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Mirkwood

Mirkwood: Taur-nu-Fuin

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• Name: Taur-nu-Fuin (Sindarin: forest under night), Deldúwath (Sindarin: deadly nightshade) / Dorthonion (Sindarin: land of pine trees)

• Description: An expansive forest in southern Dorthonion. Dorthonion, a forest region in Beleriand, sees crucial action in the First Age. Like the rest of Beleriand, it is wiped away.

This picture has lived multiple lives. In this form, it’s called “Beleg finds Gwindor in Taur-nu-Fuin,” illustrating an episode from The Silmarillion where Beleg the Sinda discovers Gwindor, an elf prince, who escaped a 14-year imprisonment by Morgoth and his orcs, now “spent and bewildered in the mazes of Taur-nu-Fuin.”[1] It’s one of Tolkien’s relatively few portraits of a narrative event, and a grim one at that. Shortly afterwards, Beleg is inadvertently killed “at the hand of him whom he most loved,” his closest friend Túrin, another survivor of orc captivity, “thinking him a foe.”

Yet this depiction of a heroic final act is one of Tolkien’s most colorful and distinctive portraits. The watercolors’ menagerie of brown and green and blue make Taur-nu-Fuin a disorienting, psychedelic landscape. The forest that kills Beleg won’t stay put.

Tolkien reused the picture to depict Mirkwood for The Hobbit. Taur-nu-Fuin’s colors are gone, and it has fewer trees, but it’s unmistakably the template for this new drawing. The trees, some plants and mushrooms, and survived longer than Beleg. (Tolkien also tried to reuse the picture as Fangorn in a couple calendars, but we’re calling his bluff.)

The forest’s similarities are not simply visual. Like Mirkwood, Taur-nu-Fuin is also possessed by Sauron, with its flora turning against its denizens. Both forests are elvish territories. And most crucially, both are initially called Greenwood and transform into Mirkwood. 

For the first time in Nowhere and Back Again, we’re in Beleriand, the northwestern part of Middle-earth where most of The Silmarillion is set. The War of Wrath, fought by the Valar and Morgoth, destroys Beleriand late in The First Age. Taur-nu-Fuin, in the elvish realm of Dorthonion, along with most of Beleriand, becomes a memory preserved by Wilderland’s Mirkwood.

On the whole, The Lord of the Rings is less grim than The Silmarillion, where half the characters suffer jaw-droppingly grim fates. Similarly, Taur-nu-Fuin is even nastier than The Hobbit’s Mirkwood. Morgoth’s occupation of northern Beleriand makes it “turned little by little into a region of such dread and dark enchantment that even the Orcs would not enter it unless need drove them[2].”

The Forest under Nightshade grows ”black and grim” trees, whose “roots were tangled, groping in the dark like claws; and those who strayed among them became lost and blind, and were strangled or pursued to madness by phantoms of terror.”[3] 

With Beleriand, Dorthonion gets a creation myth. As Beleriand’s “new-raised highlands[4],” it is a young land in The Silmarillion. Its raw untamed power is purely mythic. Its echoes permeate into Wilderland millennia later. Corrupting nature is Arda’s original sin.

Like Mirkwood, Sauron occupies it in a gothic form. Lúthien, the protagonist of Tolkien’s mythology, subdues him, and Sauron “immediately took the form of a vampire, great as a dark cloud across the moon, and he fled, dripping blood from his throat upon the trees,” settling in Taur-nu-Fuin and “filling it with horror.”[5]…

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Mirkwood (Part III: Dol Guldur)

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• Names: Dol Guldur (Sindarin: “hill of sorcery”), Amon Lanc (Sindarin: “naked hill”)

• Description: Dol Guldur is Sauron’s fortress in Southern Mirkwood. It’s built on Amon Lanc, a hill which the Elven-king Oropher rules in the Second Age. Around a millennium after the Battle of Dagorlad, Sauron settles in Oropher’s old fortress and begins to corrupt Mirkwood, using the outpost to monitor the Gladden Fields and River Anduin for the One Ring.

During the Battle of Five Armies, the White Council expels Sauron from Dol Guldur. Shortly afterwards, the Nazgûl retake the fortress. During the War of the Ring, Dol Guldur attacks the Woodland Realm. Eventually, Galadriel destroys Dol Guldur.

• Filming locations: Stone Street Studios, Miramar, Wellington, North Island

Dol Guldur in the Hobbit trilogy.

South of the dark Mirkwood Mountains, Dol Guldur lies “clad in a forest of dark fir, where the trees strive one against another and their branches rot and wither.” It stands “upon a stony height,” while “a black cloud lies over it.”[1] It’s a gothic nightmare, a talon of otherness clutching the forest by its throat. Its power haunts the Wood-elves so gravely that the unflappable Legolas says “we do not go that way.”[2]

Dol Guldur is a classic dark fantasy fortress. It’s a gothic castle in the tradition of Dracula, which corrupts Greenwood, so that “it became darkened and its new name was Mirkwood.”[3] It’s noted for its “pits,” where the Dwarf-king Thrain is murdered and has the last dwarf ring stolen from him. Sauron in The Hobbit is simply “the Necromancer,” an evil sorcerer who evilly turns good things into bad things. “To Dol Guldur evil things repaired out of all the dark places of the world,”[4] like grim fauna, sick trees, and the raiding Balchoth people.

Like most villain outposts in Middle-earth, Dol Guldur is apophatic, defined by absence and its effects more than its substance. Gandalf talks about infiltrating the fortress, saying he has “been in the dungeons of the Dark Lord… in his older and lesser dwelling in Dol Guldur.”[5] Dol Guldur is decidedly a minor outpost compared to Barad-dûr. Mirkwood is so tangled even forces of darkness like Sauron get lost in it.

Sauron goes through a series of phases. In The Hobbit, he’s The Necromancer. When The Silmarillion recaps his story, he’s “the Sorcerer.” Both names indicate hostility towards magicians. They make the villain a simple evil sorcerer with no name, but someone who manipulates nature. He’s a Catholic Lucifer; noble and ruined.

It’s when he becomes Sauron that the Necromancer gains mythological significance. As a Maia, he is an angelic figure turned into something abhorrent. He becomes a proper Tolkienian villain: a figure whose great crime is the blotting out of goodness.

Minas Morgul is a relevant point of comparison here. As we discussed in Book I, evil in Middle-earth is a corrosive force, rust on the engine of natural good. The theologically Catholic Middle-earth knows that only good can be wholly original, while evil leeches off of it.…

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Mirkwood (I: The Woodland Realm)

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  • Name: Mirkwood, Greenwood, Eryn Galen (Sindarin: green wood), Taur-nu-Fuin (Sindarin: forest under night), Taur-e-Ndaedelos (Sindarin: Forest of the Great Fear), Eryn Lasgalen (Sindarin: greenleaf wood)
  • Description: A huge forest that splits Wilderland in half, ranging from 200 to 300 miles east-to-west and about 600 miles north-to-west. Dwarfs eastern neighbors Erebor and the Iron Hills, which look like serfs levied with small plots of land. Surrounded by the Misty Mountains and Grey Mountains. 
    Encompasses the Forest River and Enchanted River, with the Celduin running through its eastern border. An Old Forest Road, Men-i-Naugrim, is lost by The Hobbit’s time, while an enchanted elf path remains. The Emyn-nu-Fuin, Dark Mountains, are roughly in its north-central region, south of the Woodland Realm of the Wood-elves.
    In the south, the East Bight chomps into Mirkwood, creating the Narrows of the Forest. The southwest corner houses Dol Guldur, sometime-home of Sauron and the Nazgûl. The Forest River and an enchanted river also run through Mirkwood.
  • Locations in Peter Jackson films: Te Anau, South Island (Mirkwood Gate), Pelorus River, South Island (Forest River), Stone Street Studios (Thranduil’s caverns)

Less a geographic location than a metonym for Middle-earth’s unfinished tale, Mirkwood is a classic fairy tale forest that defines those forests. Its iconic appearance in The Hobbit which it profoundly changes is only one aspect of its story. Many characters and texts have their own Mirkwoods. This derivé will stray out of thought and time, and wander far on roads only we shall tell. It’s up to us to find a guide through it.

Mirkwood (J. R. R. Tolkien, 1937 edition of The Hobbit)

Mirkwood is too large and complex to be one thing. John D. Rateliff points out that Mirkwood marries “two archetypes: The Dark Wood and The Enchanted Forest.” Similarly, John Garth writes “Mirkwood is a portmanteau forest of forests.” Even the name “Mirkwood” is of early provenance, having been applied to a number of historical and legendary forests. Since its name doesn’t belong to only one place, Mirkwood exists in a state of identity crisis, with factions and traditions battling over their different visions of the forest.

In The Hobbit, Mirkwood has been effectively conquered by the gothic. The book shows Mirkwood as a divided primal forest with elements of gothic horror, so dark that it’s “not what you call pitch-dark, but really pitch.” The wood is festooned in “dark dense cobwebs with threads extraordinarily thick”, populated by “black moths, some nearly as big as your hand”, heretofore unknown butterfly species, and giant spiders. Bilbo and the dwarves walk among “dead leaves of countless other autumns.” It’s a Brothers Grimm-esque scary forest, the sort of place where stepping on the wrong plant could be fatal.

Where Tolkien innovates is that Mirkwood’s darkness is a symptom of sickness. Mirkwood is suffering from Sauron’s presence. In The Desolation of Smaug, Bilbo observes that Mirkwood “feels sick, as if a disease lies upon it.” The Necromancer, or Sauron, is a foreign presence plotting his return to prominence by poisoning verdant nature.…

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