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87-731: In J. R. R. Tolkien 's legendarium , Lothlórien or Lórien is the fairest realm of the Elves remaining in Middle-earth during the Third Age . It is ruled by Galadriel and Celeborn from their city of tree houses at Caras Galadhon. The wood-elves of the realm are called Galadhrim . The realm, a broad woodland between the Misty Mountains and the River Anduin, is the Elven centre of resistance against

174-603: A frame story that changed over the years , first with an Ælfwine-type character who translates the "Golden Book" of the sages Rumil or Pengoloð; later, having the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins collect the stories into the Red Book of Westmarch , translating mythological Elvish documents in Rivendell . The scholar Gergely Nagy observes that Tolkien "thought of his works as texts within the fictional world " (his emphasis), and that

261-532: A 1960 letter. In The Silmarillion , the forested highlands of Dorthonion in the north of Beleriand (in the northwest of Middle-earth) 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

348-667: A celebration of Warwickshire, Kortirion Among the Trees . Garth suggests that the central green hill of Cerin Amroth in Lothlórien recalls the grassy Motte of Warwick Castle , known as Ethelfleda's Mound and the happy time he spent there in his youth. Lothlórien's appearance in Peter Jackson 's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy was based on the artwork of the conceptual designer Alan Lee . Some of

435-546: A continuing examination of Tolkien's works and supporting mythology, became a scholarly area of study soon after his death. A legendarium is a literary collection of legends . This medieval Latin noun originally referred mainly to texts detailing legends of the lives of saints . A surviving example is the Anjou Legendarium , dating from the 14th century. Quotations in the Oxford English Dictionary for

522-460: 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 (320 km) across; from north to south it stretched about 420 miles (680 km). The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia states that it is 400–500 miles (640–800 km) long and 200 miles (320 km) wide. The trees were large and densely packed. In

609-544: A deep, dark, and small lake, named, from the same cause, Mirkwood-Mere. There stood, in former times, a solitary tower upon a rock almost surrounded by the water... William Morris 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

696-525: A devout Roman Catholic , associated light as the Bible does with "holiness, goodness, knowledge, wisdom, grace, hope, and God's revelation", and that Galadriel was one of the bearers of that light. Lothlórien is a locus amoenus , an idyllic land that Tolkien describes as having "no stain". The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey notes that to get there, the Fellowship first wash off the stains of ordinary life by wading

783-432: A few days. She notes that Sam actually exclaims "Anyone would think that time did not count in there!", while Frodo sees Galadriel as "present and yet remote, a living vision of that which has already been left far behind by the flowing streams of Time" and Legolas, an Elf who ought to know how things work in Elven lands, says that time does not stop there, "but change and growth is not in all things and places alike. For Elves

870-467: A private project to create a mythology for England . The earliest story, "The Voyage of Earendel, the Evening Star", is from 1914; he revised and rewrote the legendarium stories for most of his adult life. The Hobbit (1937), Tolkien's first published novel, was not originally part of the larger mythology but became linked to it. Both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (1954 and 1955) are set in

957-557: A publisher would take it, and notes that Tolkien was a perfectionist, and further that he was perhaps afraid of finishing as he wished to go on with his sub-creation , his invention of myth in Middle-earth. Tolkien first began working on the stories that would become The Silmarillion in 1914. His reading, in 1914, of the Old English manuscript Christ I led to Earendel and the first element of his legendarium, "The Voyage of Earendel,

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1044-478: A sequel to The Hobbit . Tolkien began to revise the Silmarillion, but soon turned to the sequel, which became The Lord of the Rings . Writing The Lord of the Rings during the 1940s, Tolkien was attempting to address the dilemma of creating a narrative consistent with a "sequel" of the published The Hobbit and a desire to present a more comprehensive view of its large unpublished background. He renewed work on

1131-497: A vision of the end of the world, its breaking and remaking, and the recovery of the Silmarilli and the 'light before the Sun'"; and in 1954, "Actually in the imagination of this story we are now living on a physically round Earth. But the whole 'legendarium' contains a transition from a flat world ... to a globe ". On both texts, he explained in 1954 that "... my legendarium , especially

1218-452: Is an actual difference in time between Lothlórien and everywhere else, and Legolas's, that it is a matter of perception. She considers Aragorn's view to reconcile these two positions, agreeing that time has passed as Legolas said, but that the Fellowship felt time as the Elves did while they were in Lothlórien. That is not, writes Flieger, the end of the matter, as she feels that Aragorn reintroduces

1305-429: 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

1392-482: Is depicted as a massive overgrown castle in ruins. According to Alan Lee and John Howe, the concept artists , this was used to give the impression that the fortress had been built by Númenóreans during the Second Age, only to fall into ruin when Númenór's power waned. Adrián Maldonado of AlmostArchaeology speculates that the derelict castle could be interpreted by viewers as the ruins of Oropher's halls, erected during

1479-551: Is different, reflecting the traditions of European folklore ; and a land of light striving biblically with the darkness of evil. Tolkien gave the forest many different names, reflecting its fictional history and the way it is perceived by the different peoples of Middle-earth. Early in the First Age , some of the Eldar left the Great March to Valinor and settled in the lands east of

1566-567: Is exemplified in the medieval Thomas the Rhymer , who was carried off by the Queen of Elfland , and the Danish ballad Elvehøj ( Elf Hill ) . The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger writes that the Fellowship debated how much time had passed while they were there, Sam Gamgee recalling that the moon was waning just before they arrived, and was new when they left, though they all felt they had only been there for

1653-599: The Ered Nimrais and never returned. Control of Lothlórien passed to Galadriel and Celeborn. Galadriel's Ring of Power preserved the land from death and decay, and warded off Sauron's gaze. As the War of the Ring loomed, the Company of the Ring , emerging from the dark tunnels of Moria and seeing their leader Gandalf perish, was brought through Lothlórien to Caras Galadhon, and there met

1740-692: 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 . Tolkien stated in a 1966 letter that he had not invented the name Mirkwood, but that it was "a very ancient name, weighted with legendary associations", and summarized its "Primitive Germanic" origins, its appearance in "very early German" and in Old English, Old Swedish , and Old Norse , and

1827-596: 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 . Dol Guldur has been featured in many game adaptations of The Lord of the Rings , including the Iron Crown Enterprises portrayal, which contains scenarios and adventures for the Middle-earth Role Playing game. In the strategy battle game The Lord of

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1914-562: The Misty Mountains . These elves became known as the Nandor , and later as the Silvan Elves . Galadriel made contact with an existing Nandorin realm, Lindórinand, in what became Lothlórien, and planted there the golden mallorn trees which Gil-galad had received as a gift from Tar-Aldarion . The culture and knowledge of the Silvan elves was enriched by the arrival of Sindarin Elves from west of

2001-903: The Myrkviðr in the borderlands between the Goths and the Huns of the 4th century. The Atlakviða ("The Lay of Atli", in the Elder Edda ) and the Hlöðskviða ("The Battle of the Goths and Huns", in Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks ) both mention that the Mirkwood was beside the Danpar , the River Dnieper , which runs through Ukraine to the Black Sea . The Hlöðskviða states explicitly in

2088-476: The Third Age of Middle-earth , while virtually all of his earlier writing had been set in the first two ages of the world. The Lord of the Rings occasionally alludes to figures and events from the legendarium to create an impression of depth , but such ancient tales are depicted as being remembered by few until the story makes them relevant. After The Lord of the Rings , Tolkien returned to his older stories to bring them to publishable form, but never completed

2175-663: 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,

2262-675: The "'mountains green' of 'ancient time'" in William Blake 's Jerusalem . As evidence, Shippey explains that when they come to the deepest part of Lothlórien, the Elf Haldir welcomes them, calling the area the Naith or " Gore ", both unfamiliar words for the land between two converging rivers, the Hoarwell or Mitheithel , and the Loudwater or Bruinen , and then giving a third word with a special resonance:

2349-944: The "Angle". Shippey states that the name "England" comes from the Angle between the Flensburg Fjord and the River Schlei , in the north of Germany next to Denmark, the origin of the Angles among the Anglo-Saxons who founded England. He suggests that Frodo's feeling that he has "stepped over a bridge of time into a corner of the Elder Days, and was now walking in a world that was no more" may be exactly correct. Shippey writes that in Lothlórien, Tolkien reconciles otherwise conflicting ideas regarding time-distortion in Elfland from European folklore , such as

2436-533: The "primary 'legendarium'", for the core episodes and themes of The Silmarillion which were not abandoned in his father's constant redrafting of the work. The scholars Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter edited a scholarly collection " Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth ". Flieger writes that "...the greatest [event] is the creation of the Silmarils, the Gems of light that give their names to

2523-592: The 'Downfall of Númenor ' which lies immediately behind The Lord of the Rings , is based on my view: that Men are essentially mortal and must not try to become 'immortal' in the flesh", and in 1955, "But the beginning of the legendarium, of which the Trilogy is part (the conclusion), was an attempt to reorganise some of the Kalevala ". "Tolkien's legendarium" is defined narrowly in John D. Rateliff 's The History of The Hobbit as

2610-505: The Anduin lay the forest of Mirkwood and the fortress of Dol Guldur , which could be glimpsed from high points in Lothlórien. The river Silverlode or Celebrant flowed through Lothlórien and joined the Anduin; it had a tributary from the west, the river Nimrodel. The realm lay primarily to the north of the Silverlode, with a small strip of forested land to the south. The main part of the realm

2697-573: The Dark Lord Sauron in The Lord of the Rings . Galadriel had one of the Three Elf-Rings , and used it to keep Sauron from seeing into Lothlórien. The Company of the Ring spent some time in Lothlórien after passing through Moria . Galadriel prepared them for their quest with individual gifts. Scholars have noted that Lothlórien represents variously an Earthly Paradise ; an Elfland where time

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2784-532: The Elf Haldir's explanation of this [from a flet or tree-platform high above Cerin Amroth], "In this high place you may see the two powers that are opposed to one another, and ever they strive now in thought; but whereas the light perceives the very heart of the darkness, its own secret has not yet been discovered" echoes a biblical description: "The light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not." The scholar of humanities Susan Robbins notes that Tolkien,

2871-761: The Elvish realm. The Dutch composer Johan de Meij wrote music inspired by the Lothlórien woods, as the second movement, "Lothlórien (The Elvenwood)", of his Symphony No. 1 "The Lord of the Rings" . Legendarium Tolkien's legendarium is the body of J. R. R. Tolkien 's mythopoeic writing, unpublished in his lifetime, that forms the background to his The Lord of the Rings , and which his son Christopher summarized in his compilation of The Silmarillion and documented in his 12-volume series The History of Middle-earth . The legendarium's origins reach back to 1914, when Tolkien began writing poems and story sketches, drawing maps , and inventing languages and names as

2958-509: The Evening Star". He intended his stories to become a mythology that would explain the origins of English history and culture, and to provide the necessary "historical" background for his invented Elvish languages . Much of this early work was written while Tolkien, then a British officer returned from France during World War I, was in hospital and on sick leave. He completed " The Fall of Gondolin " in late 1916. He called his collection of nascent stories The Book of Lost Tales . This became

3045-517: The Finnish epic, the Kalevala ; or of St Jerome , Snorri Sturlusson , Jacob Grimm , or Nikolai Gruntvig, all of whom Tolkien saw as exemplars of a professional and creative philology. This was, Nagy believes, what Tolkien thought essential if he was to present a mythology for England , since such a thing had to have been written by many hands. Further, writes Nagy, Christopher Tolkien "inserted himself in

3132-567: The First Age. Mirkwood is a vast temperate broadleaf and mixed forest in the Middle-earth region of Rhovanion (Wilderland), 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

3219-654: The Lord and Lady of the Galadhrim. The Fellowship spent roughly a month in Lothlórien, though it seemed to them only a few days . Before they left, Galadriel allowed Samwise and Frodo to look in the Mirror of Galadriel, giving them a glimpse of events in the future or at other times; she also tested the loyalty of Fellowship members, and gave each of them a gift for their quest. After the fall of Sauron, Galadriel and Celeborn rid Dol Guldur of Sauron's influence. Galadriel left for Valinor at

3306-579: The Lothlórien scenes were shot on locations in Paradise Valley near Glenorchy , New Zealand . In The Lord of the Rings Online: Mines of Moria , Lorien was a region introduced to the game in March 2009, which allows players to visit Caras Galadhon and other places, and complete quests from the elves. Enya 's song "Lothlórien" on her album Shepherd Moons is an instrumental composition named for

3393-592: The Misty Mountains, and the Silvan language was gradually replaced by Sindarin . Amongst these arrivals was Amdír, who became their first lord, as well as Galadriel and Celeborn , who fled the destruction of Eregion during the War of the Elves and Sauron. In the Third Age , Amroth, the former Lord of Lothlórien, went to the south of Middle-earth with his beloved Nimrodel, but drowned in the Bay of Belfalas after she went missing in

3480-462: The Necromancer, Wild Warg Chieftain, and their respective armies. Giant Bats are also included in the game. In 1996, the black metal band Summoning released a music album named Dol Guldur . The Canadian artist John Howe has portrayed Dol Guldur in sketches and drawings for Electronic Arts . In Myth and Magic: The Art of John Howe , Howe includes Dol Guldur among Middle-earth fortresses. Howe created many drawings for Peter Jackson during

3567-401: The Rings , did he realise the significance of hobbits in his mythology. In 1937, encouraged by the success of The Hobbit , Tolkien submitted to his publisher George Allen & Unwin an incomplete but more fully developed version of The Silmarillion called Quenta Silmarillion . The reader rejected the work as being obscure and "too Celtic ". The publisher instead asked Tolkien to write

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3654-457: The Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth II , Dol Guldur appears as an iconic building. The campaign-scenario called "Assault on Dol Guldur" appears as the final part of the good campaign. Several portrayals of Dol Guldur are included in the Games Workshop game The Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game , appearing prominently in the "Fall of the Necromancer". Several enemies are listed, including Spider Queens, Castellans of Dol Guldur, Sauron

3741-456: The River Nimrodel. He compares this perfect place to the Earthly Paradise that the dreamer speaks of in the Middle English poem Pearl . But then, Shippey writes, the Fellowship have to cross a rope-bridge over a second river, the Silverlode, which they must not drink from, and which the evil Gollum cannot cross. What place can they have come to then, he wonders: could they be "as if dead"? Shippey notes however that it might be old England,

3828-405: The Silmarillion after completing The Lord of the Rings , and he greatly desired to publish the two works together. When it became clear that would not be possible, Tolkien turned his full attention to preparing The Lord of the Rings for publication. John D. Rateliff has analysed the complex relationship between The Hobbit and The Silmarillion , providing evidence that they were related from

3915-442: The Third Age, deep in the forest, the city's dwellings were atop tall mallorn trees; the mallorn had been brought to that land by Galadriel. The city was "some ten miles" from the point where the rivers Silverlode (Sindarin: Celebrant ) and Anduin met, close to the eastern border of the realm. In the trees there were many tree-platforms , which could be elaborate dwellings or simple guard-posts. Stairways of ladders were built around

4002-453: The Wolfings . 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. A forest called Mirkwood was used by Walter Scott in his 1814 novel Waverley , which had a rude and contracted path through the cliffy and woody pass called Mirkwood Dingle, and opened suddenly upon

4089-452: The attack by the Huns in the 370s, when they moved southwest and with the permission of the Emperor Valens settled in the Roman Empire. The scholar Omeljan Pritsak identifies the Mirkwood of Hlöðskviða in Hervarar saga with what would later be called the "dark blue forest" ( Goluboj lěsь ) and the "black forest" ( Černyj lěsь ) north of the Ukrainian steppe. Tom Shippey noted that Norse legend yields two placenames which would place

4176-408: The beginning of the Fourth Age , and Celeborn later followed her. The city slowly became depopulated and Lothlórien faded. By the time of the death of Queen Arwen , Celeborn and Galadriel's granddaughter, Lothlórien itself was deserted. Lothlórien lay in the west of Wilderland . To its west stood the Misty Mountains, with the Dwarf-realm of Moria, and on its east ran the great river Anduin . Across

4263-505: The body of Tolkien's work consisting of: These, with The Lays of Beleriand , written from 1918 onwards, comprise the different "phases" of Tolkien's Elven legendary writings, posthumously edited and published in The Silmarillion and in their original forms in Christopher Tolkien's series The History of Middle-earth . Other Tolkien scholars have used the term legendarium in a variety of contexts. Christopher Tolkien's introduction to The History of Middle-earth series talks about

4350-444: 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- (to flicker [dimly]) and *merg- (mark, boundary), and places

4437-582: The dilemma when he says that the moon carried on changing "in the world outside": this suggests once again that Lothlórien had its own laws of nature, as in a fairy tale . Flieger writes that while time is treated both naturally and supernaturally throughout The Lord of the Rings , his "most mystical and philosophical deployment of time" concerns Elves. It is therefore "no accident", she writes, that Frodo has multiple experiences of altered time in Lothlórien, from feeling he has crossed "a bridge of Time" on entering that land, to seeing Aragorn on Cerin Amroth as he

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4524-625: The early origins of both the Men of Rohan and the hobbits in his Mirkwood. 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 (across a gloomy moor) and wynleasne wudu (a joyless wood). A Mirkwood is mentioned in multiple Norse texts including Sögubrot af nokkrum fornkonungum , Helgakviða Hundingsbana I and II , Styrbjarnar þáttr Svíakappa , and Völundarkviða ; these mentions may have denoted different forests. The Goths had lived in Ukraine until

4611-626: The editor, Christopher Tolkien." Dickerson and Evans use the phrase "legendarium" to encompass the entirety of Tolkien's Middle-earth writings "for convenience". This would encompass texts such as the incomplete drafts of stories published before The History of Middle-earth in the 1980 Unfinished Tales . Shaun Gunner of The Tolkien Society has called the 2021 collection of Tolkien's previously unpublished legendarium writings The Nature of Middle-earth , edited by Carl F. Hostetter, "an unofficial 13th volume of The History of Middle-earth series". Unlike " fictional universes " constructed for

4698-454: The film The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug . The term Mirkwood derives from the forest Myrkviðr of Norse mythology ; that forest has been identified by scholars as representing a wooded region of Ukraine at the time of the wars between the Goths and the Huns in the fourth century. A Mirkwood was used by the novelist Sir Walter Scott in his 1814 novel Waverley , and then by William Morris in his 1889 fantasy novel The House of

4785-486: The filming of the Lord of the Rings trilogy , worked for Tolkien Enterprises, and drew for Iron Crown Enterprises' collectable Middle-earth card game, which mentions Dol Guldur on Gandalf's card. Mirkwood was added to the MMORPG The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar in the 2009 expansion pack Siege of Mirkwood . The storyline depicts a small Elven assault upon Dol Guldur. In Peter Jackson 's 2012-2014 film trilogy adaptation of The Hobbit , Dol Guldur

4872-451: The folklorist Jacob Grimm and the artist and fantasy writer William Morris , speculated romantically about the wild, primitive Northern forest, the Myrkviðr inn ókunni ("the pathless Mirkwood") and the secret roads across it, in the hope of reconstructing supposed ancient cultures. Grimm proposed that the name Myrkviðr derived from Old Norse mark (boundary) and mǫrk (forest), both, he supposed, from an older word for wood, perhaps at

4959-450: 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

5046-410: The functional place of Bilbo" as editor and collator, in his view "reinforcing the mythopoeic effect" that his father had wanted to achieve, making the published book do what Bilbo's book was meant to do, and so unintentionally realising his father's intention. Mirkwood At least two distinct Middle-earth forests are named Mirkwood in Tolkien's legendarium . One is in the First Age , when

5133-427: 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 evil influence of the Necromancer in his fortress of Dol Guldur ; before that it had been known as Greenwood the Great. This Mirkwood features significantly in The Hobbit and in

5220-445: The idea of multiple 'voices' who collected the stories over the millennia. When Tolkien published The Hobbit in 1937 (which was itself not originally intended for publication, but as a story told privately to his children), the narrative of the published text was loosely influenced by the legendarium as a context, but was not designed to be part of it. Carpenter comments that not until Tolkien began to write its sequel, The Lord of

5307-445: The main trees, and at night the city was lit by "many lamps" – "green and gold and silver". The city's entrance was on the southern side. The Tolkien scholar Paul H. Kocher writes that Galadriel perceives Sauron with Lothlórien's light, "but cannot be pierced by it in return". The good intelligence has the "imaginative sympathy" to penetrate the evil intelligence, but not vice versa . The Christian author Elizabeth Danna writes that

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5394-471: The name for the first two volumes of The History of Middle-earth , which include these early texts. Tolkien never completed The Book of Lost Tales ; he left it to compose the poems " The Lay of Leithian " (in 1925) and " The Lay of the Children of Húrin " (possibly as early as 1918). The first complete version of The Silmarillion was the "Sketch of the Mythology" written in 1926 (later published in Volume IV of The History of Middle-earth ). The "Sketch"

5481-453: The narrative framing device of an Anglo-Saxon mariner named Ælfwine or Eriol or Ottor Wǽfre who finds the island of Tol Eressëa , where the Elves live, and the Elves tell him their history. He collects, translates from Old English , and writes the mythology that appears in The History of Middle-earth . Ælfwine means "Elf-friend" in Old English; men whose names have the same meaning, such as Alboin, Alwin, and Elendil , were to appear in

5568-407: The nature of evil in Arda , the origin of Orcs , the customs of the Elves , the nature and means of Elvish rebirth, the "flat" world, and the story of the Sun and Moon. In any event, with one or two exceptions, he made little change to the narratives during the remaining years of his life. The scholar Verlyn Flieger writes that Tolkien thought of his legendarium as a presented collection, with

5655-472: 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 ("Black elf home") in Snorri Sturluson 's Old Norse Edda , quite unlike

5742-451: The novel" Mirkwood: A Novel About J. R. R. 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 different band in California used the 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

5829-409: The overlapping of different and sometimes contradictory accounts was central to his desired effect. Nagy notes that Tolkien went so far as to create facsimile pages from the Dwarves' Book of Mazarbul that is found by the Fellowship in Moria . Further, Tolkien was a philologist ; Nagy comments that Tolkien may have been intentionally imitating the philological style of Elias Lönnrot , compiler of

5916-436: The power of Sauron , fell upon the forest, and people began to call it Taur-nu-Fuin ( Sindarin : "forest under deadly nightshade" or "forest under night", i.e. "mirk wood") and Taur-e-Ndaedelos (Sindarin: "forest of great fear"). 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

6003-445: The purpose of writing and publishing popular fiction, Tolkien's legendarium for a long period was a private project, concerned with questions of philology , cosmology , theology and mythology. His biographer Humphrey Carpenter writes that although by 1923 Tolkien had almost completed The Book of Lost Tales , "it was almost as if he did not want to finish it", beginning instead to rewrite it; he suggests that Tolkien may have doubted if

6090-403: The same passage that the Mirkwood was in Gothland. The Hervarar saga also mentions Harvaða fjöllum , "the Harvad fells", which by Grimm's Law would be *Karpat , the Carpathian Mountains , an identification on which most scholars have long agreed. Tolkien's estate disputed the right of the Tolkien fan fiction author Steve Hillard "to use the name and personality of J. R. R. Tolkien in

6177-407: 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

6264-473: The start of The Hobbit ' s composition. With the success of The Lord of the Rings , Tolkien in the late 1950s returned to the Silmarillion, planning to revise the material of his legendarium into a form "fit for publication", a task which kept him occupied until his death in 1973, without attaining a completed state. The legendarium has indeed been called "a jumble of overlapping and often competing stories, annals, and lexicons." Much of his later writing

6351-472: The survival of mirk (a variant of "murk") in modern English. He wrote that "It seemed to me too good a fortune that Mirkwood remained intelligible (with exactly the right tone) in modern English to pass over: whether mirk is a Norse loan or a freshment of the obsolescent O.E. word." He was familiar with Morris's The House of the Wolfings , naming the book as an influence (for instance on the Dead Marshes ) in

6438-421: The synonymous noun legendary date from 1513. The Middle English South English Legendary is an example of this form of the noun. Tolkien described his works as a "legendarium" in four letters from 1951 to 1955, a period in which he was attempting to have his unfinished Silmarillion published alongside the more complete The Lord of the Rings . On the Silmarillion, he wrote in 1951, "This legendarium ends with

6525-497: The task. Tolkien's son Christopher chose portions of his late father's vast collection of unpublished material and shaped them into The Silmarillion (1977), a semi-chronological and semi-complete narrative of the mythical world and its origins. The sales were sufficient to enable him to work on and publish many volumes of his father's legendarium stories and drafts; some were presented as completed tales, while others illustrated his father's complex creative process. Tolkien research ,

6612-496: The two unfinished time travel novels, The Lost Road in 1936 and The Notion Club Papers in 1945, as the protagonists reappeared in each of several different times. There is no such framework in the published version of The Silmarillion , but the Narn i Hîn Húrin is introduced with the note "Here begins that tale which Ǽlfwine made from the Húrinien ." Tolkien never fully dropped

6699-419: The upheavings of the water that one sees at whiles going on amidst the eddies of a swift but deep stream. On either side, to right and left the tree-girdle reached out toward the blue distance, thick close and unsundered... In such wise that Folk had made an island amidst of the Mirkwood, and established a home there, and upheld it with manifold toil too long to tell of. And from the beginning this clearing in

6786-588: The western eaves of Mirkwood, as depicted in the film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey . Dol Guldur ( Sindarin : "Hill of Sorcery") was Sauron's stronghold in Mirkwood, before he returned to Barad-dûr in Mordor . It is first mentioned (as "the dungeons of the Necromancer") in The Hobbit . The hill itself, rocky and barren, was the highest point in the southwestern part of the forest. Before Sauron's occupation, it

6873-538: The whole legendarium", equating the legendarium with the Silmarillion (which with italics denotes the 1977 book published under that name, and without italics means the larger body of un-edited drafts used to create that work). In the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia , David Bratman writes that " The History of Middle-earth is a longitudinal study of the development and elaboration of Tolkien's legendarium through his transcribed manuscripts, with textual commentary by

6960-550: The wood they called the Mid-mark... 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

7047-404: The wood: The tale tells that in times long past there was a dwelling of men beside a great wood. Before it lay a plain, not very great, but which was, as it were, an isle in the sea of woodland, since even when you stood on the flat ground, you could see trees everywhere in the offing, though as for hills, you could scarce say that there were any; only swellings-up of the earth here and there, like

7134-425: The world moves, and it moves both very swift and very slow. Swift, because they themselves change little, and all else fleets by. Slow, because they do not count the running years". Shippey considers Legolas's explanation to resolve the apparent contradiction between the mortal and Elvish points of view about Elvish time. Flieger however writes that there is a definite contradiction between Frodo's position, that there

7221-545: Was a 28-page synopsis written to explain the background of the story of Túrin to R. W. Reynolds, a friend to whom Tolkien had sent several of the stories. From the "Sketch" Tolkien developed a fuller narrative version of The Silmarillion called Quenta Noldorinwa (also included in Volume IV). The Quenta Noldorinwa was the last version of The Silmarillion that Tolkien completed. The stories in The Book of Lost Tales employ

7308-668: Was as a young man, dressed in white. Flieger notes that in The Monsters and the Critics Tolkien writes "The human-stories of the elves are doubtless full of the Escape from Deathlessness". In her view, this explains the exploration of time in his mythology, death and deathlessness being the "concomitants" of time and timelessness. The author John Garth writes of a possible Warwickshire connection for Lothlórien. The young Tolkien and his fiancée Edith Bratt visited Warwick; in 1915 he wrote

7395-555: Was called Amon Lanc ("Naked Hill" ). It lay near the western edge of the forest, across the Anduin from Lothlórien . Tolkien suggests that Sauron settled on Dol Guldur as the focus for his rise during the period before the War of the Ring in part so that he could search for the One Ring in the Gladden Fields just up the river. 19th-century writers interested in philology, including

7482-442: Was however concerned more with the theological and philosophical underpinnings of the work, rather than with the narratives themselves. By this time, he had doubts about fundamental aspects of the work that went back to the earliest versions of the stories, and it seems that he felt the need to resolve these problems before he could produce the "final" version of The Silmarillion . During this time he wrote extensively on such topics as

7569-604: Was the triangular region between the converging rivers Silverlode and Anduin, called the Naith (Sindarin for "spearhead") by the Elves or the Gore or Angle in the Common Speech . The tip of the Naith was called the Egladil (Sindarin for "elven-point"). Caras Galadhon (from galadh (" tree ") was the city of Lothlórien and the main settlement of the Galadhrim in Middle-earth. Founded by Amroth in

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