Fimbrethil

The beloved of Treebeard

Fimbrethil was one of the Entwives, the female kindred of the Ents, and the one whom Treebeard loved. Her name in the Common Speech is given as Wandlimb, and Treebeard remembered her as she had been in her youth, slender and light-footed in the days when the Ents and Entwives still walked together in the forests of the Elder Days. She is the only Entwife whose name the histories preserve.

The parting

The Ents and the Entwives grew apart because they loved different things. The Ents wanted the wild woods, the high hills and the mountain springs; the Entwives wanted order, planting and tending, fruit and grain, and the small growing things that Men later learned from them. So the Entwives crossed the Anduin and made gardens in the lands east of the river, and the Ents visited them less and less. The place where those gardens lay is remembered as the Brown Lands, between Mirkwood and the Dead Marshes.

The loss

When the war of the Last Alliance against Sauron came at the end of the Second Age, the gardens of the Entwives lay in the path of the Dark Lord's armies, and they were burned and made desert. The Ents crossed the river to find them and found nothing. Treebeard searched, and asked news of Fimbrethil and her kindred from everyone he met over the following three thousand years, without result; even the Hobbits, when he asked, had never heard of any Entwives.

Legacy

Fimbrethil is the personal face of the sorrow that overhangs the Ents: no Entwives, no Entings, and a people slowly growing into trees. The Elves made a song about the Ent and the Entwife that Treebeard sang to the Hobbits, in which the two are promised a meeting only when all is lost, and it was of Fimbrethil that he was thinking.

Fimbrethil vanished with the other Entwives when their gardens east of Anduin were destroyed at the end of the Second Age; Treebeard never found her.