One of the most enduring, saddest mysteries of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy is the fate of the Entwives. During their travels together Treebeard told Merry and Pip that Ents, an ancient Middle-earth race of sentient tree people, “lost” the Ent women long ago. Tolkien never revealed what happened to the Entwives in The Lord of the Rings, but The Rings of Power, set during Middle-earth’s Second Age, long before Treebeard met those Hobbits, has shown us exactly what the world lost when they vanished. Season two’s fourth episode introduced one of the Entwives to The Lord of the Rings audiences everywhere, a beautiful and loving creature named Winterbloom.
Season two’s third episode saw Theo and others getting easily manhandled by unseen figures. The Rings of Power‘s next episode confirmed it was the large, powerful Ents who’d grabbed them. But unlike the era of Middle-earth fans know from The Lord of the Rings, the Entwives were still living with their male counterparts during the time of The Rings of Power. The show introduced the Ent couple of Winterbloom (voiced by Olivia Williams) and Snaggleroot (Jim Broadbent).
Though already many thousands of years old by this time, Ents of the Second Age are also thousands of years younger than the ones Merry and Pip will one day meet. No surprise then that on The Rings of Power, Ents move faster and with more agility. They’re maybe even more powerful. Ents are so strong that Morgoth created trolls in response to them. But trolls were never as strong as the tree folk. The Ents of the Second Age were also still just as protective of their barked brethren as ever. None more so than Winterbloom, who fully captures the nature of the Entwives imbued in them by their creator, Yavanna.
In The Lord of the Rings‘ lore, the Valar Yavanna, responsible for all growing things in the world, asked for the Ents to be created in response to her husband creating dwarves. She wanted her tree folk to serve as “shepherds” who would protect the trees from dwarves’ axes. The Ent men tended to the larger trees. The Entwives, more beautiful than their male counterparts, looked after smaller living things.
On The Rings of Power, Winterbloom showed exactly why Yavanna created the Ents. The Entwife fiercely protected her fellow living creatures, many of which came birthed. She was not simply acting as a guard; this Entwife mourned for every living thing the orcs had destroyed. Winterbloom loved those trees, plants, and flowers deeply. The passion, vigilance, and care she felt for them made it easy to see why Treebeard will one day speak so sadly of losing the Entwives. Yet it was the tree folks’ past that ultimately mattered on the Prime Video Series.
While always sentient, Ents only learned to speak thanks to the elves. The Ents never forgot that bond, and it might have saved Arondir and his cohorts on The Rings of Power. While Winterbloom said it would take an age to earn forgiveness for any trees elves had felled, she began that process immediately when Arondir promised elves would protect those woods forever. Unlike orcs or even men, Winterbloom had reason to trust Arondir.
It was a beautiful scene, one that both leaned into Tolkien’s lore and captured the spirit of Middle-earth. But it was an inherently sad one, too. Entwives have always been defined by their absence in Middle-earth. They will leave the Ents towards the end of the Second Age to start a new garden, we may even see it happen on The Rings of Power. No one will ever see them again after that. (Possibly because Sauron will kill them all.) That will ultimately doom the race of Ents entirely. No Entwives mean no new Entings. But even before the day comes when the final Ent takes his final giant step, The Rings of Power shows Middle-earth lost something special when it lost the Entwives. In a world so often overrun with darkness and death, they were loving shepherds of life.
Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist and definitely an Entwife guy. You can follow him on Twitter and Bluesky at @burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.