Great Wood

A rare title used for the vast shadow-shrouded forest known in the later Third Age as Mirkwood. In its northeastern reaches lived the Silvan people of Thranduil, the Elves of the Wood, and it was one of these, Legolas, who referred to his people as the folk of the Great Wood. In the times before the coming of the Necromancer, before the corruption of Dol Guldur had spread among the trees, Mirkwood had been known as Eryn Galen, 'Greenwood the Great', and Legolas' reference to it as the Great Wood is probably derived from this earlier name.