Was Tolkien right to.....

[Elessar]

leave the entwives out of lotr. Or wrong... take your sides.....

by the way- did i get the picture right at the top???

[madeyejay]

I think it was good to leave them out. Something you should be left to wonder about. When ever I think about the Ent wives, I think of Sam telling the story in the inn. Where he tells of his cousin or someone like that seeing a giant the size of a tree that was moving. I picture the Ent wives living around the Shire. I like not being sure though.

[Coney]

I think he was right to leave out the Entwives.

The end of the Third Age was a time of men, and as the Fourth Age approached most of the "old" races of Middle-Earth departed, Elves, Maiar, Istari etc etc. The Ents had waited a long time to play their part in the shaping of Middle-Earth (the destructin of Isengard) and as the age of men approached they would have found little comfort in remaining.

[entss89]

i think it was wronge to put the entwives aside! my reasons for this is because it makes me a little puzzled and i just feel like im missing so much!

[Sister Golden Hair]

I think it is things like that that make Tolkien so good. The mystery of the Entwives, Tom Bombadil, Balrog's wings, elves and pointy ears, etc. are all what give us something to talk and think about. That IMO is truly the mark of a great writer. We will spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out the puzzles he made for us.

[Goldberry1]

I would have liked to have known what happened to the Entwives but sometimes when a book leave you wondering about something it makes it a loot better. I think if Tolkein had the Entwives come back after the quest was over it would have been nice but everything in the books is so good it didn't really make a difference to me whether he explained what happened to them or not.

[Dussander]

I think it was neither right nor wrong, because Tolkien did it anyway!

[Earniel]

I think it was okay to leave them out. It adds a little mystery and gives you (or at least me) the feeling that all adventures aren't ended yet after the war of the rings. But.... if on the otherhand he HAD included them, I think it would have been great. And I'm very curious how he would have done so.

[katya]

I think it is good, though I would like to know what happened. My reasons everyone has said and surely will repeat.

[The Lady of Ithilien]

We never would have heard of them, if he hadn't included them in the story. Indeed, he stopped the whole story while Treebeard sang the old song of the search of the Onodrim and told Merry and Pippin the story. (I just love it when Pippin asks how it was they all died, and Treebeard says they didn't die, they'd just gotten lost.)

Rather, I would guess, the question is, why did Tolkien include the Entwives and their strange tale?

Well, it draws in the reader, of course: the adults would get a big kick out of the man vs. woman aspect of it.

And also to further the overall story. A central facet of that wider story is that desire for control over other things and other people isn't a good thing, because it corrupts. Yet isn't this desire for control just what distinguished the Entwives from the Ents?

The Entwives . . . did not desire to speak with these things; but they wished them to hear and obey what was said to them. The Entwives ordered them to grow according to their wishes, and bear leaf and fruit to their liking; for the Entwives desired order, and plenty, and peace (by which they meant that things should remain where they had set them). So the Entwives made gardens to live in....[t]hen when the Darkness came in the North, the Entwives cross the Great River, and made new gardens . . . .

Tolkien visited an unusually harsh fate on the Entwives: their gardens became the Brown Lands,

...long formless slopes stretching up and away toward the sky; brown and withered they looked, as if fire had passed over them, leaving no living blade of green: an unfriendly waste without even a broken tree or a bold stone to relieve the emptiness...What pestilence or war or evil deed of the Enemy had so blasted all that region even Aragorn could not tell

Very harsh; I mean, he even had things growing in Mordor (at least in its outer edges), but the former gardens of the Entwives were "blasted" and filled with "emptiness." As if to underline this for the reader, Tolkien has Treebeard tell Merry and Pippin:

Yet here we [the Ents] still are, while all the gardens of the Entwives are wasted: Men call them the Brown Lands now.

The reader is once more pointed in the direction of the main idea that desire for control is not a good thing. Just how Sauron destroyed the gardens and perhaps the Entwives we aren't told. But Tolkien being Tolkien, he did hold out a little hope: the possible sighting of an Entwife in the Shire's Northfarthing, for one thing, and Treebeard's comment that the Ents and Entwives may meet again in a land where they can live together happily. Indeed, Galadriel towards the end of the story may be clarifying this somewhat, saying she and Treebeard will meet again in the distant future when Beleriand is lifted up out of the sea.

[Renille]

Yes! I loved them not being there! It was genius! Really. The absence of the entwives gave the book a hint of sadness, a touch of loss.

It's kind of like if you had a big brother/ sister who ran away before you were born. You never really knew him/her, but that person is always special to you in a different way. Now, this never happened to me...but that's what I think that situation would feel like.

[Beleg Strongbow]

Originally posted by The Lady of Ithilien
Indeed, Galadriel towards the end of the story may be clarifying this somewhat, saying she and Treebeard will meet again in the distant future when Beleriand is lifted up out of the sea.

I always thought of that as more messianic-hopeful than anything else.

[The Lady of Ithilien]

I always thought of that as more messianic-hopeful than anything else.

True. But then Treebeard tells Merry and Pippin that some think the Ents and Entwives will eventually find a land where they can live together, but only after they have lost everything. This business of losing everything seems to be a theme -- it was mentioned in reference to Arwen, too. I don't quite get it.

[Asfaloth]

I think the little section about the Entwives is one of the best parts of The Two Towers and Tolkien was right to include it. I also think he was right not to put much more about them in there.

[Jonathan]

Are the Entwifes ever mentioned in other of Tolkiens works besides LotR? If so, do we get to know what happened to them?

[Elf Girl]

It was right. The world was changing, to a shape in which there is no room for the Ents or their Wives.

[Bombadillo]

I think it was right. It was pointless, but it would have been pointless to add them in, and he just made a decision. He can do that. He's the fantasy god.

[Gwaimir Windgem]

Originally posted by Renille
Yes! I loved them not being there! It was genius! Really. The absence of the entwives gave the book a hint of sadness, a touch of loss.

Yes, I agree with that, most definitely. It adds to the bittersweet sense of the story.

Jonathan, do you count letters as works...

#144

I think that in fact he 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 (vol. II p. 79 refers to it). They survived only in 'agriculture' trasmitted 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 backgrond to their soldiers and metal-workers. If any survied so, they would indeed be far estranged from the Ents, and any rapprochment would be diffiicult - unless experience of industrialized and militarized agriculture had made them a little more anarchic. I hope so. I don't know.

#338

As for the Entwives: I don't know. I have written nothing beyond the first few years of the Fourth Age. (side-track editted) But I think in Vol. II pp. 80-81 it is plain that there would be for Ents no re-union in 'history' - But Ents and their wives being rational creatures would find some 'earthly paradise' until the end of this world: beyond which the wisdom neither of Elves nor Ents could see. Though maybe they shared the hope of Aragorn that they were 'not bound for ever to the circles of the world and beyond them is more than memory.'....

[Jonathan]

Are that drafts from Tolkien's letters?
I guess that if Tolkien ever made up his mind about the Entwives destiny, he took the secret with him when he died.
But that might just have been for the best, because it leaves us hard-core Tolkien fans with something to wonder about.

[Melko Belcha]

I have always felt that the best stories are the ones only hinted at but never told. It's what adds the depth and realism to ME that lacks in many of the books I read, atleast IMO.