Forests in Middle-earth

Bilbo and his party travel from his home in the Shire into the wild, encountering the Trolls in the Trollshaws, a wooded region, lying north of the East Road between the rivers Hoarwell and Bruinen. Described as "the Trolls' wood" in the main text, the name "Trollshaws" is derived from troll and shaw, an archaic term for a thicket or small wood.[4]

After crossing the Misty Mountains and the Great River (Anduin), the party run into difficulty in Mirkwood, a vast and dark temperate broadleaf and mixed forest. The wizard Gandalf calls it "the greatest forest of the Northern world."[T 2] Before it was darkened by evil, it had been called Greenwood the Great.[T 3]

In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo Baggins and his companions travel through familiar woods in The Shire, and are pursued by Black Riders; to evade them, the party decides to enter the Old Forest.[T 5] It is an ancient woodland just beyond the eastern borders of the Shire, and somewhat feared by most of the Shire's inhabitants. Merry Brandybuck, who lives in Buckland near the Old Forest, knows a little more than the other Hobbits, but none of them are prepared for what happens to them when they try to cross the forest.[T 4]

Lothlórien is the enchanted realm of the Elves who remain in Middle-earth in the Third Age.[T 6] Its forests include a stand of tall Mallorn trees,[T 7] in which the Elves live on high platforms in their tree city of Caras Galadhon.[T 8] The forest, unlike the rest of Middle-earth, has "no stain", remaining as things were before the Marring of Arda, and seemingly shining with its own golden light.[5]

Merry Brandybuck and Pippin Took enter the ancient forest of Fangorn, at the southern end of the Misty Mountains. It shares its name with the leader of the Ents, ancient tree-giants who live there, herding the trees.[T 9] Some of the trees, Huorns, are awakening and becoming more like Ents, or are Ents who are falling asleep and becoming more "treelike".[T 10]

Frodo and Sam Gamgee travel through the fertile Ithilien, far to the south of the Shire; it still has attractive Mediterranean forest, despite its proximity to the evil land of Mordor.[T 11][T 12] Critics have noted its resemblance to Italy, both in latitude and in its Mediterranean vegetation:[6][7] "Many great trees grew there, ... and groves and thickets there were of tamarisk and pungent terebinth, of olive and of bay; and there were junipers and myrtles".[T 12]

The forest of the Drúedain is ancient, populated by a race who resemble the mythological woodwoses, the wild men of the woods of Britain and Europe, and who are named as woses by the Riders of Rohan. The woses, angered by the actions of the enemy, allow the Riders to travel on a secret road through their forest.[8][T 13]

Beleriand's major forests include the Forest of Brethil, the Elvish forest realm of Doriath, home to the Sindar, and the great southern forest of Taur-im-Duinath, occupying much of East Beleriand.[T 14] Doriath is protected by the "girdle of Melian", a magical defence around Thingol's forest kingdom.[9]

The southern part of the blessed realm of Valinor contains the Woods of Oromë, where the Vala liked to hunt.[T 15]

Michael Brisbois, writing in Tolkien Studies, comments that in The Lord of the Rings, the mainly broadleaf or mixed forests, with coniferous forests on higher ground as at Rivendell and southern Mirkwood, are realistic enough to lead the reader through into "the hyperreal" and then into "the fantastic".[10] For the Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey, the mention of Mirkwood is an echo of the Norse mythology of the Elder Edda, with the pathless forests of the North over the Misty Mountains mentioned in one of the poems in the Edda, the Skirnismal.[11] Tolkien used the name Mirkwood also of Taur-nu-Fuin in Beleriand, in the view of Tolkien's biographer John Garth "deliberately entangl[ing] the two forests."[12] Damian O'Byrne writes that "the forests of Middle-earth possess a dark agency of their own; they are malevolent places where paths 'shift and change from time to time in queer fashion'", while Taur-nu-Fuin is "a region of such dread and dark enchantment that even the Orcs would not enter it unless need drove them".[13]

The Tolkien scholars Shelley Saguaro and Deborah Cogan Thacker state that Mirkwood's role in The Hobbit is both to be the dark forbidding forest of fairy tale as Bilbo pursues his quest as in "a classical quest narrative", and to have the familiar qualities of a real wood. The forests and trees of The Lord of the Rings are, however, "much more complex": trees may change, whether by being "woken up by Elves" as were the Ents, or "going bad" like some of the trees in the Old Forest.[14] Saguaro and Thacker note that forests recur in fairy stories, as places where the protagonist becomes lost, where witches and woodcutters and wolves live. They recall that in Tree and Leaf, Tolkien's account of fairy tales, such stories are in his words "unanalysable .. outside Time itself maybe". Saguaro and Thacker mention the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim's interpretation, that going into the forest "signifies a psychoanalytic space – a place separated from everyday experience in which to be lost is to be found",[14] and Jack Zipes's alternative view, based on his analysis of the Brothers Grimm, that the forest makes enchantment possible, because the conventions of society do not apply there.[14]

Tolkien's biographer John Garth writes that the great forests, the "tree-woven lands" of Middle-earth, symbolise nature as opposed to development and industrialisation, "against the axe and furnace".[12] Tolkien's own position was that the primeval human understanding is, as he wrote in his 1964 book Tree and Leaf, "communion with other living things", now lost.[14] The Tolkien scholar Paul Kocher states that Middle-earth is meant to be the Earth itself in the distant past, when the primeval forests still existed, and with them, a wholeness that is also now lost. He adds that a forest like Fangorn "may be dire and mysterious but its trees are the same oaks, chestnuts, beeches, and rowans that make up our woods."[15] Saguaro and Thacker write that while it might seem that Tolkien is using forests mainly to represent the natural world, as against the industrial modern world, they are rather "a multi-layered portrayal, with subtle links to fairy tale and folklore, and complex psychological symbolism."[14]

• Aracil, Leticia Cortina (2019). "8. Shadow Shrouds and Moonlight Veils the Forest as an Existential Scene in Tolkien's Legendarium". In Hackett, Jon; Harrington, Sean (eds.). Beasts of the Forest: Denizens of the Dark Woods. Indiana University Press. pp. 119–132. ISBN 978-0-8619-6959-3.
• Brisbois, Michael J. (2005). "Tolkien's Imaginary Nature: An Analysis of the Structure of Middle-earth". Tolkien Studies. Project MUSE. 2 (1): 197–216. doi:10.1353/tks.2005.0009. ISSN 1547-3163. S2CID 170238657.
• Carpenter, Humphrey, ed. (1981). The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 978-0-395-31555-2.
• Garth, John (2020). "Tree-woven Lands". The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Places that Inspired Middle-earth. London: Frances Lincoln Publishers. pp. 112–131. ISBN 978-0-71124-127-5.
• Kocher, Paul (1974) [1972]. Master of Middle-earth: The Achievement of J.R.R. Tolkien. Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14003-877-4.
• O'Byrne, Damian (2019). "9. The Fiendish Forests of Middle-earth: Tolkien's Trees as Ominous Adversaries". In Hackett, Jon; Harrington, Sean (eds.). Beasts of the Forest: Denizens of the Dark Woods. Indiana University Press. pp. 133–146. ISBN 978-0-8619-6959-3.
• Shippey, Tom (2005) [1982]. The Road to Middle-Earth (Third ed.). HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0261102750.
• Tolkien, J. R. R. (1937). Douglas A. Anderson (ed.). The Annotated Hobbit. Boston: Houghton Mifflin (published 2002). ISBN 978-0-618-13470-0.
• Tolkien, J. R. R. (1954a). The Fellowship of the Ring. The Lord of the Rings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. OCLC 9552942.
• Tolkien, J. R. R. (1954). The Two Towers. The Lord of the Rings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. OCLC 1042159111.
• Tolkien, J. R. R. (1955). The Return of the King. The Lord of the Rings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. OCLC 519647821.
• Tolkien, J. R. R. (1977). Christopher Tolkien (ed.). The Silmarillion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 978-0-395-25730-2.
• Tolkien, J. R. R. (1980). Christopher Tolkien (ed.). Unfinished Tales. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 978-0-395-29917-3.
• Williams, Hamish, ed. (2021). Tolkien and the Classical World. Zurich: Walking Tree Publishers. ISBN 978-3-905703-45-0. OCLC 1237352408.