Forests in Middle-earth

Forests appear repeatedly in J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy world of Middle-earth. In The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins and party have adventures in the Trollshaws and in Mirkwood. In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo Baggins and his companions travel through woods in The Shire, and are pursued by Black Riders; to evade them, the party enters the feared Old Forest, where they encounter other hazards. Later the Fellowship comes to the Elvish forest realm of Lothlórien; and after the Fellowship has split up, Frodo and Sam Gamgee travel through Ithilien with its Mediterranean vegetation, while Merry Brandybuck and Pippin Took enter the ancient forest of Fangorn. The Riders of Rohan, on their way to war, are allowed to travel on a secret road through another ancient forest, that of the Drúedain or woses. The Silmarillion, too, features several forests, both in Beleriand which is home to places like the Elvish forest realm of Doriath, protected by the magic of Melian the Maia, and in the south of Valinor, where the Valar liked to hunt in the woods of Oromë.

Critics note that Middle-earth was set in the distant past, when primeval forests still existed. Forests play varying roles in his books. In The Hobbit, Mirkwood is the dark forbidding forest of fairy tale. In The Lord of the Rings, scholars suggest that the forests symbolise nature as opposed to industrialisation, but also embody links to fairy tale and folklore, and carry a psychological message.

J. R. R. Tolkien was a scholar of English literature, a philologist and medievalist interested in language and poetry from the Middle Ages, especially that of Anglo-Saxon England and Northern Europe. His professional knowledge of works such as Beowulf shaped his fictional world of Middle-earth, including his fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings. Middle-earth, or more precisely the world of Arda, represents what Paul Kocher has called "our own green and solid Earth at some quite remote epoch in the past."

Tolkien makes use of forests across Middle-earth, from the Trollshaws and Mirkwood in The Hobbit, reappearing in The Lord of the Rings, to the Old Forest, Lothlórien, Fangorn, and the Mediterranean forest in Ithilien, all of which feature in chapters of The Lord of the Rings, and the great forests of Beleriand, a region of the west of Middle-earth, lost at the end of the First Age, and Valinor, the blessed realm, mentioned in The Silmarillion. Indeed, while Middle-earth was still "in a twilight under the stars", the "oldest living things had arisen: ... on earth, the shadows of great trees".

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.

After crossing the Misty Mountains and the Great River (Anduin), the party run into difficulty in Mirkwood, a vast and dark forest with stands of fir trees, and in other places of oak and beech. The wizard Gandalf calls it "the greatest forest of the Northern world." Before it was darkened by evil, it had been called Greenwood the Great.

"Are the stories about it true?" asked Pippin.

"I don't know what stories you mean", Merry answered. "If you mean the old bogey-stories Fatty's nurses used to tell him ... I should say no .... But the Forest is queer. Everything in it is very much more alive, more aware of what is going on, so to speak, than things are in the Shire. And the trees do not like strangers. They watch you. They are usually content merely to watch you, as long as daylight lasts, and don't do much. Occasionally the most unfriendly ones may drop a branch, or stick a root out, or grasp at you with a long trailer. But at night things can be most alarming, or so I am told. I have only once or twice been in here after dark, and then only near the hedge. I thought all the trees were whispering to each other, passing news and plots along in an unintelligible language; and the branches swayed and groped without any wind. They do say the trees actually move, and can surround strangers and hem them in."