The Secrets of Mirkwood

“so they gave up fires and sat at night and dozed in the enormous uncanny darkness”

 

Mirkwood is a place not only of danger, but of mystery.  There are insect eyes lurking in the woods, and white deer which no arrows can slay.  The dwarves hear a song “beautiful, but… eerie and strange” and begin a fruitless chase of a roving elven feast.  After spotting the woodland king and his company, Thorin approaches, but, “Out went all light.  The fires leaped up in black smokes.  Ashes and cinders were in the eyes of the dwarves, and the wood was filled again with their clamour and their cries.”
 

When Bilbo climbs a tree to figure out their location, he enters a world of beauty – but finds no resolution to the forest’s secrets.  At first, it is the brilliance of the sun that blinds him – the very thing that allows him to see is also what obstructs his vision.  Then, “he saw all round him a sea of dark green, ruffled here and there by the breeze; and there were everywhere hundreds of butterflies.”  Yet “Gaze as much as he might, he could see no end to the trees…”

Such, then, is the nature of Mirkwood.  And such, perhaps, is the nature of many things in life – labyrinths filled with fear and uncertainty, above which float clouds of tumultuous beauty that we glimpse only briefly, and which contain only such answers as we hold deep in our hearts.

 

First Image: Adapted from Kay Nielsen, “The Gloomy Thick Wood.”

Second Image: Adapted from a photograph by AnnaLee Pauls