Everyone who's seen The Lord of the Rings or read the books knows what Ents are, right? They're the giant talking trees who help out Merry and Pippin in The Two Towers, and who attack Saruman on behalf of the forest he chopped down to build his war machine. They take a long time to make decisions, they go "hmmm," and they're the best.
But you might not be aware that there's a deeper lore behind the Ents. In the books, we learn that there were once Entwives, female tree people who wandered farther and farther from the Ents pursuing their interest in agriculture and creating great gardens. Those gardens were destroyed by Sauron in ages past, and the Entwives haven't been heard from since.
Until now! We'll meet at least one Entwife in the second season of The Rings of Power, Amazon's Lord of the Rings prequel series. Showrunner Patrick McKay gave us some details while talking to SFX Magazine. "This season, we have an incredible sequence involving the character Arondir in the middle of the season, where he's going to uncover a mystery that will lead him to a very surprising encounter with a pair of Ents," he revealed.
"They are the shepherds of the forest, which are talking, walking trees. Ents are a thing that we know exist in Middle-earth but we've never seen a couple of Ents, including an Ent wife. So that's an instance of a thing that ostensibly is not a moment fans have been anticipating, or expecting to happen on the way to the road to the Battle of Eregion."
The Rings of Power is set during the Second Age of Middle-earth, thousands of years before Frodo and Bilbo and that whole crew was around. It's unclear exactly when the Entwives vanished, but it's possible that they were still up and about during this time. You can see one around the 2:40 mark in the trailer below. "Forgiveness takes an age," she advises someone offscreen, probably the elf Arondir.
Although he never revealed anything specific in his books, The Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien once speculated in a letter that many have been killed during the War of the Last Alliance, the event which ends the Second Age, or else fled into the east or even become enslaved, which is not a rosy outlook for them. Perhaps The Rings of Power will settle the question whenever it gets to that climactic moment.
For now, there will hopefully be some cheerier times ahead to break up the doom and gloom. "There's a lot of moments in between that are hopefully just as delightful, or maybe even more surprising. But that's the fun of it all, right? In Middle-earth, you never know what you’re gonna get," McKay said.
The Rings of Power season 2 kicks off on Amazon Prime Video on August 29.
To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and Twitter account, sign up for our exclusive newsletter and check out our YouTube channel.