Old Forest
The scholar Verlyn Flieger has observed that the hostility of the Old Forest and of Old Man Willow contradicts Tolkien's otherwise protective stance for wild nature.
Scholars have discussed the symbolism of the Old Forest, likening it to "Old England", and, given that the protagonist Frodo Baggins calls it "the shadowed land", to Death.
Bombadil relates that of the corrupted trees of the Old Forest, "none were more dangerous than the Great Willow; his heart was rotten, but his strength was green; and he was cunning, and a master of winds, and his song and thought ran through the woods on both sides of the river.
His grey thirsty spirit drew power out of the earth and spread like fine root-threads in the ground, and invisible twig-fingers in the air, till it had under its dominion nearly all the trees of the Forest from the Hedge to the Downs.
[T 8] It was bordered on the east by the Barrow-downs, a hilly area dotted with ancient burial mounds, where Frodo's party encountered the Barrow-wight.
The landscape, trees and bushes were aligned so that if any strangers attempted to traverse the forest, then they were funnelled towards the Withywindle,[T 1] and into the clutches of Old Man Willow in particular.
The west and south of the forest was dominated by "oaks and ashes and other strange trees", which were generally replaced by pines and firs in the north.
"[T 7] When Gorhendad Oldbuck and his clan of Hobbits settled Buckland, they began to encroach upon the Old Forest, thus re-awakening the hostility that had first been aroused back in the Second Age.
The trees swayed when there was no wind and whispered at night, and they daunted intruding hobbits by tripping them, dropping branches, and driving them deeper into the forest.
On Merry's advice, Frodo Baggins (the bearer of the One Ring) decided to attempt a traversal of the dreadful forest in order to evade the pursuit of Black Riders.
Indeed, although the Hobbits in The Lord of the Rings had close shaves with the Black Riders, the first real antagonist which they encountered directly is Old Man Willow.
She writes also that the Bucklanders cutting and burning of hundreds of trees along the Hedge is not different from the destruction caused by Saruman's orcs in the woods around Orthanc.
[8] She notes further that Old Man Willow first appears as "a predatory tree" in the 1934 poem "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil", and that the character is developed in The Lord of the Rings, as documented in The Return of the Shadow.
[9] Old Man Willow is accompanied in the Old Forest, she writes, by "trees" that do what ordinary trees do – "dropping branches, sticking up roots", but which appear to be reacting to the presence of the hobbits, "giving an impression of motivation and intent that is enhanced by the ominous crowding that herds the hobbits 'eastwards and southwards, into the heart of the forest'",[T 1][9] exactly where they do not wish to go.
[10] Tolkien's Old Forest has been compared to "Old England" in John Buchan's 1931 The Blanket of the Dark, where the protagonist Peter Bohun disappears in the English Midlands around Evesham.
He glosses this as meaning unfenced woodland, noting that the Old Forest is "very emphatically fenced out by a strip of scorched earth and a high hedge, to deter the seemingly mobile trees from invading Buckland".
[14] In the MMORPG Lord of the Rings Online, a quest to gather lilies for Goldberry at the foot of Old Man Willow is given to the player by Bombadil, who warns that the tree will "sing you right to sleep".
