LotR -- Book 3 - Chapter 09 - Flotsam and Jetsam

[Child of the 7th Age]

Aiwendil

I don't know - to me it really does seem that the problem between the Ents and Entwives arose primarily from their differing pursuits.

Without getting into this too deeply on a chapter thread, let me add something. You were right to say it's more than "communication" that separated them. But I also think it's not simply different attitude towards nature that led to estrangement. We have other examples and patterns that the Ents and Entwives could have emulated.

For example, it's not unusual for the male and female figures in a mythic/faerie linking to have completely contrasting spheres and interests....even to have set times when they separate from each other and later join again. (Persephone and Hades are a striking example of this, both in terms of differing roles and temperments and the issue of separation.) Even during the separation of such couples, there is an underlying rhythm that keeps them in step so they never lose each other.

In LotR, Tom Bombadil and his wife come to mind. Tom would roam off on his own in the forest but always found his way back to the house that Goldberry kept to enjoy the hearth and the warmth of their relationship. Just like Goldberry, the Entwives insisted on settling down and constructing gardens while the Ents kept rambling. In Treebeard's words,

...we only came to the gardens now and again. Then when the Darkness came in the North, 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. Many men learned the crafts of the Entwives and honoured them greatly; but we were only a legend to them, a secret in the heart of the forest. Yet here we still are, while all the gardens of the Entwives are wasted: Men call them the Brown Lands now.

Differing views of nature and chosen roles in life do play a part in Ent/Entwife separation but even more critical is the fact that both of them have lost a sense of the joint rhythm of their lives. It would have been possible for them to have kept some type of cyclic relationship going where the two partners dance in and out, alternating times of separation and togetherness. After all, gardens do not blossom in the winter, and even a forest that is asleep presumably needs less care! But both genders were too wrapped up in themselves to care about the dance they were supposed to be weaving. In a strange kind of way, I am reminded of the modern couples who put so much of themselves into work that there is nothing left for each other.

It does make one wonder. Given the fact that the Ents had not made a sustained effort to nurture a relation over time and were so easily wooed away from their wives, would they actually have been the best guards of Saruman? Was it simply the Voice of the Wizard that deceived them, or did they have a natural tendency to shut out anything that distracted them from their preferred life path? Taking care of a prisoner would interfere with their desire to wander through the woods so that they might be more likely to shirk their obligations. And unlike the rapid attack on Isengard, being responsible for a prisoner takes sustained commitment over time, something they had trouble with. (These same deficiencies in behavior were just as true of the Entwives, but they are out of the picture now.)