Woodmen of Mirkwood

Origins

The Woodmen were of the same stock as the other Northmen of the Anduin valley, Men who had lived in the great forest and along the river since the early Third Age or before, kin of the ancestors of the Rohirrim and of the Men of Dale. When Greenwood the Great darkened into Mirkwood after the coming of the Necromancer to Dol Guldur around T.A. 1050, most of the Men who had lived within the forest withdrew to its edges, and those who stayed near it became the Woodmen: dwellers in clearings and stockaded villages along the western eaves and in the woods between the forest and the river.

Life on the forest edge

Their country was never safe. The shadow that lay on the southern forest sent out great spiders, wolves and Orcs, and the Woodmen lived under a constant low-level siege. In the years of Bilbo's journey the Wargs of the Misty Mountains and the goblins were raiding the Woodmen's villages, carrying off timber-cutters and planning larger attacks, and it was such a raid that Thorin's company disrupted by blundering into the Wargs' meeting glade. The Woodmen fought back with fire and arrows; the wolves feared them for it, and their villages were fenced and watched. Gandalf, escaping the wolves up a tree, remembered that it was the Woodmen's woodcutters whose stumps and burned clearings marked the forest edge.

The Woodmen were probably the Men best acquainted with the wizard Radagast, whose house at Rhosgobel stood on the forest's western margin between the Carrock and the Gladden. They knew the paths of the forest edge and the ways of its creatures better than any other Men, and they were the source of much that the wider world knew about the doings in Mirkwood: it was from the Woodmen, among others, that rumours of a creature drinking blood and robbing cradles reached the Wood-elves in the years when Gollum haunted the forest.

The War of the Ring

With the Beornings the Woodmen formed the Mannish defence of the Anduin vale during the War of the Ring, when Dol Guldur sent its armies north against Thranduil and west against Lothlórien. They were among the free peoples of the north whose stand kept the war from spilling over the Misty Mountains into Eriador. After Galadriel threw down Dol Guldur and the forest was cleansed, Thranduil and Celeborn renamed it Eryn Lasgalen and gave the wide middle of it, between the Mountains of Mirkwood and the Narrows, to the Beornings and the Woodmen, who thus regained the forest their ancestors had left.

Relations with other peoples

The Woodmen were closest to the Beornings, whom they resembled in speech and manner. They had some dealings with the Wood-elves of the Woodland Realm and with the Elves of Lórien, though these were cautious, and they were friends of Radagast and, through him, of Gandalf. Their enemies were the creatures of Dol Guldur and the Orcs and Wargs of the mountains, and the long war against these made them hard, watchful and suspicious of strangers.

The Woodmen were Northmen in appearance, tall and fair, though a life of hunting and timber-cutting in the shadow of the forest made them hard-bitten and wary. They dressed in leather and wool, carried axes and bows, and were expert at the use of fire against wolves and spiders. Nothing distinguishes them physically from the Beornings or the people of Dale in the texts.

The Woodmen lived in small stockaded villages and forest clearings, felling timber for building and for trade downriver, hunting, and keeping what livestock the wolves left them. They had no king; each village and family looked to its own. Their tongue was a Northern Mannish speech close to that of the Beornings and Dale. Fire was their chief weapon and their chief craft, and they had learned to burn the forest edge back from their homes and to fight wolves with torches and burning brands. Their lore of the forest, its creatures and its safe and unsafe paths was unmatched among Men, and they were storytellers and rumour-bearers to the wider world.

The Woodmen were the descendants of Northmen who had lived within Greenwood the Great before its darkening. When the Necromancer came to Dol Guldur and the forest became Mirkwood, they retreated to its western eaves and the vale of Anduin and lived there for the rest of the Third Age as the forest's reluctant neighbours.

After the fall of Sauron and the cleansing of Mirkwood the Woodmen were given, with the Beornings, the central part of Eryn Lasgalen. In the Fourth Age they spread back into the forest their ancestors had abandoned, freed at last from spiders, wolves and Orcs.