Mirkwood and the Woodland Realm: Greenwood, Dol Guldur and Thranduil's Halls

Quick Answer: Mirkwood is the vast forest east of the Anduin. It began as Greenwood the Great and was renamed Mirkwood around Third Age 1050, when Sauron hid in its southern fortress of Dol Guldur and a shadow spread through the trees. Its north was the Woodland Realm of the Elvenking Thranduil, home of Silvan Elves and of Legolas. It is the forest of spiders and barrels in The Hobbit. After Sauron fell, Thranduil and Celeborn renamed it Eryn Lasgalen, "Wood of Greenleaves."

Few places in Tolkien's world have a name that does as much work as Mirkwood. It is dark before you enter it. Readers of The Hobbit remember the black stream, the white deer, the feasting lights that vanish when you step into them, the spiders, and the Elvenking's barrels bobbing down the Forest River. Readers of The Lord of the Rings remember it more faintly, as the place Legolas comes from and the place where Gollum slipped his guards.

Behind those memories sits a long history. The forest was not always dark, the Elves who lived there were not always confined to its northern corner, and the shadow that gave it its name had a source. This guide follows Mirkwood from Greenwood the Great to Eryn Lasgalen, separates the books from the films, and sets out which Elvish names actually belong to it.

For the Elves who lived there, start with our hub on the Elves of Middle-earth. For the king, see Thranduil explained; for his son, Legolas explained.

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What Mirkwood Is

Mirkwood is the largest forest in the west of Middle-earth. It lies east of the Vale of Anduin and west of the lands around the Long Lake and Erebor, stretching a long way from north to south. The Old Forest Road crosses it from west to east, and the Forest River runs out of its northern hills toward the Long Lake.

Three features shape every story set there:

• The Woodland Realm in the north-east, where Thranduil ruled the Wood-elves from a great cave-hall beside the Forest River.
• Dol Guldur in the south-west, a hill fortress where Sauron hid for centuries under the guise of the Necromancer.
• The forest between, increasingly overrun with spiders, wolves and orcs as the shadow grew, and traversed only by paths that travellers were warned never to leave.

The name itself is older than Tolkien. Mirkwood echoes a dark forest of old Germanic legend, and Tolkien borrowed it as an English word that sounds the way the place feels. Inside the story it is a name given by Men, not by Elves.

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Greenwood the Great: The Forest Before the Shadow

For most of the Second Age the forest was called Greenwood the Great. The Elves who lived there were Silvan Elves, descendants of those Elves who had stayed east of the Misty Mountains in the Great Journey of the Elder Days instead of crossing to Beleriand. They lived in the trees and along the rivers, without great cities or written lore.

Into this forest came Oropher, a lord of the Sindar from Doriath. Unfinished Tales (Part Two, "The History of Galadriel and Celeborn," and the appendix on the Silvan Elves) tells how a small number of Sindar left Beleriand and went east, wanting to live far from the Noldor and the wars against Morgoth. Oropher settled among the Silvan Elves of Greenwood, who took him as their king.

Oropher's first seat was in the south of the forest, near the hill later called Dol Guldur. As the Second Age went on he moved his people northward, away from the growing power of Sauron and from the Dwarves and Galadriel's people in the west. This northward withdrawal is the first of several, and it explains why, by the time of The Hobbit, the Elves hold only the north-east corner of a once-entirely-Elvish wood.

At the end of the Second Age Oropher marched with the Last Alliance of Elves and Men against Sauron. Unfinished Tales records that he fell at the Battle of Dagorlad, charging ahead of the main host, and that many of his people died with him. Thranduil his son survived, returned to the forest, and ruled for the whole of the Third Age.

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How Greenwood Became Mirkwood

Appendix B of The Lord of the Rings ("The Tale of Years") gives the turning point plainly: around Third Age 1050 a shadow falls on Greenwood, and Men begin to call it Mirkwood. Around the same time the Istari first appear in Middle-earth.

The shadow was Sauron. After his defeat at the end of the Second Age he had no body for a long time. When he took shape again he did not return openly to Mordor. He settled instead at Dol Guldur, the "hill of sorcery," and was known only as the Necromancer. The Wise suspected but did not know who he was.

From Dol Guldur the darkness spread. The southern forest filled with spiders, which Tolkien links back to Shelob's brood and ultimately to Ungoliant (our post on Giant Spiders of Middle-earth follows that line). Orcs and wolves moved in. The Elves pulled further north. By the late Third Age the Woodland Realm occupied the northern part of the forest, while the rest was dangerous to everyone.

Appendix B also records Gandalf's visits. In Third Age 2063 he goes to Dol Guldur and the Necromancer withdraws to the East; that period is called the Watchful Peace. The shadow returns with greater strength in 2460. In 2850 Gandalf enters Dol Guldur again, finds Thráin the Dwarf a prisoner there, and learns for certain that the Necromancer is Sauron. The White Council does not act until 2941, the year of The Hobbit, when it finally drives him out.

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Mirkwood in The Hobbit

Most readers first meet Mirkwood in The Hobbit, Chapter 8, "Flies and Spiders." Gandalf leaves Thorin's company at the forest's edge on urgent business in the south, which a reader of the appendices can recognise as the attack on Dol Guldur. His parting advice is simple: keep to the path.

The company walks the Elf-path, a track that crosses the forest north of the Old Road. The details are what make the chapter memorable:

• The enchanted stream. A black river crosses the path. Bombur falls in and drops into a deep, dreamy sleep, and the company has to carry him.
• The white deer and the hunters. The dwarves hear a hunting horn and see a white hind and fawns, and waste their arrows on them.
• The feasting lights. Starving, they see Elves feasting in a clearing and leave the path to reach them. Each time they approach, the lights go out and the company is scattered in the dark.
• The spiders. Bilbo wakes alone, kills a spider with his small sword and names it Sting, then uses the Ring and his voice to free the dwarves from the spiders' webs.

Thorin, meanwhile, is taken by the Wood-elves and brought before their king. In Chapter 9, "Barrels out of Bond," the rest of the company are also captured and locked in the Elvenking's halls, a great cave above the Forest River. Bilbo, invisible, wanders the halls for weeks. When the king's butler, Galion, and the chief of the guards fall asleep over strong wine, Bilbo takes the keys, packs the dwarves into empty barrels, and floats them down the river to Lake-town.

The chapter gives one of Tolkien's warmest portraits of the Wood-elves. They are not grand or remote like the Elves of Rivendell. They love feasting, hunting, singing and wine, and Tolkien describes them as more dangerous and less wise than the High Elves, though still good at heart. It is the clearest picture in the books of what Silvan Elves were like.

Later in The Hobbit the Elvenking leads his host to Lake-town after Smaug's attack, joins Bard in the claim on the dragon's treasure, and then fights alongside Men and Dwarves in the Battle of Five Armies. Our guide to Thranduil explained covers those chapters in more detail.

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Mirkwood in The Lord of the Rings

In The Lord of the Rings Mirkwood is mostly offstage, but it matters twice.

Gollum's escape. At the Council of Elrond (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book II, Chapter 2), Legolas arrives with bad news from his father. Aragorn had captured Gollum and brought him to the Woodland Realm, where Thranduil's Elves kept him in guarded freedom, allowing him to climb a tree in the forest under watch. Orcs attacked the Elves' guard, and in the confusion Gollum escaped. Legolas admits it with some shame, and the escape sets Gollum on the trail that eventually leads to the Fellowship in Moria.

The War of the Ring in the North. Appendix B records a battle that the main story never shows. On 15 March 3019, while the Pelennor is being fought far to the south, forces from Dol Guldur invade the Woodland Realm. The text describes it as a long battle under the trees with great ruin by fire, and Thranduil wins it. Lothlórien is assaulted three times from Dol Guldur in the same period and holds.

After Sauron falls, Celeborn leads the host of Lórien across the Anduin, takes Dol Guldur, and Galadriel throws down its walls and lays bare its pits. The forest is cleansed.

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Eryn Lasgalen: The Forest Renamed

Appendix B then records the meeting that ends Mirkwood's story. On the first day of the new year, Celeborn and Thranduil meet in the middle of the forest and rename it Eryn Lasgalen, "Wood of Greenleaves." They divide it:

So the forest that had been Greenwood, then Mirkwood, becomes green again in name as well as fact. It is a quiet ending, told in a few lines of an appendix, and it is easy to miss.

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The Language of Mirkwood

Mirkwood is a useful place to understand how Elvish languages actually worked in Tolkien's world, because two levels of speech existed there at once.

Silvan Elvish. The common people of the Woodland Realm were Silvan Elves. Appendix F of The Lord of the Rings says that the Silvan Elves had their own tongue, related to Sindarin but distinct from it. Tolkien never wrote a grammar or vocabulary for it, so almost nothing of it survives as usable words. Anyone who offers you a "Silvan dictionary" is offering invention.

Sindarin. The ruling house of Oropher and Thranduil came from Doriath and were Sindar. Tolkien's later notes say that the Silvan Elves under Sindarin lords gradually adopted Sindarin, with a local accent, and that by the War of the Ring Sindarin was the normal speech of the realm. That is why the names of the place and its people are Sindarin, sometimes with a Silvan flavour. For the bigger picture, see What Language Do Elves Speak in Lord of the Rings?.

The Elvish names connected to the forest, with their sources:

The Sindarin word taur also means "forest," as in Taur-nu-Fuin, "Forest under Night" in the Silmarillion; tawar is a related word for forest or woodland. Neither is a name for Mirkwood itself in the published texts we rely on here, so we do not offer one.

Notice the leaf theme. Lasgalen and Legolas both describe green leaves, from related roots, one in pure Sindarin and one in a Silvan-coloured form. Our post on the Legolas name meaning explains why his name has e where Sindarin would have ae. Thranduil's own name, by contrast, has no meaning from Tolkien at all, which our Thranduil name meaning post sets out honestly.

If you want to see these names in Elvish script, type Eryn Lasgalen into our Tengwar name tool.

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Mirkwood in the Films and Rings of Power

Everything above comes from the books. Peter Jackson's The Hobbit trilogy shows Mirkwood at length, and it changes a good deal. These are film choices, not book lore:

• Thranduil's halls are a vast carved palace of stairs and walkways rather than the cave-hall of the book, and Thranduil rides a great elk.
• Tauriel, captain of the guard, is a character created for the films. Legolas also appears in the forest, although he has no role in the book of The Hobbit.
• The spider fight is expanded, and the spiders do not speak, as they do in the book.
• The barrel escape becomes a battle on the river with orcs attacking the barrels; in the book it is a quiet stealth escape.
• Dol Guldur becomes a major set-piece, with Galadriel, Elrond and Saruman fighting the Nazgûl and Sauron. The book reports the Council's attack in a single remark.

The Elvish dialogue in those films is film Sindarin (David Salo); our guide Elvish in The Hobbit Films: Thranduil, Tauriel and Every Line Translated goes through it line by line.

The Rings of Power is set in the Second Age, when the forest was still Greenwood. As of this writing the show has not presented the Woodland Realm or Oropher's people as part of its story, so nothing in the series should be read as book lore about the forest.

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Why Mirkwood Matters

Mirkwood works on three levels at once. It is an adventure setting, the hardest stage of Bilbo's journey and the place where he stops being a passenger. It is a picture of the Silvan Elves, the plainest and most human-seeming Elves in Tolkien. And it is a quiet thread in the long war against Sauron: the forest grows dark because he is hiding in it, and it grows green again only when he is gone.

That is also why the renaming matters. Tolkien could have ended the forest's story with the fall of Dol Guldur. Instead he gave it back an Elvish name about green leaves. Greenwood, Mirkwood, Eryn Lasgalen: the three names tell the whole history.

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People Also Ask

What is Mirkwood in Lord of the Rings? Mirkwood is the great forest east of the Anduin, first called Greenwood the Great. Around Third Age 1050 a shadow fell on it and Men called it Mirkwood. Its north was Thranduil's Woodland Realm, while Sauron hid in its south at Dol Guldur.

Why was Greenwood renamed Mirkwood? Because a shadow fell on it about Third Age 1050 (Appendix B). That shadow was Sauron, living secretly at Dol Guldur as the Necromancer. The forest grew dark and Men began to call it Mirkwood.

What is the Elvish name for Mirkwood? After the War of the Ring it was renamed Eryn Lasgalen, "Wood of Greenleaves," in Sindarin: eryn "wood," las "leaf," galen "green."

What happened to Mirkwood after the War of the Ring? Thranduil defeated an attack from Dol Guldur, Galadriel threw down its walls, and the forest was cleansed. It was renamed and divided between Thranduil in the north, the Beornings and Woodmen in the middle, and Celeborn in the south.

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Related Reading

• Elves of Middle-earth: Kindreds, Immortality and Languages Explained
• Thranduil Explained: The Elvenking of Mirkwood in the Books and Films
• Legolas Explained: Prince of Mirkwood and Elf of the Fellowship
• Lothlórien Explained: The Golden Wood of Galadriel and Celeborn
• Thranduil Name Meaning: What Tolkien Did and Did Not Say
• Giant Spiders of Middle-earth — Ungoliant, Shelob and the Mirkwood Spiders
• Elvish in The Hobbit Films: Thranduil, Tauriel and Every Line Translated
• What Language Do Elves Speak in Lord of the Rings?