The Old Forest

An old wood

The Old Forest lies immediately east of Buckland, separated from the hobbits' fields by the great hedge called the High Hay, and stretches east and south to the edge of the Barrow-downs and the marshes where its river, the Withywindle, runs out into the Brandywine. It is small by the measure of Mirkwood or Fangorn, but it is one of the last pieces of the vast forest that once covered Eriador, and its trees remember that. Under the dense canopy the air is close and heavy, paths shift or vanish, and every branch and root seems to lean toward an intruder. The trees of the Forest are not Ents or Huorns, but they are wakeful, and the oldest of them hate the things that walk on two legs and cut wood.

The Forest's heart is the valley of the Withywindle, a brown, sleepy river bordered by willows whose drowsiness spreads to anyone who sits beneath them. The greatest of these is Old Man Willow, a huge, hollow, grey tree whose will runs through the whole wood and who can sing a traveller to sleep and shut him inside his trunk. All the paths of the Forest tend downhill toward him.

Bombadil's country

At the eastern end of the Withywindle valley, where the forest thins toward the downs, stands the house of Tom Bombadil and Goldberry. Tom is the master of the Forest in the sense that nothing in it can harm him or resist his commands, though he claims no ownership and does not interfere unless he chooses. His country is a small enclave of sunlight and safety bounded on every side by things older and darker than hobbits.

The Bucklanders had lived beside the Forest for centuries and distrusted it accordingly. Once, long before the War, the trees had crept up to the High Hay and leaned over it, and the hobbits had cut down hundreds of them and burned them in a great fire; the Bonfire Glade, a bare patch on the western side where nothing would grow again, marked the place, and the Forest never forgave it.

The Forest entered the story of the Ring on September 26, 3018, when Merry led Frodo, Sam and Pippin through the gate in the Hedge to avoid the Road. The trees turned them from every path they tried until they came down to the Withywindle, where Old Man Willow put Frodo and Pippin to sleep, threw Frodo into the river and swallowed Merry and Pippin into his trunk. Tom Bombadil, coming home with water-lilies for Goldberry, sang the willow open and took the hobbits to his house for two nights. He sent them on across the Barrow-downs on the 28th and rescued them again there. Afterwards, at the Council in Rivendell, Gandalf and Glorfindel reflected that Tom's mastery of his little country would not survive the fall of everything outside it. Gandalf went to visit him after the War, and the Forest presumably continued much as it had always been.

A forest east of the Brandywine between Buckland's High Hay and the Barrow-downs, drained by the Withywindle, which flows south-west through its middle to the marshes at the river.