Anyway, at the meeting, my father asked about the Entwives and Tolkien, taking a pencil, marked on the map ‘Here be the Entwives’...

Later Dad inked over the pencil marks, keeping the hand-writing style. And I didn’t think much more about it, until I happened to mention the Map to one of my older brothers, who recalled the above anecdote and I realised how significant it may become - or not!

So below is a very small part of the map. My father inked over JT’s pencil (knowing my father’s hand-writing as I do, I think he went a bit heavy, the only bit which is definitely not his style is the ‘y’ from ‘may’). My father has yet to send a picture of the whole map as apparently the reflection from the glass is too much, so he will have to take the map down and the glass off etc. I know it sounds crazy, but my father did the map in black ink from a rotring pen and then coloured in with felt tip pens! Where he made mistakes he overlaid with new bits of paper and re-drew. It was a pretty big deal in the early ‘70’s! I have to apologise again for my first edit where I wrote ‘East bank’, but at least I have an excuse, as I’m pretty sure that’s what I was told!

I think that in fact the Entwives had disappeared for good, being destroyed with their gardens in the War of the Last Alliance (Second Age 3429 – 3441) 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 metalworkers. 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.

Were Trolls twisted from Ents by Morgoth?