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Fictional forest in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle earth

In J. R. R. Tolkien’s fictional universe of Middle earth, the Old Forest was a daunting and ancient woodland just beyond the eastern borders of the Shire. Its first and main appearance in print was in the chapter of the 1954 The Fellowship of the Ring titled "The Old Forest". The hobbits of the Shire found the forest hostile and dangerous; the nearest, the Bucklanders, planted a great hedge to border the forest and cleared a strip of land next to it. A malign tree spirit, Old Man Willow, grew beside the River Withywindle in the centre of the forest, controlling most of it. 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.

The Old Forest lay near the centre of Eriador, a large region of north west Middle earth. It was one of the few survivors of the primordial forests which had covered much of Eriador before the Second Age. Indeed, it had once been but the northern edge of one immense forest which reached all the way to Fangorn forest, hundreds of miles to the south east. The vicinity of the Old Forest was the domain of three nature spirits: Tom Bombadil, Goldberry, and Old Man Willow. The powers of these beings doubtless contributed to its survival when other forests were destroyed. Old Man Willow, along with the Barrow wight and Tom Bombadil himself, first appeared in Tolkien's narrative poem The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, where Old Man Willow trapped Bombadil himself briefly. Willow is portrayed as a sentient and evil willow tree with powers including hypnosis and the ability to move his roots and trunk. Some characters of the story speculate that he may have been related to the Ents, or possibly the Huorns. However, unlike Ents or Huorns, he is portrayed more like a tree, with roots in the ground, and without the ability to move from place to place. Tom Bombadil had power over Old Man Willow, and checked the evil as much as he could, or was willing. In the Spring of Arda, plants emerge, possibly including Old Man Willow. leaving remnants such as the Old Forest. (Other vestiges included Woody End in the Shire, Chetwood in Bree land, and Eryn Vorn in Minhiriath.) The Old Forest was now "hostile to two legged creatures because of the memory of many injuries."

The Old Forest was about 1,000 square miles in area (some 2,600 km2). 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. In the north it reached towards the Great East Road, and in the west and south it approached the Brandywine river. The Withywindle, a tributary of the Brandywine, ran through the heart of the forest, which covered most of the Withywindle's drainage basin. The Old Forest was a type of woodland nowadays described as temperate broadleaf and mixed forest. 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. and alders were found here and there in the forest, and willows were dominant along the Withywindle.

In one of his letters, Tolkien explained that "the Old Forest was hostile to two legged creatures because of the memory of many injuries." However at length (but still "long ago" before the War of the Ring), the Bucklanders found that the Hedge was under "attack" by the forest. Trees began to plant themselves against the Hedge and lean over it. To counter this attack, the hobbits cleared a narrow strip of land on the outside of the Hedge, felling and burning many trees. They cleared a space some way inside the forest; this later became known as the Bonfire Glade. They also went in to maintain the cleared strip, which was still in existence during the War of the Ring. At least one non Brandybuck visited the Old Forest: Farmer Maggot. The evil tree has puzzled critics, as it does not fit with Tolkien's image as an environmentalist "tree hugger"; others have noted that trees too are seen by Christians as affected by the Biblical Fall of Man.

The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger has observed that the Old Forest contradicts Tolkien's protective stance for wild nature and his positive views of trees in particular. 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. 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. In an early draft from 1938, she writes, the "Willow" tree and the "Old Man" character had not yet become a single "indivisible being". Instead, Tolkien writes of "how that grey thirsty earth bound spirit had become imprisoned in the greatest Willow of the [Old] Forest." Flieger writes that in this draft and in the 1943 "Manuscript B", Tolkien links "a tree and a spirit, a 'non incarnate mind'" which is "imprisoned" in an individual tree. She comments that Tolkien solved the problem of how a spirit might become trapped in this way by turning them into a single being, at once a tree and a malevolent spirit. Matthew Dickerson notes in the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia that Old Man Willow is a prime example.

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. The West Midlands were beloved by Tolkien because the maternal part of his family, the Suffields, were from this area. Tom Shippey has proposed that the Old Forest contains a more fundamental symbolism. Frodo, the central protagonist of The Lord of the Rings, describes the forest as "the shadowed land"; Shippey draws on the context to suggest that the forest could be an allusion to Death. John Garth writes that the name "Old Forest" seems plain, but is "pregnant" with meaning: "Forest" derives from medieval Latin forestem silvam, "the outside wood", in turn from Latin foris, "out of doors". 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".

The forest appears in the video game The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. 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". Along with the adventure in Crickhollow, Tom Bombadil, and the Barrow downs, the Old Forest is omitted from Peter Jackson's interpretation of The Lord of the Rings.