Mirkwood (Part V: Myrkvidr, Hercynia, Mirkwood) (Patreon)

“If one tree gets sick, then that part of the root system gets weaker and drains water from other trees,” says my friend.

My friend and I are sitting in their workplace, where some college students are quietly studying. I’m not sure if anyone is bothered by our lengthy conversation about German forests and The Hobbit, but nobody complains.

My friend grew up in the Palatinate Forest on the outskirts of Bavaria (they wish to be anonymous so they can privately commit fell deeds). They refer to the Palatinate as the Black Forest, a name shared by another remnant of Hercynia.

“Forests in Germany tend to be one giant organism of root systems,” my friend explains. “Trees communicate with each other and cannot be considered individual plants. They are one giant system. Forests are alive.”

The Palatinate is a relict tract of the Hercynian Forest, or Hercynia Silva, an ancient sprawl of trees and mountains in Central Europe. Hercynia bumped elbows with the Carpathian Mountains, the Rhine, and the Danube, with varying estimates of its boundaries.

Aristotle refers to “the Hercynian mountains” as  “the greatest in height and extent about that region,” with rivers flowing northward from it. While fighting local Germanic peoples in the Gallic Wars, Julius Caesar estimated that traversing Hercynia took “to a quick traveler, a journey of nine days.”

In 1911, Hercynia’s ghost sank its claws into Tolkien. That year, en route to a vacation in Switzerland, the 19-year-old Birmingham student, with a party of 12, traveled on a riverboat past Siebengebirge, or Seven Mountains, from which my friend hails, and Westerwald, tree-covered mountains renowned in folklore.

“[Bilbo’s] journey from Rivendell to the other side of the Misty Mountains,” wrote Tolkien to his son Michael nearly 60 years later[1], “is based on my adventures in 1911.” Tolkien’s wanderings through Switzerland, Austria, and Germany formed some of his last happy memories of Germany. Five years later, he languished in the Somme’s trenches, riddled with lice and trench fever, exchanging artillery fire with the German Empire.

When Tolkien named The Hobbit’s forest Mirkwood, he tipped his hat to Hercynia, which scholar John Garth calls “a forest that haunted the European imagination two thousand years ago.” Germanic peoples called the forest Myrkviðr, an Old Norse cognate for “dark forest.”

Myrkviðr appears throughout the Poetic Edda, the pivotal 12th century Norwegian and Icelandic collection of Old Norse myths. The Poetic Edda is the most significant extant source of Old Norse, providing much of today’s scholarly knowledge about medieval Iceland and Nordic culture.

Old Norse scholar Jackson Crawford stresses medieval Iceland’s brutal nature as key to the Edda. “Norse society prized a warlike, aggressive stance in men, and in the gods they worshiped,” he writes in the introduction to his Edda translation. “With the availability of natural resources sharply limited in medieval Scandinavia by its harsh climate[…], violent competition between families was a fact of life.”

This warlike culture forms a key part of the Poetic Edda. Odin, the Allfather of the gods, wanders in Midgard (a precursor of Middle-earth) looking to raise an army. Stories about the gods frequently involve confrontation.

The Eddic poem Lokasenna provides a glimpse of Mirkwood’s significance in Old Norse myth. Lokasenna focuses on an insult match between the gods and Loki, the Norse pantheon’s shape-shifting gender-bending trickster.

Loki’s insults are mythological in scope, befitting a god: “But what Muspell’s sons / through  Myrkwood ride / thou shalt weaponless wait, poor wretch.” The giant Muspell lives in Muspelheim, a fire realm, and his sons have to travel through Mirkwood before they reach Asgard. This makes Mirkwood a frontier, a border between worlds, a primeval landscape to cross during a quest.

It’s not hard to see why even Caesar found Mirkwood intimidating. This sounds like “pathless Mirkwood”, as the term is sometimes translated. “Those brave men / rushed across the mountains / on swift, eager horses, / through unmapped Mirkwood[2].” Pliny the Elder claimed it had flaming birds and megafauna.

Such families would come up in this environment. Yet it sounds like modern Germany is in a different place. Palatinate culture is still shaped by Soviet-era concerns.

“Germany is built from a post-communist society, so we are communalists,” says my friend. “We raise our children not to care about their own growth without other people growing with them.

“We have board games that are collaborative rather than competitive,” they say. “And a successful student is encouraged to help a struggling student.”

Perhaps William Morris, the 19th Century English polymath, socialist, textile artist, and saga writer, would have approved. Morris is perhaps the single greatest influence on Tolkien’s work. Tolkien read Morris’ translation of The Saga of the Volsungs at a young age, and was never quite the same afterwards.

Morris’ interweaving of language, myth, and geography is all over Tolkien’s work. “[The Dead Marshes] owe more to William Morris and his Huns and Romans,” wrote Tolkien late in his life, than “to Northern France after the Somme.”

Morris’ most obvious influence on The Lord of the Rings will show up again at Rohan, whose eponym “The Riddermark” is derived from Morris’ novel-shaped saga The House of the Wolfings, whose romanticized Goths live in The Mark in Mirkwood. We’ll get to Rohan in Book III (probably sometime in 2023), but seeing how Tolkien doesn’t even tamper with Morris’ name for Mirkwood, this is a good entrance for him.

Morris and Tolkien diverge significantly in politics. While Tolkien’s Catholicism and conservatism are endemic aspects of his work, Morris was an ardent socialist and atheist who preached Marx and Engels and shed his family’s Evangelical faith. Throughout his life, Morris was active in socialist politics, initially organizing for the Social Democratic Federation, then abandoning it to found the Socialist League.

Tolkien’s relationship to socialism is complex. The class system in his mythology is racially divided, and it’s clear that Hobbits and Elves have a wealth gap. In a letter to New Republic editor Michael Straight, he stated “I am not a ‘socialist’ in any sense — being averse to ‘planning’ (as must be plain) most of all because the ‘planners’, when they acquire power, become so bad.” While it’s true that anyone who wrote The Lord of the Rings is clearly averse to planning, his work exhibits a consistent dedication to community, where one character’s sacrifice uplifts everyone. Hardly a communist ethos, but certainly one that shows the egalitarian side of Catholicism.

Perhaps Tolkien and Morris converge in this way. In The House of the Wolfings, the Goths are an oppressed minority, staving off invasion by the Romans. Morris deviates from the Eddas he’s inspired by in having Thiodolf, the Wolfing King, sacrifice himself for his community rather than for personal glory.

Perhaps therein lies the crucial differences and similarities between Morris’ and Tolkien’s Mirkwoods. In Morris, the forest is a last bastion of community and liberty. To Tolkien, the forest is equally important, but it’s corrupted. The House of the Wolfings present a pagan mythology, while Tolkien’s Catholic mythology allows its physical realm to die that the spirit might live.

In both contexts, Mirkwood is holy. Its inhabitants defend it to the death. So, says my friend, do their descendants, but the forest doesn’t return its favors. Tolkien praised fairy stories, but he knew the forest had a magical voice that couldn’t be conquered.

“Fairies are real,” my friend tells me earnestly. “They’re pretty, but they’re evil.”

[1] The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, Letter 306

[2] Atlakvida, 13, trans. Jackson Crawford