Old Forest

• 1. Introduction

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  The Old Forest lies just beyond the Shire's eastern border, a daunting, ancient wood in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. Readers first entered it in 1954, in a chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring titled "The Old Forest." Tom Bombadil once described its most dangerous tree, the Great Willow. He said the Great Willow's "heart was rotten, but his strength was green, and he was cunning, and a master of winds." Its song and thought, Bombadil said, ran through the woods on both riverbanks. Its grey, thirsty spirit spread like fine root-threads until it ruled nearly every tree from the Hedge to the Downs.

  A writer famed for cherishing trees placed something monstrous at the heart of his own forest. Who kept that monster in check, and why did the hobbits nearest the trees wall themselves off from it? What actually happens to travelers who cross the Hedge and wander into the valley of the Withywindle?

• 2. Guardians of a Vanished Age

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  Eriador once held one continuous forest stretching hundreds of miles, from the Old Forest's site all the way to Fangorn in the south-east. By the time hobbits arrived, the Old Forest was one of the last survivors of the primordial woods that once covered Eriador before the Second Age. Three nature-spirits watched over this surviving patch of wood: Tom Bombadil, Goldberry, and Old Man Willow, and their combined power likely helped it endure where other forests were destroyed.

  Old Man Willow first stepped into Tolkien's writing in the narrative poem The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, where he briefly trapped Bombadil himself. The poem paints him as a sentient, evil willow capable of hypnosis and of moving his own roots and trunk. Some characters wonder whether he is kin to the Ents or the Huorns. Unlike either, though, he stays rooted, unable to walk from place to place. Bombadil alone held power over him, and reined in his malice as far as he could, or cared to.

  According to Bombadil, at the dawn of time trees were the only inhabitants across vast stretches of the world. Possibly Old Man Willow himself first sprouted then, during the Spring of Arda, when plants first appeared across the world. Because the Elves awoke far in the East, ages passed before any other beings reached the primeval forests of western Middle-earth. A handful of trees survived from that era into the present. They remained angry at Elves and Men for claiming dominion over land the trees once ruled alone. Bombadil says he himself was in the Forest "before the river and the trees" back in the First Age. In the Years of the Trees, migrating Elves skirted the forest on their way to Beleriand and the West, and Bombadil watched them pass.

  By the time Sauron was finally driven from Eriador, most of the region's ancient forests had already been destroyed. Only scattered remnants lingered afterward: the Old Forest itself, along with Woody End in the Shire, Chetwood in Bree-land, and Eryn Vorn in Minhiriath. Of those four survivors, only the Old Forest grew close enough to a hobbit settlement to end up walled off behind a hedge.

• 3. The Withywindle's Domain

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  The Old Forest covered roughly 1,000 square miles, about 2,600 square kilometres, at the heart of Eriador. Its eastern border ran against the Barrow-downs, a hilly stretch dotted with ancient burial mounds where Frodo's party later met the Barrow-wight. To the north it reached toward the Great East Road, and its western and southern edges approached the Brandywine river. The Withywindle, a tributary of the Brandywine, cut through the forest's heart and drained most of its land.

  Every slope and hedge of undergrowth seemed arranged for one purpose: to funnel any stranger straight toward the Withywindle and into Old Man Willow's reach. The stretch of that river valley inside the forest carried its own name, the Dingle.

  Oaks, ashes, and other strange trees dominated the west and south of the forest, giving way to pines and firs further north. Beeches and alders turned up here and there, while willows ruled the banks of the Withywindle itself. Moss and slimy, shaggy growths coated many of the trunks, and brambles choked a dense understorey of bushes. Where the canopy broke into occasional glades, hemlocks, wood-parsley, fire-weed, nettles, thistles, and plain grass grew. None of it offered much comfort to a hobbit expecting open ground.

• 4. The Hedge and the Hobbits

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  In one of his letters, Tolkien explained plainly why the forest behaved this way. It was "hostile to two-legged creatures because of the memory of many injuries." That memory reached back to Gorhendad Oldbuck and his clan of hobbits, who settled Buckland and began encroaching on the forest's edge. Their arrival reawakened a hostility first stirred in the Second Age, and the settlers soon found themselves under threat from the trees themselves.

  The trees, Buckland's hobbits came to believe, were in some sense awake, swaying with no wind and whispering after dark. They tripped intruders, dropped branches on them, and herded wandering hobbits deeper into the forest rather than letting them turn back. Deep inside, the Withywindle Valley held the root of every terror in the wood, a place the hobbits considered dark, evil, and malevolent.

  To hold the line, the Bucklanders planted and maintained a great Hedge, also called the High Hay, the length of Buckland's eastern border. They had done this many generations before the War of the Ring. Long afterward, still well before that war, the hobbits noticed the Hedge coming under attack. Trees pressed against it and leaned over its length. In response they cleared a narrow strip outside the Hedge, felling and burning enough trees that the cleared space became known as the Bonfire Glade.

  The Brandybucks, Buckland's ruling family, held a private gate through the Hedge and occasionally dared to cross the threshold beyond it. They also kept the cleared strip maintained, and it still stood at the time of the War of the Ring. At least one hobbit outside the Brandybuck family, Farmer Maggot, is known to have entered the Old Forest as well. Merry Brandybuck was Buckland's heir during the war and later joined the Fellowship of the Ring. He had gone into the forest several times and carried a key to the gate. On Merry's advice, Frodo Baggins, carrying the One Ring, chose to risk that same forest as a way to shake off the pursuing Black Riders.

• 5. Old Man Willow

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  Beside the River Withywindle, hidden in the forest's heart, grew Old Man Willow, a malign tree-spirit whose influence reached the whole wood. When Frodo's company wandered too close, the tree cast a spell over them and trapped two of the hobbits. Only Tom Bombadil's intervention freed them, and he explained afterward that the tree was wholly evil.

  To draw Old Man Willow correctly, Tolkien sketched an unpollarded willow that stood by a river in Oxford. The tree has puzzled critics ever since, since it clashes with Tolkien's reputation as an environmentalist "tree-hugger." Others note that Christian tradition already pictures trees as affected by the Biblical Fall of Man.

• 6. Turning to Evil

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  Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger has pointed out that the Old Forest sits uneasily against Tolkien's usual protectiveness toward wild nature and trees. Despite several close calls with the Black Riders earlier in the story, she notes, one thing stands out. The hobbits' first real antagonist in The Lord of the Rings is Old Man Willow himself. Flieger also argues that the Bucklanders cut and burned hundreds of trees along the Hedge. She compares that destruction to what Saruman's orcs later inflict on the woods around Orthanc.

  Old Man Willow began, Flieger writes, as "a predatory tree" in the 1934 poem The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. Tolkien developed the character further afterward, in The Lord of the Rings. That development is documented in The Return of the Shadow. An early 1938 draft preserved there shows the Willow tree and the Old Man figure not yet fused into one indivisible being. In that draft Tolkien instead wrote of "how that grey thirsty earth-bound spirit had become imprisoned in the greatest Willow of the Old Forest." Flieger finds the same split, a tree and a separate "non-incarnate mind" trapped inside it, in a 1943 text she calls "Manuscript B." Tolkien solved the puzzle of a spirit imprisoned in wood, she argues, by fusing the two into one single being, at once tree and malevolent spirit.

  The other trees around Old Man Willow, Flieger notes, do nothing a normal tree can't do: dropping branches, sticking up roots. Yet they seem to react to the hobbits' presence with real intent. They herd the travelers "eastwards and southwards, into the heart of the forest," exactly where the hobbits do not want to go. Tolkien himself wrote that every inhabitant of his world, Ea, can be corrupted, and that even "trees may 'go bad.'" Matthew Dickerson, writing in the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, singles out Old Man Willow as the clearest example of that corruption at work.

• 7. Other Symbolism

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  Scholars have compared Tolkien's Old Forest to the "Old England" of John Buchan's 1931 novel The Blanket of the Dark. In that book, protagonist Peter Bohun vanishes in the Midlands around Evesham. Tolkien held a personal fondness for that same West Midlands landscape, since his mother's family, the Suffields, came from the area.

  Tom Shippey proposes a deeper reading still: the forest as an allusion to Death itself. He draws that idea from Frodo, the story's central protagonist, who describes the Old Forest bluntly as "the shadowed land."

  John Garth traces the plainest possible name, "Old Forest," back to a surprisingly loaded root. "Forest" descends from the medieval Latin forestem silvam, meaning the outside wood, itself built on the Latin foris, or out of doors. Garth reads this as unfenced woodland. Yet he notes the irony that Tolkien's Old Forest is instead "very emphatically fenced out" by a strip of scorched earth and a high hedge. That barrier was meant to keep the forest's seemingly mobile trees from invading Buckland. That same fenced-off wood, so carefully built into Tolkien's prose, would not survive the trip to the screen intact.

• 8. Adaptations

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  The forest appears as a setting in the video game The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The MMORPG Lord of the Rings Online built a whole quest around him. Players gather lilies for Goldberry at the foot of Old Man Willow, a task Bombadil assigns himself. Bombadil warns the player that the tree will "sing you right to sleep."

  Peter Jackson's film adaptation left out the Old Forest completely, cutting the Crickhollow chapter, the Barrow-downs, and Tom Bombadil from the story alongside it.