The prequelization of pop culture has become so common it’s nearly a parody in and of itself. Do we really need to know how Han got the last name Solo? Why Poirot grew a mustache? That Cruella de Vil’s mom was murdered by dalmatians?
But this doesn’t mean that there are no soft places in the stories we know that are worth exploring, and there are about a million of those in Middle-earth. And With this week’s San Diego Comic-Con trailer for season 2 of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, we’ve just seen a new one.
[Ed. note: This is your cue to go watch the trailer before we talk about what was in it.]
Photo: Ben Rothstein/Prime Video
Oft I have cried: “Hey, Rings of Power, show me an Entwife! You could do it! You’re in the right time period!”
And lo, Rings of Power has answered: Here you go.
Image: Amazon Studios
Specifically, the show has answered with this lovely, blossom-covered lady with her knothole eyes, her lip-less tree mouth slit, and unmistakably female voice as she slowly, slowly intones, “Forgiveness takes an age.”
An Entwife! We are so back.
Susana, what is an Entwife?
I mean it’s really what it says on the tin. They’re the other half of the Ent species, a whole race of tree women to compliment the tree men. They’re touched on only briefly in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, but in Tolkien’s books, they’re a steady presence — in mentions, anyway — anytime characters are talking to an Ent.
Right from the moment Merry and Pippin meet him, Treebeard shows a great interest in the Shire and its countryside, because it sounds like a place Entwives might have settled. He mentions that the Ents haven’t been able to produce any young Entings in many years (which, as Ents count time, is basically an eon), because of the loss of the Entwives.
“How very sad!” Pippin replies politely in The Two Towers. He asks “How was it that they all died?”
“They did not die!” Treebeard replies. “I never said died. We lost them, I said. We lost them and we cannot find them.”
Over the course of three pages and a recited song, Treebeard explains that Ents and Entwives once lived together, until their interests began to diverge; their “hearts did not go on growing in the same way.” Where Ents wandered the great forests and attached themselves to the great-growing wild trees like oak and elm and birch, Entwives preferred to craft ordered gardens to live in, growing fond of apple and cherry, of fields of grain and gardens of herbs. The Entwives befriended humans and taught them agriculture, while Ents remained merely a legend to them.
Both Ents and Entwives believed their ways to be best, and declined to cohabitate for so long that eventually by the time any Ent had thought to go visit an Entwife, the Entwives had all gone off to parts unknown, their original lands razed by Sauron in his battles with Númenor.
“For many years we used to go out every now and again and look for the Entwives,” Treebeard tells Merry and Pippin, “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 Entwives are only a memory for us, and our beards are long and grey.” Then he spends a whole page singing a song about an Ent calling out to an Entwife to come to his wild land that he loves, and her insisting that she’d much rather stay where she is in her nice garden.
The Ents are gently melancholy about losing the Entwives, but not in any particularly proactive way. After all, if they’d had the motivation to leave their beloved forests and go actually find the Entwives, they probably wouldn’t have lost them in the first place. Still, every time Treebeard says farewell to the hobbits, his last words contain a reminder to send him word if they ever hear anything about Entwives in the ordered farmland of the Shire.
Yes, the Lord of the Rings has no fault tree divorce
Image: New Line Cinema
This might be a good time to point out that it’s easy to take humor in Lord of the Rings adaptations as a deviation from the source material, but Tolkien absolutely had jokes in his epic, and the Ents and Entwives are absolutely one of them.
Tolkien conceived of grand romances and adventurous women — Eowyn, who desired a noble death above all else; Lúthien, who quested over miles to save her sworn love from the dark lord Morgoth; Galadriel, whose ambitions were too large for heaven — but he also had time for self parody. Like a whole species of long-winded men so obsessed with their interests that they didn’t spend enough time with their wives and just kind of… lost track of them.
With Rings of Power set before Sauron and Numenor come to open warfare, we’re square in the time period that the Entwives still tended their gardens in the lands southeast of Moria and northwest of Mordor — and I’m just happy to see them.