The Rings Of Power Season 2 Teases Lord Of The Rings' Saddest Tragedy

Amazon Studios' "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" series came out swinging at San Diego Comic-Con, a month before the show's highly anticipated Season 2 premieres on the streaming platform. At SDCC, a nearly four-minute "Rings of Power" trailer revealed a host of spoilery details hinting at what fans can expect to see in the coming months. One of the most surprising of these was a group of characters we never saw coming — the Entwives.

The Entwives are the female half of the Entish race and a group that is long gone by the time of "The Lord of the Rings." The fate of the Entwives is as mysterious as it is tragic, and while the group's story is never clearly explained by J.R.R. Tolkien himself, we do know that it reaches its heart-wrenching climax during the time when "The Rings of Power" story is set.

As for where Entwives show up in the SDCC trailer, you can see them in two places. The first one starts at 2 minutes and 38t seconds. Don't be fooled by the sight of Rory Kinnear's Tom Bombadil donning his hat. It's the narration you want to listen to as an Entwife says, "Forgiveness takes an age." By the end of the melodramatic line, said with all of the requisite laborious creakings that is a trademark of the race, we see the tree person herself, close up with bark-like skin, wooden eyes, and flowering buds on her branches. Ten seconds later, we glimpse a humanoid tree from a distance in the dark fog, walking toward a tiny individual and apparently taking a swing at them. (Ents are notoriously skeptical of those who walk on two legs.)

Having the Entwives in the mix is fun, but it sets things up for the show to break all of our hearts. The tragedy of the Entwives is one of those calamities that J.R.R. Tolkien quietly weaves into the "Lord of the Rings" narrative without warning. When Merry and Pippin meet Treebeard in "The Two Towers," they get onto the topic of Entish families and procreation. When Pippin asks why there are so few Ents, Treebeard explains that there haven't been any "Entings" or Ent children for a long time, adding, "You see, we lost the Entwives."

When Pippin asks how they died, Treebeard corrects that they didn't die. The Ents lost them, something he calls both a strange and sad story. The Ents and Entwives once lived near one another. The Ents were hermit-like, secretly tending to the larger forests and wild woods. The Entwives gave their love to smaller plants of the fields and thickets and were expert gardeners with famous dwellings. Then, when Sauron and the Númenóreans went to war (which is coming in the "Rings of Power" story), the Ents visited the Entwives and found they had disappeared and their land was laid to waste. "It was all burned and uprooted, for war had passed over it," Treebeard says, "But the Entwives were not there."

The Ents search for their beloved Entwives for ages but never find them. In a letter in 1954, Tolkien addressed this great tragedy of the Ents, basically saying that he doesn't know their fate, but if he had to guess, they probably fled further east or were enslaved. The final turn of the dagger? Even if the Ents found them at that point, they probably would be estranged.

So, how do the Entwives factor into the "Rings of Power" story? Canonically, there isn't much to go on. We know that the Ents and Entwives are around and that they are thriving. J.R.R. Tolkien adds that the Entwives are important in teaching Men and Hobbits agricultural skills early in Middle-earth history. By the time of the show, they live in and around the area south of Mirkwood (called the Brown Lands on your average Middle-earth map). This is the area where the Harfoots wander throughout Season 1.

Bringing the Entwives into the show could be an interesting way to build up the story and set the stage for the calamity to come. It also offers a way to integrate the tree-people into the show's larger non-canonical storylines. If we had to make a guess, the line in the trailer is already setting that up, too. The words "forgiveness takes an age" indicate a profound sense of grievance, pain, and suffering. However, at this point in the Second Age, the Entwives haven't disappeared or been killed or enslaved.

Instead, the statement is likely referring to the tension between the Ents, who want to stay isolated in the woods, and the Entwives, who live out amongst the Free Peoples of Middle-earth, ordering their gardens and living prosperous lives. Treebeard talks about this from the Entish perspective in "The Lord of the Rings," sounding confused and betrayed by the Entwives' decision to choose their gardens over their male counterparts. Perhaps there is more to the separation between the two halves of the race, and we're going to hear it from an Entwife's perspective, this time around.