The Middle-earth Mysteries

There is much mystery bound up in the forests of Middle-earth. Tolkien loved trees, and he revered in a special way. He always seemed to think they had gotten the bitter half of the bargain in sharing the world with men. He was upset with "the shabby use of made in Shakespeare of the coming of 'Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill'". He wanted the trees to really march to war, and eventually this longing achieved fruition in the Ents. One must ask how the Ents came to live in Fangorn Forest. Tolkien doesn't ever really say. Fangorn (Treebeard) himself speaks of having wandered freely in Beleriand, in lands largely untroubled by Morgoth even during the wars with the Elves. Clearly if the Ents had survived the destruction of Beleriand at the end of the First Age they must have wandered eastward, and in Eriador there was once an ancient forest where, Elrond said, "time was when a squirrel could go from tree to tree from what is now the Shire to Dunland west of Isengard. In those lands I journeyed once, and many things wild and strange I knew." Elrond's journeys aside, one must ask how the squirrels (and the Ents) crossed the mighty river Gwathlo. It was wide and deep enough that ocean-faring ships could navigate it as far inland as Tharbad, where, perhaps, the waters became shallow enough for the Ents to travel across. But why should they do so? At what point in time did they leave the northern woods? Apparently they did so before the War of the Elves and Sauron, and in another text Tolkien notes that Fangorn himself met with the King of Lothlorien early in the Second Age and set a boundary between their realms. Did the eastward migration of Beleriandic Elves in the Second Age push the Ents eastward as well? Or did the Ents at one time become so numerous they had to spread out? There is much we'll never know about the Ents' history, alas. Anohther woodland creature that has a mysterious past is the giant spider of Mirkwood. Where and when did these creatures show up? They are said to be the descendants of Ungoliant, and Mirkwood was Greenwood the Great until Sauron arose in the Third Age and established himself on Dol Guldur. He undoubtedly brought or induced some of Ungoliant's offspring to move north to the forest, but how did they

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