Mirkwood

Before the shadow that gave the forest its later, grimmer name, the wood east of the Misty Mountains was called Greenwood the Great — a straightforward name, describing a vast and thriving forest rather than laying any particular claim upon it. It was the greatest wood of its kind in that part of Middle-earth, and the name reflected simple fact rather than legend: a green wood, and a great one. Under this name the forest appears in the earliest records of its history, when it was still open to travel and held no particular dread for those who knew it.

The name changed as a shadow spread from the forest's southern part, where the presence later known as the Necromancer had taken root at Dol Guldur; the peoples of Wilderland began to call the wood Mirkwood, and the older name fell into disuse. The word itself is a plain English compound, pairing the archaic adjective 'mirk' — dark, gloomy — with 'wood'; it is a name of Men, not of Elves, coined to describe the dread the forest now inspired rather than any Elvish understanding of its nature. It was as Mirkwood that Bilbo and the Dwarves, and later the Fellowship, knew the forest, and the name held until the shadow was finally lifted from it, after which its inhabitants renamed it once more, this time as Eryn Lasgalen, the Wood of Greenleaves.

Tolkien himself noted, in a letter responding to a reader's question, that Mirkwood was not a name of his own devising but a genuinely old one, inherited from the traditions of Northern European legend, where a dark and perilous forest bearing such a name commonly marked the boundary between the known world and lands beyond it. In borrowing the name for the wood east of the Misty Mountains, he placed the forest within that older literary lineage of boundary-forests — places at once real geography and half-legendary threshold — rather than inventing an entirely new toponym for it.

Mirkwood occupies a great stretch of Wilderland, the region east of the Misty Mountains also known as Rhovanion, and stands with Lothlórien and Fangorn among the last of the large forests remaining in that part of Middle-earth by the close of the Third Age. It does not rise directly from the mountains' feet but is set back from them across the upper vales of the Anduin, so that a traveller crossing the Misty Mountains from the west must still descend into open country and cross the river's valley before reaching the eaves of the wood. The forest runs broad and deep from north to south, its interior largely trackless and its canopy in most places thick enough to shut out the sky, a darkness that by the later Third Age was as much a matter of report as of the trees themselves.

A single ancient track, the Old Forest Road, once ran east and west through the wood, linking the vales of Anduin to the lands beyond, but by the time Bilbo and the Dwarves attempted it, it had become faint and untrustworthy, crossed partway along by the Enchanted River, whose dark waters brought heavy sleep and forgetfulness to any who touched them. Further north and east, where the Forest River flowed down out of the wood toward the Long Lake and the town men called Esgaroth, the land grew somewhat more open and less oppressive; there, among beech woods rather than the gloom-laden oak and fir of the south, lay the caverns that served as the halls of the Elvenking, a discrete and relatively guarded stronghold within the larger forest.

The forest's southern reaches held the opposite character: there, on a wooded height, stood Dol Guldur, and the country around it grew ever fouler and more perilous, infested with giant spiders and haunted by other creatures drawn to the darkness spreading from the hill. This split in character, a guarded and lightly wooded northeast set against a fouled and spider-ridden south, gave Mirkwood in the years of its dark name a divided geography as much as a divided reputation, with safe passage narrowing to the paths held by the Elvenking's people while the broad heart of the forest fell into unchecked shadow.

The forest's political history begins with the Sindarin lord Oropher, who led a following of his people eastward across the Misty Mountains in the aftermath of the wars of Beleriand and settled among the Silvan Elves already dwelling in Greenwood the Great, becoming their king. Oropher and his folk gradually adopted the customs and speech of the Silvan Elves among whom they lived, so that within a few generations his line ruled as a woodland kingdom rather than a Sindarin court in exile. Oropher fell in the War of the Last Alliance, leading his people into the great battle before the gates of Mordor without waiting for Gil-galad's full army, and the losses his folk suffered there led his son and heir, Thranduil, to withdraw the survivors northward within the forest, away from the more exposed southern reaches. It was from this retreat that Thranduil's realm, centred on great caverns beside the Forest River, took the shape it held through the rest of the Third Age.

For centuries afterward the forest prospered under this arrangement, until, around the year 1050 of the Third Age, a shadow began to spread from its southern part and the folk of Wilderland took up the name Mirkwood in place of the old one. Some fifty years later the Wise became aware that a hidden power had raised a stronghold at Dol Guldur, on a wooded hill in the south of the forest, though its identity remained unknown to them for a long age afterward. Suspicion hardened only slowly, since the power at Dol Guldur took care to conceal itself, and the forest's decline into darkness was for a long time a matter of rumor and dread among Men rather than confirmed knowledge among the Elves and Wizards who might have challenged it.

By the middle of the third millennium of the Age, the strength gathered at Dol Guldur had grown enough that the Wise began to suspect its master was Sauron himself returning to power, a fear the Silmarillion's own account of the period confirms was justified. In the year 2063 Gandalf journeyed to Dol Guldur to test this suspicion, and the power there withdrew eastward rather than face him, opening a long lull known afterward as the Watchful Peace, which held for some four centuries. That peace ended in 2460 when Sauron returned to his old stronghold in greater strength than before, and the White Council was formed three years later expressly to watch and, if possible, counter the danger regrowing in the south of the forest.

Gandalf returned to Dol Guldur alone in 2850 and there confirmed at last that its master was indeed Sauron, gathering strength and searching in particular for news of the One Ring; in the same venture he found the captive Dwarf-lord Thráin and received from him the key and map that would later set Bilbo's journey in motion. This discovery pressed the White Council to act, and in 2941, the same year as the Battle of Five Armies fought at the forest's northeastern edge, the Council's combined strength finally drove Sauron from Dol Guldur, forcing his open withdrawal to Mordor. For some seven decades afterward Mirkwood knew a fragile respite, its southern stronghold empty though still darkly regarded, until the opening of the War of the Ring brought fresh war to its borders.

In 3018 Sauron's servants reoccupied Dol Guldur, garrisoning it anew as a forward base against Thranduil's realm, and the following year, as the War of the Ring came to its climax elsewhere, the forest itself became a battleground: the forces massed there struck Thranduil's kingdom three times, and his people fought a hard action remembered as the battle under the trees before finally repelling the assault. That same year Galadriel led the strength of Lothlórien across the Anduin, threw down the walls of Dol Guldur, and cast its darkness out; Sauron's power departed the stronghold for the last time, and with the War's end the shadow that had named the forest for nearly three thousand years was lifted from it.

In the peace that followed, Celeborn crossed the Anduin and took the cleansed southern woodland as his own realm, called for a time East Lórien, while Thranduil retained the north; the two rulers agreed together to set aside the name Mirkwood and rename the whole forest Eryn Lasgalen, the Wood of Greenleaves, leaving its middle region free for the Beornings and the Woodmen who had long dwelt along its eastern edges. The forest thus passed out of its long age of dread not through abandonment but through a deliberate division of stewardship among those who had fought to reclaim it, closing its Third Age history much as it had opened, as a realm shared between Silvan Elves and their Sindarin lords.

The forest's population divided along lines of origin as much as of geography. The bulk of its people were Silvan Elves, a branch of the Elven-kind who had never crossed the Sea nor dwelt in Valinor, and who by temperament and custom stood apart from the higher, more courtly Elves of Rivendell or Lothlórien; their speech and ways were their own, shaped by long ages in the woodland rather than by the traditions of the West. Ruling over them, from Oropher onward, sat a line of Sindarin origin, so that Thranduil's court combined Sindarin kingship with a predominantly Silvan people, a pairing distinct from Lothlórien, where a Sindarin ruling pair likewise presided over Silvan subjects, or Rivendell, whose folk were more mixed still. Beyond the Elvenking's own halls, the forest's fringes held other inhabitants only loosely bound to his rule: Men of Wilderland, among them the Woodmen who lived along the eastern eaves near the Long Lake, and the Beornings further north near the Old Forest Road's crossing of the Anduin, folk who dwelt near the wood and traded with it but were not subject to Thranduil's governance.

Thranduil's relations with his neighbors were guarded rather than close. His folk kept a wary distance from Dwarves, a mistrust rooted in old grievances between their peoples and sharpened by the imprisonment of Thorin's company, though it did not prevent later cooperation against common enemies. With Men of the Lake and of Dale the Elvenking maintained a more even footing, trading and, when need arose, standing together in arms, as at the Battle of Five Armies and again in the fighting of the War of the Ring's final year. Toward Lothlórien and its rulers Thranduil's realm held a kinship of kind, both being woodland kingdoms of Silvan population under courtly leadership, though the two remained politically separate through the Third Age, their peoples divided by the width of Wilderland and the peril of the road between.

Within The Hobbit, the forest functions less as scenery than as ordeal: it is the one stretch of the journey the company must cross without Gandalf, who turns back at its eaves and leaves Thorin's party to rely on its own judgment rather than his. The single rule the wizard leaves them, never to stray from the path, becomes the story's real test, and the company fails it: lured by the sound and light of feasting that always recedes as they approach, they wander off the track, lose it entirely, and are picked off one by one by giant spiders and by the Elvenking's patrols. It is here that Bilbo, left effectively in charge by Thorin's collapse and the Dwarves' despair, first uses both sword and Ring not merely to flee but to plan and act, killing spiders unseen and freeing his companions; the forest marks the point where the story's initiative visibly passes from the Dwarves to the hobbit.

The company's subsequent captivity in the Elvenking's halls extends this shift rather than reversing it: Thorin, held apart and unbending, achieves nothing by defiance, while Bilbo, unseen and unsuspected, works out the barrel-escape that frees the whole company and carries them onward to Lake-town. Mirkwood in The Hobbit thus stands for a passage that cannot be forced, only outwitted, and the Wood-elves who imprison the Dwarves are shown as suspicious and short-tempered rather than as enemies, a distinction the story is careful to draw against the true darkness gathering unseen in the forest's south.

In The Lord of the Rings the forest recedes into report rather than direct passage: the Fellowship deliberately bends its route around it toward Caradhras and Moria rather than risk its paths, and Mirkwood's presence in the story is carried instead by what has already happened there, chiefly Gollum's capture within its bounds and his subsequent, costly custody under Thranduil, recounted at the Council of Elrond as the chain of events that let Sauron's servants learn the Shire's name. Legolas himself arrives at that council as a messenger out of the forest, bearing news of Gollum's escape, so that Mirkwood enters the wider tale of the Ring less as a place visited than as a source of consequence, a reminder that the world beyond the Fellowship's own road continues to move and to matter.

The name Mirkwood is older than The Hobbit itself. In the earliest phase of Tolkien's legendarium, during the 1920s, he used the name for a quite different wood: the corrupted pine-forest of Dorthonion in the north of Beleriand, which the finished Silmarillion calls Taur-nu-Fuin. In the name-list Tolkien compiled to accompany his alliterative Lay of the Children of Húrin, this forest is glossed in plain English as Mirkwood, alongside the developing Elvish names Taur-na-Fuin and Deldúwath that would eventually displace it in the First Age narrative. When Tolkien began The Hobbit around a decade later, he reused the same evocative name for the great forest east of the Misty Mountains, apparently drawn back to a word he had once liked rather than intending any link between the two woods; nothing in the finished legendarium connects Beleriand's vanished forest to the Third Age wood of Wilderland, and the coincidence is a matter of authorial habit rather than invented history.

The name's later history briefly reversed itself. Christopher Tolkien's edition of the earliest continuation of The Hobbit shows that when his father began drafting what became The Lord of the Rings in the later 1930s, the eastern geography around Mirkwood needed almost no fresh invention, since its shape, its rivers, and the Elvenking's halls were already fixed by the earlier book's map. The lands west of the Misty Mountains, by contrast, were barely sketched in The Hobbit and had to be built up and repeatedly reworked as the new story grew. In this drafting process Mirkwood served much the role it plays within the finished tale: a settled, already-known point at the story's eastern edge, against which an unfamiliar western geography was gradually invented.

The forest's fullest screen treatments belong to the two adaptations of The Hobbit. The Rankin/Bass television film, compressing the novel into roughly an hour and a half, keeps the wood as a set-piece but reduces the crossing to its essentials, so that the company's straying from the path leads more or less directly to the spiders and to capture by the Elvenking's folk; the Elvenking himself was voiced by Otto Preminger, and the subsequent escape from his halls is retained in shortened form. Peter Jackson's trilogy moves in the opposite direction, expanding the forest across two of its three films and drawing on material the novel leaves off-page. Thranduil, played by Lee Pace, is given a far larger part than the book's brief and mostly nameless Elvenking, and two figures absent from the novel are placed in his realm: Legolas, played by Orlando Bloom and carried over from the earlier trilogy, and Tauriel, played by Evangeline Lilly, a captain of the Woodland guard invented for the films. The most substantial departure concerns the forest's southern reaches, since Dol Guldur, which the novel keeps entirely in report, is shown directly: Gandalf investigates and is imprisoned there, Radagast is written into the same events, and the White Council's assault on the stronghold is staged onscreen rather than merely mentioned afterward.

Adaptations of The Lord of the Rings necessarily treat the wood as background, since the story itself never enters it. Jackson's earlier trilogy accordingly gives it no scenes, identifying Legolas only by his origin in the Woodland Realm and passing over the account of Gollum's captivity there; Bakshi's animated film likewise condenses the Council of Elrond sharply and drops most of what the chapter reports about events in the east. The BBC Radio dramatisation, having twenty-six half-hour parts at its disposal, has room for a good deal more of that reported material and preserves the forest chiefly as a place spoken of rather than reached, with Legolas voiced by David Collings.