Old Forest

Because you've figured out an optimal route, you just keep doing that over and over again, and you ignore all the rest.

So, I was doing a bunch of quests that were taking me into the, the notorious Old Forest.

It's-

Oh, I still remember the launch version of that place.

Yeah, this big old bear was bugged.

It would...

It was much higher level than you, and it was bugged so you couldn't see it, but the beta people would be walking around the Old Forest, suddenly hearing this giant roar, and then their character would be dead.

[laughs]

to their arrival at Bree.

Which means, of course, for everybody who knows the books, they skipped not just the trip into the house at Crick Hollow, they skipped the entire Old Forest, all of Tom Bombadil, and the Barrow Downs.

You know, there's three, four chapters of material that got totally cut out of the film.

And so the core...

And given what we've learned about Tom Bombadil previously, this probably shouldn't surprise us.

While there do not seem to be any Ents in the Old Forest, Tom is able to govern Old Man Willow through song, and trees and Ents are quite closely related.

The music of the Ents looks predominantly backward.

Of their four songs, not counting the lore of living creatures, three look back on times past, whether to a time when the lands to the west were still above the waves, in the willow meads of Tasarinen, or to a time when the Entwives were not lost, the Ent and the Entwife and Bregaled's song.

While Chapter 7 will deal with some of the more interesting aspects of music in The Lord of the Rings, this chapter will focus on one of the book's most enigmatic characters, Tom Bombadil.

Who in the world is he, and why is he always singing? The Music of the Master When Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin enter the Old Forest to escape from the Black Riders, they discover that they have, to invert a saying from The Hobbit, leapt out of the fire and into the frying pan.

While the imminent danger of the Black Riders has left them for the time being, the Old Forest is not a safe place, and it's not long before they run afoul of the strange Old Man Willow.

As they try to defend themselves, Frodo runs along the path crying, Help! when all of a sudden, seemingly in response, he hears a deep-clad voice singing.

Though it takes a few bars, eventually the singer identifies himself as Old Tom Bombadil, and again, in song, orders Old Man Willow to tuck his roots away.

It's as if the tree is bound to follow the singing command of Tom Bombadil.

Even so, Mary is still in danger of being squeezed to death by the tree, to which Tom replies, This scene is our introduction to the fascinating enigma that is Tom Bombadil, he of the powerful song, he of the mysterious ability to use music to command the very forces of nature.

When the four hobbits visit Tom's homestead in the old forest, they are greeted by Tom's wife, Goldberry.

But then he adds to it.

He says that he used to go into the Old Forest at one time, and he had a reputation for knowing some very strange things.

Which means that Farmer Maggot, although he seems very straight and narrow when it comes to hobbits and, you know, a good old conservative farmer type, is also very interested in some of the other goings-ons and isn't completely blind to the more magical and fantastic elements of the world.

He's not stuck in a perspective where everything has to be a certain way.

So I'll be posting more stuff on the Patreon for that for those of you who are interested, but here, let's get into this section of the end of A Shortcut to Mushrooms.

Now, although this section of the story in the book isn't directly shown in the movie version, in fact, there are significant differences from this part of the story moving forward through the old forest until they get out of the old forest.

But in this section, the tone of the story is actually very similar to the tone of the movies even though the events are different.

And if you are more familiar with the films than you are the book, then keep this in mind, that although we don't already have the four hobbits together, they're not frantically running through the night in order to get to the ferry and then just barely making it on and getting across the water.

This was their boundary.

This was their protective border for this part of the world, not just to outsiders, because hobbits are careful about outsiders.

But the old forest itself, we are getting foreshadowing about the old forest here.

But of course, it was not a complete protection.

Because this is the lore detail that completely breaks my brain.

Frodo is wandering through the Old Forest.

He meets this bizarre singing entity in yellow boots and just hands him the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.

She just gives it to him.

It's not too much to say that there's a very real chance that without Merry, Frodo and the Ring would never have made it out of the Shire.

Aragorn was nowhere near and Gandalf a prisoner of Saruman, but Merry took control and made sure that the Ring made it as far as the Old Forest.

His little speech to Frodo when Frodo was about to head off alone probably sums up the special bond there was there and why Merry did what he did.

You can trust us, he said, to stick to you through thick and thin, to the bitter end, and you can trust us to keep any secret of yours closer than you keep it yourself.

We are your friends, Frodo.

To be fair, he rather took his eye off the ball for the next couple of encounters.

He made a thing of knowing the old forest better than the others, but then was one of the first to fall prey to Old Man Willow.

Then was also one of the first to fall for the barrow-white.