In the First Age, when Morgoth attacked, he ended up ruling most of Middle-earth, so even if his forces didn’t specifically get to the gardens of the Entwives, they would have been under his command.īut what happened to turn these lush gardens into the ugly and barren Brown Lands? The Entwives crossed to the eastern side of the Anduin in the First Age, and were basically forgotten by the Ents until the very end of the Second Age, during the War of the Last Alliance. Treebeard also made reference to being one of three remaining Ents “that walked in the woods before the Darkness.” If both Darknesses were the same (and they were), then it would be a bit shortsighted to think that he’s talking about the Third Age. However, in that war, Sauron didn’t come down from the North, but came from the south and east.īut I’d wager this was a much earlier war and a much earlier Darkness – when Morgoth attacked from Angband. Treebeard explained that “when the Darkness came in the North, the Entwives crossed the Grate River, and made new gardens.” It’s been suggested that “the Darkness” was Sauron and the War of the Last Alliance, which took place at the end of the Second Age – over 3,000 years before our story began. These became the gardens in which the Entwives lived, on the western side of the Anduin, and the Ents would visit every now and then.
The way that he tells the story, the Entwives were more concerned with their gardens than with the Ents themselves, and they ordered their trees to grow as they wished. He was a Ranger and if how the Brown Lands became brown was lost to the Dúnedain, and even apparently to the Elves, the truth must be ancient.Īnd ancient it was! Later in the narrative, we’ll learn from Treebeard some of what happened. That Aragorn did not know their story is telling in and of itself. Tolkien explained in an unfinished index that the name, Brown Lands, was derived from the word Berennyn, which was a translation of the Sindarin word baran, which meant “brown, yellow-brown.” He considered that it had to have been disease or war or some “evil deed of the enemy” that turned them into what they saw before them. This wasn’t how they originally were made. To Aragorn, they didn’t seem to be natural.
“They had come to the Brown Lands,” we’re told. The slopes were brown and lifeless, “as if fire had passed over them.” There were no trees, no plants, no grasses – not even rocks. When they started from Lothlórien, they were among tall grey trees, but as the first few days wore on, “the trees thinned and then failed altogether.” On their left, the eastern banks of the river, the land sloped from high toward the water. At this point in the journey, they had traveled 250 miles, passing by some fairly desolate land. While it seems as if we’ve been waiting for the Fellowship to end their journey down the Anduin for millennia, in actuality, they haven’t even been out for a week.
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