The Old Wood
Myrkviðr — the “mirk-wood,” the dark forest of the old North — is the boundary the sagas set between worlds. In the Eddic poems it is the wood you must cross to pass from one realm into another: swan-maidens fly through it in the Völundarkviða, the sons of Muspell will ride through it at the world’s ending, and in the hero-lays it stands between kingdoms the way night stands between days.
No map marks where it begins. That is the point of it.
In Literature
The wood keeps returning. Tolkien borrowed its name for his own dark forest, by way of William Morris, who took it from the Edda. Older doors stand open, free to any traveler:
- The House of the Wolfings — William Morris, 1889. A tale of a folk who dwell in Mirkwood.
- The Story of the Volsungs — with excerpts from the Poetic Edda, tr. Morris & Magnússon.
- The Poetic Edda — tr. Henry Adams Bellows, 1936. The verses where the wood is first named.
A Later Verse
You think you left the forest — look:
the towers are trees, the wires are vines,
and every glowing window-hook
hangs lantern-light between the pines.You never left. The wood came too.
It learned new names, it wears new bark.
And somewhere, padding soft as dew,
a black cat keeps you from the dark.