In this chapter, Tolkien depicts Mirkwood in ways that conjure up not just one but
two archetypes: The Dark Wood and The Enchanted Forest. The realistic description
of a desperate journey through primal woodlands, struggling against starvation
and thirst, exhaustion and despair, dominates the first half of the chapter and represents
yet another tour de force as Tolkien uses sensory details to build up a claustrophobic
impression of a nightmarish journey in darkness and near-darkness that
never seems to end. Tolkien’s other journeys into darkness are relatively brief in
duration: Bilbo’s journey under the Misty Mountains, the Fellowship’s trek through
Moria, the Grey Company’s passage of the Paths of the Dead, and Frodo and Sam’s
disastrous trip through Shelob’s Lair all take a few days at most, in some cases only
hours. By contrast, Bilbo and the dwarves’ trip through Mirkwood lasts for weeks if
not months; in some outlines Tolkien projected that as much as an entire year might
pass while they remained lost or captive within the forest. For more on Mirkwood,
or Taur-na-Fuin as it was sometimes called, as it had appeared in Tolkien’s earlier
works in the Silmarillion tradition, see the commentary on The Pryftan Fragment, p.
20.
The second half of the chapter shifts the descriptions to highlight the eerie aspects
of the endless woods, dim rather than pitch-dark but full of disturbing features: the
alluring sounds and smells and sights that lure the travellers off the path into disaster,
the uncanny appearance and disappearance of the feasters, the spell of sleep
that falls first upon the hobbit and then the chief dwarf. For more on this enchanted
forest theme, see ‘The Vanishing People’ following Chapter IX.
 

With the wood-elves, we have finally come full circle to what, had this been one
of the Lost Tales, would have been either the starting point or the core of the book.
With the inversion of Tolkien’s invented races we have already discussed back in
the commentary to the conclusion of Chapter I (see pp. 76 & 78), The Hobbit starts
far from the elf-centric core of all Tolkien’s earlier works in the legendarium1 (perhaps
one reason why he was sometimes ambivalent about whether it was or was
not part of the mythology). Bilbo’s story only comes to a sustained treatment of the
elves mid-way through the book, and even then views them only from outside, and
relatively briefly, before passing on. The flighty elves in the trees surrounding the
Last Decent House (Rivendell) had been more like the fairies of Elizabethan and
Victorian tales, a tradition Tolkien was probably first exposed to in Knatchbull-Hugesson’s
Stories for My Children [1870] – see Letters pp. 407 & 453 – and himself
contributed to in ‘Goblin Feet’ [1915], ‘Tinfang Warble’ [1914], and similar early
poems during the era when that tradition reached its lowest ebb in Barrie’s Tinkerbell
[1904] and Conan Doyle’s flower-fairies of the Cottingley Photographs [1920].
By contrast, the wood-elves harken back to a more sinister side of faerie belief, one
dominant throughout the Middle Ages and surviving into at least the nineteenth and
possibly early twentieth century in Ireland and the more isolated parts of Britain.2
Tolkien professed, in his Andrew Lang lecture (revised and expanded as ‘On
Fairy-Stories’), not to be an expert in faerie lore,3 but this is simply typical modesty
on his part, as the essay itself shows; his definition of ‘expert’ required exhaustive,
comprehensive knowledge of all the publications in a field (cf. his Beowulf essay,
which although well-researched includes his disclaimer against having read every
book ever written about his topic). His interest in elves dates back at least to his
undergraduate days4 and possibly much earlier – the wood-elves of Mirkwood display
so many traditional traits ascribed to elves in folklore that it is clear Tolkien
knew and directly drew on those folklore traditions.5 Although he chose not to draw
from modern works such as Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter (published
in 1924, only some seven years earlier, by an author Tolkien admired and who
had heavily influenced his earlier work),6 even a cursory examination of traditional
elf-behavior in folklore as described in Katharine Briggs’ A Dictionary of Fairies
[1976] or in The Vanishing People: Fairy Lore and Legends [1978] shows that
Tolkien had not chosen to call his Eldar ‘elves’ haphazardly but, like the cooks in
his metaphor of the great Cauldron of Story (OFS.31), had picked and chosen from
among the various strands of tradition with a fine, discriminating eye: his woodelves
are recognizably the elves of folk-lore belief.
Consider, for example, the elves of British folk-lore as described by Briggs.
Among their characteristics was their ability to vanish from mortals’ sight in the
blink of an eye (a characteristic Tolkien refers to pointedly early in ‘On Fairy-Stories’;
cf. OFS.11); this feature is in fact one of the reasons Briggs calls her book The
Vanishing People.7 In The Hobbit this is paralleled by the scenes where the elven
feasters thrice disappear when all their lights are suddenly and simultaneously extinguished.
In itself, this looks like a realistic rationalization of how the old legend
might have started (‘Somebody kicked the fire’, p. 306), but an uncanny element remains:
how to explain ‘hundreds of torches and many fires’ which on the one hand
appear so suddenly that they ‘must have been lit . . . by magic’ (‘The Enchanted
Stream’ p. 354), only to have all the lights disappear ‘as if by magic’ (Ch. VIII, pp.
306–7), all simultaneously snuffed out in an instant. These elf-lights seem to have
something of the air of a will-o’-the-wisp about them; we have already been told
that the feast thus illuminated had an ‘enchanting’ aroma (p. 353) that lured the travellers
to stray from their way and meet disaster, and there are hints that the forest
clearings are enchanted spots (e.g., elf-rings or fairy circles) – cf. a passage in the
typescript when the spiders suddenly break off their pursuit of the fleeing dwarves
as soon as the latter enter the fairy-ring:
The dwarves then noticed that they had come to the edge of a ring where elffires
had been. Whether it was one of those they had seen the night before,
they could not tell. But it seemed that some good magic lingered in such spots,
which the spiders did not like . . .
—First Typescript 1/1/58:15; italics mine.
The motif of enchantment falling upon a mortal who steps into a fairy-ring,
as happens to first Bilbo and then Gandalf (Thorin), also derives from traditional
folklore: Briggs gives several examples, most of which involve the mortal joining
briefly in a fairy dance (rather than, as here, a feast)8 only to discover that vast
stretches of time had passed in what seemed mere minutes – cf. Bombur’s dream
of ‘a great feast going on, going on for ever’ (‘The Enchanted Stream’ p. 352; emphasis
mine).9 To have the hobbit or dwarves caught up in a tarantella would hardly
have suited the solemn mood Tolkien had worked so hard to establish for the Mirkwood
chapter; the substitution of enchanted sleep makes a reasonable equivalent but
raises some interesting questions of its own. Bombur’s dream of enjoying a great
feast while in fact he is slowly starving in an enchanted sleep, and Bilbo’s dream
of joining the feast when he too is enchanted upon stepping into the elf-ring and is
in fact not eating but lying sleeping on the ground, suggests that we are seeing here
examples of what Tolkien in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ called ‘Faërian drama’:
If you are present at a Faërian drama . . . [t]he experience may be very similar
to Dreaming . . . [b]ut in Faërian drama you are in a dream that some other
mind is weaving, and the knowledge of that alarming fact may slip from your
grasp . . . You are deluded – whether that is the intention of the elves . . . is another
question. They at any rate are not themselves deluded. (OFS.49)
I take this to mean that what among the elves is a high art presents itself to mortal
minds, like Bilbo’s and Bombur’s (and presumably Gandalf’s), as a dream. In short,
those who fall under the spell of the elves’ enchantment are overwhelmed and can
no longer distinguish fantasy from reality; they may even come to prefer the pleasant
dream over the harsh reality:
‘I was having such a lovely dream,’ he grumbled, ‘all about having a most gorgeous
dinner’.
‘Good heavens! he has gone like Bombur,’ they said. ‘Don’t tell us about
dreams. Dream dinners aren’t any good, and we can’t share them’.
‘They are the best I am likely to get in this beastly place’ he muttered as he
lay down beside the dwarves and tried to go back to sleep and find his dream
again.
—First Typescript; see p. 354.
Casting people into a trance or sleep while they carried them off, as the elves do
here with Gandalf, is yet another well-known fairy trick; Briggs cites a number of
examples in her chapter ‘Captives in Fairyland’ in The Vanishing People (cf. page
104):
Gandalf was caught much more fast than those bound by spiders! You remember
Bilbo falling like a log into sleep as he stepped into the feasting ring? Next
time Gandalf had stepped forward; and as the lights went out he fell like a
stone enchanted. All the noise of the dwarves lost in the night, their cries as the
spiders caught them, and all the sounds of the battle next day, had passed over
him. Till the wood-elves (and wood elves the people were of course) came to
him and bound him, and carried him away.
—Chapter VIII, pp. 314–5.