What happened to the Ent-Women?

We also know that the Ent-Women, unlike the Ents, interacted with the race of Men and taught them much about the art of agriculture. They apparently lived in peace until Sauron destroyed their gardens, after which they disappeared. The Ents searched for them but never found them. The Elves, moved, created songs about the day when the Ents and the Ent-Women would meet. In fact, in The Return of the King, Treebeard asks the Hobbits not to forget to send him a message if they hear any news of the Ent-Women in their lands.

The only Ent-Woman we know with a proper name is Fimbrethil, Treebeard’s missing wife. According to her description, Fimbrethil was very beautiful in her eyes, but already advanced in age, and marked by time and work, bent over and tanned by the sun. At the time in which the action of The Two Towers takes place, Bárbol had not known anything about Fimbrethil for more than 3,000 years.

Tolkien himself spent a lot of time pondering what happened to the Ent-Women, but never came to a definitive conclusion. In fact, in Letter 144 he stated:

On the other hand, Trolls were created by Morgoth in the First Age, long before the Ent-Women disappeared. However, is it likely that they were corrupted to perfect or create a new race of Trolls, as Morgoth evidently intended them to be a mockery of the Ents? If this is so, this new race of Trolls could be the Olog-Hai. It is significant that these Trolls appeared at the end of the Third Age south of Mirkwood, on the mountainous borders of Mordor, very close to the Brown Lands. But there is really no evidence that the Olog-Hai were anything more than specially trained Trolls, in the same way that the Uruk-hai were elite Orcs. There is certainly no evidence that the Olog-hai have any connection to the Ent-Women.

On the other hand, in The Hobbit it is said that Trolls return to the stone from which they are made when sunlight hits them. Keep in mind that The Hobbit represents a simplified version of Tolkien’s mythology: Morgoth could not create life from inert matter, since he never possessed the Undying Flame. Morgoth and Sauron could only transform existing life into new forms, corrupting them. In this context, the origin of the Trolls given in The Hobbit is simply the literalization of a way of speaking, something like saying from dust to dust.

The main testimony about the fate of the Ent-Women is that of Treebeard, who maintains that they moved to the East. If they continued moving in that direction we might have to look for them in the far east of Middle-earth, which no one, not even Tolkien, was familiar with; so this path is closed to us.

Despite the previously accepted answer, Tolkien left some hints about the possible fate of the Ent-Women. For example, in a conversation between Sam Gamgee and Ted Arenas. In the first chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring, Sam comments on a strange experience that his cousin Hal had of him:

Hal claims to have seen a tree giant that resembled an elm, not only in size but also in lifelike appearance. It certainly looks like an Ent-like creature lurking near the northern border of the Shire. In fact, we know that this area would not be unpleasant for the Ents. During the Fangorn episode, Merry and Pippin tell Treebeard about the Shire, and he says that the Ent-Women would have liked that land. This, combined with the sighting of Sam’s cousin, has led some to speculate that the Ent-Women may have lived near the Shire.

There are many speculative theories about what Hal saw. One of them is that she could have been an Ent-Woman; However, these tended to be more flowery in appearance and smaller than an elm, and I doubt they had a twenty-foot stride. We also cannot rule out that Hal may have seen an Ent looking for the Ent-Women. It always seemed to me that this lone Ent’s journey, if that’s what it was, would have been a whole story in itself.

Now, the idea that Trolls are essentially mutilated Ent-Women does not seem possible, considering that Trolls were introduced long before the events of the War of the Ring, a time when the Ent-Women disappeared. In fact, Trolls were present in the First Age and were already part of Morgoth’s armies. However, this does not mean that Trolls are not Ents trapped, tortured, and mutilated by Morgoth in the First Age.

It is important to note that Tolkien, in no letter or note published posthumously, states that the Trolls are a mockery or parody of the Ents, not explicitly at least. The only one who makes that claim is Treebeard, and his statements are hardly the end of the discussion. In the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien states that Trolls were originally a race compared to beasts rather than more sentient beings like man. In Myths Transformed, a chapter in Morgoth’s Ring, Tolkien again suggests that Trolls existed before Morgoth encountered them, but that they were manipulated into the creatures we are familiar with.

So Tolkien is explicit in stating that the Trolls existed in their own right, but were manipulated by Morgoth. You don’t have to delve into the labyrinth of Christopher’s published notes to discover this; in fact, in Appendix F of The Lord of the Rings it is said of the Trolls that:

In a long letter from September 1954, cited in a note to The Ring of Morgoth, Tolkien again mentioned his doubts about the origins of the Trolls:

Tolkien goes on to speak of Trolls in Transformed Mythos, stating that these are similar to Orcs in nature, but different physically, that they may have been perversions of human types and therefore not Ents; With which we can discard the theory that the Ents-Women were transformed into Trolls:

It seems that Tolkien himself was unsure of the origin of the Trolls. But one thing we can be sure of is that they were not mutilated Elves, and we can be almost certain that they were not Ent-Women perverted through torture, although they certainly are a mockery of the Ents.

For those who suffer from the common condition of confusing a character’s statements with those of the author, Tolkien himself left a pertinent comment when answering a question about Trolls in Letter 153:

This is for everyone who relies on Bárbolbeard’s statements in The Two Towers as if they were some kind of revealed truth.

Treebeard is clearly trying to describe the similarities in the creation of Trolls and Orcs. Furthermore, he compares the Trolls as a rather pathetic attempt to approximate the form of the Ents, but does not say that Morgoth would have captured any Ents. As Tolkien says, Treebeard’s knowledge is limited. For example, Treebeard didn’t know what a Hobbit was and he generally wasn’t very aware of Saruman’s activities in Fangorn’s backyard, which is why he doesn’t seem to be a reliable source. He could also be hyperbole, with the Orc-Elves parallel serving to reinforce the point that Trolls were created as a counterpart to the Ents, but not necessarily created from the Ents.

Also, we can agree that Treebeard was a bit… talkative. He often used a lot of hyperbole and metaphor, and, as Tolkien explained, he was not necessarily wise in matters beyond the natural concerns of the Ents.

Another point that is important to clarify is the false conception that exists about the appearance of the Ents. Firstly, they were much more humanoid than commonly thought. Treebeard compared the similarity between the Ents and their trees to the shepherds and their sheep in The Two Towers:

Treebeard clarifies that these similarities might have become more pronounced for the Ents and their trees. This would suggest that they were mostly humanoid, although they resembled trees. Second, while Treebeard’s skin is described as bark-like, it is also explicitly described as soft, like human skin:

Thirdly, Ents are described as something similar to a Troll:

Furthermore, Ents possess fëar and, as such, are sentient beings. Whether this affects its reproduction is anyone’s guess. But it is clear that they have free will and, in this context, they most likely do not reproduce through the passive means that one would expect from a tree.

Manwë answers:

In short, Tolkien does not provide a definitive answer regarding the fate of the Ent-Women within the story. However, he commented on the matter in several letters, and although he was careful to say I think and I don’t know, the tone of these comments is generally pessimistic. Furthermore, Tolkien doesn’t seem to have changed his mind over time. The following was written in 1954 in Letter 179:

Note that the reference to Sauron’s “scorched earth policy” makes the destruction of the lands where the Ent-Women lived seem a much more serious, deliberate, and strategic matter in military terms than is evident in the main story, in which Treebeard simply says that “the war had happened there.”

The following reference to the song of the Ent and the Ent-Woman recited by Treebeard to Merry and Pippin was written in 1972, the last year of Tolkien’s life, in Letter 419:

While Tolkien’s comments are not very hopeful, there is still the unsolved mystery of the conversation between Sam and Ted in The Flying Dragon; For many, evidence of the survival of the Ent-Women. Now, this conversation takes place at the beginning of the story, when its tone was still similar to that of The Hobbit. When read for the first time, the natural reaction is to accept it as just another miscellaneous matter of a fairy tale. However, as the story matures, when we cross paths with the Ents it is impossible to reread this conversation without thinking about them. This impression is reinforced by Treebeard’s own words to Merry and Pippin:

Together, these two conversations make the idea that what Halfast saw was an Ent-Woman seem at least plausible. However, as far as can be determined, Tolkien never explicitly connected the issue to the Ent-Women; in fact, he never mentioned it at all. So all we are left with is sterile speculation. The fact that a creature is described as “as big as an elm” proves nothing one way or the other. For all we know it could all be Hal’s invention, but also that a fourteen-foot-tall Ent might seem gigantic to an unsuspecting hobbit, and that the story may have been a bit… exaggerated, to impress El’s customers. Flying Dragon.

Nor is textual analysis useful here. Tolkien himself, in a discussion of his methods of invention, mentioned that Treebeard’s adventure was not fully planned until he reached that point in the…