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Old 01-03-2007, 12:29 PM   #57
Alcuin
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Ok, I’ll start with the tree on the cliff top in the Emyn Muil. I posted most of this before at Minas Tirith. I assume my friends there will not be offended if I modify it slightly for reposting here.


First of all, my beef on this is that I think that anyone who claims that he’s found something in the text, especially something as interesting as the fate of the Entwives, and then provides no evidence is either perpetrating a hoax or else extremely deficient in both personal maturity and net etiquette. Chanting the mantra, “I know a secret you don’t know,” is a taunt, not an invitation to discussion.

I have no idea what the guy who originally started this thought he’d found, or if the guy was simply firing up a hoax to get the rest of us spinning in a dither. Ardamir the Blessed, who posts under the moniker “Herendil” at Minas Tirith, started this thread, the one we’re in now, about the subject, and a new poster under the name “will.r.french” posted something that got me thinking: There is at least an outside chance that at least one Entwife does show up in Lord of the Rings.

The evidence is sparse and circumstantial, but at the risk of ruining my reputation, I’ll post it for discussion. I will try to quote chapter and verse to make it as clear as possible, and then I will discuss what I see as its most obvious problem. There is no “inside game” or “philological jest” in this material, nor is there anything that might reflect on Tolkien’s friends, his wife Edith, or any of the other women even remotely associated with the Inklings, as far as I can tell.

Antecedents

The Ents rather looked like the trees they tended, or so it has always seemed to me. The description of Quickbeam, for instance, recalls to mind a rowan tree, which grows quickly (Bregalad the Ent was nicknamed “Quickbeam” because he was “hasty” for an Ent), and he was himself fond of rowans. At the Entmoot, Merry and Pippin noted the various appearances of the different ents (Two Towers, “Treebeard”):
Quote:
…Merry and Pippin were struck … by the variety that they saw: the many shapes, and colors, the differences in girth; and height, and length of leg and arm; and in the number of toes and fingers (anything from three to nine). A few … reminded them of beech-trees or oaks. … Some recalled the chestnut: brown-skinned Ents with large splayfingered hands, and short thick legs. Some recalled the ash: tall straight grey Ents with many-fingered hands and long legs; some the fir (the tallest Ents), and others the birch, the rowan, and the linden.
All of these are what Treebeard called “the great trees” in his discussion of the Entwives with Merry and Pippin; but he told them that the Entwives had given their attention to other trees:
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…the Entwives gave their minds to the lesser trees… and … the sloe in the thicket, and the wild apple and the cherry blossoming in spring.... The Entwives ordered them to grow according to their wishes, and bear leaf and fruit to their liking; for the Entwives desired order, and plenty, and peace (by which they meant that things should remain where they had set them). …the Entwives were bent and browned by their labor…
If the Ents resembled “the great trees” of the forest, then perhaps the Entwives more resembled “the lesser trees,” or at least, they were smaller and of slighter build than the Ents. Consider for instance the name of Treebeard’s beloved: “ah! the loveliness of Fimbrethil, of Wandlimb the lightfooted, in the days of our youth!”

The Entwives had established their gardens in the region south of Greenwood the Great, which later became the forest of Mirkwood.
Quote:
Then when the Darkness came in the North [Morgoth: see also Hammond & Scull, Reader’s Companion, p 387], the Entwives crossed the Great River, and made new gardens, and tilled new fields, and we saw them more seldom. After the Darkness was overthrown the land of the Entwives blossomed richly, and their fields were full of corn.
Later, the Last Alliance of Men and Elves fought a battle with Sauron and his armies of Mordor in the land of the Entwives, and it was destroyed:
Quote:
...the gardens of the Entwives are wasted: Men call them the Brown Lands now. ...in the time of the war between Sauron and the Men of the Sea... We crossed over Anduin and came to their land: but we found a desert: it was all burned and uprooted, for war had passed over it. But the Entwives were not there.
And of course, the Ents began to hunt for them:
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...we asked all folk that we met which way the Entwives had gone. ...some said that they had seen them walking away west, and some said east, and others south. But nowhere that we went could we find them.
We explicitly know the position of the Brown Lands, for they are marked on Tolkien’s map between Mirkwood and the Emyn Muil east of the Anduin.

Observation

In Two Towers, “The Taming of Sméagol”, Sam and Frodo find themselves faced with what appears at first to be an insurmountable barrier: the cliffs of the eastern faces of the Emyn Muil:
Quote:
At last they were brought to a halt. The ridge took a sharper bend northward and was gashed by a deeper ravine. On the further side it reared up again, many fathoms at a single leap: a great grey cliff loomed before them… They could go no further forwards… west would lead them only into more labor and delay…; east would take them to the outer precipice.

‘There's nothing for it but to scramble down this gully, Sam,’ said Frodo.
Now, observe in particular the description of the place in which they halted:
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The cleft was longer and deeper than it seemed. Some way down they found a few gnarled and stunted trees, the first they had seen for days: twisted birch for the most part, with here and there a fir-tree. Many were dead and gaunt, bitten to the core by the eastern winds. Once in milder days there must have been a fair thicket in the ravine, but now, after some fifty yards, the trees came to an end, though old broken stumps straggled on almost to the cliff's brink.
Frodo attempts to climb the cliff face but falls. At this point, Sam remembers the Elven rope he had been given in Lórien.
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Sam unslung his pack ... at the bottom was a coil of the silken-grey rope made by the folk of Lórien. He cast an end to his master. ... Leaning his weight forward, [Frodo] made the end fast round his waist, and then he grasped the line with both hands.

Sam stepped back and braced his feet against a stump a yard or two from the edge. Half hauled, half scrambling. Frodo came up and threw himself on the ground.
The Hobbits discuss how they might use the rope to get down the cliff; Sam estimates the distance to the bottom at “thirty ells, or … about eighteen fathom”, and on this point Christopher Tolkien comments in The War of the Ring, “The Taming of Sméagol”, footnote 11, that his father spent some time working out the height in “hobbit-ells” to account for the distance in height. Christopher Tolkien estimates the height of the cliff at 187½ feet and the length of the rope somewhat longer, so that
Quote:
there would be 4½ feet of rope to spare (‘there was still a good bite in Frodo’s hands, when Same came to the bottom’, TT p. 216)
The Hobbits decide to tie off the rope at the top of the cliff in Two Towers:
Quote:
Frodo thought for a while. ‘Make it fast to that stump, Sam!’ he said.
Once on the bottom of the cliff, Sam realized his new problem:
Quote:
‘Noodles! My beautiful rope! There it is tied to a stump, and we’re at the bottom. Just as nice a little stair for that slinking Gollum as we could leave…’
But magically, as it were, the rope resolved the problem for them:
Quote:
[Sam] looked up and gave one last pull to the rope as if in farewell.

To the complete surprise of both the hobbits it came loose. Sam fell over, and the long grey coils slithered silently down on top of him. Frodo laughed. ‘…To think that I trusted all my weight to your knot!’

Sam did not laugh. ‘I may not be much good at climbing, Mr. Frodo,’ he said …, ‘but I do know something about rope and about knots. It’s in the family, as you might say. …my grand-dad, and my uncle Andy … had a rope-walk over by Tighfield many a year. And I put as fast a hitch over the stump as any one could have done, in the Shire or out of it.’
Sam and Frodo then fall to discussing how this might be:
Quote:
‘Then the rope must have broken – frayed on the rock-edge, I expect,’ said Frodo.

‘I bet it didn’t!’ said Sam in an even more injured voice. He stooped and examined the ends. ‘Nor it hasn’t neither. Not a strand!’

‘Then I’m afraid it must have been the knot,’ said Frodo.

Sam shook his head and did not answer. He was passing the rope through his fingers thoughtfully. ‘Have it your own way, Mr. Frodo,’ he said at last, ‘but I think the rope came off itself – when I called.’ He coiled it up and stowed it lovingly in his pack.
I have read Lord of the Rings fifty times or more. I never questioned that Sam was correct, and the rope came down to Sam of its own, Elvishly magical accord.

Hypothesis

There is another possibility. The rope could have been deliberately thrown down to the Hobbits below. Assuming that Gollum was not being helpful, remember that the only things at the top of the cliff were
Quote:
…a few gnarled and stunted trees, … twisted birch for the most part, with here and there a fir-tree. …old broken stumps straggled on almost to the cliff's brink.
Could one these stumps be a battered, broken Entwife?

First, compare the description just cited of the ruined grove to part of that of the Ents at the Entmoot:
Quote:
Some recalled … the fir (the tallest Ents), and others the birch…
Remember, too, Merry and Pippin’s first encounter meeting Treebeard:
Quote:
High up, … there was a shelf under a cliff. Nothing grew there but a few grasses and weeds at its edge, and one old stump of a tree with only two bent branches left: it looked almost like the figure of some gnarled old man, standing there, blinking in the morning-light.
From these passages we can draw some parallels to the descriptions of the Ents at the Entmoot and of the unsuspecting Merry and Pippin’s initial impression of Treebeard’s to what Frodo and Sam perceived in the Emyn Muil: firs and birches, and stumps. (Treebeard also resembled “the distant stump of an old tree” when Merry and Pippin left Isengard in the company of Gandalf, Aragorn, Théoden and Éomer; Two Towers, “The Palantír”.)

If one or more of the Entwives had fled south from their gardens which became the Brown Lands into the Emyn Muil, they would also have become trapped at the edge of the tall cliff, and might have had to withstand whatever happenstance then overtook them: war, fire, axes. There the survivors remained, maimed and injured, until Sam tied a stout hitch around an Entwife, and he and Frodo climbed down the cliff. The Entwife, perhaps having heard Frodo and Sam’s voices, and their discussion of Elves and of the rope given the Hobbits, then tossed the rope down after them. After all, Treebeard liked the sound of Merry and Pippin’s voices when he met them (“Treebeard”):
Quote:
‘…I heard your voices – I liked them: nice little voices; they reminded me of something I cannot remember ... Very odd you are, indeed. Root and twig, very odd!’
The Elven rope was unbroken, and it came, it seemed, Providentially at the heartfelt wish of Sam.

The Entwife and any surviving companions might have remained in that place down the centuries believing that they were the only survivors of their kind of the great war at the end of the Second Age, becoming “tree-ish” and “sleepy” with time, like Leaflock the Ent. Of Leaflock, Treebeard told Merry and Pippin,
Quote:
Leaflock has grown sleepy, almost tree-ish, you might say: he has taken to standing by himself half-asleep all through the summer with the deep grass of the meadows round his knees. Covered with leafy hair he is. He used to rouse up in winter; but of late he has been too drowsy to walk far even then.
Supposing that there was an Entwife among the stumps at the top of the cliff, she might have roused when Frodo and Sam arrived, but kept herself hidden – perhaps the only reason she had survived attacks by the forces of Mordor – moving only when the two Hobbits were already at the bottom of the cliff and no longer posed any perceived threat, but in need of assistance in retrieving the rope.

Objections

I can think of numerous objections to this hypothesis.

First and foremost, there is no mention of any of the stumps being Ents or Entwives in any of the drafts, as far as I can tell. In War of the Ring, “The Taming of Sméagol”, Christopher Tolkien makes one reference to Ents, and that only by way of discussing when Frodo and Sam were doing what, as well as Merry and Pippin and the rest of the Company of the Ring: in the timeline, Tolkien was working who was where and doing what. (See “Note on Chronology” at the end of the chapter, after the footnotes.) Moreover, the discussion of the rope in the drafts centered on the fear of Frodo and Sam that Gollum would follow them by using the rope. Christopher Tolkien says that his father
Quote:
resolved their difficulty about leaving the rope from the cliff-top for Gollum to use by simply not introducing the question into their calculations until they had both reached the bottom.
Christopher Tolkien notes that
Quote:
The fir-trees in the gully would have a narrative function in the final form of the story, … for Sam would brace his foot against one of those stumps, and tie the rope to it…
Of the rope coming undone at Sam’s desire, all he mentions is that
Quote:
Sam’s uncle, the Gaffer’s eldest brother, owner of the rope-walk ‘over by Tighfield’, now appears …, but he was at first called Obadiah Gamgee, not Andy.
Christopher Tolkien says that this material was written around 5 April 1944, when in Letter 59, his father wrote him that
Quote:
I have gone back to Sam and Frodo, and am trying to work out their adventures. A few pages for a lot of sweat: but at the moment they are just meeting Gollum on a precipice.
Tolkien may continue to discuss this in Letter 60, written 13 April 1944; on 23 April 1944, he reported to his son that he had read “Passage of the Dead Marshes” to C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams in Letter 62.

In defense of the hypothesis, it might be pointed out that in “Note on Chronology”, Christopher Tolkien remarks that details of the timeline were still being worked out in October 1944, some six months later; it is possible that Tolkien introduced the idea of an Entwife throwing down the rope anywhere in that time. (Possible, but not likely, in my opinion.)

More serious are objections based upon Tolkien’s own words regarding the Entwives in his Letters. In Letter 144 to Naomi Mitchison written 25 April 1954, some ten years later, he wrote that
Quote:
Tom Bombadil ... has no connection in my mind with the Entwives. What had happened to them is not resolved in this book. ...

I think that in fact the Entwives had disappeared for good, ... destroyed with their gardens in the War of the Last Alliance ... when Sauron pursued a scorched earth policy and burned their land against the advance of the Allies down the Anduin... 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.
That passage has led me to conclude that Sauron might have taken some of the Entwives and enslaved them around the Sea of Núrnen, where he kept slave-farms to feed his armies; however, even the Nurn was occupied, or at least explored, by the victorious Elves and Númenóreans at the end of the Second Age and the beginning of the Third Age, when many of the ancient maps of Mordor that Elrond possessed in Rivendell that Frodo, Aragorn, and Gandalf consulted before their departure were prepared. Any Entwives found alive by the allies would have been set free. (There is a reference to rope-making and Tighfield in relation to the name “Gamgee” in Letter 144, but it does not refer to the “magic” of the Elven rope or to any purported intervention of an Ent or Entwife at the cliff.)

In Letter 338 in June 1972, near the end of his life, Tolkien again addressed the question of the Entwives, writing that
Quote:
As for the Entwives: I do not know. …I think in [The Two Towers] 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.’
Again, there is no mention whatever of any Entwives in the eastern Emyn Muil.

Finally, we must ask ourselves, if an Entwife survived, why would she remain on the cliff in the Emyn Muil? And why did the Ents not find her? Are we to presume that she was part insensate or “shell-shocked” as a result of the trauma of the war? Or that perhaps she believed all the Ents dead but she? (That would be hopelessness, something Tolkien condemns: cf. the end of Denethor by his own hand.) Perhaps she saw herself as broken and ugly, so much so that she sought to stay away from her own kind, even if she heard them looking for her. (Again, this would be hopelessness.) None of those arguments are particularly convincing to me.

Conclusion

I put no credence whatsoever in the idea that there are “clusters” and “jokes” instilled into Lord of the Rings regarding the Entwives. That Treebeard is in some ways patterned on C.S. Lewis, particularly his “hm, hoom,” is well-known (Humphrey Carter, Tolkien: A biography, ‘The New Hobbit’, p 194); however, I see no evidence that the Entwives or their fate is based upon any similar relationship to anyone that Tolkien knew. As far as I am concerned, anyone claiming that there are such “clusters,” internal or private jokes, or referential material concerning the Entwives and people whom Tolkien knew will have to document those claims clearly and convincingly: for now, I do not believe any such “clusters” or jokes deliberately embedded by Tolkien exist.

While the notion that the stump at the top of the cliff in the Emyn Muil was an Entwife is very appealing, it is based entirely upon circumstance and speculation. There is nothing, to my knowledge, in the rest of Tolkien’s corpus that would suggest that the stump was anything other than a stump. In that case, the propitious fall of the Elven rope after its use is due either to “Elvish magic” or the kind of Providence that led Gildor and the wandering Noldor to come upon Frodo, Sam, and Pippin in the Woody End just in time to scare off the Nazgûl tracking them. Without further evidence to support it, the objections against the stump being an Entwife are more compelling to me.

But it was worth a good essay!

Last edited by Alcuin; 01-03-2007 at 12:38 PM. Reason: grammar, 2nd sentence, 1st paragraph; no further edits.
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