Q: What Happened to the Entwives?
See our more detailed and up-to-date answer to this question in the 2018 article Did the Entwives Survive?
ANSWER: When asking or thinking about what happened to the Entwives, most people conclude that the Entwives were long dead by the time Merry and Pippin wandered into Fangorn, but J.R.R. Tolkien does not seem to have made up his mind about the matter. In Letter No. 144, which he wrote to Naomi Mitcheson in 1954, Tolkien said:
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 (vol. II p. 79 refers to it). 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 industrialized and militarized agriculture had made them a little more anarchic. I hope so. I don’t know.
In this case “I don’t know” seems to indicate that (in 1954, at least) Tolkien had not really thought the entire matter about what happened with the Entwives all the way through. He answered a similar question 18 years later in Letter No. 338, where he wrote:
As for the Entwives: I do not know. I have written nothing beyond the first few years of the Fourth Age. (Except the beginning of a tale supposed to refer to the end of the reign of Eldaron about 100 years after the death of Aragorn. Then I of course discovered that the King’s Peace would contain no tales worth recounting; and his wars would have little interest after the overthrow of Sauron; but that almost certainly a restlessness would appear about then, owing to the (it seems) inevitable boredom of Men with the good: there would be secret societies practising dark cults, and ‘orc-cults’ among adolescents.) But I think in Vol. II pp. 80-811 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.’….
So it would appear that until the end of his life J.R.R. Tolkien had no clear idea in mind of whether the Entwives were entirely gone, or merely separated from the Ents. More than likely a great many of them must have perished in the War of the Last Alliance — but the author’s doubt suggests that he did not feel it necessary to decide the matter fully. Perhaps there was the seed of a story in his heart, a story that unfortunately never found its way to paper.
See also …
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