What are the Ents and Entwives in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power?
By Dan Selcke
In the fourth episodes of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Theo is taken captive by what we later learn is an Entwife and an Ent. Most Lord of the Rings fans probably remember the Ents, giant tree creatures who take a long time to do anything. All the Ents seem to be male. But at one point there were Entwives, female tree creatures. But they're all gone by the time of the original Lord of the Rings story, which is set thousands of years after The Rings of Power.
We don't know what's going to happen on The Rings of Power, but in J.R.R. Tolkien's books, it's said that the Ents and the Entwives once lived together in Middle-earth, but eventually their interests diverged. The Ents wanted to tend to the trees for the forest that were already there while the Entwives wanted to plant gardens; the Entwives even taught agriculture to the first men who settled in the western part of Middle-earth. But when Sauron rose to power, he burned the Entwives' gardens and they were never seen again. The Ents would spend much of the Third Age of Middle-earth looking for the Entwives, but they never found them.
Did the Entwives migrate somewhere else? Were they all killed? We don't know that either, but here in the Second Age on The Rings of Power, there's an Ent and an Entwife traveling together. By this point in the books, the Ents and Entwives were mostly living separately, but it's not out of the realm of possibility that they were still in contact.
This episode of The Rings of Power doesn't go into any of this; a forest has been cut down by men and the Entwife is really mad about it. We'll see if the show gets into any of Tolkien's mythology concerning the Ents and Entwives as season 2 continues. New episodes drop Thursdays on Prime Video.
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