Middle-Earth Tours

Tour 2: The Places of Middle-Earth

Fangorn Forest
He led the way in under the huge branches of the trees. Old beyond guessing, they seemed. Great trailing beards of lichen hung from them, blowing and swaying in the breeze. Out of the shadows the hobbits peeped, gazing back down the slope: little furtive figures that in the dim light looked like elf-children in the deeps of time peering out of the Wild Wood in wonder at their first Dawn. --TTT, "The Uruk-Hai"

Yes, it is all very dim and stuffy in here,' said Pippin....."Untidy. I can't imagine what spring would look like here. If it ever comes; still less a spring-cleaning.'
     'But the Sun at any rate must peep in sometimes,' said Merry. 'It does not look or feel at all like Bilbo's description of Mirkwood. That was all dark and black, and the home of dark black things. This is just dim, and frightfully tree-ish. You can't imagine animals living here at all, or staying for long.' --Pippin and Merry discuss Fangorn, TTT, "Treebeard"
Fangorn Forest, by Alan Lee

Treebeard, by Alan Lee


image from the TTT Visual Companion





Treebeard, by Inger Edelfeldt
Treebeard, by John Howe
Fangorn Forest, by J. R. R.
Tolkien
They found that they were looking at a most extraordinary face. It belonged to a large Man-like, almost Troll-like, figure, at least fourteen feet high, very sturdy, with a tall head, and hardly any neck. Whether it was clad in stuff like green and grey bark, or whether that was its hide, was difficult to say. At any rate the arms, at a short distance from the trunk, were not wrinkled, but covered with a brown smooth skin. The large feet had seven toes each. The lower part of the long face was covered with a sweeping grey beard, bushy, almost twiggy at the roots, thin and mossy at the ends. But at the moment the hobbits noted little but the eyes. These deep eyes were now surveying them, slow and solemn, but very penetrating. They were brown, shot with a green light. Often afterwards Pippin tried to describe his first impression of them.
     'One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present: like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don't know, but it felt as if something that grew in the ground -- asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between root-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky -- had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years.' --TTT, "Treebeard"

Treebeard at Wellinghall, by Ted Nasmith
Entmoot, by Ted Nasmith

Stranger in the Forest, by Ted Nasmith

 The old man was too quick for him. He sprang to his feet and leaped to the top of a large rock. There he stood, grown suddenly tall, towering above them. His hood and his grey rags were flung away. His white garments shone. He lifted his staff, and Gimli's axe leaped from his grasp and fell ringing on the ground. The sword of Aragorn, stiff in his motionless hand, blazed with a sudden fire. Legolas gave a great shout and shot an arrow high into the air: it vanished in a flash of flame.
     'Mithrandir!' he cried. 'Mithrandir!'
     'Well met, I say to you again, Legolas!' said the old man.
     They all gazed at him. His hair was white as snow in the sunshine; and gleaming white was his robe; the eyes under his deep brows were bright, piercing as the rays of the sun; power was in his hand. Between wonder, joy, and fear they stood and found no words to say. -- TTT, "The White Rider"

image from a trailer, via lordoftherings.net
image from the Time magazine website
image from a trailer, via lordoftherings.net


For more on Fangorn, visit the Ents page
Full-size versions of these pictures are on display at Rolozo Tolkien.