Mirkwood
Mirkwood is a name used for a great dark fictional forest in novels by Sir Walter Scott and William Morris in the 19th century, and by J. R. R. Tolkien in the 20th century. The critic Tom Shippey explains that the name evoked the excitement of the wildness of Europe's ancient North.
At least two distinct Middle-earth forests are named Mirkwood in Tolkien's legendarium. One is in the First Age, when the highlands of Dorthonion north of Beleriand became known as Mirkwood after falling under Morgoth's control. The more famous Mirkwood was in Wilderland, east of the river Anduin. It had acquired the name Mirkwood after it fell under the influence of the Necromancer; before that it had been known as Greenwood the Great. This Mirkwood features significantly in The Hobbit and in the film .
The term Mirkwood was used by Sir Walter Scott in his 1814 novel Waverley, and then by William Morris in his 1889 fantasy novel The House of the Wolfings, influenced by the forest Myrkviðr of Norse mythology. Forests play a major role in the invented history of Tolkien's Middle-earth and are important in the heroic quests of his characters. The forest device is used as a mysterious transition from one part of the story to another.
In Sir Walter Scott's ''Waverley''
The name Mirkwood was used by Sir Walter Scott in his 1814 novel Waverley, which hadIn William Morris's fantasies
used Mirkwood in his fantasy novels. His 1889 The Roots of the Mountains is set in such a forest, while the forest setting in his The House of the Wolfings, also first published in 1889, is actually named Mirkwood. The book begins by describing the wood:In Tolkien's writings
A Mirkwood appears in several places in J. R. R. Tolkien's writings, among several forests that play important roles in his storytelling. Projected into Old English, it appears as Myrcwudu in his The Lost Road, as a poem sung by Ælfwine. He used the name Mirkwood in another unfinished work, The Fall of Arthur. But the name is best known and most prominent in his Middle-earth legendarium, where it appears as two distinct forests, one in the First Age in Beleriand, as described in The Silmarillion, the other in the Third Age in Rhovanion, as described in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.The First Age forest in Beleriand
In The Silmarillion, the forested highlands of Dorthonion in the north of Beleriand eventually fell under Morgoth's control and was subjugated by creatures of Sauron, then Lord of Werewolves. Accordingly, the forest was renamed Taur-nu-Fuin in Sindarin, "Forest of Darkness", or "Forest of Nightshade"; Tolkien chose to use the English form "Mirkwood". Beren becomes the sole survivor of the men who once lived there as subjects of the Noldor King Finrod of Nargothrond. Beren ultimately escapes the terrible forest that even the Orcs fear to spend time in. Beleg pursues the captors of Túrin through this forest in the several accounts of Túrin's tale. Along with the rest of Beleriand, this forest was lost in the cataclysm of the War of Wrath at the end of the First Age.The forest in Rhovanion
Mirkwood is a vast temperate broadleaf and mixed forest in the Middle-earth region of Rhovanion, east of the great river Anduin. In The Hobbit, 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.After the publication of the maps in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien wrote a correction stating "Mirkwood is too small on map it must be 300 miles across" from east to west, but the maps were never altered to reflect this. On the published maps Mirkwood was up to 200 miles across; from north to south it stretched about 420 miles. The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia states that it is 400-500 miles long and 200 miles wide.
The trees were large and densely packed. In the north they were mainly oaks, although beeches predominated in the areas favoured by Elves. Higher elevations in southern Mirkwood were "clad in a forest of dark fir". Pockets of the forest were dominated by dangerous giant spiders.Animals within the forest were described as inedible. The elves of the forest, too, are "black" and hostile, drawing a comparison with Svartalfheim in Snorri Sturluson's Old Norse Edda, quite unlike the friendly elves of Rivendell.
Near the end of the Third Age – the period in which The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are set – the expansive forest of "Greenwood the Great" was renamed "Mirkwood", supposedly a translation of an unknown Westron name. The forest plays little part in The Lord of the Rings, but is important in The Hobbit for both atmosphere and plot. It was renamed when "the shadow of Dol Guldur", namely the power of Sauron, fell upon the forest, and people began to call it Taur-nu-Fuin and Taur-e-Ndaedelos.
In The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, with Thorin Oakenshield and his band of Dwarves, attempt to cross Mirkwood during their quest to regain their mountain Erebor and its treasure from Smaug the dragon. One of the Dwarves, the fat Bombur, falls into the Enchanted River and has to be carried, unconscious, for the following days. Losing the Elf-path, the party becomes lost in the forest and is captured by giant spiders. They escape, only to be taken prisoner by King Thranduil's Wood-Elves. The White Council flushes Sauron out of his forest tower at Dol Guldur, and as he flees to Mordor his influence in Mirkwood diminishes.
Years later, Gollum, after his release from Mordor, is captured by Aragorn and brought as a prisoner to Thranduil's realm. Out of pity, they allow him to roam the forest under close guard, but he escapes during an Orc raid. After the downfall of Sauron, Mirkwood is cleansed by the elf-queen Galadriel and renamed Eryn Lasgalen, Sindarin for "Wood of Greenleaves". Thranduil's son, Legolas, leaves Mirkwood for Ithilien. The wizard Radagast lived at Rhosgobel on the western eaves of Mirkwood, as depicted in the film .
Literary philology
The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey noted that the motivation that drove 19th-century philologists to meticulous scrutiny of linguistic theorems of "language-change, sound-shifts and ablaut-gradations" was the excitement of speculating about the wild, primitive Northern forest, the Myrkviðr inn ókunni and the secret roads across it.Shippey described how "romantically inspired philological interpretations of Myrkviðr" had been made not just by Tolkien but before him by the folklorist Jacob Grimm and the artist and fantasy writer William Morris. These, Shippey argued, helped them to build their own reconstructions of supposed or wholly imaginary cultures. Grimm proposed that the name derived from Old Norse mark and mǫrk, both, he supposed, from an older word for wood, perhaps at the dangerous and disputed boundary of the kingdoms of the Huns and the Goths.
Morris's Mirkwood is named in his 1899 fantasy novel House of the Wolfings, and a similar large dark forest is the setting in The Roots of the Mountains, again marking a dark and dangerous forest. Tolkien had access to more modern philology than Grimm, with proto-Indo-European mer- and *merg-, and places the early origins of both the Men of Rohan and the hobbits there. The Tolkien Encyclopedia remarks also that the Old English Beowulf mentions that the path between the worlds of men and monsters, from Hrothgar's hall to Grendel's lair, runs ofer myrcan mor and wynleasne wudu.
Shippey, looking back at the philological evidence, concluded that while the early philologists were driven to some extent by a romantic excitement, their enthusiasm was guided by "a rigorous and academic discipline". He notes that Norse legend does in fact yield two placenames which may well localise the Myrkviðr to the borderlands between the Goths and the Huns of the 4th century. The Atlakviða and the Hlöðskviða both mention that the Mirkwood was beside the Danpar, the River Dnieper, which runs from Belarus through Ukraine to the Black Sea. The Hlöðskviða states explicitly in the same passage that the Mirkwood was in Gothland. The Hervarar saga also mentions Harvaða fjöllum, "the Harvad fells". Shippey writes that modern linguistics, applying Grimm's Law for the shifting of consonants, reconstructs "Harvad" as *Karpat, with the strong suggestion that the "Karpat fells" are the Carpathian Mountains. These form an arc to the west of the Dnieper, running from Austria and the Czech Republic down to Romania.
Influence
Tolkien's estate disputed the right of novelist Steve Hillard "to use the name and personality of JRR Tolkien in the novel" Mirkwood: A Novel About JRR Tolkien. The dispute was settled in May 2011, requiring the printing of a disclaimer.A rock music group named Mirkwood was formed in 1971; their first album in 1973 had the same name. A band in California used the same name in 2005.
Tolkien's forests were the subject of a programme on BBC Radio 3, with Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough and the folk singer Mark Atherton.
Literary holidays in the Forest of Dean have been sold on the basis that the area inspired Tolkien, who often went there, to create Mirkwood and other forests in his books.