Middle-Earth Tours

Tour 2: The Places of Middle-Earth

The Old Forest
Suddenly Frodo himself felt sleep overwhelming him. His head swam. There now seemed hardly a sound in the air. The flies had stopped buzzing. Only a gentle noise on the edge of hearing, a soft fluttering as of a song half whispered, seemed to stir in the boughs above. He lifted his heavy eyes and saw leaning over him a huge willow-tree, old and hoary. Enormous it looked, its sprawling branches going up like reaching arms with many long-fingered hands, its knotted and twisted trunk gaping in wide fissures that creaked faintly as the boughs moved. The leaves fluttering against the bright sky dazzled him, and he toppled over, lying where he fell upon the grass. --FotR, "The Old Forest"
Old Man Willow, by John Howe


The Taming of Old Man Willow,
by Roger Garland
The Taming of Old Man Willow,
by Ted Nasmith

The grass under their feet was smooth and short, as if it had been mown or shaven. The eaves of the Forest behind were clipped as trim as a hedge. The path was now plain before them, well-tended and bordered with stone. It wound up on to the top of a grassy knoll, now grey under the pale starry night; and there, still high above them on a further slope, they saw the twinkling lights of a house....Suddenly a wide yellow beam flowed out brightly from a door that was opened. There was Tom Bombadil's house before them, up, down, under hill. Behind it a steep shoulder of the land lay gray and bare, and beyond that the dark shapes of the Barrow-downs stalked away into the eastern night. --FotR, "The Old Forest"

Bombadil's House, by Alan Lee
Tom Bombadil and Goldberry, by Ted Nasmith
In the House of Tom Bombadil, by Anke-Katrin Eiszmann

Beyond the Old Forest, by
Ted Nasmith		 They hastened up the last slope, and stood breathless beside her. They bowed, but with a wave of her arm she bade them look round; and they looked out from the hilltop over lands under the morning. It was now as clear and as far-seen as it had been veiled and misty when they stood upon the knoll in the Forest, which could now be seen rising pale and green out of the dark trees in the West. In that direction the land rose in wooded ridges, green, yellow, russet under the sun, beyond which lay hidden the valley of the Brandywine. --FotR, "Fog on the Barrow-Downs"


For more on the Old Forest, visit the Bombadil and Goldberry page
Full-size versions of these pictures are on display at Rolozo Tolkien.