What happened to the entwives?

''I don't think this is Tolkien being deliberately evasive though, in fact I think it was quite deliberate'' - so in other words, that he WAS being deliberately evasive. M8, that was a direct contradiction!

I always thought that the Entwives went to the Shire, based on Hal's story.

Entwives were strong and independent, hence they went to Dubai to party, where they were used and turned into coffee tables.

Happened during the hard winter.
Robert Shnorfinpickle was short on firewood , and well....
You can guess the rest.

They went out for a pack of smokes and never came back.

Man Sauron is a bastard

Was Tolkien the father of needs before needs was a thing because he got fan mail from people who loved the story's

I knew a guy in college who was absolutely convinced that the Elves cut down the Entwives to build their boats

Just as the Ents stood still and became trees, the Entwives, laid down and became gardens. Not gardens like the one in your yard, but parks like the Garden of Gethsemane.

It would make sense that they were wiped out.
LOTR end story is mostly about how magical things are leaving the world.
As such, the Ents also need a "dead end" scenario where they will eventually have to leave the world, one day or another.

Ever heard of the five stages of grief?

I think the Ents were stuck in stage one and just stopped before they could get through it.

This makes me so sad.

I like to think that the Entwives called their spouses HusbENT.

As much as i adore the 'noone knows" amswer there is a more obvious and rather sickening answer.
The Trolls were created in effigy (at minimum) of Ents.
The Entwives were lost, broadly in the Brown Lands, near Morder.
Sauron begins breeding Olag-Hai in greater numbers.....

I always thought it was hilarious that Samwise had most likey heard of entwives in hobbiton and failed to tell treebeard.

I’m guessing the answer is (wait for it) no tale tells.

I like the idea that the Entwives look like flowers since the Ents resemble the trees they care for.

entwives went away. entwives gone.
then they became trees... and then orcs cut them down...

I find the story of the entwives to be Tolkien's saddest tale. Imagine the Ents spending the rest of their existence pining for and lamenting their loss.

The lore surrounding the Entwives disturbs me more than anything else in LotR. 😟

I fear they all died. The way they nurtured and protected their gardens, I can’t imagine they would abandon their gardens when it was attacked by Sauron. They would have done everything to protect their flowers and plants, even given their lives to save them. The Ents may not know where the Ents-wives went, but surely the Ent-Wives would know the location of their Ent-Husbands. They would have returned or visited Fangorn in the Third Age if they were still alive. It truely saddens me, but I feel the evidence is just too overwhelming that they have died along with their garden. 😢

Romans kidnapped them and married them.

Trolls.

I theorize that the Entwives in their eagerness to cultivate, grow, explore, and foster relationships with other races was twisted and corrupted, becoming more bestial and subservient to the dark creatures, the warmth of the sun becoming an anathema as they sought to be less likened to the trees the Ents shepherded and becoming bloated with the devouring of meat, and tormented as the Elves might've been into Orcs. For some, their sense of wandering and cultivation grew into greedy hoarding.

In this way, the Entwives were not destroyed and they had moved to many other parts of the world as Treebeard imagined, but their form had twisted and changed. It would thus be even more saddening that the legacy of the Entwives were not snuffed out or destroyed, but is now a part of the ruin wrought by dark forces upon the world.

The walking tree story should have been mentioned to Treebeard in passing, at least set up possibility.

I imagine the "Tree-Man" that Hal saw was an Ent searching for the Entwives.

Because if it had been one of the Entwives then her being north of the Shire doesn't make sense. Since if the Entwives went that way from the Brown Lands then they would have had to go past Fangorn Forest.

I don't see them bypassing their home and their husbands without dropping in first.

Like as not they went East, North or South. Less likely they went West since that would mean they deliberately bypassed the Ents.

In my headcanon, there is a wife or two in the Shire. Treebeard comes to visit Mary and Pippen and finds them. Many characters in the story get a happy ending; Treebeard should too.

You write and present very well; you earned a sub.

This explanation makes me realize that not all things may have the “closure” we need or desire. A slight variant to the feeling of loss that Tolkien was eluding.

It would have been a nicer ending if the entwives had been taken to south Mordor near the Sea of Nurnen to grow food for Sauron's forces. Then they could be freed and returned to the ents after the ring was destroyed

...But cheer up Ents. Illuvatar has a plan for you!

I always assumed they lived or at least passed through the old forest by Buckland and by Bombadil's house and woke up some of the trees. Namely the old oak that almost ate the hobbits.

You forgot another possible connection between the entwives and the shire. Namely, the old forest. Its behavior in the Fellowship of the Ring is very similar to that of the Huorns of Fangorn as the trees crowd the hedge, block off straight paths, and slowly but inexorably herd the hobbits toward Old Man Willow. The hobbits feel a certain resentment from the trees, quite understandable when the last time so many hobbits came through the forest they chopped down dozens of trees simply to pile them up and burn them as a warning to the rest of the wood. It seems likely to me that one or more entwives made that forest their home but became corrupted, either due to the evil in Angmar or from a long cold war against the expansion of men, a fight which eventually the hobbits would inherit and continue.

In the Age of the Ring mod for Battle for Middle Earth: Rise of the Witch King, the Entwives are actually used as siege units for Dol Guldur. Them and corrupted hunters come from the same building, suggesting that the entwives were corrupted in some manner.

Sauron had them chopped up as magic firewood for one of his projects.

Feminism got em.

One Entwife stuck around, still kicking in The Last Unicorn.

"She was worried the dwarves would fell all the trees"
Meanwhile the dwarves: Let's go build another mountain home out of nothing but stone. Trees? What do you mean? We're not gonna see daylight for at least the next 20 years.

"Where did the entwives go?"
Treebeard already gave us an answer, they lost them.

I always took it as enteives thought they could go survive on their own and clearly didn't... Just like feminist wouldn't be able to

i real question is, would ents still be around if the ent wives did return to them? would they have made babies forever and made entire forests of just ents? how the heck do they breed

My take is that the entwives never existed, and the Ents have a mass psychosis about their purported existence

What if the entwives are the roots?

There were in my opinion, multiple subtle hints dropped in the books that the Entwives were hiding- yes hiding- in the lands north of the Shire. As by the incident described by 'cousin Hal', and the very inveigling comment by Treebeard that 'they would have liked your country'.
The suggestion is strongly being made- but never said directly- that some of the Entwives escaped, but after moving far off remained traumatized by the war and became extremely reclusive. They probably had witnessed other Entwives burned and all sorts of terrible things, and so gave up their public gardening as they now deliberately did not want to be found or seen, and lived in secrecy. And that would be easy enough for them, if they hid in a wood.
So much so that the Ents of course, never heard word of them or found them. But signs point to this area for sure.

I doubt the elves actually cut down trees. They probably farmed tree branches, or else they just asked the trees to give them the wood they need.

Sam's conversation is too specific to be a coincidence. It's meant for the reader to connect them.

But considering the incredible change in the early 1900s, the great rise of machine and industry, your belief in Tolkien's intention to describe loss is very likely.

This was by far, the saddest part of the story for me growing up. The world of Middle earth was changing and even in our time, theres no place for trees that don't want to be cut down. I always wished that, in some good way, the Ents would get to see the Entwives again.

It seems the will of Illuvatar that the stuff of creation must fade away at the coming of Man. Perhaps we will learn what we must on our own before passing to the tasks that await us beyond the veil.

This channel makes me really happy. I struggle to sleep, but that's okay.

I think that the entwives indeed survived. Looking at how ents behave I can imagine that they just forgot the time a bit because they had so much to do and were enjoying the nature there so much that they just forgot to tell their husbands