Editing Old Forest (section)

=== Other symbolism ===

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 [[Midlands (England)|English Midlands]] around [[Evesham]]. The West Midlands were beloved by Tolkien because the maternal part of his family, the Suffields, were from this area.<ref>{{cite book |last=Hooker |first=Mark T. |title=Tolkien and the Study of His Sources: Critical Essays |chapter=Reading John Buchan in Search of Tolkien |page=173 |editor-first=Jason |editor-last=Fisher |editor-link=Jason Fisher |publisher=[[McFarland & Company|McFarland]] |year=2011 |isbn=9780786464821 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=98VQ3gHsVsMC&pg=PA173}}</ref>

[[Tom Shippey]] has proposed that the Old Forest contains a more fundamental symbolism. [[Frodo Baggins|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.<ref>{{harvnb|Shippey|2005|loc=chapter 6}}</ref>

[[John Garth (author)|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".<ref>{{cite book |last=Garth |first=John |author-link=John Garth (author) |title=[[The Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien|The Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien: The Places that Inspired Middle-earth]] |date=2020 |publisher=[[Frances Lincoln Publishers]] & [[Princeton University Press]] |isbn=978-0-7112-4127-5 |pages=127–128}}</ref>