Actually, it's carpet-cleaning day at my house as the temperatures will be in the 80s.
We read LOTR and The Hobbit last fall and my husband and I took turns reading aloud to the kids. Dear Hubby decided that during his turn at reading, he would sing all the songs that were in his assigned chapters.
By the time we got to The Old Forest and In the House of Tom Bombadil, he had rather petrified into the same tune for all of Tom's songs.
We all groaned that he used the same tune throughout the rest of LOTR.
The Old Forest:
Merry:
But the Forest is queer. Everything in it is very much more alive, more aware of what is going on, so to speak, than things are in the Shire. And the trees do not like strangers. They watch you. They are usually content merely to watch you, as long as daylight lasts, and don't do much. Occasionally the most unfriendly ones may drop a branch, or stick a root out, or grasp at you with a long trailer. But at night things can be most alarming, or so I am told.What is it about forests that bring out that primal fear? Look through all those fairy tales and how the forest is the locus for much mischief and angst.I thought all the trees were whispering to each other, passing news and plots along in an unintelligible language; and the branches swayed and troped without any wind...
For my part, I love it. Our house is surrounded by pine forests. Though at night, when the moon is full and the owl is hooting and the trees sway...and in the distance, a twig snaps...
Our Mr. Tolkien, it seems, most definately had a fear associated with forests. In The Hobbit, there was Mirkwood, in our story, The Old Forest (so far)
Now, in the end, the forests turn out to be more queer than evil. Scary, but only because they are very mystical. Perhaps those who grow up in more open country (like rural England) become fearful when they cannot see the horizon.
The forest is indeed a mysterious and sometimes seemingly miscievous place. I can recall many "odd" experiences in the forests of various places. Your eyes and ears can play tricks on you under the best of circumstances. A moving shadow accompanied by the rustle of dried leaves from a whisper of wind can become a hungry black bear just out of one's view. A slow, steady breeze can be almost musical, and it isn't hard to imagine enchanting voices in it. Lightening bugs in the woods at night as you walk along a path can take on the magic of fairy lights. And what child has not been frightened at one time or another by the long spindly arms of a tree reaching out in the shadows scratching against a window pane, thinking that surely it was some other worldly monster come after them?
It is very easy for me to understand and relate to our little friends' plight, and even moreso when we consider that, except for Merry, the forest was an altogether unfamiliar place to them.