the Valar begging for the trees to have some protection the ents were therefore added into the song of creation although there's more than a hint that they may have already been there as part of arulu guitars ineffable plan anyway the ents were created and were known as the Shepherd's of the trees they were there to protect them from all perils not just dwarves all the ancient enmity there may well explain Jim Lee's initial innate dislike of Fangorn forest anyway the ents were created pretty much as we saw them in the Lord of the Rings although over time they did become more tree-like even slower and sleepier and barring ever closer resemblances to the trees they each shepherded the elves taught them to speak a gift the ents were hugely appreciative of although they seemed less appreciative of the way the elves would then constantly talk to them so the trees and the forests were protected by the ends and it seems that the nth wives were with them for a long time joining together for the creation of endings baby ants not that we see any of them in the main story but feel free to imagine baby Groot that's what I do anyway Treebeard just describes them as being more bendable but of course with no aunt wives there are no more endings and the N trace is slowly dying or more accurately slowly becoming that which they once shepherded the parting of the ways between the ents and the ant wives seems to have been caused by different interests or purposes for existing the ents we know were all about the trees in the forest their shepherding of the trees was rather less a fare it seems preferring nature wherever possible to go its own way for the forest to evolve and change as the centuries passed the nth 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 land which is sort of between Mordor and Mirkwood at the time though it was a rich and fertile land and there they taught humans how to garden and farm and cultivate nature although this might seem like quite a big move the end wives just leaving the ents for another part of the world entirely the split seems to have been largely amicable the ents travelled to see the aunt wives every now and then and all was still good the problem came as it so often does with Sauron during the war of the last a lion which took place at the end of the second age the Allied army of elves and humans marched towards Mordor Saren was fighting a defensive battle and adopted a scorched-earth policy to hamper his opponents advance he destroyed the land of the ant wives completely it's called the brown lands now because nothing grows there still millennia later the Fellowship's see it in passing while paddling down the river and doing in those boats and the aunt wives disappeared Treebeard went looking for them and couldn't find them the elves sang for them as they sing for the dead but we never have any conclusive evidence that they did die in a sense the ents seemed to blame themselves Treebeard says that we lost them in fact this is tree bids own sad account it goes on for some time as you'd expect from an end so I've edited it down a bit but I've tried to keep the spirit of it in my own hasty way I remember it was long ago in the time of the war between Saren 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 end wives 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 again and look for the end 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 end wives are only a memory for us and our beards a long and gray so what happened to them well perhaps they were simply killed by saurons forces this to be honest is the most likely solution the least satisfying perhaps but the most likely Treebeard doesn't believe this though when Pippin asked how the end wives died Treebeard seems quite angry with this 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 Treebeard 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 ents asked the people they met in the brown lands where the ant wives had gone and some said that they went south some west and some east the ents looked but perhaps not far enough perhaps the ed wives are still out there somewhere so if they did move on somewhere where might that have been well we don't know definitively but we do have a few clues when merry and pippin talked a tree beard 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 aunt wives there because he thought they would like it there clearly the ents had never been there he didn't know the land and never heard of hobbits so it wasn't one of the places that he had searched and there's this curious conversation between Sam and Ted sandy man their 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 sandy man 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 had about the end wives it's intriguing all right said Sam laughing with the rest but what about these tree men these giants as he 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 Hal for one he works from mr. boffin at Overhill and goes up to the North farthing for the hunting he saw one says he did perhaps your howls always been saying he's seen things and maybe he sees things that ain't there but this one was as big an elm tree and walking walking seven yards to astride 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 so if and it's a big if the end wives survived Sirhan's attack then the most likely place does seem to be in the lush land somewhere north of the Shire at this point we would normally turn to Tolkien himself for an explanation he was generally very open about his writing ideas and the background to his world answering literally hundreds of letters from friends and fans alike in surprising detail and so on but in this instance Tolkien himself is actually not as much help as you might think in one letter responding to the question of whether the ents ever found the end wives he simply says I do not know because he had not written the future of middle-earth beyond the first few years of the fourth age which seems to imply that he didn't necessarily think that they were dead just that he hadn't written that far in the story and if you search the internet hard enough you will find people who swear blind that Tolkien told him in person where the nth wives may be but in another letter he says quite categorically that I think that in fact the nth wives have disappeared for good being destroyed with their gardens in the war of the last Alliance so what is it did Tolkien simply not know or not make up his mind I think on reflection the answer is that all this was deliberate he didn't want to provide an answer because the answer to where the nth wives are actually distracts from the much more important point he's trying to make the nth wives are lost their absence has left an indelible mark on the ents and it makes them sad many things in middle-earth a lost and found again Aragorn as the lost heir to the thrones of Arnor and Gondor is chief among them the Shire is lost to the forces of industrialization and then we planted by Sam and so on but for Tolkien 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 idyll 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 Somme but at the end of that war as he wrote in the foreword to the Lord of the Rings all but one of my close friends were dead Tolkien 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 and the bad guy vanquished and all the rest of it but Frodo is never whole again Galadriel talks about how she must diminish and pass into the west and the ents live on with their deep sense of loss of the end wives we have no hope to give them Tolkien deliberately doesn't ever give them hope the nth wives are gone and the ents just have to carry on mourning their loss that thought makes you sad or feeling a sense of loss then that is exactly what talking intended the ents lost the nth 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 life goes on for the ends as do our lives if you'd like to see more videos on the world of junior art Okun and the Lord of the Rings please click on the link to the playlist on the left of your screen or if you'd like to support this channel or get access to some content I produce just for my patrons please click on the link to my patreon page on the right of the screen thanks for watching that's all for this time I'll see you again seen

Channel: In Deep Geek

Views: 344,420

Keywords: in deep geek, deep geek, lord of the rings, lotr, the lord of the rings, ents, the ents, entwives, the entwives, lord of the rings ents, lord of the rings entwives, where are the entwives, where did the entwives go, ent lore, ents history, treebeard, theory, theories, entwives lotr, entwives theory, entwives theories, what happened to the entwives, fangorn forest, lore and history, lotr lore, brown lands

Id: -K5ptb6W8FU

Length: 13min 24sec (804 seconds)

Published: Sat May 16 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Steeps87]

That was beautiful. Made me feel sad for the Ents. I think of my own husband, my Ent, and how keen the hurt would be if he were lost to me or I him.

I've never spent much time in r/Ents but I wonder how different our sub is compared to theirs. How much more do we nurture (support one another) and grow (share our hobbies of crafting and gardening/growing plants)?

And finally, I find myself ok with being lost to the r/Ents. I love our community and am content with where I am.