Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical | Places: Mirkwood
While I have been a fan of Tolkien’s writing for about twenty years, I saw his depictions of Mirkwood for the first time only a few weeks ago. Initially, I was surprised by the orderly rows of trees that looked no more than a hundred years old. Then, after considering the history of Middle-earth as a place of severe habitat destruction from millennia of wars, the apparently recent rehabilitation of the forest made sense. Unlike the Old Forest in the Shire with its massive trees, much of Mirkwood was restored as a shadow of its former arboreal glory. In this essay, I discuss the name of the kingdom and its place in folklore, how the elves’ respect for trees may have been inspired by Finnish culture, and how silviculture or active forest management has been practiced in Europe from ancient times to the present day.
Linguistics & Motifs
The name Mirkwood is a translation from Westron using words from Proto-Germanic that still appear in modern English. “Murk” entered English from Old Norse around 1300 to mean gloom or darkness, while “wood” meaning a forest has existed in the language since the oldest forms of English. In medieval times, the word had a double meaning. “Wood” from Old English “wudu” was a collection of trees, while “wood” from “wod” meant “violently insane”. The name “Mirkwood” likely referenced both meanings. In The Hobbit, Bilbo noted that Wood-elves were “more dangerous and less wise” than High Elves of the West, elsewhere known as Ñoldor.
The magic forest motif (D941) appears regularly in the legendarium. I have already discussed nature deities, spirits in the woods, and walking trees. However, these magical beings all loved nature. In contrast, the Dark Lord Sauron poisoned Mirkwood, causing the place to align with the motif “Devil in the woods” (G303.8.13). When “the evil power in Mirkwood had been driven out by the White Council” (87), this aligned to “Forest cleared by magic” (D1641.4).
Finnish Forest Friends
Since the culture of Mirkwood elves was in part inspired by the Kalevala, the national epic of Finland, I decided to see how modern Finnish people thought about forests. Finland has about 23 million hectares [57 million acres / 224,000 km2] of forests, with 13% of this forest receiving federal protection. The total land area of Finland is about 304,000 km2, meaning 74% of the land is covered in forest, with the most common trees being pine, spruce, and birch. As one might expect, Finns love their forests and have implemented policies to care for them. One successful effort is reducing the number of wildfires by keeping careful watch on forests and regularly tilling the ground in dry areas.
Before Christianization, Finns cared for trees as “sacrifice places and house guardians”. Folk beliefs did not vanish with the arrival of a new religion during the 12th and 13th centuries. Instead, it morphed into the practices of karsikko or cross-tree, when the branches of a tree were removed during a funeral as a memorial to the recently deceased friend or family member. Funeral-goers would also carve information onto the tree, including a Christian cross, date of death, and the initials of the one being honored. This aspect was similar to gravestones carved in other parts of Europe. Contemporary accounts indicated that branches may be left on if the deceased had a spouse: one branch indicated that the spouse would not remarry, and two branches indicated that the spouse could remarry. The unique tradition died out in Finland around the start of the 20th century, not long after skiing anthropologist Elias Lönnrot had sought to preserve this culture in his compilation of the Kalevala.
While karsikko is no longer prevalent in Finland, a love of trees remains. A survey of 1,758 Finns conducted in 2019-2020 showed that 1,635 respondents (93%) had at least one favorite tree, while 417 respondents (24%) felt that they were friends with their favorite trees. While the survey was distributed to a wide geographic area, including cities, university campuses, national parks, libraries, and social media, the people most likely to take the survey were also most likely to love trees, perhaps skewing the results.
Active Forest Management
The term sylviculture or silviculture was coined around 1851 by combining the Latin words silva meaning forest and cultura, now found in words such as “cultivating” and “agriculture”. In the legendarium, the Silvan Elves, also called Wood-Elves, were ethnically Teleri Elves who remained east of the Misty Mountains.
Back in the Real World, medieval Europeans managed their woodland as the Roman Empire declined. One traditional method was coppicing, leaving the stumps after clear-cutting so saplings could sprout. This was an ancient practice known around the Mediterranean, as the concept appears in Isaiah 11:1, “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; / from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.” A forest made of such trees was called a coppice, and the word came from Greek kolaphos meaning “to cuff”, as if repeatedly slapping the trees. The coppice might be hundreds of years old but appear young after being cut down at regular intervals. Besides a source for timber, woods were hunting grounds for the elite and grazing spaces for livestock. This practice continued without regulation until the 13th century, when feudal lords imposed the first forestry rules.
Historians learn about medieval forests through dendroarchaeology, the study of woodland history by analyzing “tree cookies” or slices of a tree to determine when and how the tree grew. When livestock grazed in a forest, the animals would often eat the bark from the tree, causing a callous tissue to grow over the wounds and creating a rough patch on that year’s ring. If other trees in the area were cleared, the tree would grow rapidly, as it no longer had to compete with other trees for resources, and create a thick ring. Tree cookies also show signs of epicormic shoots, new growth after a tree is pruned or cut down. Combined with other time measuring tools, such as radiocarbon dating, scientists and historians work together to figure out the timeline of events that happened in the life of a tree and correlate these to exact years.
In post-medieval Europe, most forests were destroyed through complete timber removal and draining wetlands. Advances in technology meant urban-industrial areas became larger, and the transportation between cities became more extensive. The forests in Great Britain reached the lowest percentage of land cover around 1924, when it was measured at 5.4%. This was what Tolkien remembered from his childhood as he lamented in the Foreword, “The country in which I lived in childhood was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten…” (xi). His childhood and much of his adulthood coincided with the worst ecological destruction in the history of his home country.
Across the water in the United States, the forests follow a different pattern. According to the New England Forestry Foundation (NEFF), forests covered over 90% of the land in this region, but clear-cutting from the 1620s through 1880s dropped this cover to under 30%. The first government body controlling forest management was the Division of Forestry under the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which opened in 1881 and rebranded as the U.S. Forest Service in 1905. The ambitious project created 154 national forests covering over 193 million acres [781,000 km2] with plans to reforest an additional 3.5 million acres [14,000 km2]. The government agency even received a nonprofit sister in 1992 with the creation of the National Forest Foundation. These organizations tend to preserve untouched land in the West, and New England has only two national forests: Green Mountain and Finger Lakes in Vermont, and White Mountain in New Hampshire and Maine. Forest restoration would take a different skill set.
This effort began at an unlikely time. In 1929, the crash of the stock market started the Great Depression, leading to widespread unemployment. To create more jobs, the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt started the New Deal Program in 1933, which trained and paid workers to complete public projects across the United States. One part of the program was the Civilian Conservation Corps or CCC, open to single men of any race between the ages of 18 and 25, although camps were racially segregated and authority positions were granted only to white employees. Despite being started by a woman, U.S. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, women were not employed by the CCC. (Perkins and First Lady Elanor Roosevelt created a much smaller number of poorly funded “She-She-She” camps. Men in the CCC received $30 a month plus room and board, while women received $25 a month but paid $15 for room and board.)
The CCC built infrastructure at national parks and restored forests using a distinct planting style. Trees were planted in straight lines spaced evenly apart, and variations on this methodology are still used today. This was an efficient way to train men to plant many saplings, as a restored wildlife habitat requires about six hundred trees per acre, but it creates a strange visual effect in grown forests. Ninety years later, CCC forests are instantly recognizable to those familiar with the method, as the trees still stand in straight lines.
The CCC disbanded in 1942 after the United States joined World War II, although several iterations of the model have been revived as nonprofit organizations. Tree replanting efforts were soon needed in Europe, as forests had been destroyed by bombing and used for firewood after coal supplies were interrupted. Restoration efforts were initially slow and disorganized, but federal governments soon took charge. Many countries passed laws detailing who could cut down or plant trees, with the UK Forestry Act passed in 1951. Simultaneously, tree scientists studied how to breed healthier trees.
Reforestation efforts took place in the 1950s through the 1970s as former battlefields and remaining coppices were replaced by monoculture plantations, meaning only one species of tree was planted with the purpose of later harvesting the trees. Popular trees included fast-growing conifers like Norway spruce and pine species, along with deciduous trees that could be made into paper. In the United Kingdom, forest cover increased to 9.4% of the land by 1984 and has reached 14% according to the latest study released by Forest Research in 2025. This is not as much as the original forest cover, which was up to 50% of the land during the Late Bronze Age or the 2nd millennium BC and about 15% during the time of the Domesday Book in 1086. Even so, this steady increase in woodlands shows that restoration is possible through concerted effort.
What This Means for Mirkwood
Tolkien’s first reveals of Mirkwood appeared in 1937 in the first edition of The Hobbit. My favorite picture is found in “Chapter 9 Barrel Out of Bond”. Called “The Elvenking’s Gate”, the forest surrounding the entrance to the palace has orderly rows of straight young trees, exactly like what the CCC planted throughout the United States or how tree plantations grow around the world. This implies that the Elves have restored the area within the last hundred years, likely after a battle or harvesting the wood to sell to their friends, the Men of Dale. Not all parts of Mirkwood show this level of human-made order. The drawing from “Chapter 8 Flies and Spiders” showed scrawny young trees and a broken stump amid a few larger but still young trees and mushrooms along the ground. This section was unhealthy growth, indicating damage within the last ten to twenty years. Since the spiders lived in this part of the forest, the Elves likely avoided it.
In my own depiction of Mirkwood, I show the trees as a heterogeneous restoration effort, meaning several species are planted to ensure a healthy forest. Since Bilbo killed or injured many spiders in the decades before the main story line of The Lord of the Rings, the area was likely safer for planting. Once the White Council drove the evil power from Mirkwood, further restoration efforts could continue until the end of the War of the Ring, when the forest once again became known as Greenwood. Unfortunately for the residents of Middle-earth, this victory is many chapters away.
