This is
an extract from The Hobbit by J.R.R.Tolkien:
"But
your way through Mirkwood is dark,
dangerous and difficult," he said. "Water is not easy to find
there, nor food. The time is not yet come for nuts (though it may be past and
gone indeed before you get to the other side), and nuts are about all that
grows there fit for food; in there the wild things are dark, queer, and savage. I will provide you
with skins for carrying water, and I will give you some bows and arrows. But I
doubt very much whether anything you find in Mirkwood will be wholesome to eat
or to drink. There is one stream there, I know, black and strong which crosses the path. That you
should neither drink of, nor bathe in; for I have heard that it carries
enchantment and a great drowsiness and forgetfulness. And in the dim shadows of
that place I don't think you will shoot anything, wholesome or unwholesome,
without straying from the path. That you MUST NOT do, for any reason.
"That is all the advice I can give you.
By the
afternoon they had reached the eaves of Mirkwood, and were resting almost
beneath the great overhanging boughs of its outer trees. Their trunks were huge and gnarled, their
branches twisted,
their leaves were dark
and long. Ivy grew
on them and trailed along the ground. "Well, here is Mirkwood!" said
Gandalf. "The greatest of the forests of the Northern world. I hope you
like the look of it.
They walked in single file. The
entrance to the path was like a sort of arch leading into a gloomy tunnel made by two
great trees that leant together, too old and strangled with ivy and hung with lichen to bear more
than a few blackened
leaves. The path itself was narrow
and wound in and out among the trunks. Soon the light at the gate was like a
little bright hole
far behind, and the quiet
was so deep that their feet seemed to thump along while all the trees leaned over
them and listened. As their eyes became used to the dimness they could see a
little way to either side in a sort of darkened green glimmer. Occasionally a slender beam of sun that
had the luck to slip in through some opening in the leaves far above, and still
more luck in not being caught in the tangled boughs and matted twigs beneath, stabbed down thin and bright before them. But this was seldom, and it
soon ceased altogether. There were black squirrels in the wood. As Bilbo's sharp inquisitive eyes
got used to seeing things he could catch glimpses of them whisking off the path
and scuttling behind tree-trunks. There were queer noises too, grunts, scufflings, and
hurryings in the undergrowth, and among the leaves that lay piled endlessly
thick in places on the forest-floor; but what made the noises he could not see.
The nastiest things they saw were the cobwebs: dark dense cobwebs with threads extraordinarily
thick, often stretched from tree to tree, or tangled in the lower branches on
either side of them. There were none stretched across the path, but whether
because some magic kept it clear, or for what other reason they could not
guess.
It was not long before they grew to
hate the forest as heartily as they had hated the tunnels of the goblins, and
it seemed to offer even less hope of any ending. But they had to go on and on,
long after they were sick for a sight of the sun and of the sky, and longed for
the feel of wind on their faces. There was no movement of air down under the
forest-roof, and it was everlastingly still and dark and stuffy. Even the dwarves felt
it, who were used to tunnelling, and lived at times for long whiles without the
light of the sun; but the hobbit, who liked holes to make a house in but not to
spend summer days in, felt he was being slowly suffocated. The nights were the
worst. It then became pitch-dark, not what you call pitch-dark, but really
pitch; so black that you really could see nothing. Bilbo tried flapping his
hand in front of his nose, but he could not see it at all. Well, perhaps it is
not true to say that they could see nothing: they could see eyes. They slept all closely
huddled together, and took it in turns to watch; and when it was Bilbo's turn he would see gleams in the darkness
round them, and sometimes pairs of yellow or red or green eyes would stare at him from a little
distance, and then slowly fade and disappear and slowly shine out again in
another place. And sometimes they would gleam down from the branches just above
him; and that was most terrifying. But the eyes that he liked the least were horrible pale bulbous
sort of eyes.
"Insect eyes"
he thought, "not animal eyes,
only they are much too big". Although it was not yet very cold, they tried
lighting watch-fires at night, but they soon gave that up. It seemed to bring
hundreds and hundreds of eyes
all round them, though the creatures, whatever they were, were careful never to
let their bodies show in the little flicker of the flames. Worse still it
brought thousands of dark-grey and black moths, some nearly as big as your
hand, flapping and whirring round their ears. They could not stand that, nor
the huge bats, black as a top-hat, either; so they gave up fires and sat at
night and dozed in the enormous uncanny darkness.
Points for discussion
What impressions do you get of the
forest from the adjectives
used?
What effect is created by the
repetition of the word “eyes”
in the final paragraph?
Notice the other words from the lexical field of sight – how
does this add to the effect?
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