Early in e Fellowship of the Ring, an important scene takes place in a shadowy tunnel under a thick hedge near the eastern border of Buckland, an outlying region settled by Hobbits on the far side of the
Brandywine River. Frodo and company are discussing their departure from known regions of Buckland and the Shire into the dark, unknown, ominous Old Forest:
Merry got down and unlocked the gate, and when they had passed through he pushed it to again. It shut with a clang, and the lock clicked. e sound was ominous.
“ ere!” said Merry. “You have le the Shire and are now outside, and on the edge of the Old Forest.” (I/vi)
In Peter Jackson’s film interpretation of Tolkien’s work, scenes of the Old Forest and Tom Bombadil have been excised entirely, and the hedge and locked iron gate that mark the clear transition into the Old Forest do not appear. However, Jackson seems to have realized that something important is happening here, so he included a variation of it. In the film version, it is a sunny a ernoon, not a gloomy early morning, and the boundary is marked by a change in the color of the grass instead of a locked iron gate. Further, rather than Merry talking to Pippin, it is Sam talking to Frodo. When he steps across an imaginary line, Sam remarks:
S : “ is is it.”
F : “ is is what?”
S : “If I take one more step, it’ll be the farthest away from home I’ve ever been.”
In the film, the liminal importance of this moment is reinforced visu-ally by three large black birds perched ominously on a scarecrow in the background. ese details highlight the significance of the event for Sam, a stereotype of Hobbit parochialism who also serves as an index character for the exploration of the natural world of Middle-earth. In the course of the story, it is Sam who develops most as a character, and crossing the border of the Shire into the wilder world outside is the first step in his initiation into maturity; for him, this is a significant thresh-old moment. But the liminality of this scene for all four travelers is no less marked in the book than it is in the movie. In fact, it is laced with unmistakable signs of foreboding. ese include rather obvious nar-rational comments (“ e sound was ominous”) and formulaic auditory
signals, including the clanging of a gate and the click of a lock. ese details direct the reader to regard this unmistakably as the significant crossing of a boundary. Indeed, one of the most important environ-mental contrasts in Middle-earth is between farmland and wilder-ness—between the friendly, cultivated fields of the Shire and the wild, untamed realms summed up in the atmosphere of Fangorn and the Old Forest.
e reader is not disappointed. Soon herea er, the travelers encoun-ter changes in the environment that make unavoidable distinctions between the agrarian comforts of the Shire and the hostile forces out-side it. In addition to the attacks of Old Man Willow and the Barrow-wights in the Old Forest and the Black Riders in Bree, on Weathertop, and at the Ford of Bruinen, the hobbits encounter significant opposi-tion from the environment itself: malicious trees, briars, and under-brush in the Old Forest; fog on the Barrow-downs; parasitic insects in the Midgewater Marshes and the trackless marshes themselves; and rough terrain in what Aragorn specifically calls “wilderness” before their respite in Rivendell (I/xii).10 e narrative tension of the first sev-eral hundred pages has as much to do with the natural hazards encoun-tered a er leaving their familiar homeland as it does with the specific threat of the Black Riders’ pursuit. Nevertheless, however portentous the scene in which they cross the border of the Shire and enter the wil-derness, the hobbits’ escape from the agrarian world of the Shire is in other ways a gradual one. ey first pass through marginal areas, lim-inal spaces of considerable breadth or thickness. ese function as both narrative ecotones and ecological ones: overlapping settings that are not quite civilized but not quite wilderness either, having qualities of both.
In short, the agrarian world and the wilderness are demarcated by no visible dividing line—like that between Fangorn and the grass-lands—with absolute farmland on one side and true wilderness on the other. So when do the hobbits actually find themselves in the wil-derness? How wide is the liminal space? A definition of wilderness as
“untrammeled,” “undeveloped,” “retaining its primeval character,” and
“without permanent improvements or . . . habitation”11 would put this development much later in the story than their entrance to the Old Forest. A er their departure from Bag End, the hobbits’ journey takes them from the village of Hobbiton into the more sparsely settled areas eastward in the Shire, and then through the Green-Hill country and the
tangled woods along the Stockbrook. Even within the Shire there are relatively less settled areas as well as areas of denser population. When the hobbits escape by ferry across the Brandywine River at night, they are outside the Shire, yet they enjoy another brief respite of civilization in Frodo’s house at Crickhollow. On the following morning, they genu-inely leave the Shire behind when they go under the High Hay into the Old Forest.
is marks a major shi : technically, they are now in the wilderness.
As proof, their first serious setback occurs immediately therea er in the nearly disastrous encounter with Old Man Willow, an embodiment of malevolent natural forces residing in the wilderness—the darker spirit of the primeval forest, as Treebeard later suggests. However, the threat is neutralized when they are rescued by Tom Bombadil, whose entrance into the story a ords the hobbits yet another brief recovery. Tom’s household is a peaceful outpost secure from the wilder forces of nature, with wholesome food, good drink, and the telling of tales—just the sort of thing Hobbits love when they are at home. A er being rescued again by Bombadil on the Barrow-downs, they find their way to the village of Bree, which is described as “a small inhabited region, like an island in the empty lands round about” in the center of “a small country of fields and tamed woodland only a few miles broad” (I/ix). Bree even has a village inn on the model of Hobbiton’s Ivy Bush and Bywater’s Green Dragon.
As a result, although at many points early in the story the reader may be convinced that the hobbits have finally le the agrarian world and are out in the wilderness, it is almost 200 pages before the term wil-derness in any way accurately describes their surroundings. e word first appears in the book a er the departure from Bree, where we read,
“On the third day out from Bree they came out of the Chetwood. e land had been falling steadily, ever since they turned aside from the Road, and they now entered a wide flat expanse of country, much more di cult to manage. ey were far beyond the borders of the Bree-land, out in the pathless wilderness, and drawing near to the Midgewater Marshes” (I/ix). Even this assertion may not be fully persuasive, how-ever. To the list of domestic outposts cited earlier, we must now add Rivendell, toward which Aragorn guides the hobbits a er leaving Bree.
Although it lies beyond the “Edge of the Wild” on a map of Wilderland published in e Hobbit, we may recall that the Elves call Rivendell “the
Last Homely House east of the Sea” (II/i), indicating that it is the last outpost of civilization before the wilderness begins. Also, there is a road that runs from Bree to Rivendell—albeit a dangerous one at times, and one that the company does not stick to—but its presence precludes the land’s classification as wilderness by many definitions accepted in mod-ern environmental discourse.
erefore, it could be said that not until the Company of the Ring departs from Rivendell a er the Council of Elrond do the main char-acters leave civilization and enter the wildest regions of Middle-earth.12 roughout the lengthy series of narrative developments all the way up to Bree and even, to a lesser degree, as far as Rivendell, at no point are the hobbits very far from reminders of the familiar comforts of home:
Farmer Maggot’s house, Crickhollow, the house of Tom Bombadil, the Prancing Pony Inn. Each place may be wilder than the one before, but the transition is gradual, and during the transition, elements of civiliza-tion, rural agrarianism, and true wilderness mix. Yet these spaces in the journey from cultivated agrarian life to real wilderness are all ecologi-cally and narratively important and rich.
e ecological richness of these places is indicated by the variety of trees and vegetation either implied or explicitly mentioned in the hob-bits’ passage toward wilderness. A er jumping the hedge at the edge of the garden at Bag End, the hobbits make their way westward down a narrow lane, heading south “along hedgerows and the borders of cop-pices” of unspecified type. ey cross the Water, a stream “bordered with leaning alder-trees,” then head eastward, climbing slopes grown with
“thin-clad birches.” ey halt for the night in the “deep resin-scented darkness” of a fir wood, yet they are “still in the heart of the Shire” (I/ii).
e second day’s “zig-zagging” route takes them to a steep bank from which they look across “lower lands dotted with small clumps of trees,”
disappearing into the “brown woodland haze” of Woody End near the Brandywine River. In the a ernoon, the terrain begins to change again.
Now on level ground, the road ahead lies “through grass-lands sprinkled with tall trees, outliers of the approaching woods,” apparently—based on subsequent references—oaks. A er a close encounter with one of the Black Riders, they leave the road and strike a course parallel to it through “thick and tussocky grass” and uneven ground. e outlying trees of the approaching forest increase in density, as “the trees began to draw together into thickets.” A er sunset, the thickets have converged
into a full-fledged cover of timber as they turn down a narrow lane winding “through a wood of ancient oak-trees” toward Woodhall. ey pause shortly therea er inside the “huge hulk” of a hollow tree—again, presumably, an oak. A er another period of walking, upon hearing the approach of Gildor and the elves, they slip quietly o the path “into the deeper shade” under the oaks. ey meet Gildor, who establishes their destination that night as “the woods on the hills above Woodhall” some miles away. eir final nighttime march on this second day’s journey takes them through still denser woods, with trees that are “now younger and thicker,” with “many deep brakes of hazel on the rising slopes.” e late hours of the night are spent eating and talking with the elves in an outdoor hall pillared by living trees (I/iii).
On the third day’s journey, further changes in vegetation make for di cult travel. ickets grow “closer and more tangled,” and the stream-bed they strike is “overhung with brambles.” A er going slowly and painfully through “bushes and brambles” alongside the stream, they wade across and come to “a wide open space, rush-grown and tree-less,” then encounter “a belt of trees: tall oaks, for the most part, with here and there an elm tree or an ash.” ey journey through this belt as quickly as possible, “over patches of grass and through thick dri s of old leaves,” halting at midday beneath an elm tree described as still in full leaf, though it is turning yellow with the waning of the year. e woods now “came to a sudden end,” with wide grasslands stretching ahead; the lands become “steadily more tame and well-ordered,” and they soon find themselves surrounded by “well-tended fields and meadows” in the approach to Farmer Maggot’s land at Bamfurlong (I/iv). ough not necessarily liminal symbols in the fullest sense of the term, this catalog of tree species reveals how Tolkien uses natural images as indicators of subtle environmental change. ese references serve not only to create a sense of forward motion but also to establish a picture of arboreal diversity even within the relatively small compass inside the borders of the Shire—a diversity associated here with the margin or the transition between agrarian and wild.
Another important boundary type appearing in Tolkien’s narrative, and one worth examining, even though it seems somewhat humble, is the hedge. In Tolkien’s writing, hedges play an important role, uniting his presentation of the agrarian idyll with evocations of liminality as the hobbits venture into the wider world. Hedges appear several times. A er
his birthday party, Bilbo’s departure begins with his jumping over a low place in the hedge below Bag End (I/i). Seventeen years later—and nar-rated in almost the same words—Frodo walks “down the garden-path”
and jumps over what we assume to be the same “low place in the hedge”
before taking “to the fields, passing into the darkness like a rustle in the grasses” (I/iii). Hedges and gates appear again the next day as Frodo and his companions leave their di cult passage through Woody End and approach Maggot’s farm at Bamfurlong. Maggot’s house lies down a rut-ted lane running between “low well-laid hedges.” At the ferry crossing at Bucklebury, there is a reference to wisps of mist “above the hedges,” and the entrance to Frodo’s house at Crickhollow is described as an opening through a “narrow gate in a thick hedge” (I/v). e crossing into the Old Forest, of course, is under a hedge, the High Hay, and the agrarian order of the landscape surrounding Bombadil’s house includes a reference to the eaves of the forest as “clipped, and trim as a hedge” (I/vii). e list could go on, including hedges at Bree and at the gates of Moria.
e frequent reference to hedges is based on the traditional land-scape of rural England. Whether created by leaving strips of natural vegetation to grow wild or by planting any number of species of bush, shrub, or tree, hedges have served historically as barriers for the con-tainment of livestock, protection against intruders, and prevention of erosion; as a source of fruit and nuts, kindling, and timber; and as habitat for wildlife for hundreds of years in England. Traditionally, maintenance of hedges has been part of a program of wise agricultural management, and hedges’ importance as a microenvironment has long been recognized. eir presence in the Shire befits the rural environ-ment Tolkien has invented.13